Unlike the OP who was playing the Stack Overflow game, I use SO like a typical programmer: I type my question into Google which often returns results from Stack Overflow. Sometimes I'll come across an unanswered question or one with a better answer, so I'll submit an answer. If I can't figure something out after a few hours of trying, I'll ask the question on SO.
Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine -- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the interwebs where the question is answered.
What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.
I don't really see those Necro badges as devalued by other badges. I have 14 of them that I'm pretty proud of. I think each one of them represents a good answer to a question most people had ignored or forgotten about. I'd much rather have a Necro badge than 10 upvotes on a question that 10 other people were racing to answer as soon as it was posted.
Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine -- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the interwebs where the question is answered.
But the answer that has earned me the most points is a stupid throwaway CSS answer that's technically wrong: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1817792/css-previous-sibl...
What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.