[dragonwriter]

> Does a lawyer do law outside of billable hours?

Yes, all of them study law outside of work clients pay them to do; in fact, they are required to do so as a condition of licensing, it's called continuing education requirement.

The same is true of virtually all licensed professionals.

Programmers aren't licensed professionals, so they don't have a licensing requirement for continuing education. But the programmers that are professionals, even if not licensed are doing continuing education anyway, and hands-on projects that aren't for paying clients is frequently a big part of that.

(Now, professionals with good employers will often be paid to do continuing education on work time, and that's true of programmers, too. If you have 20% time, your continuing education projects may not be “side projects”.)

[huffmsa]

Studying law isn't practicing law.

Yes, all professionals should be reading and continuing their education. I read tons of technical publications. But I rarely commit code.

But working full-stress cases outside of your actual work? Sounds like a good way to burn out.

[dragonwriter]

> Studying law isn't practicing law.

And doing side projects isn't practicing the trade that would be regulated if programming was a regulated profession.

> But working full-stress cases outside of your actual work?

Whoever said programming side projects should be “full-stress cases”?

[huffmsa]

> Whoever said programming side projects should be “full-stress cases”?

That's what the context is here. There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into. Because you love coding so much you can't stop.

Be it your future start-up, or contributing to an open source project (or 3).

Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices. Actually writing a project using it is another level of complexity.

It's the difference between reading and analyzing the arguments of a legal case and reconstructing and presenting the arguments yourself.

[dragonwriter]

> That's what the context is here.

I disagree.

> There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into.

There's a common notion that you should be doing practical learning, including side projects, outside of “normal” paid work. It is far less common, however, to encounter the idea that it should be near full-time hours (and it's not clear to me what “full-time effort” distinct from hours even could mean.)

> Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices.

No, it's not: in fact, this kind of professional reading is often expressly excluded from the definition of activities that apply to continuing legal education requirements. Lawyers do, as a practical matter, need to do the equivalent of what you are talking about, but in addition to not as their CLE requirement.

[pojzon]

My wife is an excellent lawyer. She spends "NOWHERE" the same amount of time as I do to stay in touch with whats happening in the field.

She has to read new laws once in a while (sometimes even once per year). To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.

I would not be lyin when i say being a good software developer (in the eyes of industry) costs you around 20h of work extra per week.

[TeMPOraL]

> To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.

No, you don't. To be relevant, you just have to know a little JavaScript. You can find a good-paying job with that.

What you described is something that's correlated with personal love in the craft, and which can help you get better at it (then again, it also makes you more frustrated about professional life). You can fake it, of course, if for some reason you feel you need to,.

[P_I_Staker]

Yup. I agree about work life balance and not letting your profession consume you. On the other hand "real professions" do have continuing education outside of work, and it does seem to suck. Takes similar, or even more hours than personal coding, and it's probably less enjoyable. There's an argument that programmers should be treated more like licensed professionals, be more liable for mistakes due to negligence, and have more demands placed on them.

[C1sc0cat]

CPE is meant to be in work time though

[dragonwriter]

> CPE is meant to be in work time though

For independent practitioners, it's outside of billable client time, but, yes, for people working wage labor on the profession this is true.

Software dev as wage labor has pretty crappy (for a profession) work conditions, and part of that is employers not alotting time and funding for CPE.

That doesn't mean people in the field shouldn't do CPE, but it does mean they should seek better terms of employment.