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

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620142512-3...

Honestly edw519 you are being pedantic. The highest earning programmers I know made billions of dollars starting a company and now no longer program. The outliers don't matter because most people are not competent enough to be an outlier. And that is ok. It is OK to "just" earn $200k / year at 27 years old working a 8/9 to 5 job. If someone follows my advice, they can easily achieve that if they want to.

> You will be a better developer if you deliver more. "More languages, tools, people, and ideas" can just as easily dilute your focus as improve your skill. To get better, you must focus on results, not activity.

I completely disagree. I hand rolled ASP (pre .net) code for 4 years manually stitching things together. No. Production on its own once you stopped learning doesn't matter to your personal development. I became much more productive once I switched to Ruby/Python.

Results mean coding up another pricing page for yet another A/B test.

> Why do you assume these 2 are mutually exclusive? I know lots of excellent programmers who deliver more before noon than most deliver all week. Nothing wrong with being excellent during working hours and doing something else in your spare time, like perhaps, enjoying your spare time.

Why do you assume that I assume that they are mutually exclusive? I said essentially "If X and Y then Z" someone could code in their spare time, and be happy where they are (coding is self fulfilling for its own sake). But if someone is not happy where they are, and they are not coding outside of work then I think they should start coding after work. This is not exactly a ground breaking opinion. If you are sick of working at a souless jquery job, learn a more productive language on the side and get moving.

> If you want to be a better developer more than anything, then you should deliver production quality software. Sometimes the "blocker" is a distraction. Distractions can be other things that masquerade as "side work".

I agree that this could happen, but more often the opposite thing happens. People come to work, check out, and slowly stop caring about learning because every day they are doing the same thing and working on small problems that don't really matter (like making a stupid parallax effect because the marketing guy wants it). Usually people could be more productive and be paid more if they understood more productive technologies.

> Personally, I never show code samples.

Well ok. Put yourself in my position. You get 1000 resumes a week and 58% of people exaggerate or outright lie (I know MySQL, can't do a basic join clause) and 40% are completely unqualified. Now, I put in a very basic requirement. Send me code sample or a link to your github. 100 resumes, half of which have horrible, horrible, horrible code. 45 of which have decent, but not amazing code, and 5 of which have outstanding code.

I've yet to interview someone that had amazing code and turn them down for the job. I went from rejecting 8 or 9 out of 10 people in an interview to 1 or 2 out of 10 (depending on the position).

Code isn't underwear. Code is a product. You don't hire photographers for your wedding without seeing their work. You don't give production keys to people that don't know what a hash table is. It is that simple. Not my loss. The rest of you are the crazy ones and in the long run I'll be proven right.

You are a good developer if you make stuff that helps people. Not if you have an impressive résumé, not if you make a lot of money. Not even if your stuff is really technically impressive or shows off IQ or promise.

Really, that's important. There's a lot on this site about being the cleverest, the fastest, knowing more comp sci than the next person or handling trickier interviews or proving there's something wrong with some other ecosystem, program, language, etc. Sometimes I'm not sure everyone feels they have a job to do that can improve people's lives.

Whether sideprojects can sometimes help you reach career goals is a more appropriate question. For applicants I think there's an initial threshold of whether they can ship nontrivial stuff. They can demonstrate it with their past jobs or by actually building stuff. A sideproject could certainly help you get hired if you have no experience and the credentials aren't getting you there; it might be smart to do if you're having trouble finding right work out of college, say. Likewise, it might help you show you have potential in a radically different specialty that your past experience has no bearing on (e.g., you used to write Ruby on Rails but want start to writing code for microcontrollers).

And if someone has unrealistic expectations about how much of a rockstar you need to be, maybe you don't want to work for them. If a potential employer wants you to have a github account that shows you spend all weekend every weekend hacking, maybe you dodged a bullet when they didn't hire you.

I say this having just taken a bunch of time to build a side project. It was fun and stuff (building from scratch instead of tweaking a giant codebase! learning golang! making things go fast!) but there's no possibility in my mind it makes me "better" or I'd be "bad" had I not done it.