15 ms·

It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too

196 points by majikarp 7y ago

K0nserv 7y ago
It is perfectly OK to only code at work, but you need to ensure you are learning and developing at work. Almost all programming related fields are still growing and changing rapidly. To stay relevant you need to invest in learning and self improvement. This can definitely be done as part of your job, but it's also something you can achieve by coding outside of work. Regardless of how you do it, ensuring that you are continuously learning and staying relevant is important.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  You absolutely should be learning and growing on company time.
  - exelius 7y ago
    Yup, this is the real reason behind concepts like “10% time”. Play with new stuff on your side projects, not on production systems.
- jshowa3 7y ago
  While I agree that you should keep learning and growing, I don't agree that its because technology is changing so rapidly. Often times change is equated with "new X framework" that just becomes popular and has no significant advantage over existing tool sets. Also, most companies rarely adopt new technologies, even if it would benefit them, because they've produced so much product using one tool set, that making a change would require too much time. So it's not unreasonable to find companies still working with 20 year technologies (cough vb6) because the install base is so large that an investment to upgrade just isn't worth the cost. In short, you can make a pretty good living simply maintaining old, existing software and never learning anything really new. After all, people only care that it works and that you fix their perceived issues with it. As long as you keep doing that, you'll be employed.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  Yes, but not at the cost of work-life balance.
badfrog 7y ago
Anecdotally, I've been a professional software engineer for around 10 years at top tech companies. I'm currently have similar pay and seniority as a Google L6. I've very rarely worked more than 9 hours in a day, and in those 10 years, I've spent less than 100 evenings coding on personal projects. So yeah, it's possible for sure.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That’s around $200,000 in cash and up to about double that in stock and bonus according to https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ Most recently from Zürich, $448,000 210k Cash| 190k Stock 48k Bonus
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Thanks for the explanation and link. I have no clue what levels at google are or correspond to.
wenham 7y ago
I think this goes deeper than coding, we live in a world of “Give it you’re all”, but really the only thing we should be giving it all for is what makes us happy. Over the last 25 years of coding, I’ve always stuck to the 9-5 (ish), 5 days a weeks. I’m not rich, but do alright and I’m fairly happy. I actually have time to do things that are not coding outside of work. The world needs driven people that give it their ‘all’, but we shouldn’t give those a hard time that just give their ‘bit’
- dsego 7y ago
  I don't think the world needs driven people. Maybe a few, but not many for sure. So maybe things get produced or invented at a slower pace, but people have time to enjoy a meaningful life, well sign me up.
  - wenham 7y ago
    Yes, I aggree, a few driven people is probably enough. There is a really interesting book called 'in praise of slow' which has the idea as its main point
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I'd say that the world does need driven people. The dayjob is just not usually the thing that deserves that drive.
petercooper 7y ago
Yes, and similarly it's also possible to be into coding both at work and at home and to still have "a life" where you're doing what you're enjoying.
ljf 7y ago
Totally this! My father is/was a stage and costume designer in the theatre. He worked so hard during the week (and weekends - theatre people keep some heavy hours!) that he rarely did many passion projects (though he did manage to fit a few in). But when he did they were on things that we really important to him, and that he gave himself the time to enjoy the process, and results and the iterations to follow. I think he's always set me to have a good work life balance, and when I look back at the life he built for himself (and for us) it makes me really proud. Now he's 'retired' he is in over-drive. He and my mother are slowly hand-painting their entire house, nothing is safe from redecoration. He's also painting loads of portraits and writing far more. Great to see a 78 year old man have so much drive and energy for creativity. I hope I do too at his age.
leecarraher 7y ago
I recall this as a standard 'canned' interview question. The goal was to assess if the applicant had a general passion for software development as well as a drive to learn new things. While I had no particular issue with the goal of the question at the time, I always felt it a bit one dimensional. At a different job in a more corporate setting, I find the push to be just the opposite. Time-off is time to unwind, use it as such. I believe companies have found success in this cultural imperative as a means of preventing turnover and burnout.
andrewfromx 7y ago
i like 4 hours a day, everyday, weekends too. Even on vacations I like to get 4 hours of coding in and THEN enjoy non-coding activity. But lots of coders seem stuck in i must do a full 8 hours a day M-F only.
Tor3 7y ago
Well.. this assumes that coding (all coding?) is a burden.. I agree with the article in that coding _for_ work, outside of normal work hours, isn't something to strive for. I did that a lot when I was young, but that was not only when it was necessary due to the strained time schedules we had then, it was also because I literally hungered for it. I needed to. So I would go back to work after dinner and hack away to figure out how the OS worked, deep inside, for example. Writing or modifying device drivers, writing tools that extended the OS functionality, that kind of things. Back when things were new. These days I don't, as a rule, code for work outside of work hours. But I need to code in my spare time. That's when I can do things that really interest me, side projects where I can enter the 'flow', something I nearly never can do at work anymore. I have to go into flow mode now and then to keep up my ability for concentrating on problems (and yes that's necessary to keep up my work performance too). A few years back the constant interrupts at work degraded my performance so much that I spent my three week holiday in various cafeterias, with a laptop and documentation, and worked all day on my hobby project, finally re-learning to enter the flow again. As in "I looked up, and five hours had passed". Myself, laptop computer, documentation, coffee, food available. Happiness.
- mruts 7y ago
  I don’t code after work, instead I just focus my efforts on coding for the firm. That way I can get rewarded for it.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  On personal projects I have entered a flow state so deep that, when my wife interrupts me to remind me I skipped breakfast and now it's lunchtime, it takes me a few moments to actually be able to understand her. It's like she's speaking a foreign language. I have never had that happen at a day job.
  - keanebean86 7y ago
    I've done this to lesser extents a few times. Last week I read the comment below and it legit scared me. I've been getting up and walking a lot more because of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699955
rich-tea 7y ago
Yeah. It's also perfectly OK to code outside of work. It's still "having a life" but it's my life and therefore my choice.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Obviously. But no one is being pressured to not code at home by their peers and employers.
  - rich-tea 7y ago
    Except when they imply that it's "not having a life".
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      Some guy with a blog accidentally implying a mild insult is hardly the same thing.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Obviously. But no one is being pressured to not code at home by their peers and employers. Except everyone is. The people calling us "nerds" having "no life" only recently shut up, and that's because they see how much money this occupation nets and now are silently jealous. But if some of them asks you "what are you up to this weekend", and you say "coding $sideproject", they'll look at you weird. That's all on top of the social pressure to "not be on the computer so much".
huffmsa 7y ago
Does a lawyer do law outside of billable hours? Some do pro-bono. But not the majority. Does a doctor practice medicine outside of his hours? Again, some work at free clinics, but generally no. Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no. Work is work, leisure is leisure. If coding is leisure for you, that's great.
- boboguitar 7y ago
  > Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no. My wife(a vet) won't even let me tell people, that aren't very close to me, that she is a vet. It's ridiculous the amount of free advice she gets asked. The worst part about it is that she has had several classmates from vet school that have been sued(and lost) from the free advice they gave to other people outside of work hours. It's a huge liability issue and trust me, the people who want free medical advice are the people who will sue you because you didn't correctly diagnose the problem for free.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    I included the vet example because they're almost violent about not wanting to work outside of hours. For the reason you stated. And some have told me that providing that kind of free advice devalues the profession and enables bad (read cheap) pet owners.
- dazzawazza 7y ago
  All of those professions do plenty of hours of "work" outside of "billable hours". They all read professional publications in order to keep up with the progress their professions are making. In many cases this is a few hours a day of reading. For most this is a chore but it's part of being a professional in those professions.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Reading papers isn't the same as doing the job though. I read mostly technical content related to software dev / general tech, but I rarely create software outside of work.
newsgremlin 7y ago
People are allowed to do whatever they want. Any claims of lack of passion or work ethic are opinions and anecdotes of individual experiences. There is limited time in a day and in life, you can't spend hours on multiple hobbies and interests without compromise and without eventual burnout within ones capabilities. Feel like this kind of do's and don'ts of when to spend time and how much time to spend coding is a recurring topic that should be put to bed in the developer world. Those who want to shine above the rest will always and should pursue that goal, those falling below that bar is perfectly fine, it's all about personal wants and needs at the end of the day.
fuball63 7y ago
Semi related to this, if you do code after work (because you enjoy it), it's OK to code without it being a "startup". I often get bogged down with "how do I monetize, market, and maintain this", which just kills my motivation. Just because something isn't marketed and monetized doesn't make it invalid; outside of work coding has brought me numerous benefits: - Learning new things. Not because I feel like if I don't I'll fall behind, but because I like learning things I don't get to experience at work. - Expressing yourself. I like being able to execute on my vision without worrying about what my employer wants. Or, if its a game I'm making, using that coding to express an artistic vision. - Meeting people. You can still talk about your project at meetups or online without trying to "sell" it.
- soneca 7y ago
  I think this happens because the term "side-project" has a lot of possible interpretations: - Hobby project to play with some tech just because you find interesting - Hobby project to play with some tech that might help your career in the future - Homework project to learn about the tech you currently use at work - For-profit project to hopefully earn some extra money - For-profit project to hopefully earn enough money to allow you to quit your day job (my case now) - Portfolio-making projects to show at job-interviews as a junior developer (my case a couple of years ago) All of them seems legit if your decision to do them is personal. But some of them might be prone to abuse by employers
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    No I would have taken side project or gig - to absolutely mean a moneymaking enterprise.
- Longhanks 7y ago
  Or, that's it for me personally, coding what I want, with no deadlines, managers or 'agile' strategy, is really a lot of fun.
- pradn 7y ago
  I think it's only the HN crowd that tries to look at side-projects from the monetization angle. (How else do you explain the frequent 'what's your side-business' posts? Also, this is a VC's site after all.) There are many computing cultures - people making games for gamejams, working on quines, writing code for GameBoys, contributing to Firefox, Arduino hackers. Maybe finding one of those groups will change your mindset?
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
It's sad that this has to be said. I have lots of side projects that involve making stuff, music, electronics, restoring old computers and the like. Very occasionally these projects involve writing some code, but it's the exception rather than the rule. If you want to write code for fun and it makes you happy then go for it! But by no means feel obliged to. It doesn't make you any more or less of a programmer.
angarg12 7y ago
If I have a piece of advice to juniors about this is: burnout is real. I used to have personal projects that didn't pay off in any way beyond personal learning, and they sure were taxing on my life. Now I have a job that I enjoy and is challenging enough. For the last year I have been making a conscious effort to change how I deal with personal projects. I try to take on tasks that are low effort, and not feel guilty about dropping something if I feel that it doesn't work, or it's starting to require too much from me.
suff 7y ago
So what happens when your company's roadmap consists of technical slop and they won't pay you to learn things like differentiable programming? Do you think they're going to pay you to write Vue.js until you retire? This strategy might work for a few years, but is a long-term career hazard. You are in charge of raising your own bar.
- ska 7y ago
  Honestly, this is a good reason to consider a job change. You can learn new/other tech on your own, sure... but not nearly as efficiently as you can in-situ. Besides, the tech itself is rarely the limiting factor.
- mkane848 7y ago
  Currently in this position. I'd rather find another job that cares about giving me the tools and helping me do the tasks they want me to do, just busting my ass in my own time doesn't solve the underlying issue.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anotherthro313 7y ago
In a somewhat related arena, Dries Buytaert from Drupal has some great arguments on how being able to contribute to open source is a privilege, and you could extrapolate that it is sort of discrimination to turn down job applicants who haven't contributed to major projects. https://www.drupal.org/blog/the-privilege-of-free-time-in-open-source https://www.drupal.org/blog/the-privilege-of-free-time-in-op...
willemojnr 7y ago
Ah man, I wish my work was "only coding", wouldn't that be nice.
segmondy 7y ago
No it's not, not if you want to want to claim to be a true professional. I have never met a professional that only engages in their craft at work only. Professionals practice their craft all time especially outside work. Work time is game time. Work time is not the time to engage in Research but strictly development. Unless you work for an R&D lab. It is the engaging in research instead of development that's the cause of software projects failing and having all sorts of issue. When it's D time, it's time to simply apply all the best principles that you know, nothing else. This means, you must practice (research) off hours. Can you imagine a math professor that only practices mathematics only when they teach? Or a musician that only plays music only during performance? It's okay to only code at work if you are just a code monkey and not a professional. In that case, don't expect the high rewards of the industry, don't claim to be a "professional" granted that the definition of a professional is one that does it only for money. Look at the very best in the industry, just think of them, name em. They all code outside of work. Jeff Dean, Norvig, Linus, Stallman, Carmack, Wolfram
- jdlyga 7y ago
  Spending 100% of work time coding reminds me of the startup world. Eventually it leads to a culture where people get locked in the same patterns and don't try new things. If you work at a larger company, there's always down time for watching conference videos, side projects, etc. I've found encouraging people to spend some of their work time learning makes for better developers.
  - segmondy 7y ago
    There's no difference between work and living. it's all the same. This work/life balance is crap. Working 100% of the time is bad, but the idea that your only can work in an allocate piece of time for intellectual work is the most ridiculous thing ever. Doesn't matter if you write music, write code, or writing a book. You work when your mind is ready to go. To refuse to work when your brain is ready is a strong signal that you don't have passion for this. If you're engaged in manual labor then sure, but for all intellectual work there's no boundary. It's perfectly NOT okay to preach these rubbish about being mediocre. The interesting thing is the very people who also code anywhere, tend to be very balanced and also enjoy their life outside of coding.
np_tedious 7y ago
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the article's content with a banner about listening to coding podcasts
threwawasy1228 7y ago
I hate that this has become so entrenched, and I hate that my previous jobs don't allow me to use samples from their codebase in my portfolio. I hate feeling like my github or bitbucket are sparse and this is somehow a sin. Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! Don't force me to waste my precious time making little toys in my spare time to potentially amuse someone. Yes I could make a minesweeper clone in a day, no I don't want to. Most of the fun of programming for me is the mathematics and theory portion, I like to implement or toy around with algorithms and write little half finished scripts. That is fun for me, but is that presentable? Nope.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! I once applied for a job where that was the entry exam: they gave you the specs for a program about a month in advance of your interviews and you were expected to bring in the solution you wrote. The task was intentionally extremely difficult (they specifically warned you about that). Although I didn't get the job, I really did appreciate that approach to skills testing. I thought it was brilliant.
bichiliad 7y ago
Off-topic: is that a marquee tag at the top of the page?
citeguised 7y ago
I work in Front-End and have always had side-projects with coding involved (Games, Websites, CLI-Tools). Some of my career's and company's circumstances (no senior front-end-devs for reviewing and mentoring around, mostly work on classic websites/web-shops) make it necessary. It's the only way to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date and to improve beyond what I do at work. Coding and building is fun to me, so I was ok with this. After getting kids though, my available home-coding-time shrunk to almost zero. My employer does allow and pay for conferences/workshops, but there's nothing as good for learning as a real project with more senior team-members, I guess. I really don't want to leave after 8 years of building reputation and seniority, and start from scratch elsewhere, in a big unknown. How do others cope with that?
- souprock 7y ago
  Well, same here on the kids. I wrote /bin/ps for Linux and maintained the procps package for about a decade. I also did significant work on Tux Paint and a little Linux kernel work. I managed just fine with 3 tiny kids and a job, and later with 5 small kids and no job. Adding back a job, I hit my limit. This is one way that Open Source projects die. Since then, the situation has only gotten more extreme. My family size goes to 11, and yes that is one louder than 10. Soon I'll have a dozen, all homeschooled. I got one kid interested in following in my footsteps, so sometimes I get to have fun teaching him. Mostly, there just isn't time for anything extra. One factor that helps is that I'm in a different part of the industry. You're in "Front-End", which might mean you need to learn a new javascript framework every year. I mostly write in C, for which the last update was 8 years ago and the last significant update was 20 years ago. When I'm not doing C, I'm doing a wide variety of different kinds of assembly language. That changes, but one is expected to constantly refer to the manual. So really I've gone a quarter century with no significant change. I am pondering the value of learning rust, but I certainly don't have to scramble each year to learn the hot new thing.
gnode 7y ago
Personally, I feel like if I didn't develop software outside of work, I would start to see software development as work, rather than a skill, just like being able to write or play a musical instrument. I think, for your own sake, if you're skilled at something, you should try to use that skill on your own terms. Many arduous professions are the practise of enjoyable skills on someone else's terms (be it an employer or a market): driving, cooking, gardening, etc.
JohnFen 7y ago
I love to code, and do so not only at work but at home as well. That said, I was unaware that there are people who feel pressure to code in their off-hours. That's silly. On your own time, you should do whatever helps you live a good life and be happier. If that includes programming, there's nothing wrong with that. If it doesn't, there's also nothing wrong with that.
sridca 7y ago
> There is often pressure inside Software development for Software developers to code outside of work hours. Funny. What I actually noticed is the pressure to _not_ code outside of work hours. :-P It feels like hobbyist hacking is increasingly falling out of place, even to the point of gaining antagonistic feelings about it.
maceurt 7y ago
Idk, I have found the best programmers all love to code. Unless you are a prodigy talent, you are going to have to program a lot on your own to be able to even be good enough to land and keep a job at a good company.
oneplane 7y ago
On one hand: duh. On the other: if you also code at work as a step on a ladder you'd like to climb, coding more than just at work is a common method of getting ahead of people who don't. Then again, that doesn't require not having a life, so the ultimate position I'd take would be: find a balance but make sure that it doesn't turn in to complacency.
soulofmischief 7y ago
I became a coder because I find it useful, valuable, and creatively stimulating. The only time I really enjoy coding, in the sense that 12 hours can pass by in the blink of an eye, is when I'm working on my own things. So by the time I'm done working for ~8 hours a day I'm bursting with excitement for when I get to fire up my development VM and code for another 6 hours. I get excited learning new things about my field. I get excited encountering and solving new problems. I get excited when I am able to form connections between isolated domains of knowledge and create work that is more valuable than the time I spent on it. Programming is engineering, but it is also art. I am an engineer, but I am also an artist. I live to create; writing useful applications, making video games and writing music are all ways I do this. My career path has and will continue to be a reflection of these values. I understand if some people chose to become programmers just for the money. I hope you are at least treating my field with respect and not just getting by with minimal effort while eroding employer/employee trust and dragging down the median salary. But consider that you could be making money in a field you are truly passionate about, blurring the lines between what is "work" and what is a "personal project". This is what it means to become successful in life, not wads of cash.
triplee 7y ago
Yes. It is ok. I hate that we've made it a norm to expect everyone to have the same hobby -- exactly the thing you do at work, and it better damn well be a hobby that you can monetize. Some people code and live on the MeetUp circuit when they're not coding. I do those things on rare occasion, but I've got a wife, a small child, and other hobbies. I like that this article reminds all of us to not normalize overwork. That said, it seems anti-hustle is becoming the new hussle, and yes, it's ok to code on your own as well if you enjoy it, want to learn, etc. You just shouldn't HAVE to.

196 points by majikarp 7y ago

It is perfectly OK to only code at work, but you need to ensure you are learning and developing at work. Almost all programming related fields are still growing and changing rapidly. To stay relevant you need to invest in learning and self improvement. This can definitely be done as part of your job, but it's also something you can achieve by coding outside of work. Regardless of how you do it, ensuring that you are continuously learning and staying relevant is important.

xfitm3 7y ago
You absolutely should be learning and growing on company time.
- exelius 7y ago
  Yup, this is the real reason behind concepts like “10% time”. Play with new stuff on your side projects, not on production systems.
jshowa3 7y ago
While I agree that you should keep learning and growing, I don't agree that its because technology is changing so rapidly. Often times change is equated with "new X framework" that just becomes popular and has no significant advantage over existing tool sets. Also, most companies rarely adopt new technologies, even if it would benefit them, because they've produced so much product using one tool set, that making a change would require too much time. So it's not unreasonable to find companies still working with 20 year technologies (cough vb6) because the install base is so large that an investment to upgrade just isn't worth the cost. In short, you can make a pretty good living simply maintaining old, existing software and never learning anything really new. After all, people only care that it works and that you fix their perceived issues with it. As long as you keep doing that, you'll be employed.
bovermyer 7y ago
Yes, but not at the cost of work-life balance.

badfrog 7y ago

Anecdotally, I've been a professional software engineer for around 10 years at top tech companies. I'm currently have similar pay and seniority as a Google L6. I've very rarely worked more than 9 hours in a day, and in those 10 years, I've spent less than 100 evenings coding on personal projects. So yeah, it's possible for sure.

barry-cotter 7y ago
That’s around $200,000 in cash and up to about double that in stock and bonus according to https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ Most recently from Zürich, $448,000 210k Cash| 190k Stock 48k Bonus
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Thanks for the explanation and link. I have no clue what levels at google are or correspond to.

wenham 7y ago

I think this goes deeper than coding, we live in a world of “Give it you’re all”, but really the only thing we should be giving it all for is what makes us happy. Over the last 25 years of coding, I’ve always stuck to the 9-5 (ish), 5 days a weeks. I’m not rich, but do alright and I’m fairly happy. I actually have time to do things that are not coding outside of work. The world needs driven people that give it their ‘all’, but we shouldn’t give those a hard time that just give their ‘bit’

dsego 7y ago
I don't think the world needs driven people. Maybe a few, but not many for sure. So maybe things get produced or invented at a slower pace, but people have time to enjoy a meaningful life, well sign me up.
- wenham 7y ago
  Yes, I aggree, a few driven people is probably enough. There is a really interesting book called 'in praise of slow' which has the idea as its main point
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I'd say that the world does need driven people. The dayjob is just not usually the thing that deserves that drive.

petercooper 7y ago

Yes, and similarly it's also possible to be into coding both at work and at home and to still have "a life" where you're doing what you're enjoying.

ljf 7y ago

Totally this! My father is/was a stage and costume designer in the theatre. He worked so hard during the week (and weekends - theatre people keep some heavy hours!) that he rarely did many passion projects (though he did manage to fit a few in). But when he did they were on things that we really important to him, and that he gave himself the time to enjoy the process, and results and the iterations to follow. I think he's always set me to have a good work life balance, and when I look back at the life he built for himself (and for us) it makes me really proud. Now he's 'retired' he is in over-drive. He and my mother are slowly hand-painting their entire house, nothing is safe from redecoration. He's also painting loads of portraits and writing far more. Great to see a 78 year old man have so much drive and energy for creativity. I hope I do too at his age.

leecarraher 7y ago

I recall this as a standard 'canned' interview question. The goal was to assess if the applicant had a general passion for software development as well as a drive to learn new things. While I had no particular issue with the goal of the question at the time, I always felt it a bit one dimensional. At a different job in a more corporate setting, I find the push to be just the opposite. Time-off is time to unwind, use it as such. I believe companies have found success in this cultural imperative as a means of preventing turnover and burnout.

andrewfromx 7y ago

i like 4 hours a day, everyday, weekends too. Even on vacations I like to get 4 hours of coding in and THEN enjoy non-coding activity. But lots of coders seem stuck in i must do a full 8 hours a day M-F only.

Tor3 7y ago

Well.. this assumes that coding (all coding?) is a burden.. I agree with the article in that coding _for_ work, outside of normal work hours, isn't something to strive for. I did that a lot when I was young, but that was not only when it was necessary due to the strained time schedules we had then, it was also because I literally hungered for it. I needed to. So I would go back to work after dinner and hack away to figure out how the OS worked, deep inside, for example. Writing or modifying device drivers, writing tools that extended the OS functionality, that kind of things. Back when things were new. These days I don't, as a rule, code for work outside of work hours. But I need to code in my spare time. That's when I can do things that really interest me, side projects where I can enter the 'flow', something I nearly never can do at work anymore. I have to go into flow mode now and then to keep up my ability for concentrating on problems (and yes that's necessary to keep up my work performance too). A few years back the constant interrupts at work degraded my performance so much that I spent my three week holiday in various cafeterias, with a laptop and documentation, and worked all day on my hobby project, finally re-learning to enter the flow again. As in "I looked up, and five hours had passed". Myself, laptop computer, documentation, coffee, food available. Happiness.

mruts 7y ago
I don’t code after work, instead I just focus my efforts on coding for the firm. That way I can get rewarded for it.
bovermyer 7y ago
On personal projects I have entered a flow state so deep that, when my wife interrupts me to remind me I skipped breakfast and now it's lunchtime, it takes me a few moments to actually be able to understand her. It's like she's speaking a foreign language. I have never had that happen at a day job.
- keanebean86 7y ago
  I've done this to lesser extents a few times. Last week I read the comment below and it legit scared me. I've been getting up and walking a lot more because of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699955

rich-tea 7y ago

Yeah. It's also perfectly OK to code outside of work. It's still "having a life" but it's my life and therefore my choice.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Obviously. But no one is being pressured to not code at home by their peers and employers.
- rich-tea 7y ago
  Except when they imply that it's "not having a life".
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    Some guy with a blog accidentally implying a mild insult is hardly the same thing.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Obviously. But no one is being pressured to not code at home by their peers and employers. Except everyone is. The people calling us "nerds" having "no life" only recently shut up, and that's because they see how much money this occupation nets and now are silently jealous. But if some of them asks you "what are you up to this weekend", and you say "coding $sideproject", they'll look at you weird. That's all on top of the social pressure to "not be on the computer so much".

huffmsa 7y ago

Does a lawyer do law outside of billable hours? Some do pro-bono. But not the majority. Does a doctor practice medicine outside of his hours? Again, some work at free clinics, but generally no. Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no. Work is work, leisure is leisure. If coding is leisure for you, that's great.

boboguitar 7y ago
> Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no. My wife(a vet) won't even let me tell people, that aren't very close to me, that she is a vet. It's ridiculous the amount of free advice she gets asked. The worst part about it is that she has had several classmates from vet school that have been sued(and lost) from the free advice they gave to other people outside of work hours. It's a huge liability issue and trust me, the people who want free medical advice are the people who will sue you because you didn't correctly diagnose the problem for free.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  I included the vet example because they're almost violent about not wanting to work outside of hours. For the reason you stated. And some have told me that providing that kind of free advice devalues the profession and enables bad (read cheap) pet owners.
dazzawazza 7y ago
All of those professions do plenty of hours of "work" outside of "billable hours". They all read professional publications in order to keep up with the progress their professions are making. In many cases this is a few hours a day of reading. For most this is a chore but it's part of being a professional in those professions.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Reading papers isn't the same as doing the job though. I read mostly technical content related to software dev / general tech, but I rarely create software outside of work.

newsgremlin 7y ago

People are allowed to do whatever they want. Any claims of lack of passion or work ethic are opinions and anecdotes of individual experiences. There is limited time in a day and in life, you can't spend hours on multiple hobbies and interests without compromise and without eventual burnout within ones capabilities. Feel like this kind of do's and don'ts of when to spend time and how much time to spend coding is a recurring topic that should be put to bed in the developer world. Those who want to shine above the rest will always and should pursue that goal, those falling below that bar is perfectly fine, it's all about personal wants and needs at the end of the day.

fuball63 7y ago

Semi related to this, if you do code after work (because you enjoy it), it's OK to code without it being a "startup". I often get bogged down with "how do I monetize, market, and maintain this", which just kills my motivation. Just because something isn't marketed and monetized doesn't make it invalid; outside of work coding has brought me numerous benefits: - Learning new things. Not because I feel like if I don't I'll fall behind, but because I like learning things I don't get to experience at work. - Expressing yourself. I like being able to execute on my vision without worrying about what my employer wants. Or, if its a game I'm making, using that coding to express an artistic vision. - Meeting people. You can still talk about your project at meetups or online without trying to "sell" it.

soneca 7y ago
I think this happens because the term "side-project" has a lot of possible interpretations: - Hobby project to play with some tech just because you find interesting - Hobby project to play with some tech that might help your career in the future - Homework project to learn about the tech you currently use at work - For-profit project to hopefully earn some extra money - For-profit project to hopefully earn enough money to allow you to quit your day job (my case now) - Portfolio-making projects to show at job-interviews as a junior developer (my case a couple of years ago) All of them seems legit if your decision to do them is personal. But some of them might be prone to abuse by employers
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  No I would have taken side project or gig - to absolutely mean a moneymaking enterprise.
Longhanks 7y ago
Or, that's it for me personally, coding what I want, with no deadlines, managers or 'agile' strategy, is really a lot of fun.
pradn 7y ago
I think it's only the HN crowd that tries to look at side-projects from the monetization angle. (How else do you explain the frequent 'what's your side-business' posts? Also, this is a VC's site after all.) There are many computing cultures - people making games for gamejams, working on quines, writing code for GameBoys, contributing to Firefox, Arduino hackers. Maybe finding one of those groups will change your mindset?

SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago

It's sad that this has to be said. I have lots of side projects that involve making stuff, music, electronics, restoring old computers and the like. Very occasionally these projects involve writing some code, but it's the exception rather than the rule. If you want to write code for fun and it makes you happy then go for it! But by no means feel obliged to. It doesn't make you any more or less of a programmer.

angarg12 7y ago

If I have a piece of advice to juniors about this is: burnout is real. I used to have personal projects that didn't pay off in any way beyond personal learning, and they sure were taxing on my life. Now I have a job that I enjoy and is challenging enough. For the last year I have been making a conscious effort to change how I deal with personal projects. I try to take on tasks that are low effort, and not feel guilty about dropping something if I feel that it doesn't work, or it's starting to require too much from me.

suff 7y ago

So what happens when your company's roadmap consists of technical slop and they won't pay you to learn things like differentiable programming? Do you think they're going to pay you to write Vue.js until you retire? This strategy might work for a few years, but is a long-term career hazard. You are in charge of raising your own bar.

ska 7y ago
Honestly, this is a good reason to consider a job change. You can learn new/other tech on your own, sure... but not nearly as efficiently as you can in-situ. Besides, the tech itself is rarely the limiting factor.
mkane848 7y ago
Currently in this position. I'd rather find another job that cares about giving me the tools and helping me do the tasks they want me to do, just busting my ass in my own time doesn't solve the underlying issue.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

anotherthro313 7y ago

In a somewhat related arena, Dries Buytaert from Drupal has some great arguments on how being able to contribute to open source is a privilege, and you could extrapolate that it is sort of discrimination to turn down job applicants who haven't contributed to major projects. https://www.drupal.org/blog/the-privilege-of-free-time-in-open-source https://www.drupal.org/blog/the-privilege-of-free-time-in-op...

willemojnr 7y ago

Ah man, I wish my work was "only coding", wouldn't that be nice.

segmondy 7y ago

No it's not, not if you want to want to claim to be a true professional. I have never met a professional that only engages in their craft at work only. Professionals practice their craft all time especially outside work. Work time is game time. Work time is not the time to engage in Research but strictly development. Unless you work for an R&D lab. It is the engaging in research instead of development that's the cause of software projects failing and having all sorts of issue. When it's D time, it's time to simply apply all the best principles that you know, nothing else. This means, you must practice (research) off hours. Can you imagine a math professor that only practices mathematics only when they teach? Or a musician that only plays music only during performance? It's okay to only code at work if you are just a code monkey and not a professional. In that case, don't expect the high rewards of the industry, don't claim to be a "professional" granted that the definition of a professional is one that does it only for money. Look at the very best in the industry, just think of them, name em. They all code outside of work. Jeff Dean, Norvig, Linus, Stallman, Carmack, Wolfram

jdlyga 7y ago
Spending 100% of work time coding reminds me of the startup world. Eventually it leads to a culture where people get locked in the same patterns and don't try new things. If you work at a larger company, there's always down time for watching conference videos, side projects, etc. I've found encouraging people to spend some of their work time learning makes for better developers.
- segmondy 7y ago
  There's no difference between work and living. it's all the same. This work/life balance is crap. Working 100% of the time is bad, but the idea that your only can work in an allocate piece of time for intellectual work is the most ridiculous thing ever. Doesn't matter if you write music, write code, or writing a book. You work when your mind is ready to go. To refuse to work when your brain is ready is a strong signal that you don't have passion for this. If you're engaged in manual labor then sure, but for all intellectual work there's no boundary. It's perfectly NOT okay to preach these rubbish about being mediocre. The interesting thing is the very people who also code anywhere, tend to be very balanced and also enjoy their life outside of coding.

np_tedious 7y ago

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the article's content with a banner about listening to coding podcasts

threwawasy1228 7y ago

I hate that this has become so entrenched, and I hate that my previous jobs don't allow me to use samples from their codebase in my portfolio. I hate feeling like my github or bitbucket are sparse and this is somehow a sin. Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! Don't force me to waste my precious time making little toys in my spare time to potentially amuse someone. Yes I could make a minesweeper clone in a day, no I don't want to. Most of the fun of programming for me is the mathematics and theory portion, I like to implement or toy around with algorithms and write little half finished scripts. That is fun for me, but is that presentable? Nope.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! I once applied for a job where that was the entry exam: they gave you the specs for a program about a month in advance of your interviews and you were expected to bring in the solution you wrote. The task was intentionally extremely difficult (they specifically warned you about that). Although I didn't get the job, I really did appreciate that approach to skills testing. I thought it was brilliant.

bichiliad 7y ago

Off-topic: is that a marquee tag at the top of the page?

citeguised 7y ago

I work in Front-End and have always had side-projects with coding involved (Games, Websites, CLI-Tools). Some of my career's and company's circumstances (no senior front-end-devs for reviewing and mentoring around, mostly work on classic websites/web-shops) make it necessary. It's the only way to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date and to improve beyond what I do at work. Coding and building is fun to me, so I was ok with this. After getting kids though, my available home-coding-time shrunk to almost zero. My employer does allow and pay for conferences/workshops, but there's nothing as good for learning as a real project with more senior team-members, I guess. I really don't want to leave after 8 years of building reputation and seniority, and start from scratch elsewhere, in a big unknown. How do others cope with that?

souprock 7y ago
Well, same here on the kids. I wrote /bin/ps for Linux and maintained the procps package for about a decade. I also did significant work on Tux Paint and a little Linux kernel work. I managed just fine with 3 tiny kids and a job, and later with 5 small kids and no job. Adding back a job, I hit my limit. This is one way that Open Source projects die. Since then, the situation has only gotten more extreme. My family size goes to 11, and yes that is one louder than 10. Soon I'll have a dozen, all homeschooled. I got one kid interested in following in my footsteps, so sometimes I get to have fun teaching him. Mostly, there just isn't time for anything extra. One factor that helps is that I'm in a different part of the industry. You're in "Front-End", which might mean you need to learn a new javascript framework every year. I mostly write in C, for which the last update was 8 years ago and the last significant update was 20 years ago. When I'm not doing C, I'm doing a wide variety of different kinds of assembly language. That changes, but one is expected to constantly refer to the manual. So really I've gone a quarter century with no significant change. I am pondering the value of learning rust, but I certainly don't have to scramble each year to learn the hot new thing.

gnode 7y ago

Personally, I feel like if I didn't develop software outside of work, I would start to see software development as work, rather than a skill, just like being able to write or play a musical instrument. I think, for your own sake, if you're skilled at something, you should try to use that skill on your own terms. Many arduous professions are the practise of enjoyable skills on someone else's terms (be it an employer or a market): driving, cooking, gardening, etc.

JohnFen 7y ago

I love to code, and do so not only at work but at home as well. That said, I was unaware that there are people who feel pressure to code in their off-hours. That's silly. On your own time, you should do whatever helps you live a good life and be happier. If that includes programming, there's nothing wrong with that. If it doesn't, there's also nothing wrong with that.

sridca 7y ago

> There is often pressure inside Software development for Software developers to code outside of work hours. Funny. What I actually noticed is the pressure to _not_ code outside of work hours. :-P It feels like hobbyist hacking is increasingly falling out of place, even to the point of gaining antagonistic feelings about it.

maceurt 7y ago

Idk, I have found the best programmers all love to code. Unless you are a prodigy talent, you are going to have to program a lot on your own to be able to even be good enough to land and keep a job at a good company.

oneplane 7y ago

On one hand: duh. On the other: if you also code at work as a step on a ladder you'd like to climb, coding more than just at work is a common method of getting ahead of people who don't. Then again, that doesn't require not having a life, so the ultimate position I'd take would be: find a balance but make sure that it doesn't turn in to complacency.

soulofmischief 7y ago

I became a coder because I find it useful, valuable, and creatively stimulating. The only time I really enjoy coding, in the sense that 12 hours can pass by in the blink of an eye, is when I'm working on my own things. So by the time I'm done working for ~8 hours a day I'm bursting with excitement for when I get to fire up my development VM and code for another 6 hours. I get excited learning new things about my field. I get excited encountering and solving new problems. I get excited when I am able to form connections between isolated domains of knowledge and create work that is more valuable than the time I spent on it. Programming is engineering, but it is also art. I am an engineer, but I am also an artist. I live to create; writing useful applications, making video games and writing music are all ways I do this. My career path has and will continue to be a reflection of these values. I understand if some people chose to become programmers just for the money. I hope you are at least treating my field with respect and not just getting by with minimal effort while eroding employer/employee trust and dragging down the median salary. But consider that you could be making money in a field you are truly passionate about, blurring the lines between what is "work" and what is a "personal project". This is what it means to become successful in life, not wads of cash.

triplee 7y ago

Yes. It is ok. I hate that we've made it a norm to expect everyone to have the same hobby -- exactly the thing you do at work, and it better damn well be a hobby that you can monetize. Some people code and live on the MeetUp circuit when they're not coding. I do those things on rare occasion, but I've got a wife, a small child, and other hobbies. I like that this article reminds all of us to not normalize overwork. That said, it seems anti-hustle is becoming the new hussle, and yes, it's ok to code on your own as well if you enjoy it, want to learn, etc. You just shouldn't HAVE to.