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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: 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!