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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see the same sort of pushback for people who do side-projects as a hobby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So we can be on HN and sing "Oh, you do you!" but that won't relieve the fundamental source of pressure.
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.
Since becoming a manager at work less of my time is actual coding, and in the last 6 months or so I have started to code a lot more on my own projects and I'm really enjoying it. It feels like overall there is a certain desire/capacity for it, and if that is getting used up at work, so be it, if not, then it fills up outside of work hours.
Either way, each to their own. Some people would probably love to spend more time coding or on other hobbies but have other commitments like family to consider.
I love writing software. Over the festive period I wrote a text-based double-entry bookkeeping system with balance sheets and income (p&l) statements. For no reason; I just wanted to.
And that's how it is for me. In my own time I code what I want and purely for pleasure. Sometimes it relates to work, but it is never actual work stuff.
My work-life balance has the usual family aspects, but the main thing for me is making that clear distinction on what my motivation is for what I'm working on. As long the motivation isn't for work benefit that's fine, even if the learning outcome does eventually help there.
It's hard for me to "let them be", but I have to, obviously. It creates a lot of internal tension that I can't figure out how to resolve.
Not just coding but other types of technical work might benefit from not ruling this out, especially creative or innovative efforts.
It can really make a difference depending on where you stand in a project environment.
For me it was pretty easy to accept with cargo work where the ships come in at any time 24/7.
Before I started my company I had already gone the extra mile like this for employers when it really made a difference.
So I knew what I was getting into beforehand, I used to say you can run a company OK during business hours alone, but building a company may be the best use of nights & weekends depending on the circumstances.
It took some time but doing it for my own self turned out better after all.
It's not exactly a "super power" but good to have in your arsenal, plus in the right situation you could direct all your focus migrating toward having a 24/7 business that hardly ever requires "after-hours" effort after a while.
This, unfortunately leaves me with very little time to do the computer and electronics-related projects I would so love to finally be working on. Also makes it just about impossible to level up my technical knowledge to further my career. I kind of dream of retiring early and finding some low-paying job that keeps me walking all day but leaves me with plenty of mental energy to come home and rock out a few hours of coding or whatever in the evening.
Do strength training when you are stuck waiting for things: tests running, mandatory meetings where you only listen. I have a set of dumbbells and kettlebells next to my (WFH) workstation and put them to good use during most working days.
>There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
Mark Twain
You are if you're only making salary.
> There is a narrative that working hard is inherently bad for your health or that long hours lead to burnout. I disagree. It's not about how many hours you put in, but about the enjoyment and quality of the work you're doing. Still some of my most favorite memories were some all-nighters I did when I was younger working on something. It wasn't even necessarily on projects that ended up meaningful or successful, but it was the act in itself. When you find joy in what you're building in the moment, work does not feel like a burden. Instead it feels exciting and exhilarating. These memories, that some might describe as unhealthy are some of my most pleasant ones.
It’s all about how you feel about it. When you enjoy it, spending nights and weekends can feel great.
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/12/26/reflecting-on-life/
- I recently had an hours-long screenshare with a MMO guild leader showing dozens of spreadsheets. I was bewildered until he said that this is the game for him. This stuff is fun. He loves it. You can love what people call "work."
- I fell into a years-long trap of, "if <activity> is not advancing my career or my family, why would it ever be worth doing?" This led to depression and terrible downwards spiraling of Five Why's of "what's the point of it all?" There's very few ways to live life wrongly. All of them are obvious.
- I just had 2 weeks off where I didn't look at a single line of code. The longest stretch in my career. I was worried I'd come back to work and feel I wasted my time off. But no, it was amazing. My kids are amazing creatures.
By the way, have you read Paul Graham's essay "A Project of One's Own" (https://paulgraham.com/own.html)? I really connected with his idea of being a "skater," and I wonder if you might relate to it as well.
That disconnect is something I'm working on lately. Why do I have so much fun when it's driven by my own desire, but don't enjoy when it's driven by the companies desire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully you like your day job well enough but lots of very competent people shut it off when they go 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.
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)