Are You A Bad Developer If You Don't Take On Side Projects?

From the Quora answer [1]:

  > I do attend (and give) technical talks; and perhaps most
  > importantly, I pick my day job based on learning and 
  > growth opportunities: which company I’m working at, which 
  > team I’m on, and which projects I take on. I stumbled 
  > onto this a little bit by accident, but I discovered that 
  > responsibilities in your day job that require you to 
  > learn are a great forcing function for learning.

I think that this is the nuance of the article that the headline simplifies away. I think we often look for side-projects because they are an indicator of ongoing learning and they demonstrate expertise. They are by no means the only way to show these things to a prospective employer. Giving presentations, writing articles, being able to discuss industry trends intelligently... All of these things count too.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Software-Engineering/Are-you-a-bad-dev...

> Side projects are not necessarily a great way to get better at engineering, and by no means the only way to get better. If you take on a side project, you do go through the process of defining a product and coding it up, most likely full-stack and hopefully with some interesting technologies, but you’re probably not going to be working with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time, which ends up being a lot of what software engineering actually is.

Notwithstanding the fact that working "with a lot of teammates on a large, complicated codebase with evolving and expanding product requirements and scaling it up and maintaining it over time" is not necessarily what "software engineering" entails (or should entail) at every company, I actually think this is why a lot of developers take on side projects: being able to design and build something of one's own using the technologies of one's own choosing can be a lot more satisfying than refactoring code and putting out fires for 8+ hours every day.

Obviously, developers who are adequately stimulated and satisfied by their day jobs probably have less incentive to indulge in side projects, and there's nothing wrong with that, but most people in the industry know that engineering jobs, even at the hottest or most prestigious companies, often leave something to be desired.

Many developers have a bad LIFE / WORK balance. For the long run, I decided not to work beyond working hours.

I try to enjoy the little time I do have with friends and family.

An addition to other recent unfortunate trends: older devs not getting jobs, apps costing 99 cents.

Forbes' web site has been for a while little more than a collection of badly-curated, badly-written blogs. This seems like a logical next step.