7 ms·

I Don't Code in my Free Time

167 points by sharms 17y ago

Readmore 17y ago
then I would not hire you.
davidw 17y ago
"Instead, I spend my free time saying nasty things about people who do - it's easier and more fun!" Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview, although I would be unhappy if I didn't have at least a side project or two to hack on, though. I have less time for that now, with a child, but it's something I need to do. Oh, and I'd much rather spend my time riding my bicycle than fiddling with it. My mechanic is way better and faster than I am in any case.
- unalone 17y ago
  What's wrong with doing something easy and fun that gets lots of media attention?
- timwiseman 17y ago
  Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview, Why? As an interviewer, I think it tells me a great deal. It certainly should not be the focus of the interview, but I want to know things like: 1. Will this candidate mesh well with the existing team? 2. Is this candidate going to take the initiative to learn useful things on their own? It seems to speak quite well to those issues.
jseifer 17y ago
"I like to spend free time wrenching on a car or a bike, but I don't set out on Saturday morning and say "I'm going to learn how to use a torque wrench today, because those things are the future of tools"." That one made me laugh.
- greentree 17y ago
  Really? I'm getting kind of tired of the tool analogies. They are thrown around as answers in place of actual thinking and reasoned arguments. The comparison between learning how to use a torque wrench and learning a language is absurd.
  - crucini 17y ago
    It depends. Learning a significantly different language can be mind-expanding. Going from C to Lisp is not just picking up a different tool. More like a brain transplant. Going from Java to C# is more ho-hum. There will be no epiphanies. More like "Oh, Microsoft solved problem X. That's nice." That really is like replacing a Husky brand wrench with a Craftsman brand wrench.
sjs 17y ago
> You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING. I feel extremely lucky to not only have known what I wanted to do from a young age, but enjoy it, and can make good money doing it. I like to ride my bike, hike, climb mountains, go to the beach, and walk my dog as well as solve problems, math or otherwise. I really hope for Ted's sake that he enjoys development at least a little bit. No one wants to work with people that aren't happy.
- philfreo 17y ago
  I worked with Ted at Google. Trust me, even though his articles have a certain sarcastic tone to them, he was definitely enjoyable to work with and clearly did like solving hard problems in development. His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work.
  - _pius 17y ago
    His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work. Is doing a little coding outside of work mutually exclusive to enjoying your life? I feel like the article draws a false dichotomy that either you have a life and don't code at all outside of work or you spend all of your non-work time coding.
    - thenduks 17y ago
      That's my biggest gripe here, too. Why are people so black-and-white about this? I work 40-60 hours/week depending on what's going on. Sometimes while working 40 hour weeks I don't write any code at home preferring to do one of the many other thing I enjoy. Other times I'm practically buried in work and come home and poke around on a side project. This just varies depending on my mood and what (if any) interesting stuff has my attention. If you enjoy something, you'll find time. If you don't enjoy it, why is it your career again? If you ask me the whole point of this discussion shouldn't be 'coding at home' but instead 'giving a crap'. Even just a little passion for your field will get you a long way in any profession - and I think that is especially true in creative fields like programming. Here I am on a Saturday afternoon putting some thinking time into my field... have I devoted the day to it? Hardly! You're right on that there's absolutely nothing mutually exclusive about enjoying coding (and lots of other completely unrelated stuff) as a hobby and as a career.
mustpax 17y ago
For all this person claims to be wise and experienced, this is a very contentless and juvenile blog post. The tone is condescending and reeks of insecurity.
wheels 17y ago
"I love it when twenty-something engineers take such a hard-line position on something they have so little experience with, like hiring." Uhm, the author graduated from college 3 years ago. It took me about 2 minutes of searching to find out that the "twenty-something" he's referring to (raganwald) is about 20 years older than him. http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pdf http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pd...
- unalone 17y ago
  This isn't a response to Raganwald. It's a response to this Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you_hire_a_programmer_that_does_not_write/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you...
  - swombat 17y ago
    Is the reddit thread a response to raganwald's post?
    - tlrobinson 17y ago
      No, vice versa, Raganwald links to the Reddit post (http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-08/no_hire.md http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-0...)
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Yes, especially since I agree with much of what Ted is saying. p.s. Not that anyone needs further evidence I am imperfect, but if we must have a bash at it, here are two flaws with my original article that I think have merit: 1. I presented a dichotomy between two strategies, first hiring people who know me or whom I know through networking, the Internet, and so on. Second, using monster.com and recruiters. Isn't this a false dichotomy? 2. Although the linkbait headline of my post said something about people who code outside of work, the post itself actually said something about networks and communities. Clearly someone can belong to the HN community without coding oustide of work. According to my headline, I wouldn't hire them. According to my post, I would. Which is it, Mr. Braithwaite?
adamhowell 17y ago
After seeing Pressflip, I don't blame him.
- unalone 17y ago
  What a snotty, immature response. Dziuba worked for Google before Pressflip, and is now working on Milo, which looks pretty sweet. But I don't blame you for needing to snark at other people after seeing adamhowell.org.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Yeah, but there's only so much one can take of Ted Dziuba's writing before the urge to respond in kind wells up. It'd just be simpler if people wouldn't upvote his articles.
    - unalone 17y ago
      Ted's an asshole, and most of the time I'm pissed off by his writing. When Uncov came "back" early last year it was terrible. That said, this article I agreed with entirely, all respect to raganwald, and it pisses me off that people would stoop to namecalling rather than discussing it. I think this is the rare Dziuba piece worth a good debate. Above all, I can't stand insulting somebody by insulting the work they've done. Ted is obviously smart, he put a lot of work into Pressflip before retiring to have a kid, and Pressflip, while not brilliant, wasn't terrible when I used it. I just didn't see the point to it. Now he's off working on new things, so he's not exactly lazy or coasting.
      - tsetse-fly 17y ago
        Any insults that Ted Dziuba receives are well-deserved. He's written dozens of trollish articles on how useless other startups are or how he hopes they'll fail. It seems fair to me that people are insulting his failure to produce a successful startup when he's spent so long being a hypocrite. You can't expect to be the Glenn Beck of startups and not be on the receiving end of the trolling. Here are some of his headlines from Uncov, incase you've forgotten his work: "Fanboy Driven Development with Arc" "Paul Graham, Just Shut Your Face Already" "RockYou Dominates The Fake Business World" "Surprise, Mahalo Still Blows" "Mahalo Is Hawaiian for Useless" "Guy Kawasaki Should Stick To Contentless Blog Posts" "Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old can do it" "Middio: Another Marginally Useful Feature As A Product" "WriteWith: Everybody Point and Laugh" "YouOS: YouHave To Be Kidding Me" "Wellsphere's Fail Tale, Part 2" "Firefox Fanboys: The Only People More Dangerous and Less Competent Than ..." "Did Enron Cause Web 2.0?" "Web 2.0 Amateur Hour: Sputtr" "VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail" http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com
chaosmachine 17y ago
"I would not want to work for a company that wouldn't hire me" Me either ;)
- maxklein 17y ago
  And I don't want to go out with any hot model that does not want to go out with me!
tocomment 17y ago
Couldn't you spin not coding outside of work into something positive? Job interview: What have you coded in your free time? Me: I spend my free doing X and Y. I find I'm most effective at work if I save all of my creative energy for the job.
- unalone 17y ago
  That's uncomfortably in the realm of PR bullshit for me. Give the answer, and don't spin it. The sorts of jobs you can only get through spin are jobs you don't want to have.
- wooster 17y ago
  confused look "What's 'free time'?"
  - Hexstream 17y ago
    A word-for-word translation of "temps libre" from french. Spare time. Temps is time, libre is free.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  It depends on what X and Y are. If they are something closely related to programming then it can be directly positive (as a personal example, I spend what I call free time working on a masters in math). If it is something that makes you sound well rounded, then that can play well, at least to certain types of interviewers (one interviewee talking about writing fiction on the side, not directly related but it showed well rounded intellectual interests.) On the other hand, if your answer involves watching tv, playing video games, or reading popular fiction, then it will probably not help (though reading may be a notch up from the other two) for most positions.
maxklein 17y ago
I agree absolutely with him and I disagree with raganwald. Why is this? Because there are only so many rockstars you can have in one joint. There are only so many people who live and breath code you can have in one room before trouble starts brewing. Every team needs a crop of solid, dependable and slow developers that do the boring tasks. The guy who does not mind going over all the functions and commenting them. The guy who is satisfied to port a C script to Mac OS X, even though it is mindless bug testing. And those type of guys don't code at home. If you will never hire such people, then who will do the boring tasks? Your highly intelligent and highly paid coders? You recruit them to put them for 3 months working on some inane and boring database program? Intellectual diversity is a neccessity in any shop that makes its living from brainwork.
- weavejester 17y ago
  It seems to me that "boring" often means "potentially automatable".
  - maxklein 17y ago
    How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers? Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another platform You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.
    - daleharvey 17y ago
      or you just need smarter programs I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.
      - thenduks 17y ago
        It's what we do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest' it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm. In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the examples given is simply lowering your job security.
alex_c 17y ago
Can we remove "Ted Dziuba" from the title? It's in the URL right after, anyway. Coming from a random unknown blogger, I doubt this would've made it to the front page. I actually happen to mostly agree with what he says in this post (even though a lot of it is strawman), but really - who cares?
deleted 17y ago
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gruseom 17y ago
After reading this and its complacent I've-learned-as-much-as-I-need-and-besides-I-have-kids attitude, I'd say he does a good job making a case against himself being a very good programmer. His mechanical analogy (socket wrenches) for "computer code" (sic) is particularly revealing. Ironically, none of this has intrinsically to do with his not liking to program on Saturdays, yet ends up reinforcing the notion that, for whatever reason, there is a correlation. I know at least five guys who have small children and hack in their spare time. Yes, it's a struggle, but they all do it. I also know quite a few with small children who never do that. They never did before they had kids, either, but the kids furnish a nice excuse. Kids are handy that way. (Edit: notice how the author plays this card, even though he already said he almost never programmed outside of work or class.) Anyway, my point is that the first group are really good programmers and the second are, by and large, not. Anecodotal though this may be, I buy the idea of a correlation. P.S. Another trait that good programmers tend to have is not seeing themselves as good enough and not getting defensive about proving how good they are. Exercise to the reader.
- callmeed 17y ago
  If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer. And, yes, much of what you wrote is anecdotal.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Actually, I was careful not to say that he isn't a skilled programmer. I have no way of knowing whether he is or isn't. What I said is that his piece does a good job of making a case against his own argument.
    - lanstein 17y ago
      'If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer.' Actually, you do have a way.
dasil003 17y ago
I would hire someone who didn't code in their spare time, but I definitely wouldn't hire Teddy boy. Who would want that kind of publicity-addicted blowhard polluting their team?
- nearestneighbor 17y ago
  PR talent is important.
  - billswift 17y ago
    Judging by the post he has more of an anti-PR talent.
    - tlrobinson 17y ago
      Yet we all know who he is.
      - chancho 17y ago
        Fame and Infamy have subtle differences.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    This can also backfire. I have a friend who hired a very well known developer to work on their startup in large part for PR reasons. The product had already been developed and was doing well, but he wanted to expand his team and gain more mindshare in the developer community. Long story short, when things went south, this "A-list blogger" took all the credit for the companies success, and made a big stink about it, airing his dirty laundry in public, which was all anyone ever heard about it because he had a legion of screaming fanboys to spread the dirt even though not one of them had the slightest clue what really happened.
- maigret 17y ago
  On a somewhat related point, I think the best advantage of hiring people who code in their free time is that none of them will try to take your job as long as they can use their favourite editor. Think of that as the early Steve Job strategy ;)
jrockway 17y ago
I am not sure I agree. The main reason is that when all you do is work, you are only exposed to one codebase, written by one small group of (perhaps inexperienced) people. You are never going to get any new ideas from that; you are going to spend your 8-hour day reinventing the wheel and doing things wrong. You will just continue the same monoculture forever. This may "meet the business needs" (the favorite excuse of the non-programmer], but it's not going to be good code. (You could be taking an interest in outside programming "stuff" at work, perhaps, but between meetings, lunch, and getting your actual work done, how much time do you have to learn new programming languages and peruse open-source projects? Probably not enough. This stuff is time-consuming!) So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday? How many great artists would rather spend time with their kids than painting? Not many.
- unalone 17y ago
  Cormac McCarthy famously said he didn't read Proust or Pound, because to him that wasn't literature, and it wasn't what he wanted to write. There are lots of artists who famously didn't do much work, because they preferred only to work when they were inspired. The moral is that it's possible both to be good and hardworking and good and not quite so obsessed.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Neither of these are "show up in an office at 9am, work for 8 hours, go home at 5, not think about anything work-related for 16 hours, repeat", however.
- _pius 17y ago
  So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday? For me, this sums it up. It seems really uncontroversial ... I don't see why some folks get so defensive about such a simple idea.
paul9290 17y ago
Sorry but I hate the photo on that site! Yeah it's nature and all but it speaks loudly about the author of that blog!
xtho 17y ago
I wouldn't hire somebody who publishes a picture named "obama-winning-the-nobel-proves-that-white-guilt-is-one-of-the-most-awesome-powers-on-earth.jpg" on his blog (although I'm open to interpretations of that filename).
- omouse 17y ago
  I would def hire someone like that. He'd be the comedy relief for the rest of the team as we make our way through various crazy adventurous situations :D
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Is it because he thinks that Obama didn't deserve the peace prize, or because he thinks that white racial guilt is a factor in the President's incredible popularity? I guess this is another example of why keeping your political opinions to yourself if you disagree with the majority is good for your career.
  - rimantas 17y ago
    Somehow I doubt norwegians would have any of that white guilt.
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      I'm not arguing for the guy's point. I just don't think politics should be taken too personally.
    - xtho 17y ago
      Swedes.
      - MaysonL 17y ago
        Actually, the commitee is five Norwegians, age 58-68, all members or former members of the Storting (Norwegian parliament). One man, the chairman, four women. See: http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/members/ http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/member...
cmelbye 17y ago
This post gave me a chuckle. You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING. Sorry, why is this guy trying to convince everyone that his hobby is better than everyone else's?
- Dilpil 17y ago
  If the title of the post didn't disqualify him from my fantasy hiring process, then certainly this line would.
derefr 17y ago
I think that, regardless of whether the hypothetical correlation applies to Ted, it could survive weakening to eliminate his complaint and still be useful: "Good coders have coded outside of work at some point, or used coding to solve non-work-or-school-related problems." it doesn't mean you're still doing it now when you have -5 hours to spare a day, but it means you would be if it wasn't a matter of prioitizing. Bad coders don't assign "coding as a hobby" a priority value--they simply never consider doing it at all.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  Agreed. There's definitely more important things in life. As long as one can demonstrate that software is a passion for him/her, there's no issue, even if that person hasn't been able to find the time to scrape much code together for their own pet projects over the last six months or the last year or whatever. This concept of only hiring hobbyist programmers exists because we've all worked with the complacent "career programmer" -- people who don't really care and went into the field because someone told them it was a good living and they needed a major. These people are usually bad programmers. Coding as a hobby demonstrates that you're not one of these people, but arbitrary standards like "Wrote at least six muffin-fulls of code last week", like most arbitrary standards, are much too restrictive and unforgiving.
- EliAndrewC 17y ago
  I don't think we should treat this as a discussion of good coders and bad coders. "I wouldn't hire someone who ____" is a hiring filter. And ANY worthwhile hiring filter will be over-aggressive. So it's more a distinction between groups that contain close to 100% good coders vs groups that contain a much lower percentage. The point of a hiring filter is to weed out bad coders, and hirers should realize that any filter you set that will weed out most/all bad coders will also weed out a LOT of good ones. So if someone says, "I wouldn't hire someone who ______", they're NOT necessarily saying, "All people who _____ are bad programmers". Instead, the smart hirer is actually saying, "People who _____ are Group A and everyone else is Group B. Group B contains many great hires, but it's really difficult to distinguish good hires from bad ones, and Group A has almost no bad hires. Therefore I'm only hiring from Group A."
baguasquirrel 17y ago
The problem I've noticed with hiring people based on whether or not they code on their free time is that whether they do so is often dependent on how much their work/coursework sucks. If it sucks pretty badly (which it usually does), then the folks who enjoy programming will tend to do as little work as they possibly can, and save their energy for their side projects. One interesting thing you can infer from this is, if you're running a shitty shop, you actually want bad programmers, not good ones. Bad programmers with a high degree of discipline. I don't mean for this to get sucked into that other discussion about immigration and employment, but I've long thought that this is why the big employers like IBM like to hire foreign talent (it's not for the same reason why we want to keep foreign talent here).
johnfn 17y ago
> "You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING." This is pretty depressing since last weekend I was learning Haskell by working on Project Euler problems.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Why is it depressing? just because some douchebag on the internet said so?
DaniFong 17y ago
Maybe the reason this guy is pissed off constantly is because he just doesn't like his work.
notlisted 17y ago
I have a family. I understand where he's coming from, but only to the extent that I have to balance family time with passionate hobby time, but... I would not hire a writer that does not write in his free time. I would not hire a lead singer that does not sing in his free time. I would not hire a chef that does not cook in his free time. I would not hire a prostitute that does not have sex in her 'free time'. OK, that last one is a stretch perhaps, but my point is simple: if someone loves what they do, the act of doing it is not a chore and never "something they do for money" but "a state of mind". You can never learn all there is to know "on the job". Perhaps MANAGERS do not have to manage in their spare time, but anyone producing tangible stuff better love it. He sounds like he's trying to tell himself he can still be a good programmer without putting in the time. I'd like to tell myself the same thing, but sadly, those days are really gone (it's a slippery slope, it started with a kiss, a gf, a relationship, living together, marriage, children... pooof!)
- lanaer 17y ago
  I tend not to code in my free time, because whenever I feel like coding, I apply that effort to a project designed to make me money, so that time becomes work time.
Virax 17y ago
"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and went on vacation for a week." ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason? This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly pissing people off.
- uuilly 17y ago
  Ted is like Ali G / Borat / Bruno. It's a lot more fun to sit back and enjoy the show than it is to scold him for being an ass. Esp when he's so obviously going out of his way to be an ass. And like Ali G's antics, the AOL script was really funny. I hope he open sources it.
ori_b 17y ago
Me to Ted: And I wouldn't hire you. Not only are you an asshole (that would be excusable), you are an asshole that consistently writes articles full of sound and fury, but completely vapid. As a writer, you are incompetent, albeit rabble-rousing. To top it off, from what I gleaned from your articles, you know very little about programming. You consistently seem to misinterpret ideas, either deliberately in order to mock them on unsound grounds, or simply through ignorance. In short, I wouldn't hire a troll.
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rlf 17y ago
AMEN.
chrischen 17y ago
Well the obedient type is normally what a company would want to hire to work under it. The crazy people who code in their spare time are more startup-founder type anyways. And these types have a tendency to fail the hiring process more often.
jobeirne 17y ago
So that explains why I've never heard this guy's name before.
forgotmypasswd 17y ago
he works for his startup right? he doesn't have any spare time anyway.
yason 17y ago
If you code in your spare time, it could simply mean that what you do for work isn't challenging or satisfying enough. If you're a good programmer you need to make something beautiful, you need to leave your fingerprint somewhere. If you can do it at work, good; if you can't, you can't not do in the evenings... It can be a drag though. Few people can do actual coding more than 5-6 hours a day when they're in the good shape. Trying to do a good job and still satisfy your own itches the same day may not be possible, either.
- maigret 17y ago
  Two excellent points! Add to that: I code at work the same type of things I'd make at home else. That free up some time, and wow, you get paid for that :)
nl 17y ago
If Ted doesn't code at home, doest he blog about code at home? Or at least blog about not coding at home? Doesn't that mean he's thinking about it, which is effectively the same thing?
gfunk911 17y ago
The debate is not really about whether you program in your spare time. It's a debate about whether you love programming. 1. People who love doing something are on average going to be much better at it than people who don't. 2. People who love something find a way to do it, meaning that programming in your spare time is a very strong indicator of whether you love programming. 3. Therefore, whether you program in your spare time is a very strong indicator of your programming skill. Whether you program in your spare time is a proxy for whether you love programming, which is a proxy for your programming skill. If this author has only coded for pleasure one time in his entire life, including college (!), then the probabilities say he's overwhelmingly likely to not be a very good programmer. Maybe he's the exception, I know nothing about him other than what's in my comment.
quizzical 17y ago
I've met lots of really smart programmers that don't even seem to talk about coding during lunch, much less program during free time. I'd certainly code more at home if I didn't have a family and lots of other interests besides programming.
loupgarou21 17y ago
I work in IT, and the way I see it, there is a certain amount of time that I want to work on computers. When I'm working work on computers 40 or more hours a week for work, I'm unlikely to want to spend any of my free time working on computers. When I've got a lower work load, I tend to spend more time on personal projects related to computers. If I were actually a programmer, I would probably fall into the same pattern.

167 points by sharms 17y ago

then I would not hire you.

"Instead, I spend my free time saying nasty things about people who do - it's easier and more fun!" Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview, although I would be unhappy if I didn't have at least a side project or two to hack on, though. I have less time for that now, with a child, but it's something I need to do. Oh, and I'd much rather spend my time riding my bicycle than fiddling with it. My mechanic is way better and faster than I am in any case.

unalone 17y ago
What's wrong with doing something easy and fun that gets lots of media attention?
timwiseman 17y ago
Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview, Why? As an interviewer, I think it tells me a great deal. It certainly should not be the focus of the interview, but I want to know things like: 1. Will this candidate mesh well with the existing team? 2. Is this candidate going to take the initiative to learn useful things on their own? It seems to speak quite well to those issues.

jseifer 17y ago

"I like to spend free time wrenching on a car or a bike, but I don't set out on Saturday morning and say "I'm going to learn how to use a torque wrench today, because those things are the future of tools"." That one made me laugh.

greentree 17y ago
Really? I'm getting kind of tired of the tool analogies. They are thrown around as answers in place of actual thinking and reasoned arguments. The comparison between learning how to use a torque wrench and learning a language is absurd.
- crucini 17y ago
  It depends. Learning a significantly different language can be mind-expanding. Going from C to Lisp is not just picking up a different tool. More like a brain transplant. Going from Java to C# is more ho-hum. There will be no epiphanies. More like "Oh, Microsoft solved problem X. That's nice." That really is like replacing a Husky brand wrench with a Craftsman brand wrench.

sjs 17y ago

> You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING. I feel extremely lucky to not only have known what I wanted to do from a young age, but enjoy it, and can make good money doing it. I like to ride my bike, hike, climb mountains, go to the beach, and walk my dog as well as solve problems, math or otherwise. I really hope for Ted's sake that he enjoys development at least a little bit. No one wants to work with people that aren't happy.

philfreo 17y ago
I worked with Ted at Google. Trust me, even though his articles have a certain sarcastic tone to them, he was definitely enjoyable to work with and clearly did like solving hard problems in development. His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work.
- _pius 17y ago
  His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work. Is doing a little coding outside of work mutually exclusive to enjoying your life? I feel like the article draws a false dichotomy that either you have a life and don't code at all outside of work or you spend all of your non-work time coding.
  - thenduks 17y ago
    That's my biggest gripe here, too. Why are people so black-and-white about this? I work 40-60 hours/week depending on what's going on. Sometimes while working 40 hour weeks I don't write any code at home preferring to do one of the many other thing I enjoy. Other times I'm practically buried in work and come home and poke around on a side project. This just varies depending on my mood and what (if any) interesting stuff has my attention. If you enjoy something, you'll find time. If you don't enjoy it, why is it your career again? If you ask me the whole point of this discussion shouldn't be 'coding at home' but instead 'giving a crap'. Even just a little passion for your field will get you a long way in any profession - and I think that is especially true in creative fields like programming. Here I am on a Saturday afternoon putting some thinking time into my field... have I devoted the day to it? Hardly! You're right on that there's absolutely nothing mutually exclusive about enjoying coding (and lots of other completely unrelated stuff) as a hobby and as a career.

mustpax 17y ago

For all this person claims to be wise and experienced, this is a very contentless and juvenile blog post. The tone is condescending and reeks of insecurity.

wheels 17y ago

"I love it when twenty-something engineers take such a hard-line position on something they have so little experience with, like hiring." Uhm, the author graduated from college 3 years ago. It took me about 2 minutes of searching to find out that the "twenty-something" he's referring to (raganwald) is about 20 years older than him. http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pdf http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pd...

unalone 17y ago
This isn't a response to Raganwald. It's a response to this Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you_hire_a_programmer_that_does_not_write/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you...
- swombat 17y ago
  Is the reddit thread a response to raganwald's post?
  - tlrobinson 17y ago
    No, vice versa, Raganwald links to the Reddit post (http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-08/no_hire.md http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-0...)
- raganwald 17y ago
  Yes, especially since I agree with much of what Ted is saying. p.s. Not that anyone needs further evidence I am imperfect, but if we must have a bash at it, here are two flaws with my original article that I think have merit: 1. I presented a dichotomy between two strategies, first hiring people who know me or whom I know through networking, the Internet, and so on. Second, using monster.com and recruiters. Isn't this a false dichotomy? 2. Although the linkbait headline of my post said something about people who code outside of work, the post itself actually said something about networks and communities. Clearly someone can belong to the HN community without coding oustide of work. According to my headline, I wouldn't hire them. According to my post, I would. Which is it, Mr. Braithwaite?

adamhowell 17y ago

After seeing Pressflip, I don't blame him.

unalone 17y ago
What a snotty, immature response. Dziuba worked for Google before Pressflip, and is now working on Milo, which looks pretty sweet. But I don't blame you for needing to snark at other people after seeing adamhowell.org.
- davidw 17y ago
  Yeah, but there's only so much one can take of Ted Dziuba's writing before the urge to respond in kind wells up. It'd just be simpler if people wouldn't upvote his articles.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Ted's an asshole, and most of the time I'm pissed off by his writing. When Uncov came "back" early last year it was terrible. That said, this article I agreed with entirely, all respect to raganwald, and it pisses me off that people would stoop to namecalling rather than discussing it. I think this is the rare Dziuba piece worth a good debate. Above all, I can't stand insulting somebody by insulting the work they've done. Ted is obviously smart, he put a lot of work into Pressflip before retiring to have a kid, and Pressflip, while not brilliant, wasn't terrible when I used it. I just didn't see the point to it. Now he's off working on new things, so he's not exactly lazy or coasting.
    - tsetse-fly 17y ago
      Any insults that Ted Dziuba receives are well-deserved. He's written dozens of trollish articles on how useless other startups are or how he hopes they'll fail. It seems fair to me that people are insulting his failure to produce a successful startup when he's spent so long being a hypocrite. You can't expect to be the Glenn Beck of startups and not be on the receiving end of the trolling. Here are some of his headlines from Uncov, incase you've forgotten his work: "Fanboy Driven Development with Arc" "Paul Graham, Just Shut Your Face Already" "RockYou Dominates The Fake Business World" "Surprise, Mahalo Still Blows" "Mahalo Is Hawaiian for Useless" "Guy Kawasaki Should Stick To Contentless Blog Posts" "Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old can do it" "Middio: Another Marginally Useful Feature As A Product" "WriteWith: Everybody Point and Laugh" "YouOS: YouHave To Be Kidding Me" "Wellsphere's Fail Tale, Part 2" "Firefox Fanboys: The Only People More Dangerous and Less Competent Than ..." "Did Enron Cause Web 2.0?" "Web 2.0 Amateur Hour: Sputtr" "VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail" http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com

chaosmachine 17y ago

"I would not want to work for a company that wouldn't hire me" Me either ;)

maxklein 17y ago
And I don't want to go out with any hot model that does not want to go out with me!

tocomment 17y ago

Couldn't you spin not coding outside of work into something positive? Job interview: What have you coded in your free time? Me: I spend my free doing X and Y. I find I'm most effective at work if I save all of my creative energy for the job.

unalone 17y ago
That's uncomfortably in the realm of PR bullshit for me. Give the answer, and don't spin it. The sorts of jobs you can only get through spin are jobs you don't want to have.
wooster 17y ago
confused look "What's 'free time'?"
- Hexstream 17y ago
  A word-for-word translation of "temps libre" from french. Spare time. Temps is time, libre is free.
timwiseman 17y ago
It depends on what X and Y are. If they are something closely related to programming then it can be directly positive (as a personal example, I spend what I call free time working on a masters in math). If it is something that makes you sound well rounded, then that can play well, at least to certain types of interviewers (one interviewee talking about writing fiction on the side, not directly related but it showed well rounded intellectual interests.) On the other hand, if your answer involves watching tv, playing video games, or reading popular fiction, then it will probably not help (though reading may be a notch up from the other two) for most positions.

maxklein 17y ago

I agree absolutely with him and I disagree with raganwald. Why is this? Because there are only so many rockstars you can have in one joint. There are only so many people who live and breath code you can have in one room before trouble starts brewing. Every team needs a crop of solid, dependable and slow developers that do the boring tasks. The guy who does not mind going over all the functions and commenting them. The guy who is satisfied to port a C script to Mac OS X, even though it is mindless bug testing. And those type of guys don't code at home. If you will never hire such people, then who will do the boring tasks? Your highly intelligent and highly paid coders? You recruit them to put them for 3 months working on some inane and boring database program? Intellectual diversity is a neccessity in any shop that makes its living from brainwork.

weavejester 17y ago
It seems to me that "boring" often means "potentially automatable".
- maxklein 17y ago
  How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers? Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another platform You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.
  - daleharvey 17y ago
    or you just need smarter programs I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.
    - thenduks 17y ago
      It's what we do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest' it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm. In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the examples given is simply lowering your job security.

alex_c 17y ago

Can we remove "Ted Dziuba" from the title? It's in the URL right after, anyway. Coming from a random unknown blogger, I doubt this would've made it to the front page. I actually happen to mostly agree with what he says in this post (even though a lot of it is strawman), but really - who cares?

deleted 17y ago

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gruseom 17y ago

After reading this and its complacent I've-learned-as-much-as-I-need-and-besides-I-have-kids attitude, I'd say he does a good job making a case against himself being a very good programmer. His mechanical analogy (socket wrenches) for "computer code" (sic) is particularly revealing. Ironically, none of this has intrinsically to do with his not liking to program on Saturdays, yet ends up reinforcing the notion that, for whatever reason, there is a correlation. I know at least five guys who have small children and hack in their spare time. Yes, it's a struggle, but they all do it. I also know quite a few with small children who never do that. They never did before they had kids, either, but the kids furnish a nice excuse. Kids are handy that way. (Edit: notice how the author plays this card, even though he already said he almost never programmed outside of work or class.) Anyway, my point is that the first group are really good programmers and the second are, by and large, not. Anecodotal though this may be, I buy the idea of a correlation. P.S. Another trait that good programmers tend to have is not seeing themselves as good enough and not getting defensive about proving how good they are. Exercise to the reader.

callmeed 17y ago
If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer. And, yes, much of what you wrote is anecdotal.
- gruseom 17y ago
  Actually, I was careful not to say that he isn't a skilled programmer. I have no way of knowing whether he is or isn't. What I said is that his piece does a good job of making a case against his own argument.
  - lanstein 17y ago
    'If you've read any of Ted's past stuff or followed his startups at all, you'd probably find plenty of evidence that he's a very skilled programmer.' Actually, you do have a way.

dasil003 17y ago

I would hire someone who didn't code in their spare time, but I definitely wouldn't hire Teddy boy. Who would want that kind of publicity-addicted blowhard polluting their team?

nearestneighbor 17y ago
PR talent is important.
- billswift 17y ago
  Judging by the post he has more of an anti-PR talent.
  - tlrobinson 17y ago
    Yet we all know who he is.
    - chancho 17y ago
      Fame and Infamy have subtle differences.
- dasil003 17y ago
  This can also backfire. I have a friend who hired a very well known developer to work on their startup in large part for PR reasons. The product had already been developed and was doing well, but he wanted to expand his team and gain more mindshare in the developer community. Long story short, when things went south, this "A-list blogger" took all the credit for the companies success, and made a big stink about it, airing his dirty laundry in public, which was all anyone ever heard about it because he had a legion of screaming fanboys to spread the dirt even though not one of them had the slightest clue what really happened.
maigret 17y ago
On a somewhat related point, I think the best advantage of hiring people who code in their free time is that none of them will try to take your job as long as they can use their favourite editor. Think of that as the early Steve Job strategy ;)

jrockway 17y ago

I am not sure I agree. The main reason is that when all you do is work, you are only exposed to one codebase, written by one small group of (perhaps inexperienced) people. You are never going to get any new ideas from that; you are going to spend your 8-hour day reinventing the wheel and doing things wrong. You will just continue the same monoculture forever. This may "meet the business needs" (the favorite excuse of the non-programmer], but it's not going to be good code. (You could be taking an interest in outside programming "stuff" at work, perhaps, but between meetings, lunch, and getting your actual work done, how much time do you have to learn new programming languages and peruse open-source projects? Probably not enough. This stuff is time-consuming!) So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday? How many great artists would rather spend time with their kids than painting? Not many.

unalone 17y ago
Cormac McCarthy famously said he didn't read Proust or Pound, because to him that wasn't literature, and it wasn't what he wanted to write. There are lots of artists who famously didn't do much work, because they preferred only to work when they were inspired. The moral is that it's possible both to be good and hardworking and good and not quite so obsessed.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Neither of these are "show up in an office at 9am, work for 8 hours, go home at 5, not think about anything work-related for 16 hours, repeat", however.
_pius 17y ago
So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday? For me, this sums it up. It seems really uncontroversial ... I don't see why some folks get so defensive about such a simple idea.

paul9290 17y ago

Sorry but I hate the photo on that site! Yeah it's nature and all but it speaks loudly about the author of that blog!

xtho 17y ago

I wouldn't hire somebody who publishes a picture named "obama-winning-the-nobel-proves-that-white-guilt-is-one-of-the-most-awesome-powers-on-earth.jpg" on his blog (although I'm open to interpretations of that filename).

omouse 17y ago
I would def hire someone like that. He'd be the comedy relief for the rest of the team as we make our way through various crazy adventurous situations :D
jacoblyles 17y ago
Is it because he thinks that Obama didn't deserve the peace prize, or because he thinks that white racial guilt is a factor in the President's incredible popularity? I guess this is another example of why keeping your political opinions to yourself if you disagree with the majority is good for your career.
- rimantas 17y ago
  Somehow I doubt norwegians would have any of that white guilt.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    I'm not arguing for the guy's point. I just don't think politics should be taken too personally.
  - xtho 17y ago
    Swedes.
    - MaysonL 17y ago
      Actually, the commitee is five Norwegians, age 58-68, all members or former members of the Storting (Norwegian parliament). One man, the chairman, four women. See: http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/members/ http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/member...

cmelbye 17y ago

This post gave me a chuckle. You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING. Sorry, why is this guy trying to convince everyone that his hobby is better than everyone else's?

Dilpil 17y ago
If the title of the post didn't disqualify him from my fantasy hiring process, then certainly this line would.

derefr 17y ago

I think that, regardless of whether the hypothetical correlation applies to Ted, it could survive weakening to eliminate his complaint and still be useful: "Good coders have coded outside of work at some point, or used coding to solve non-work-or-school-related problems." it doesn't mean you're still doing it now when you have -5 hours to spare a day, but it means you would be if it wasn't a matter of prioitizing. Bad coders don't assign "coding as a hobby" a priority value--they simply never consider doing it at all.

cookiecaper 17y ago
Agreed. There's definitely more important things in life. As long as one can demonstrate that software is a passion for him/her, there's no issue, even if that person hasn't been able to find the time to scrape much code together for their own pet projects over the last six months or the last year or whatever. This concept of only hiring hobbyist programmers exists because we've all worked with the complacent "career programmer" -- people who don't really care and went into the field because someone told them it was a good living and they needed a major. These people are usually bad programmers. Coding as a hobby demonstrates that you're not one of these people, but arbitrary standards like "Wrote at least six muffin-fulls of code last week", like most arbitrary standards, are much too restrictive and unforgiving.
EliAndrewC 17y ago
I don't think we should treat this as a discussion of good coders and bad coders. "I wouldn't hire someone who ____" is a hiring filter. And ANY worthwhile hiring filter will be over-aggressive. So it's more a distinction between groups that contain close to 100% good coders vs groups that contain a much lower percentage. The point of a hiring filter is to weed out bad coders, and hirers should realize that any filter you set that will weed out most/all bad coders will also weed out a LOT of good ones. So if someone says, "I wouldn't hire someone who ______", they're NOT necessarily saying, "All people who _____ are bad programmers". Instead, the smart hirer is actually saying, "People who _____ are Group A and everyone else is Group B. Group B contains many great hires, but it's really difficult to distinguish good hires from bad ones, and Group A has almost no bad hires. Therefore I'm only hiring from Group A."

baguasquirrel 17y ago

The problem I've noticed with hiring people based on whether or not they code on their free time is that whether they do so is often dependent on how much their work/coursework sucks. If it sucks pretty badly (which it usually does), then the folks who enjoy programming will tend to do as little work as they possibly can, and save their energy for their side projects. One interesting thing you can infer from this is, if you're running a shitty shop, you actually want bad programmers, not good ones. Bad programmers with a high degree of discipline. I don't mean for this to get sucked into that other discussion about immigration and employment, but I've long thought that this is why the big employers like IBM like to hire foreign talent (it's not for the same reason why we want to keep foreign talent here).

johnfn 17y ago

> "You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING." This is pretty depressing since last weekend I was learning Haskell by working on Project Euler problems.

mahmud 17y ago
Why is it depressing? just because some douchebag on the internet said so?

DaniFong 17y ago

Maybe the reason this guy is pissed off constantly is because he just doesn't like his work.

notlisted 17y ago

I have a family. I understand where he's coming from, but only to the extent that I have to balance family time with passionate hobby time, but... I would not hire a writer that does not write in his free time. I would not hire a lead singer that does not sing in his free time. I would not hire a chef that does not cook in his free time. I would not hire a prostitute that does not have sex in her 'free time'. OK, that last one is a stretch perhaps, but my point is simple: if someone loves what they do, the act of doing it is not a chore and never "something they do for money" but "a state of mind". You can never learn all there is to know "on the job". Perhaps MANAGERS do not have to manage in their spare time, but anyone producing tangible stuff better love it. He sounds like he's trying to tell himself he can still be a good programmer without putting in the time. I'd like to tell myself the same thing, but sadly, those days are really gone (it's a slippery slope, it started with a kiss, a gf, a relationship, living together, marriage, children... pooof!)

lanaer 17y ago
I tend not to code in my free time, because whenever I feel like coding, I apply that effort to a project designed to make me money, so that time becomes work time.

Virax 17y ago

"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and went on vacation for a week." ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason? This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly pissing people off.

uuilly 17y ago
Ted is like Ali G / Borat / Bruno. It's a lot more fun to sit back and enjoy the show than it is to scold him for being an ass. Esp when he's so obviously going out of his way to be an ass. And like Ali G's antics, the AOL script was really funny. I hope he open sources it.

ori_b 17y ago

Me to Ted: And I wouldn't hire you. Not only are you an asshole (that would be excusable), you are an asshole that consistently writes articles full of sound and fury, but completely vapid. As a writer, you are incompetent, albeit rabble-rousing. To top it off, from what I gleaned from your articles, you know very little about programming. You consistently seem to misinterpret ideas, either deliberately in order to mock them on unsound grounds, or simply through ignorance. In short, I wouldn't hire a troll.

deleted 17y ago

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rlf 17y ago

AMEN.

chrischen 17y ago

Well the obedient type is normally what a company would want to hire to work under it. The crazy people who code in their spare time are more startup-founder type anyways. And these types have a tendency to fail the hiring process more often.

jobeirne 17y ago

So that explains why I've never heard this guy's name before.

forgotmypasswd 17y ago

he works for his startup right? he doesn't have any spare time anyway.

yason 17y ago

If you code in your spare time, it could simply mean that what you do for work isn't challenging or satisfying enough. If you're a good programmer you need to make something beautiful, you need to leave your fingerprint somewhere. If you can do it at work, good; if you can't, you can't not do in the evenings... It can be a drag though. Few people can do actual coding more than 5-6 hours a day when they're in the good shape. Trying to do a good job and still satisfy your own itches the same day may not be possible, either.

maigret 17y ago
Two excellent points! Add to that: I code at work the same type of things I'd make at home else. That free up some time, and wow, you get paid for that :)

nl 17y ago

If Ted doesn't code at home, doest he blog about code at home? Or at least blog about not coding at home? Doesn't that mean he's thinking about it, which is effectively the same thing?

gfunk911 17y ago

The debate is not really about whether you program in your spare time. It's a debate about whether you love programming. 1. People who love doing something are on average going to be much better at it than people who don't. 2. People who love something find a way to do it, meaning that programming in your spare time is a very strong indicator of whether you love programming. 3. Therefore, whether you program in your spare time is a very strong indicator of your programming skill. Whether you program in your spare time is a proxy for whether you love programming, which is a proxy for your programming skill. If this author has only coded for pleasure one time in his entire life, including college (!), then the probabilities say he's overwhelmingly likely to not be a very good programmer. Maybe he's the exception, I know nothing about him other than what's in my comment.

quizzical 17y ago

I've met lots of really smart programmers that don't even seem to talk about coding during lunch, much less program during free time. I'd certainly code more at home if I didn't have a family and lots of other interests besides programming.

loupgarou21 17y ago

I work in IT, and the way I see it, there is a certain amount of time that I want to work on computers. When I'm working work on computers 40 or more hours a week for work, I'm unlikely to want to spend any of my free time working on computers. When I've got a lower work load, I tend to spend more time on personal projects related to computers. If I were actually a programmer, I would probably fall into the same pattern.