[cesarbs]

Why the false dichotomy? Can't someone designate a certain amount of time of their day to work, and focus on other things in the remaining hours?

I love writing software, but that does not mean I don't love other things. Years ago I lived and breathed software. That's not the case anymore. I'd much rather help my daughter with her homework than read about the latest uber nifty JavaScript transpiler that will change my life and make everything awesome with unicorns and whatnot.

Our field churns the same ideas over and over. After a few years things get old really fast.

But there's what I said in another comment in this thread: I love writing reliable, correct, secure, well-documented software. Focus on those and my passion comes out. But come 5-ish o'clock and you bet I'm leaving the office to pick up my daughter from school and spend some time talking with her about her day and what she learned and whatnot. And then my wife will come home, we'll have dinner and we'll spend some time talking about our days and watching TV. Without those things I might as well not have a life.

I don't like it when there's an expectation that I'll be available to work 24/7. I don't want people expecting me to be on social media promoting my work or things related to it. I'll disappoint anyone who expected me to think of work as my life's mission or anything like that (unless I'm using my skills to help find a cure to a serious disease, or realistically help solving the problem of poverty in the world - that would change the game).

I have a number of interests in my life that are completely unrelated to work. Those are the things that I live for. Working is a means to bring in some cash that enables me to enjoy other things in life.

[jcoffland]

> Working is a means to bring in some cash that enables me to enjoy other things in life.

Because you work mainly for the money is why I would not want to work with you. Not because you like other things.

[dmichulke]

Everyone who works, works mainly for the money. If there was no salary they wouldn't work there.

You could prove your point and offer your employer to work without your salary / equity. Would you?

[TheBobinator]

So what are you doing it for then?

To satisfy a political agenda?

Because you're a child looking for fun? (And will create yet another cookie-cutter framework named something childish.)

To satisfy a need for validation because you aren't an adult?

To make great products? (so someone else can make money.)

Because it's new and shiny and trendy and you need to keep up with the Jones's?

Why is an experienced coder so much more efficient than an inexperienced coder? Because they have learned many infrastructures, frameworks, and algorithms, have learned through experience not to make certain mistakes like over-complicating a problem or seeking clarity to a problem prior to coding it and thus understand the cost of requirements, and have picked up good design habitations like divide and conquer, coding without making assumptions, or multi-tiered architectures.

Most Managers don't understand the foundation of good software and great IT infrastructure are solid requirements. That requires a solid investment, like a building foundation, in analyzing the business; great managers know enough about a particular business that they can spot the mistakes analysts make in building requirements and vet them so they don't change in major ways. Do colleges teach any of this? No.

When Changing requirements meets improper planning and tight project budgets (which may be tight because the company is in trouble, or may be tight because the Project Manager is incompetent), it means over-working staff to hit those changes which produces cognitive pollution. That pollutes the code base with too many assumptions, and pollutes the staff's minds with bad habitations and expectations. Eventually like any pollution, it builds up until it becomes terminal; developers quit, the cost of making any change becomes terminal for the code base, and so forth. We've all seen it. More importantly you take a developer who's worked a 9-5, then spend 2 hours a night for the last 10 years learning advanced mathematics, or low-level compiler design, or other things that really create good habits and techniques, and you literally cannot introduce them to that environment because the environment won't be able to value them; it can't see through the pollution.

The tautology simply is the overtime exemption. If you don't have staff clocking in and out, there's not a chance in hell of you ever figuring out how much time it takes to do any project, which in turn, feeds the tautology. Very simple question to ask at an interview "Do you track the hours of your software developers?" "Well no." "Why would I want to work at a company, overtime-exempt no less, when the management has no idea how to estimate the hours consumed for a project?". We get into concepts like "We practice scrum and estimate the story points based upon"; you sound like a 5-year old when you start talking that kind of jargon.

The pollution sloshes around in the talent pool, and companies end up with poisoned projects because of it.