61–70 of 91 posts
I don't get this. It is like being an accomplished painter, but never painting anything for yourself. Or a carpenter, and not making your own table or chairs. As a coder, you have the ability to create almost anything. How can that knowledge not tempt you to create something yourself?
I don't get this. It is like being an accomplished painter, but never painting anything for yourself. Or a carpenter, and not making your own table or chairs. As a coder, you have the ability to create almost anything. How can that knowledge not tempt you to create something yourself?
My greatest accomplishments were all done as paid work for other people and I'm very proud that they could build a successful business with the things I've created.
I'm not terribly interested in going into business for myself because A) I suck at it and B) it's just not that interesting for me. I'd rather someone else take on the risk of having a cool idea and the knowledge to run a business and let me help them get the technical side under control. That's what I'm good at.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this actually enforceable though? Asking for a friend.
I'm sure it depends on local laws but, in many cases, absolutely if the company wants to try to enforce it. At a minimum, they can make you spend a lot of money on lawyers.
If you’re not sufficiently excited about programming that you want to spend your free time doing it, that’s fine. But don’t expect technical employers to be all that excited by you.
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If you're serious, the way I look at it is that people like you are one of the problems with tech culture. Way too many people in tech have this attitude that there's something exceptional and unique about it that requires participants to be all-in 24 hours a day. It's not. And this sort of attitude discourages a large swath of the population from bringing their talents to the field.
>people like you are one of the problems with tech culture And that's any kind of way to talk to someone?! I don't think so. I was very surprised that the only downvoted comments on this page currently are by people who apparently don't understand how if you love programming, you never do it outside work. On Hacker News! Repeatedly on this page I've seen the total straw man response like yours of "requires participan…
tech is moving so fast, if you're not learning in your spare time, you'll quickly fall behind. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to find a job though
Take a good productive software developer 30 years ago, and time travel him/her here today and they will be productive with very little ramp-up. A bad software developer from 30 years ago will be bad today too.
Learning for its own sake is great, but don’t actively try to create and get on an unnecessary treadmill.
>It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too That short life-affirming quote structured like a pithy aphorism is hiding the true debate that motivates it. The real discussion before that quote is this: Some employers prefer programmers that like programming outside of work. For the other programmers that would rather constrain coding work to 40 hours a week, they feel that employer preference is…
As an employer (100+ people), I prefer folks that code outside of work in the same way that I prefer marketing people that study/practice marketing outside of work. For the simple reason that it correlates highly with performance.
What's the sales rep supposed to do in their spare time to study and practice? Or the finance person?
I don't get this. It is like being an accomplished painter, but never painting anything for yourself. Or a carpenter, and not making your own table or chairs. As a coder, you have the ability to create almost anything. How can that knowledge not tempt you to create something yourself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think employers prefer engineers who are effective and have a past track record of success. I have talked to startup founders who were very explicit that they only hired developers who coded obsessively outside of work. One was very clear: If you didn't have a public Github profile showing a track record of frequent commits on personal project outside of work hours, you would not be hired at his firm. > I've most…
> you would not be hired at his firm. If they make that public it would be good, it would save me the bother of applying for a job with them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an employer (100+ people), I prefer folks that code outside of work in the same way that I prefer marketing people that study/practice marketing outside of work. For the simple reason that it correlates highly with performance.
As someone who is (more or less) in marketing, I'm not sure what studying/practicing marketing outside of work even looks like. I suppose I could read more business books--I read some--but mostly they don't have a whole lot of value. Am I supposed to have a side gig where I do some consulting? I'd think you might have a problem if I were to do that for closely related companies where I had the most experience. (Not t…
Do I want my surgeon to be studying the latest techniques outside of his work? YES
Do I need a surgeon who dissects animals and removes tumors at home as a hobby on weekends? NO