[x0xrx]

A lot of people that are in tech because it’s a good job got pressured to make it their life. They reasonably pushed back, but the upshot was those of us that are passionate about programming as a hobby got pressured to not do it for fun.

Both things are unreasonable. You shouldn’t have to program for fun to get a job. You can be good at it as a profession only. You also should be allowed to love it as a vocation or avocation. That doesn’t make you a sucker.

[bee_rider]

I think there is some anxiety on the part of people who love code, and find the computer to be a little magic almost-thinking box that is one of the most interesting things humans have ever invented, that the boring careerists will take all the fun out of it. Somebody is willing to pay us to play with the magic box, but now these other folks have come along and they don’t even seem to enjoy the game? WTF, go away if you don’t actually like it!

But then I put on my grown-up hat and realize that there really are customer needs to be satisfied, the less enthralled do real work, and they have as much right as the rest of us get a paycheck.

[zelphirkalt]

I think this hits the mark, or almost hits the mark. I think there is more to it. People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts. There is at least one additional anxiety, which is, that in a company people don't listen to those, who do it with passion, and rather play hierarchy games. When they don't listen and the things you predicted then happen, impacting your work, then it sucks and it was entirely preventable. So the anxiety is, that people will think of not passionate employee A the same as passionate employee B, even though one of them has a lot more experience due to lots of free time projects and exploring things outside of work, and will give their opinion equal weight, potentially leading to bad decisions, that impact what B needs to work with.

[devsda]

> People who are passionate about computer programming and also do it off the job will over time gain more experience and knowledge than their only on the job counterparts.

Those who are passionate also have a tendency to use their personal time to "try/do/fix that one last thing for work" because they are really excited.

The problem is the said extra work gradually eats into personal time & projects and it raises baseline expectations from the employer even when it stops being fun. Then the grind begins with no personal time or projects. That's a common recipe for burn-out.

Those who can have strict separation between work & personal time or projects will obviously not fall into this trap but when you are excited and passionate, its hard to realize and fight against it.

[erosivesoul]

This is something I had to learn the hard way. My first job, I didn't even sign up as a programmer. One day someone was like, man, this is such a boring task (setting up excel sheets from one format to another). So I wrote a VBA script to automate it. At the time I was playing with C# and bash at home, setting up a home lab. So when I started getting asked to write other things, I was elated. Fast forward a year or two and now I'm the "VBA/bash/C#/typescript/react/sql/blah" guy and I've gone from solving work problems for fun and doing it just because I have to. That job didn't last long after that point. My current job has pretty clear-cut lines. I only work on work-related stuff at work, and personal stuff at home.

[whstl]

I don’t disagree in general, but I remember the world before careerists and we were also listening to and collaborating with customers, and delivering results.

Maybe significantly more tham today.

I remember talking constantly with end-users 20 years ago, something I’ve seen countless PMs dreading, postponing and treating like an absolute chore. I’ve experimented, A/B tested and rolled back code in enterprise, something that is a bureaucratic nightmare even in agile startups.

If they have rights to a paycheck, then we should also have rights to not have the joy sucked out of it.

[bad_haircut72]

There's more anxiety in the people who only code for $$ because deep down they know they're at a disadvantage, so they try to suppress the hobby/passion people with all kinds of "x should y" statements.

[koverstreet]

Have you never considered the absolutely /terrible/ manners of showing up to a profession where other people are passionate about what they're doing, doing the best work they know how and enjoying it - and then complaining because you only want to phone it in for a paycheck?

Perhaps you chose the wrong line of work...

Not everyone has to be a programmer. Not everyone is entitled to be a programmer just because they want an easy white collar job. There are a lot of other fulfilling jobs out there! There's no reason for you to bring the standards down for everyone just so that you feel you can keep up.

It's like being back in high school again, when everyone else was complaining about being graded on a curve - and implicit was the complaint about who they were being graded against.

[hollerith]

According to you, is it possible to do a programming job well while not deriving enjoyment from it?

[koverstreet]

Sometimes, yes. There are always times when the work just needs to be done, and there's always going to be parts that are less pleasant and others that are more pleasant.

But I got into programming nearly 30 years ago because it was fascinating, and amazing, and it still is. I love seeing what I can build, I love using decades of accumulated skills to their full potential. And I love writing code that people use and that makes users happy.

And more and more I see what was once a wonderful /culture/ being taken over by corporate 9-5 types who want to show up, go to a bunch of meetings and talk about anything but work, pick up a few tickets, and call it a day.

There's a dark side to professionalism....

Personally, I'll only work with people who are here because they want to be here - it's too draining trying to get anything done with corporate drones.

[throw__away7391]

I think it is very unlikely. If you're a super disciplined individual and you can continuously overcome your dislike of programming day after day and force yourself to practice, maybe you'll be really really effective, having the skills on one hand and also never getting distracted by interesting programming problems and keeping the focus on business purpose. These people are insanely annoying to work with because they constantly shoot down every fun abstraction you want to implement, but they can get a lot done. They're also extremely rare. To me this doesn't sound like a fun way to live life either, but to each their own..

More commonly, they don't enjoy it so they don't improve outside work. In my experience these people introduce and embrace a lot of synthetic metrics, generally resist change once they get comfortable with particular technical paradigms, generally are not knowledgable about anything that's not directly in the scope of their day to day, and are quite unable to lead anything new. They do best in environments where someone else has already laid the foundation, tasks are repetitive and predictable, and success is measured in story points rather than the quality of software delivered. Possibly they do well in the first few years of a new project, but over time they will bring down the overall quality of whatever they are working on.

[koverstreet]

I may have to steal some of this for the next time I have to explain on LKML why I don't care to work with the corporate world, you really hit the nail on the head :)

[anonzzzies]

I think it is possible however it seems you don't have much incentive to explore more than you need to. Which might be enough to do your work well, but I don't understand that you wouldn't want that. I build stuff all the time, weekends, evenings and try to implement new things I never did before. It's fun and handy for later.

[neither_color]

I'm in a non-tech job and I never quite got into a tech "career" but I've built my own tools that no SAAS offers and I spend some of my free time tweaking them and I feel proud the more I use them. Everyone in society benefits from a little DIY tech literacy, even those of us not FAANG caliber.

[brokencode]

Personally, I avoid all side projects at home because they turn into a huge distraction for me at work. It’s hard for me not to think about them all day.

So the whole “program for fun to get a job” thing has always felt pretty dumb to me. Companies should only care about what I get done at work. What I do at home is my business.

[diggan]

> Companies should only care about what I get done at work. What I do at home is my business.

I mean to some extent you're right, but obviously there are limits here. And, it can be used as a signal to see how interested a person is in something.

As one example, I don't have any college education or beyond that, and when I wanted to start working as a programmer it was kind of hard to get any response from companies and with a tiny local startup ecosystem (this was in Spain back in 2012), I managed to only find one company that was interested in hiring me as an intern in the beginning, to at least give this person without any professional experience a chance.

Since I always done programming as a hobby just for fun, it was way easier for them to evaluate if it was an outlandish bet or a somewhat safe bet, as I already had some projects on GitHub that I had done in my free-time they could look at and displayed some eagerness to program professionally.

I don't mean to say that you have to program in your free time just to be "hireable", but I'm 100% certain individuals who do that (and publish results at least sometimes) have a way higher chance of getting hired, especially if they're just starting their career.

[brokencode]

Oh yeah, I was talking from my perspective as somebody more established in the industry.

I definitely think that if you’re just getting started, especially if you don’t have the typical college degree and internships, side projects are a great way to demonstrate your skills.

[Apreche]

90% agree. Someone is a sucker if they work for their employer during their personal time. If someone wants to code for their employer by day and code for themselves by night, that’s great. I just hope they get enough sleep.

[firgil]

That assumes the world is zero-sum. If my employer has a code base that I find more enjoyable / fascinating than any of my side projects, maybe the employer does get extra out of me from me putting in extra hours, but I also get more out of him by both delivering what's expected of me and getting to toy around in a code base that I find fun. I might even be improving my earning potential (if the "fun" argument isn't good enough for you) by building skills working on that production code base that I wouldn't by just messing around on side projects. The dynamic is obviously very open to abuse and people have to protect themselves from that, but I don't agree "extra hours = sucker" is universally true.

[el_benhameen]

I like building stuff. During the day, I get paid to do it for my employer. In my off time, sometimes it takes the form of a personal project. Sometimes it takes the form of a house or garden project. And sometimes I’m still thinking about something that I’m enjoying at work, so it takes the form of a little more work on a work project. If I’m enjoying it and I’m not doing it to the exclusion of family time, then whatever, I’m happy.

[ghaff]

I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

I don't see the same sort of pushback for people who do side-projects as a hobby.

[diggan]

> I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

This is the same in every space/community/hobby I've ever participated in. The people who don't live and breathe $SUBJECT 24/7 are often passed off as "posers" and only doing it for the money, in everything from software engineering, finance, gardening, music making, game development or whatever.

Eventually, we grow up and realize everyone needs food on the table, and everyone isn't chasing combining their passion with their career, and sometimes just do their career to earn enough so they can continue with their passions.

[ghaff]

Music making? Probably. If I'm a landscaper, I'm not sure I need to have a garden at home. Finance? Other than managing my personal finances, I'm not sure I'd have any reason to be an active bond trader in my spare time even if that's what I did all day.

Hopefully you like your day job well enough but lots of very competent people shut it off when they go home.

[diggan]

> If I'm a landscaper, I'm not sure I need to have a garden at home.

There are more professions around gardening than specifically landscaping :) And yes, they have communities and hard-core fans who read books, engage with community members and spend basically 24/7 thinking about plants and what not.

Same with finance. You've never met any finance-bros who just can't stop talking about finance every time you look their way?

> Hopefully you like your day job well enough but lots of very competent people shut it off when they go home.

Absolutely, I wasn't trying to say if you don't do that, you suck at your day-job. I'm just trying to get across that this pushback you see sometimes in the software industry about people just doing it as a job instead of a passion are "worse" somehow, happens in every industry I know of. It's in no way exclusive to software developers.

[datavirtue]

I'm so bored with software, be careful not to bring up finance around me.

[htrp]

> in everything from software engineering, finance, gardening, music making, game development or whatever.

In finance, the A tier people don't have work/life balance. It's expected for them to demand effective 24/7 availability (and they get paid accordingly)

[hello_moto]

Likewise in Software. Those A-Tier paygrade is expected to be on-call (24/7 through weekend) no-bonus, lead big projects, review codebases, teach juniors...

[ghaff]

Or exec salaries tend to come with a lot of baggage. Yes, some do fairly disconnected personal travel. But there tend to be pretty long hours and a lot of business travel that I've seen.

[ghaff]

Yes, but that's different from having finance as a hobby.

[aprilthird2021]

It's one of the few highly paid fields where you can do it for fun. You cannot really practice medicine or law in your free time on whatever you want. You can only really do charity work in your free time. Not medical or legal research or anything like what OSS / personal projects are for us.

For other types of engineering, I think there is a bit of a thread of doing it for fun. The Homebrew Robotics Club comes to mind. The easier it is to actually create something in your field, the more there will be a thread of doing it because you love it.

[rafaelmn]

>But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

Software scales differently, that's why software companies that benefit from that scaling pay so much for top talent.

I can't think of an area where being hyperfocused on your discipline isn't viewed as a a given to get to the top. It's just that most engineering positions that I know of don't care if you're the best to do X, and are more "can you do X". Equivalent to enterprise 9-5.

[HEmanZ]

I only encountered this attitude during college, when doing smart extra work outside of class or internships definitely put you ahead.

In the real world, I literally can’t name a single Senior+ engineer (at the FAANG+ companies I’ve worked at) who codes for fun outside of work. Plenty of them have other constructive and interesting hobbies, but not coding.

Put another way, your hobby app that got 15 downloads doesn’t matter at all if your day job regularly has you shipping code to millions (or especially if it’s billions) of users.

[threatofrain]

As a hypothetical employer, should I be allowed to select for people who love programming because my internal metrics say they're an awesome fit? If so, then that's where the fundamental pressure is going to come from.

So we can be on HN and sing "Oh, you do you!" but that won't relieve the fundamental source of pressure.

[bee_rider]

You can, but I think it might be a little hard to do so. I mean it is a well known thing and so people will game it, right? We have people grinding levels leetcode now to trick you. Of course you are probably savvy to that. But who knows what else they’ll do? Getting a good job is a life-changing event, so they are very motivated to trick you…

I love programming. How much? I’ve written a bunch of little programs that nobody else will ever see, just for fun and just for me. Why? I just enjoy doing it. It’s more like knitting than studying. Sometimes it will come in handy—once my boss had an idea an I got to say “oh, I actually implemented that for fun the other day,” which was very funny, but it isn’t intended to be useful and 99% of the time it is just a waste of time.

[shswkna]

If a company’s goal is to bring rockets to mars/solve world transport logistics/create driverless cars/etc/etc, you are not going to care about what is fair or what creates pressure. You will find the persons that can get the job done. Things like preventing burn out or balancing work with personal life will be dealt within the scope of reaching that goal. Many sensitivities in this thread or considerations of whats fair and isn’t, is really irrelevant. What goal is being pursued, and how can it be reached sensibly, is what matters in the end.

[boh]

You can hypothetically do whatever you want, no one in the real world is hiring you because you "love programming".

[asdasdsddd]

That's definitely not true. The whole side project meme was a big thing a while back because employers were specifically looking for people who liked programming so much they do it on the side.

[boh]

A "while back".

[asdasdsddd]

Yes like 5 years ago

[boh]

Without pointing out that what happened five years ago doesn't reflect current priorities, that wasn't really a thing back then either. Unless you're fresh out of college with zero previous experience, your work experience is the only thing that matters. Don't let the feel-good, you-can-do-it, power-through posts fool you, a side project getting you a job is a rarity (unless you're one of the first 10 programmers on a PyTorch level library--and those type of guys usually have careers by the time they work on that stuff).

[treve]

I work at a small company and I do try select for people that create because of internal drive. It doesn't strictly have to be programming, but it tends to be. I agree not every company needs this. It could even be a negative for some type of work.

[zelphirkalt]

The state of software in most places reflects this.

[deadbabe]

It helps to accept that no matter how balanced or perfect you try to make your life, you’re going to screw it up anyway, so just do what you feel like, for fun or not for fun, and don’t worry about it.

[boh]

The programmer succeeding because he loves to program is a "George Washington chopping the cherry tree" kind of anecdote Silicon Valley likes to represent themselves with. Nine out of 10 times, the fun kind of programming someone is doing during their nights and weekends has zero application to their professional life. Yes doing any kind of coding is a teaching moment, but living your life outside of a computer screen offers lessons as well.