3 ms·

I always want to tell people things like this, to take care of themselves and not overprioritize work. At the same time I've never done that and it's in large

I always want to tell people things like this, to take care of themselves and not overprioritize work. At the same time I've never done that and it's in large part why my career has gone so well. It's "OK" either way, live life how you want to. But if someone asked me for career advice and said they don't know how much time they should spend outside of work on programming, I'd have a hard time telling them "no time at all". If your goal is to advance your career, yeah, my advice is to program in your free time. If your priorities are different - maybe your career is already set, and you want to focus on life - sure, don't program in your free time.

fgonzag 7y ago
Exactly. Everyone is free to choose his priorities. If you priorities are family, hobbies, or any myriad of things, that's amazing! But it will be probably be a bit harder to advance in the field than someone who lives and breathes code every day. That's just obvious... I find myself right at the middle, I don't code much in my free time but I do like reading programming books and learning about new topics and paradigms while only doing basic exercises now and then. I catch up on new technologies even if I'm not using them at the moment.
solipsism 7y ago
Depends on what you want out of a career too. The big FAANG type companies don't tend to care at all about your GitHub, so "practice whiteboard problems" is better advice for someone looking for that of job.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  I don't think any company cares that much about your github. It almost always comes down to the interview. But programming in your free time will (likely) make you more effective in your job, garner recognition/ place you in a programming community, teach you about new problem spaces, etc. So while that may not help you move from job to job (I'd argue, however, that it does), it'll help you accelerate your career within a company. I don't think it's contentious to say that practice will improve your skill, and improving your skill generally leads to a better (by some definition) career.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    > I don't think any company cares that much about your github. It almost always comes down to the interview. Personally, I would weight a great GitHub more highly than an interview. But great GitHubs are very rare.
    - staticassertion 7y ago
      Sure, I would too. Interviews are mostly stupid. At small companies where you have more wild-west type procedures you can probably get away with saying "Github is good enough", but my experience is that even mid sized companies start to put all of their bags in the interview basket.
  - solipsism 7y ago
    I would like to see evidence that, say, 10 hours a day (assuming 2 hours of free time programming) yields better results than 8. It's plausible, but it's not at all obvious.
    - staticassertion 7y ago
      Me too. I can't say one way or the other, I can only speak to what I perceive in my career. I believe I've made it this far, in part at least, due to the extra hours I've put in. I believe I'm a much better programmer for it too. But I also put way more in than an extra 2 hours a day.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > The big FAANG type companies don't tend to care at all about your GitHub My feedback from Google was to put more code up on my GitHub (and I already had hundreds of thousands of lines in a major open source project on there.)
  - singron 7y ago
    I doubt that the feedback Google gives to candidates is valuable (seems like it wasn't for you). I'm surprised they give any at all since they are probably afraid of getting sued. If you got anything back, it's probably been so filtered down from the original pages of feedback the interviewers wrote that it's meaningless.
spullara 7y ago
I've always assumed that people telling other people this are either delusional or are actively undermining their competition.
- selestify 7y ago
  Why would people not prioritizing their career be "delusional"?
bradleyjg 7y ago
> If your goal is to advance your career, yeah, my advice is to program in your free time. I don't know how long you've been in this game, but I'd say most programmers I've observed don't need to program at home to advance their careers. Programming skills don't end up being the bottleneck. By the time the other necessary things are in place to advance, their programming skills have been more than sufficient for the next level. YMMV
- staticassertion 7y ago
  I agree - I think putting in the extra hours is way more important early on in your career. Eventually it isn't going to pay off the same way (though I think it still will, just less).
gopalv 7y ago
> But if someone asked me for career advice and said they don't know how much time they should spend outside of work on programming, I'd have a hard time telling them "no time at all". One of the most interesting hiring measure one my teams held was whether the new hire has a hobby or not. Obviously we were in a talent rich environment (Bangalore), where this was the easiest proxy to judge a senior engineer's treatment of a junior developer's time - we could find really talented people, but a lot of them drove everyone nuts. Indirectly, a lot of the qualities we were looking in people came out in the way they expressed their hobbies - there are lonely hobbies, group hobbies, competitive hobbies and entirely leisure hobbies. Working with those folks, I've seen books full of stamps from countries which don't exist, played with trillion dollar bills from Zimbabwe, heard free bird on the guitar too many times, been inspired to run marathons, learnt to solve rubik's cubes, done support car for motorbike trips, "waterboy"ed soccer games, umpired cricket matches ... even the odd "do you even lift" bro in there. There's been the coders too - but even those were super interesting. Home automation systems, car dash hacks for phones, wall clocks from tablets (I too wrote a Sudoku hinting solver, because my mom loves it). That ended up with "Get people who have weekends" as a result. > If your goal is to advance your career, yeah, my advice is to program in your free time. I'd tell people to not do it in their free time, but spend dedicated time for it as you prep for interviews. My general "get better" advice would be to "understand something and get writing, draw diagrams" (I think jvns.ca lz77/huffman blog is a standout example to aspire to).

fgonzag 7y ago

Exactly. Everyone is free to choose his priorities. If you priorities are family, hobbies, or any myriad of things, that's amazing! But it will be probably be a bit harder to advance in the field than someone who lives and breathes code every day. That's just obvious... I find myself right at the middle, I don't code much in my free time but I do like reading programming books and learning about new topics and paradigms while only doing basic exercises now and then. I catch up on new technologies even if I'm not using them at the moment.

solipsism 7y ago

Depends on what you want out of a career too. The big FAANG type companies don't tend to care at all about your GitHub, so "practice whiteboard problems" is better advice for someone looking for that of job.

staticassertion 7y ago
I don't think any company cares that much about your github. It almost always comes down to the interview. But programming in your free time will (likely) make you more effective in your job, garner recognition/ place you in a programming community, teach you about new problem spaces, etc. So while that may not help you move from job to job (I'd argue, however, that it does), it'll help you accelerate your career within a company. I don't think it's contentious to say that practice will improve your skill, and improving your skill generally leads to a better (by some definition) career.
- ori_b 7y ago
  > I don't think any company cares that much about your github. It almost always comes down to the interview. Personally, I would weight a great GitHub more highly than an interview. But great GitHubs are very rare.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Sure, I would too. Interviews are mostly stupid. At small companies where you have more wild-west type procedures you can probably get away with saying "Github is good enough", but my experience is that even mid sized companies start to put all of their bags in the interview basket.
- solipsism 7y ago
  I would like to see evidence that, say, 10 hours a day (assuming 2 hours of free time programming) yields better results than 8. It's plausible, but it's not at all obvious.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Me too. I can't say one way or the other, I can only speak to what I perceive in my career. I believe I've made it this far, in part at least, due to the extra hours I've put in. I believe I'm a much better programmer for it too. But I also put way more in than an extra 2 hours a day.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> The big FAANG type companies don't tend to care at all about your GitHub My feedback from Google was to put more code up on my GitHub (and I already had hundreds of thousands of lines in a major open source project on there.)
- singron 7y ago
  I doubt that the feedback Google gives to candidates is valuable (seems like it wasn't for you). I'm surprised they give any at all since they are probably afraid of getting sued. If you got anything back, it's probably been so filtered down from the original pages of feedback the interviewers wrote that it's meaningless.

spullara 7y ago

I've always assumed that people telling other people this are either delusional or are actively undermining their competition.

selestify 7y ago
Why would people not prioritizing their career be "delusional"?

bradleyjg 7y ago

> If your goal is to advance your career, yeah, my advice is to program in your free time. I don't know how long you've been in this game, but I'd say most programmers I've observed don't need to program at home to advance their careers. Programming skills don't end up being the bottleneck. By the time the other necessary things are in place to advance, their programming skills have been more than sufficient for the next level. YMMV

staticassertion 7y ago
I agree - I think putting in the extra hours is way more important early on in your career. Eventually it isn't going to pay off the same way (though I think it still will, just less).

gopalv 7y ago

> But if someone asked me for career advice and said they don't know how much time they should spend outside of work on programming, I'd have a hard time telling them "no time at all". One of the most interesting hiring measure one my teams held was whether the new hire has a hobby or not. Obviously we were in a talent rich environment (Bangalore), where this was the easiest proxy to judge a senior engineer's treatment of a junior developer's time - we could find really talented people, but a lot of them drove everyone nuts. Indirectly, a lot of the qualities we were looking in people came out in the way they expressed their hobbies - there are lonely hobbies, group hobbies, competitive hobbies and entirely leisure hobbies. Working with those folks, I've seen books full of stamps from countries which don't exist, played with trillion dollar bills from Zimbabwe, heard free bird on the guitar too many times, been inspired to run marathons, learnt to solve rubik's cubes, done support car for motorbike trips, "waterboy"ed soccer games, umpired cricket matches ... even the odd "do you even lift" bro in there. There's been the coders too - but even those were super interesting. Home automation systems, car dash hacks for phones, wall clocks from tablets (I too wrote a Sudoku hinting solver, because my mom loves it). That ended up with "Get people who have weekends" as a result. > If your goal is to advance your career, yeah, my advice is to program in your free time. I'd tell people to not do it in their free time, but spend dedicated time for it as you prep for interviews. My general "get better" advice would be to "understand something and get writing, draw diagrams" (I think jvns.ca lz77/huffman blog is a standout example to aspire to).