41–50 of 50 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that even enforceable? If it is, I hope, for your sake, they are paying you EXTREMELY well.
Depends on the state. In California the labor law is very clear that its a right that can't be taken away (even if present in a contract)
I have mixed feelings about side projects. Sure it sounds good and looks good but let me tell you my own example. I am a single core processor. I am pretty much capable of doing pretty much just one thing at a time. I've tried to multi-task to the point of switching off from what I'm doing at work to something else but it just doesn't work. One or both of them suffer. I tend to be engrossed in what I'm doing at work.…
In your case, it could be caused by many factors. One possible reason is that your task switching itself is the bottleneck, say, saving current context into stack and loading previous context from stack. It's very fast in computers just a few memory access and overwriting a few registers, human brain cell is different storage, the process may take much longer. Not sure if it can be trained to be faster though.
Another possible cause (and maybe worse) is that the main memory is very limited, such that only one of tasks can stay in the memory, every time you need to switch to another task, you encounter a page fault that triggers the OS to load the task from the much slower hard drive. I guess maybe it's the case in brain as well, there are areas for storing short-term memory and for long-term memory respectively, while the former has faster access speed but much limited capacity.
In your case, in order to maximize your throughput, you make the multitasking OS running into a batch mode.
Now my main project gets to be my family, which is really a great life. Envy me.
Per my contract, every creative thought and act I perform while employed belongs to my employer. My contract could be interpreted to mean that even my comments here are owned by my employer. Rather demotivating for genuine side-projects.
I've found that most of my coworkers over the years don't really react very well to the idea of me having a side project-unless they have one themselves. I think they believe it's pretty strange to making something not work related. I'm not sure I've worked with many programmers at all who read on the side let alone make much of anything. Maybe my experience is just weird.
No, it's normal at big companies or non programming firms. Spare mental capacity is devoted to sports teams and American Idol.
Side projects rock! They sniff out your true interests and true motivations. But.. I doubt they're for everybody, naturally.
Don't quote me on this in a court of law but I'm pretty sure all of my current main sources of income (other than consulting) started life as side projects, including a site I sold for 5 figures, a technology I sold for 6 figures, and most of my current sites which provide a day to day income now (the biggest of which was set up as a side project to try and help promote a book I was writing at the time). A personal b…
Balance, though, is key. I've never quite managed to figure out how to make sure an exciting side project doesn't consume my life leaving everything else to rot, or conversely, how to keep a side project sufficiently alive when swamped with more important things.
I always make sure the work that's paying the bills is done, before I work on the side project. Other than that, I'll typically commit to 5 hours a week. Usually in 2 sessions.
Seems to be a common theme around here: http://www.exratione.com/2011/03/the-side-project-considered... "It seems strange to me that there exist developers who do not have side-projects: exploratory exercises in coding, tinkering, and scratching personal itches that run on the weekends, or here and there in the evenings as a replacement for mindlessly consuming mass-market entertainment. Do these people not enjoy the…
Wait 'til you have kids.
I can definitely relate to the part that talks about analysis paralysis. When starting a new project, like everybody else, I'm usually faced with several different options on how I'm going to design it, which libraries I'm going to use, what the overall architecture is going to look like, what features I'll implement and so on. And very often, I get stuck deciding between two options, weighing which one is better, wh…