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There is often pressure inside Software development for Software developers to code outside of work hours. Coding is considered a passion for some, but others don’t think this way. They are more than happy to not code in their spare time. This is OK.
Meetup groups, side-projects, coding quizzes, side-hustles, developing websites for friends and family. Improving your coding skills takes time, effort, discipline and sacrifice. But is it really necessary? That is for you to decide.
There is no doubt that there is importance to setting goals. It helps to see where you are going and to have something you are working towards. Being the best coder isn’t everyone’s goal.
People often feel peer pressure to code outside of hours, to stay competitive and to be the best. If someone is making you feel this way, you can remind yourself that it is perfectly OK to only code at work. Some people might even argue that doing too much can have diminishing returns…
[...] In short, it is perfectly OK to have a life outside of work. Many people hack their schedules according to their own goals and interests, which may or may not include coding. If you think this post could help someone out there, please share it around!
(Score: 2) by black6host on Saturday May 04 2019, @10:56PM (4 children)
When I was working I made it a point that me, and my team, left at 5pm. Quitting time. No forced overtime, no 24hr on call bullshit. That being said, there wasn't a night I didn't go home and code because I wanted to. Didn't have to but I just liked doing it so much!
I guess my point is that while you may not have to do something the odds are you will if you truly love what you do.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:19AM (1 child)
And after you turned 25? Got married? Realized you are compensating? Then what.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:11PM
Married? I can't find that package on the repository. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:05AM (1 child)
I find that the more I like working at a job, the more I feel motivated to code for them outside of work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:59PM
If you code for them outside work, you are screwing over your fellow programmers with either the direct employer expectation of free overtime -or- by making it seem that 8 hrs is enough to do all your work and therefore why can't the OTHER PROGRAMMERS get the same work done as you? Time estimates become dishonest then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by exaeta on Saturday May 04 2019, @11:08PM (5 children)
As long as my employer doesn't try to steal code I write in my off time, I have no problem with continual coding. I think it helps teach me to think logically, so I support the practice. It's unlikely that the for-profit coding is going to give you the challenge and variety needed to stay sharp. Usually you just code whatever the client wants, which might not be particularly interesting.
Should you always code outside work? No. Not every day; but the practice is important for staying sharp.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:25AM (1 child)
It's not stealing if you signed a contract which states that it is theirs.
If you have signed any kind of employment agreement, read very carefully if you want to retain your outside work as your own IP. Odds are there is strong encouragement in there for you to disclose your "outside work" to management, if you do not, you risk the presumption that company resources (including your time) may have been used to create the work, rendering it their property.
Unless you've got a strong promotional capability on your side somehow, don't get your hopes up too high that code you create on your own will do much to earn you money. Making money is much more than building the better mousetrap, you can code up a steaming pile of poo and with great promotion (and a bit of luck) it can make you billions, not just Gates and Zuckerman, there are tons of examples. You can also code up a very high quality solution for a valuable unmet need, but without continual promotion it is unlikely to replace your day job income.
A coworker of mine did setup a lucrative home business back around 2002: selling embroidery machine fonts. The market was rich old ladies who bought these very expensive embroidery machines and needed help installing new fonts on them. Coworker's wife did the customer service, which was the whole business really, since fonts cannot be copyrighted all they had to do was teach their customers how to use them, and a little old lady who spent $15K on an embroidery machine wouldn't blink at sending $70 to a nice young woman who sold her a new font and helped her to get it working on the machine.
Similarly, I coded up an app in 1999 that helped people who had just installed $5-10K turbo systems in their cars to tune the systems with a Palm Pilot - I sold that for $69 per copy, and probably had 50% market penetration among the 100 or so very specific potential customers of this very specific device - it promoted itself through the owner support internet chat boards, but I was competing with the main manufacturer of the systems and they eventually got their software "up to snuff" enough that I just didn't feel like chasing them down anymore.
Bottom line, though, is that every $70 sale required a bit of my time to support the sale, even if it was just cashing a check... I wouldn't mind cashing $70 checks for a living, but it's more than that - a few words exchanged with each customer - it's kinda fun, but in the end my day job reliably pays me $70 about 8 times a day, plus benefits, and I'd say that all in all the day job is less work than "handling" 40 customers a week, not to mention simultaneously building and maintaining a product and promoting it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:08AM
It is plain stealing still no matter what the contract.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:39AM (2 children)
Careful with that, the laws around imaginary property state very clearly that your employer owns the rights to anything you create in your own time that you could reasonably have done during work time. So basically, unless you have an IP exception clause in your contract, your private work is already theirs.
That goes for open-source contributions as well. If you submit personal patches to a project that's also used at work (or could also be used at work), you're putting the project in murky legal waters because you don't own the copyright to what you submit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:00PM
That's not how any of that works.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Monday May 06 2019, @01:48AM
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 04 2019, @11:49PM (14 children)
A coder who doesn't write things for his own use, is like a plumber who doesn't fix a leaking faucet in his own home.
One must either be convinced that his skill is too abominable to inflict on oneself the results; or hate his day job and everything related with a burning passion.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:19AM (4 children)
You haven't met many tradesmen, have you? The plumber's house is the one house that has the leaky faucet in the same way that the mechanic's car is virtually always a beater. Just because they can fix these things doesn't necessarily mean that they care to do so for free on their own time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:24AM (2 children)
I worked for a well-known robotics company just a bit ago. The shop master told me a story about how he built his kids a Zamboni one snowy winter. I'm sitting there going, wtf? you built your kids a driving vehicle that they ride atop... to smooth the ice? What even is a Zamboni, anyway? I don't even know how one works (I plumb, I do electrical, I've rebuilt a hot tub, small engine repair, motorcycle repair, rebuilt car engines with my dad growing up, I have a hobby of electronics) -- how does a zamboni even work?
He was really, really good at what he did. He obviously did more outside of work. The new job, it's the same thing. The mechanical engineers make things to mod their cars. The skilled software devs (<-all of them) tell me about hobby projects. (There are the some that go home and work on work. I discourage that.) The shop master has gobs of experience, and when I lost a part to my bike he asked, "You have any pictures? We could 3d print a new one." These are really skilled people, software, hardware, engineers, across the board. They don't limit them to what their day job requires of them -- they do what they do because they love doing it, and they are very, very skilled because they do it a _lot_, in many forms.
What I'm saying is that when you get past corporate cogs and get into the startups that start small and grow up, founded and gotten off the ground by people who are really passionate about this stuff, you don't see the attitudes of "This is my job and this is what I do -- only at work." Interviewing people, there's a stark contrast between those who do it for work and those who do it all the time because they love doing it. The skill level is worlds apart. Additionally, it's obvious the ones who do it because "it's good money."
What I'm suggesting is that doing it outside of work, in its many different forms, provides a wealth of experience that you wouldn't have gotten doing it on the job with a limited, temporary focus. That experience shows when someone is asking you during an interview, "How many TCP ports are there?" or "What tools might you use to integrate a Linux machine with a domain?" (and expect more than "Samba!" and yes I ran a domain for fun back in high school) or, "How might you find a process on a system? good `ps`. What if it doesn't show up in the `ps` list? (Continue for depth.)"
It's fine to not work in your field outside of work. It's just limiting.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:05AM
It can be. But the best insights don't come when you're working your craft, they come when you're doing other things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:49AM
Yeah, this nails it. Extremely well put.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:29PM
With some of my own relatives being blue-collar workers, I had plenty. For every one of them, applying their skills to improve their own home is a point of pride. No exceptions.
Don't know from who you got your "informed opinion" but they lied. Or you did.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:26AM
Or possibly option three [youtube.com]. s/calculator/programmer/ and get a couple chuckles at parties you attend after hours when you're not coding.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:31AM (5 children)
A cobbler may choose not to make shoes for his family, not because his shoes are inferior, but because the work day is long enough and he might better spend his time with his family doing something besides making shoes for them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:06AM (4 children)
Money that you did not have to spend is not taxed, where money you earned is.
That's when I consider economies of scale to decide whether to make it myself or buy one.
I am not going to make plumbing stuff on the lathe if I can buy the fitting at home depot.
But I may well spend a lot of time making unique LED lighting fixtures, as I am very picky about how they are made. The ones I see have way too many failure points and they usually run them too hard. I build one and I expect it to work from then on with no further adoo from me. Hermetically sealed. Silicone. All connections exposed to weather soldered. All feed currents limited, etc.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:09PM (3 children)
While I appreciate and agree with the sentiment, and much of what the market sells you is indeed utter crap, silicone isn't as good a seal as a properly engineered injection molded solution, there are many things that you just can't do in a home shop that a 10 million quantity production line can churn our for $0.04 per copy. It seems that these days the real trick is in finding quality products on the market, and often that's just a matter of buying many and seeing which ones last.
Antiques have value not only because they have been "preserved" for so long, but often because they lasted that long on their own without special care. The market has always sold crap, stuff that lasts a very short time, but of the hundreds of pieces of crap that get purchased and used up, the ones that last stand out, and in a collection of stuff it's easy to point to the 30+ year old things and lament: they just don't make 'em like that anymore... truth more often is: they didn't make many of 'em like that back then, either.
What I'm growing to resent about my local labor market are the unskilled who build a "premium" business around something like washing houses. They employ "go-see quote writers" to go out and float 10x fair rate prices to see who bites, and since it takes about 10% of the time of a job to do a quote, they can write 100 quotes for every sucker who actually pays (assuming one quote writer per actual work team, I think some of these operations actually have 5-10 quote writers per team, 500-1000 quotes per actual job). Then, one sucker pays $3000 to have their 2500 square foot house washed - the team uses $1000 in tools and knocks out the job in 4 hours, netting $500 per hour for their actual labor on the first job, $750 on later jobs - most of which goes to pay for the "free quote" writers' time and mileage. It's easy enough to say "no" to a $3000 quote, but the fact that there are more of these premium idiots out there than honest working people leaves the rest of the market open to think they can demand $75 per hour doing stuff like scrubbing a wall and be doing people a favor. So, as a homeowner, that leaves you with the option of first having to sift through 9 super-premium idiots to find a slightly honest laborer (and the super-premium idiots are much easier to find, they can afford to advertise...) and then your slightly honest laborer might show up with a two man team, charging $600 to $1200 for a 4 hour no-skill job, but don't expect them to do little things like clean up messes they make or carry insurance, the $3000+ companies barely do that. At least the cheaper guys have decent availability once you find them, they're usually living on ~$30K per year, so they only need to work about 50-100 4 hour jobs per year, 1 or 2 per week - not a bad life for them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:06PM
Couple of quibbles:
I don't think GP spoke of bathroom sealant. One can purchase two-part formula relatively inexpensively, and degas in a home-made vacuum, to get the same quality as 10M run of injection molded. If the form isn't as smooth on the outside because of form quality, that doesn't impact function which is what OP specifically prioritized.
So whle it's true that
it's also true that a competent home producer can, with junkyard parts, make 10M run quality pieces at a per-result cost comparable to MSRP. Most people don't repair their radios, TVs, monitors, etc, and wouldn't make their own lights, but on this board there are folks who think that's fun, and getting a result that's to one's own design means - if successful - getting exactly what was wanted (which might not be what will be wanted next week, or after an unforeseen failure which would've been caught in a 10m run's initial sample check, but...).
That is one trick! A good one. Others include buying used (as you pointed out later), repairing, reducing unnecessary need, sharing and/or borrowing, and renting.
Check out the term Survivor Bias.
Wow. Thanks for describing this scam. So sketchy. I have gotten this kind of laughable quote through the mailbox, but never ran the math as you have to see what it systemically must mean. Thanks for explaining, very very interesting.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday May 06 2019, @04:10PM (1 child)
Whilst this is undoubtedly a factor, my usual experience when replacing (or more often witnessing someone else replacing) an old item with a modern equivalent, I find over and over again that there is nothing available on the current market that even approaches the build quality of the older item, regardless of price. It seems to be a combination of the process of incrementally increasing profit margins by eating away at product quality, an increase in the use of plastics in most areas of manufacturing where metal or timber had been in the past, a massive increase in mail order purchases meaning people can't examine the product before buying, and soulless, homogeneous big businesses replacing the independent craftsman that took pleasure and great pride in producing a beautiful piece of work.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 06 2019, @05:03PM
All too often true - I have a blender from the 1960s, the chromed base must weigh 20 pounds, and while the motor isn't as powerful as new blenders, it is built with so much more safety margin in the strength and tolerances that it should outlast 3+ generations of newer blenders.
Cars from the 1950s were built with 1/4" thick body panels - while there are obvious downsides to this, the upsides (repairability, damage resistance) are just not available in modern cars.
WalMart exemplifies this in spades. I only buy motor oil there anymore, but I used to buy the occasional article of clothing or home goods - because you could see the good quality for price right there on the rack. What I found was: if you go back after a couple of years, they still carry something that looks like that good quality good price product you remember, but it's not the same, it has been "cost optimized" at the supplier and is now a tissue-paper simulacrum of what you bought last time: same branding, same price, bigger profit AND shorter service life: retail's one and only dream.
Old-growth timber basically doesn't exist anymore - it's about 0.01x as available, and 200x as expensive as it was 100 years ago. "New wood" isn't the same, it's still a good raw material for many things, but it's just not the same.
I think this has a tremendous impact, and I wish that something like blockchain brand reputation building would catch on because that could make global mail-order sourcing even better than in-person shopping used to be. As things are, yeah, it's worse than a flea market.
That has been going on since before I was born (1960s), and until people are ready to pay the differential cost, probably 3x+ for most "comparable" products, the world will continue supplying them what they demand: cheap crap.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:33PM
A coder who doesn't write things for his own use, is like a plumber who doesn't fix a leaking faucet in his own home.
I agree, but: I code a lot less than I used to. For the first 20 years or so of my career, I tried out new programming languages all the time, fiddled with databases, experimented with new frameworks - generally stayed up-to-date in as many different aspects of IT as possible. Not because I had to, but just because it was fun.
About the time .NET came out, I stopped. It started to seem like a rat-race: New programming languages aren't actually new - they're the same old ideas with a different syntax. Wow, yet another functional language. Or, worse, mix some random lambda expressions into Java. Yet another web framework, no better than the one before it, but it's the next shiny new thing.
I still program for fun, of course. I couldn't not program. But I've also started more non-technical hobbies as well. It's also fun to wield physical tools, whack a tennis ball, learn a new (human) language, or whatever.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:14PM
I don't think the comparison fits. The thing is, any experienced plumber doesn't learn anything new fixing his (/her/their/its) own pipes at home.
My thoughts on this are practical. I don't owe my employer any work outside work hours and I also don't owe them any additional education for myself outside my work ours. If they thought my skill was inadequate, they shouldn't have hired me.
However, software engineering is a relatively unique technical career in that additional education and practice makes you faster at it. I don't owe that increased speed to my employer. But it does make my work more enjoyable to me. A task that takes four hours with an hour and a half of interesting work and two and a half hours of boilerplate crap (builds, syntax fiddling, routine configuration files, etc... etc...) becomes a three hour task because I know how to work faster, and I spend less time bored. Anyone working in our field is free to spend their free time however they like. But I'm frankly surprised that a good chunk of software engineers - even pretty competent ones - don't spend any free time at all honing their skills. If I was no quicker today than I was five (or ten) years ago, the work day tedium would be driving me crazy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:11AM (19 children)
best summed up as: it's okay to only work at work.
If your hobby is coding, then outside work hours coding is hobby time. But then you're probably too young to know that when your hobby is also your work, it quickly ceases to be fun.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:44AM (14 children)
Well, I'd have to disagree:
If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. -- Marc Anthony
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:00AM (5 children)
Well, if you're a a top-ranking musician during the day and Cleopatra's lover at night, life tends to be more exciting than that of a code monkey paid to debug a Javascript expense sheet checker written without comment by someone else in a nondescript company in Bangor, Maine, overdue and under budget, to eek out enough to pay for the house and the car and send the kids to college...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:12AM (4 children)
Sorry about that. Are you debugging the one I wrote in all caps or the one without vowels in the variable names (it's like only playing the white keys on a piano).
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday May 05 2019, @07:19AM (2 children)
The one where every variable/block/function is an acronym, and there isn't a single comment anywhere.
Oh ... Sorry. You were exaggerating, and I ruin it with actual i-work-with-this-guy trauma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:24AM (1 child)
An acronym of Hindi terms using Sanskrit code-points?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday May 05 2019, @08:58PM
Purebred white American who graduated long before memory and storage got cheap.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:16PM
You mean, like C major and A minor?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:26AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:13AM (2 children)
I'd have to disagree with your disagreement.
Because I've been there. I've had multiple types of careers in my life already "doing what I love," and jobs ultimately have many ways of sucking fun out of it.
Either you are responsible to an employer who will ultimately make demands of you -- even in the process of doing kinds of things you love to do -- that make it feel much more like "work" or you're some sort of independent contractor or consultant or artist who usually has to pay attention to what customers want to make a living.
So, if you do what you love AND are independently wealthy enough to ignore demands from all others about your work, you never have to work a day in your life. Or, if you are one of the lucky few who "hits it big" doing a personal project while young or something, you can "retire" to just do what you love on your own schedule.
For the rest of the world, doing what you love to cater to others' specifications is often still very much like "work" at least part of the time.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:40AM (1 child)
The situation that invariably gets my goat is when I am required to do substandard work to satisfy some arbitrary requirement.
For instance, there is no way I can seriously consider a popular software vendors products suitable for use in some factory automation applications. I trust even Arduinos far more. I don't sleep well knowing at all times, an update may break things and leave me with everyone on my ass. But yet, that is what the handshakers want... A brand name latent problem. I could probably be earning good money turning out "business grade" crap, handshake quality, but I do have a pride of "doing it right".
Reminds me of the phrase about there being some things even a pig won't do.
I really hate to do something the wrong way, on purpose, just to get paid. I feel like a damm prostitute. Not an artist paid for skill and creativity. I feel like a chef required to serve poorly prepared meals... With my name on it, no less.
I know my girlfriend got really tired of hearing my diatribes about mixing code and data thirty years ago...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:57AM
I feel the same way, but after a while, you must come to the realization that IT'S JUST A JOB.
The one who pays the piper calls the tune.
It's not "art." Slapping something together as quickly as possible and getting it out the door is the way it is done, and there's little you can do to change that because that's capitalism for you.
I dare say that if everyone knew what programming is really like as a career, a lot of people would choose something else as a young person.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:23AM (2 children)
A totally misattributed citation [quoteinvestigator.com].
Many tried to find it in Confucius, or Arthur Szathmary, or Harvey Mackay, or Janet Lambert-Moore, or many others.
I'm sorry to say, but clearly such words of wisdom... 100% sure it was The William Shatner who said them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @08:33AM
I think you're right, as there's no other explanation for this:
https://youtu.be/lul-Y8vSr0I?t=38 [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:43PM
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I miss MDC. RIP.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:36AM
Too much of a good thing is still too much.
How does the system kill artists? with debt (see courtney love's letter about piracy) and live tours with a tight schedule. An artist which cranked up a perfectly fine album out of demos gets to a shit second album after a year of touring. And has likely become dependent on some drugs.
Coding is fun if the problem is fun, else it's OK. Still better than unclogging toilets, unless you are dealing with systemd or windows, in that case I fail to see any difference.
Anyway, sometimes you'd pull all nighters, then after the stuff is finished the proper employer should send you home for a vacation.
That does not happen because the rest of the world has inherited the USA double problem: employers love money more than their enterprise, employees love money more than their workplace. The second part of the problem is probably caused by the first but it has become an independent issue.
Workers will try to do nothing on company time because they are treated like HUMAN RESOURCES (an expression who is better suited for auschwitz), the company will squeeze every drop of blood from the workers and then boot them out because they are HUMAN RESOURCES and prone to cheat anyway.
The way out? well I cannot legally suggest to kill whoever calls you human resources and torture and kill those who taught them and profit off them, so I am a bit stumped.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:41AM
Two decades on, still enjoying it!
Seriously. I don't do _work_ when I get out of work (_that_ is a good case of the burn-outs), but I go to work, code and bash and tweak servers, whatever needs to be done, technically, for computers.
I come home and I do the same thing -- check my RAID, develop a database-driven app, a new clause of SQL, investigate sysctl aspects to performance, read the kernel docs, add SSD caching, write a web-based front-end, use {perl,php,bash,C,SQL,etc} -- and the home experience has provided a great deal to the work experience (network booting, installer scripting, software packaging, network troubleshooting, hardware troubleshooting, performance tuning, automated/manual testing of assumptions).
The work experience has again given me reason to investigate more in-depth some aspects of home projects. Home projects have given me a strong base with which to tackle work projects.
For me, they're mutually contributory. (Having trouble with words at the moment.) Each has its place, each is different, yet both are the same. What you're saying and what the title is saying, is like saying, "I have meetings at work so once I get home I don't utter a word to anyone." Bleh.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:36AM
Coding at home can be fun, at times, but I tend to oscillate...
There was a time I was into high engagement games like Starcraft. There was a time I was into coding at home. Both require a bit of focus and ignoring what's going on around you.
Lower engagement games like Hearthstone or computer chess don't "take you away" as much, and other design work like 3D model building for printing can be easier to do without having to ignore everyone around you.
Then, there's "high engagement" family activities like travel and boating, which pretty much take you away from doing anything like Starcraft or coding.
Bottom line, I enjoy variety, sometimes that means coding at home, but not often.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:15AM
Next story on the topic will maybe let you salivating.
If you wait 5 more years [soylentnews.org] for S/N to ketchup, you are gonna to learn that's Ok to code during sex, but it's Ok if you don't - 'cause, see, human race had it** for millennia without coding and yet it grew to occupy all the Earth.
** (Incels excluded, other terms and conditions may apply)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:43AM
Which is why I don't code for a living. I do systems administration and release management (as in: I manage our build infrastructure), but I don't write code for my employer.
(and of course I do, I write plenty of admin scripts. But I also have an exception clause in my contract that says I own the rights to everything else I code).
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:09AM
Too bad, we could have a quality aristafu submission instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:31AM (4 children)
Some folks like hobbies related to their jobs. Some like to have very disparate hobbies and find pleasure in doing stuff completely unrelated to the way they think at work and the types of tasks they do there. Some are in the middle.
What is healthy is continuing to learn about your work. Sometimes you get that done as part of your work. Sometimes you need to add some exploratory activities outside of work hours to expand your knowledge. It may depend on your job and its tasks (and flexibilty in time/projects), or it may depend on your personality and when and where you can concentrate and learn best.
What isn't healthy usually is when work begins to take over your life so you don't have anything else. If something were ever to happen to your work situation, how would you define yourself outside of it? Even worse is giving up on other life goals (health, family, other relationships, other opportunities..) just to chase a work-related goal that won't give you happiness.
Often people tend to tell themselves that work is paramount, money is important, you need to be financially settled, secure, etc., and you obsess about getting ahead in work.
But sometimes you need to just take an hour and throw a ball around with your 8-year-old son, or go to your 12-year-old daughter's ballet recital, or be there for your significant otther more often... Or call your parents or make friends or go hiking and eat better and...
Everyone has to find their own balance. So I give no general advice. Just make sure if you're devoting extra time to work that it's fulfilling for you and that it's helping achieve BALANCED goals in various parts of the life you want.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:39AM (2 children)
I did a fair amount of research work for a while, and it was remarkable how much of my "hobby time" activities found serious practical application in the research. If you don't have any of those outside experiences, you can't bring them into the office for practical use.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday May 06 2019, @09:43PM (1 child)
Can you describe a few of these? I've found a couple hobby-time activities that extended/integrated two technologies/tools/techniques to produce something very specific and impractical, the skills from which helped in other areas. Just the exercise of integrating tools pays off when you're on the spot at work to pull something together that solves a product development problem, regardless of how purposeless the result of your original integration project was.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 06 2019, @09:56PM
The big one that sticks in my mind was this, Problem statement: secure a supine adult to a platform comfortably such that the platform may accelerate their skeletal frame head-to-foot at up to +/- 0.6g at a rate of approximately 2Hz, whilst leaving the soft tissues free to move.
Solution: secure the feet to a solid footboard using snowboard boots and bindings.
That one got refined away from the snowboard boots later when the accelerations required moved down from 0.6 to about 0.2, but snowboard boots, and bindings, were readily available off the shelf at a cost less than the engineering hours required to even begin to talk about how to accomplish the goal from scratch.
Minor plumbing stuff from automotive hot-rod hobby work came in handy periodically, of course Ham radio is a virtual requirement in some RF work, I believe SCUBA came into play more than once - including neoprene material from wetsuits.
Then we can get into woodworking / cabinetry making... and later days 3D printing, with obvious implications for prototype fabrication of all kinds.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Sunday May 05 2019, @07:22AM
Right -- the furry conventions. Don't forget those.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:51AM
If someone does not want to touch a computer once they leave work it's fine by me.
But learning and knowing more about your job is important (especially?) as a programmer.
So you need to take your time for that at work. And likely it needs to be a team effort.
If you care so little you intend to do the same thing in the same way for the rest of your life that is unlikely to end well (written as somebody still using vim almost exclusively and not really caring about Rust and Go, so I am not saying you have to jump on very fad...).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 05 2019, @07:02AM (2 children)
If you enjoy software development, then it is highly unlikely that you don't write code during personal time. There are tons of opportunities for writing code, so if you enjoy software development, there's always many projects you can work on in your free time. It's not like, say, interstellar rocket science, where there are fewer opportunities to do what you enjoy in the course of daily life.
Thus, it's safe to conclude that if you don't write code during personal time, then you don't enjoy software development. Which is fine.
The problem is that someone who enjoys software development will almost certainly be better at their craft than someone who does not. Your skill improves with the amount of effort you invest, and someone who enjoys it will invest more effort (i.e., their personal time).
Thus, it's safe to conclude that you're inferior to someone who writes code during personal time.
Yes, it's perfectly okay to only code at work. Except that, while there's a dire shortage of skilled developers, there's a glut of subpar developers. In fact, subpar developers generally create net positive work, thus increasing the demand for skilled developers.
If you are a skilled dev and yet don't enjoy it, then that's fine I guess. Except that people tend to enjoy doing things that they are good at. This fact coupled with Dunning-Kruger means that if you don't enjoy software development and you think you are good at it, then it's very likely that you are not good at it.
So chances are that if you only code at work, then you suck at it and you're creating net positive work for the skilled devs. Which is fine, but stand still while I get my crossbow.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:31PM (1 child)
If you enjoy software development, it doesn't imply that software development is the only thing you enjoy. And if you're doing software development for the most of your time in the job, then you might prefer to use the free time for the other things you enjoy, but which you don't get to do at work.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:38PM
>it doesn't imply that software development is the only thing you enjoy
I never said such a thing. If you do enjoy software development, it's highly unlikely that you never write code outside of work unless you're lying to yourself. And the people asking "is it okay to only code at work" are not the people who enjoy software development and other hobbies, they're the people who think work is something you don't like doing but you do anyway to earn a paycheck.
To be clear, lying to yourself is perfectly normal. This is why surveys about positive behavior are generally over-reported and exaggerated; it's not because people are consciously lying to appear better than they are, but they unconsciously deceive themselves. "I visit the gym, about once a week" when in reality it's once a month; the human mind is very fluid with the concept of truth.
If you think you enjoy coding and you never code outside of work, you're lying to yourself.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:44AM (2 children)
> it is perfectly OK to have a life outside of work
Right. And an interviewee that doesn't seem to have such a life will probably not get hired.
It's a false dichotomy to say "a life outside work" cannot coexist with coding or other projects outside of work.
When I'm interviewing candidates, if they have NOTHING indicating they actually enjoy solving problems (this can be coding on their own time, or physical projects, or musicianship, or kite fighting analysis) then I'll almost always hard pass. We have lots of candidates and those who just want to be a cog in a machine can go to one of the 10,000+ head places and be salarimen coding sprockets. This policy means our hires are much more probing, much more alert to 'bad smells', much less blind copypasting from stackoverflow, and need much less micro managment, compared to when we still hired people who were good enough at their job but had no passion for problem solving.
The itch to create, fix, take apart and put back together, implies a set of *personality* traits that can, with technical chops, make a high quality coder (or QA or manufacturer or manager or accountant).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:47AM (1 child)
Keep telling yourself that all that matters for cranking out the code at work.
Sounds like you've got a bunch of prima donnas in your office.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:25PM
> Sounds like you've got a bunch of prima donnas in your office.
Huh. We have a lot of passionate people, and a good chunk of the engineers and a majority of the admin and fabbers are artists and musicians, so I guess to whatever extent a musician must be a prima donna to have enough courage to sing on stage.
But having lunch around these people is amazing. Someone will be talking about their new homebrew robot hack, or their new art or music project, or some music or video or installation that stood out, and they will be SO into it, and everyone else gets caught up and enraptured. It's like being around kids under 10-12 without being responsible for them; it instills a kind of energy, a spring to the step and a willingness to be playful. People go away from lunch clumps excited to get things done. At after-lunch meetings, quieter folks are more energized and willing to express themselves and louder folks are more willing to play a(n admittedly active) listener role.
And when I say "many and most are artists and musicians" I mean, they might do 20 or 40h with us because they're into what we do and need income, but they clearly don't think of themselves as their day jobs.
We're at almost a hundred heads now and there's no way we'd have this kind of success without this overarching theme.
We make sacrifices for it; musicians go on tour sometimes, and artists have crunch times, and when the burners go to Nevada we have noticeably laggier customer service, and HR has a harder time balancing things because flakes are gonna be flakes, and the non-flakes are often parents and kids are gonna be kids.
Maybe they're prima donnas, if so I can deal with it for the quality of the environment I get out of it. If it made me code WORSE at work, I would still take it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:29AM
The responses to this article just reinforce to me that programmers must have a low fertility rate.
I am serious.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:43PM (5 children)
The crux of the matter is not "coding for fun," but rather "coding for free." The article asks if it's ok to refuse to work outside of work hours, at home, unpaid, for the benefit of the corporation. Yes, it is.
The company will not love you back. Being highly productive will not save you when the outsourcers and H1-Bs come for you. You will not get a better raise, because the manager wants the extra money generated by your effort to go into his raise/bonus; after all, he is the inspirational genius who got you to do your best "for the team." Doing extra work at home will not put you on the fast track to get promoted; there, the fix is in.
Save your best self for yourself. Put your best work into your dreams.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
So many programmers are better with machines than people/politics, they can't even SEE that they are being taken advantage of.
How many project managers are expected to manage fake projects in their spare time, for example?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 06 2019, @10:02PM
Not fake, but if you own a home and hire contractors directly - instead of paying a General Contractor double to do it for you, that's plenty real enough of a project to manage. My wife has done this twice now on home remodels, and saved us about 40% vs using GCs both times.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 06 2019, @10:00PM (2 children)
No, they won't, but if you play it right you can take the skills you learn 9-5 and parley those into a hobby that pays you in the evenings/weekends.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 06 2019, @10:30PM (1 child)
that's true, and the way the value proposition should flow. Ask not what you can do for the company, but what the company can do for you.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:05AM
Many are evil, but many also will pay for your continuing education and smile and wave when you leave 2 years later for a promotion into another a competitor.
🌻🌻 [google.com]