[chucktingle]

Yes, you should work more than others - weekends, holidays, evenings, etc. And, no, you should not work more for others.

People should spend their time working for themselves. That could be building new skills, developing your personal brand, starting projects/businesses, etc.

Bonus points for aligning personal benefit projects with your career, so you can develop yourself while being a team player and an esteemed colleague.

[codegeek]

It is not that cut and dry. A lot of times even working for others, you are building skills for yourself that you could utilize in the future. If you are entry level programmer and you work weekends to finish a project for your employer while learning a lot, it is still something that will help YOU in the future. You are just doing it faster than others who are working the bare minimum. It really matters how you look at things. You can say "why should I work for my employer on weekends" or you can say "I am going to do this on the weekend to learn faster and get things for my employer as well". It is all about how you look at things.

To get ahead in life, the important thing is to constantly learn things and early on in your career, you can do that working for others as well. Not everyone can start a side project or business at 22. Those who can, power to them of course.

[PragmaticPulp]

> A lot of times even working for others, you are building skills for yourself that you could utilize in the future.

Exactly. Building experience, skills, reputation, a network, rapport, discipline.

Technically you could build all of these things on your own through freelancing, but freelancing is far harder than it sounds when people talk about it online. Especially when you're a junior without a strong network or reputation.

Working for others isn't inherently bad, especially if you're learning a lot in the process. No one should avoid working for a company on principle alone, as working for a strong company with strong peers is one of the fastest and most accessible ways to improve yourself early in your career.

It's not just about the paychecks. Likewise, a lack of paychecks doesn't make the project more valuable to your career. It's much easier to ramp up on a technology by pairing up with an experienced mentor and developer than it is by poking around on side projects that never get finished. Shipping real products to real customers is a powerful forcing function for learning how to deliver results in the real world.

[chucktingle]

> If you are entry level programmer and you work weekends to finish a project for your employer while learning a lot

I think that's what I meant by aligning personal projects with career ones. I have no problem with this type of work.

I just wanted to bring up the point of making sure you're not being taken advantage of.

> Not everyone can start a side project or business at 22.

It depends on the project. There is no need for it to be a new business or a groundbreaking open source project. You can be a junior web developer that learns more about SQL and the PostgreSQL internals. Or packages your app with Docker, improves CI pipelines and/or runs it in k8s. Those types of projects get you hugely successful at your job while raising your programmer market value.