> 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 tellin

> 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).