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I just can't understand the attitude that good programmers should be expected to voluntarily always spend 10+ hours a day, just because they love the work. I g
by mquander 17y ago
I just can't understand the attitude that good programmers should be expected to voluntarily always spend 10+ hours a day, just because they love the work.
I genuinely enjoy my programming job, and it provides me interesting challenges. I think I am at least an average programmer, depending on where you're putting the "average" bar. But I enjoy many other things, too. I want time to read, play chess, go out places, study other fields, and spend time with friends -- and I don't even have a family and kids, like many professionals!
Given that I'm programming a minimum of 8 hours a day, why would it be a red flag that I usually prefer to spend the other 8 doing something else? I'm already spending as much time programming as all the other things I also love, combined!
- gaius 17y agoI just can't understand the attitude that good programmers should be expected to voluntarily always spend 10+ hours a day, just because they love the work. It's easy. The author of that piece, at the time he wrote it, was making a shit-tonne of money hiring out programmers to large corporations on an hourly basis. He had a huge vested interest in persuading his employees that this is how they ought to be. Did/does he really believe it himself? That's another question. We only have the material that he chooses to make public to go on.
- Tamerlin 17y agoI agree... what he's describing is a sweatshop, and honestly I've never seen code from someone who was working 70+ hour weeks actually work. Every time I've worked with someone like that, I've had to waste a lot of MY time fixing it, making me extremely unproductive... but I was still able to get my work done, because I did it right -- I avoided unnecessary complexity. And did anyone else notice that he equated "productive" with "works long hours?"