Having a github full of side projects is helpful when pursuing a job, but I find it difficult to go hard at work and put 100% in and then come home and work on side projects. Usually, I'd rather spend time with friends and family.

This seems to disqualify me from a lot of job postings.

Many organizations hire programmers as technical roles, but they are generally creatives. A lot of them are night owls, who ebb and flow between long productive stints and proverbial 'writers block'.

Many of the best developers I know have a creative desire and just writing code for 10 hours a day doesn't satiate it.

I think we need to start treating developers as creatives and giving them the processes they need to be successful and not be stressed, overworked, stretched thin, etc.

Show me a world-class writer who doesn't obsess about his writing with every waking moment.

Show me a master painter who doesn't paint every single chance she gets.

And show me a music prodigy who hasn't slogged through 15 years of mind-numbing practice every single day.

Only then will I believe that these artists are just getting more "efficient with their tools".

In creative fields, it's even more important that you put in a huge volume of work. That's the only way to connect the dots and create something truly unique.

If I ask for decent private office and 3x32" screens I just get blank faces and bullshit excuses. Since I started working for myself remotely, I can sustain 10 hours of uninterrupted concentration. Before in office it was more like 30 minutes of concentration per day.

Perfection in the big projects doesn't matter. The world is full of crap software. Perfection in the little pieces however really matters, and this makes it possible to build better software.

I still have stressful days, usually involving bug reports and unhappy users. However, for the most part that realization meant that rather than the stress being an ongoing thing, sometimes lasting days or weeks, it became an occasional thing usually lasting only hours, and the sense of beauty in seeing successful things come together has become more common. That doesn't mean you spend time chasing perfection on every little detail because a lot of things are legitimate tradeoffs and you won't know some deficiencies until it is actually used.

To me that is craftsmanship.

So, when I was growing up, where the family had to drive 50 miles to visit other Asians, I started to realize there was a pattern to how bumf#cks would come circling in for what was in their minds the justified pleasure of humiliating a non-white person. Most people were decent, but I and my family members stuck out.

I notice the same sort of circling at some programmer meet-ups here in the bay area, though I don't think it's my race that prompts it. Programmers make good money, are highly sought after, and in many companies are positively coddled. Just about every group that found itself in such a position has developed some small sub population of arrogant, entitled jerks. In retrospect, I may have been guilty of being a little bit of that myself.

One might like to think that good programmers are also good at thinking rationally in general. That's not how it works. Being good at programming just trains us to think rationally in a very specific context. The rest of the time, we're primates vying for a place in the social hierarchy. The best we can hope for are social structures and patterns that co-opt such tendencies for the uncovering of truth and the good of the group. Seeking social contexts that humanely succeed at this should underly one's seeking for a place of work.

It's hard to do this, and most of the time, people find a situation that achieves group cohesion and effectiveness through an "us vs them" dynamic.

Yeah, like writers, painters and musicians aren't also crazy...

I am feeling like this (burnout/mental sickness of programmers) is becoming a successful theme on HN lately. Many-many posts are popping up to front page.

Not like it's a bad thing, being myself a victim it feels good to read experience of fellow coders who has seen what I am about to see or how to avoid seeing it, but still, it is becoming a theme. I am imagining hordes of posts on this topic coming up. Or may be we already have 'em, just the good ones are popping up to front page.

There are actually more than one pattern emerging. I think I gotta hint of for writing posts more likely to hit front page.

However in the long run it has been and always will be a means to an end.

I think the advice to look afield is good. Gerald Sussman seems to agree as he often looks to biology for new ideas. Ideas are not born in a vacuum after all. They need to form hunches and meet other hunches and be given time to cook. That's a number of metaphors... but I think you get where I'm going with this. I hope.

Spend time learning the fundamentals for sure but branch out as soon as you can.

What we do would be highly dimensional (i.e. specialized) if we weren't a colonized people. But we'd be able to come to peace with it. We wouldn't fret others knowing more than us (which happens to everyone) if we weren't constantly watching our backs. We are constantly meeting people who know more about certain topics than we do (and, reciprocally, so are they). It wouldn't be an issue if we had more career and income security.

It's not something about programming that makes people sick. It's not an intrinsically stressful activity. It's far less demanding (speaking of the work itself, not context and social dynamics) than over 75% of paid labor. What's hurting us is that we're a lost, conquered, and scatterd tribe. We think we're elite specialists, but we've done such an obnoxiously bad job of fighting for ourselves and our own value as to let ourselves be typecast to business subordinates, and it's horrible.

It would actually be a win for the more progressive business people (as well as us) if we could get ourselves out of this. Would you want to be operated on by a doctor with the pay and social status of an average programmer? Of course not. Well, similarly, we'd make better products if we got ourselves out of the "business subordinate" trap, and pretty much everyone would win.

The business side has been entrusted with a lot of money, its own or someone else's. Success has already been achieved. As such, it approaches things from a mindset of risk reduction. And the absolute worst thing possible, from a risk-reduction standpoint, is creative work. It's unpredictable, you don't know when you've got an end product, and it involves dealing with workers who have egos, who often work on things you don't understand. It is unmanageable, which obviously troubles those whose job it is to manage.

The most common approach, so far, has been to ignore this scary possibility: Keep projects as low-level as possible, spread responsibility far and wide (to reduce risk, not for optimal efficiency), and keep everyone wearing business casual.

Developers are (often) in the weird position of Ozzy Osbourne and other rock stars: potheads whose potheadery became valuable. What the developers know, however, is that businesses don't really want what they have to offer. They don't want to see the full effect of a bad trip. For every Bieber who turns crappy branding to gold in the teen girl demographic, there's Joe Concept Artist who's experimenting with some new grooves, but will never catch on. For every Zuckerberg who can bang out a social network in PHP, there's some dedicated open-source hacker whose dream is to make Lisp accessible to the common man.

And yet: the money guys are offering money. Just swallow your pride, play "Stairway to Heaven"[1] at the wedding, and pretend you've never had crazy eyes when talking about homoiconicity, and the rent will be paid.

[1]Nothing against the song.

Also: T shaped people: http://zurb.com/article/11/the-t-in-team

We need to distinguish between creators and people who just implement, because there is a lot of work that doesn't involve new ideas. Complicating this is the fuzziness between the titles 'engineer' and 'programmer' and 'developer'.

Much of this just seems like growing pains for a field that's relatively new to humanity.

To paraphrase, many of the best X (X being developers, managers, accountants, salesmen etc.) have a creative desire and just doing their job for 10 hours a day doesn't satiate it. That's why they indulge in create activities in their free time.

I hate being treated as a code monkey.

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/2007/07/haru...

I could give you more examples of writers, Joyce Carol Oates , Michael Crichton but same thing basically. Also note that Murakami didn't start writing until 29 and loafed around at the public library chill in' and reading' and at Japanese jazz cafes. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a prodigy and workaholic at 27 for starting so early.

Also in regards to music, others can comment as I'm not an expert. But I've wasted 2 years of my life doodling around scales, ear training and music theory focusing on speed, dexterity and memorization, attempting to learn how to improvise like the greats. That I never taken the time to listen to the groove of the great pieces, sounds wonky but I decided that if I never can become a good musician, at least I could slow down and learn to enjoy the music as opposed to the idea. And I enjoy listening and playing much more now and don't give two-shits about how my solo's sound and just keep playing. And in the small moments of self-delusion inspired by bluesy turns, my own playing gives my deluded mind a self-congratulatory chill to the spine.

And in regards to programming, let's be real. CRUD or iOS apps are not going to change the world. We are like the capitalist work-bees, shoveling digital snow around like escorts shoveling sensual snow. If we are really secure enough to want to dive into our craft, then learn Linux kernel, compilers, advanced algorithms and contribute to the bottom of the stack for a change instead of fluffing snow at the top.

However, most guitarists get paid to provide pleasant background music at weddings. Making money writing and playing Purple Haze is a (boom-and-bust, drug-induced) outlier. Master artists aren't employees of Paint-o-Corp who get paid salary in exchange for the rights to their creative output (even if it's side-projects).

If we want a sustainable population of healthy, balanced engineers, we need to adjust our expectations for the typical coder.

Slogging through 15 years of practice every day is a technical endeavor. If you need to learn how to do something or to master a technical skill, then yes, volume of work will get you there. Code is a tool that is used to create, and I think the quote you selected just serves to underline the difference between learning how to be an effective engineer vs learning how to become an effective technician.

Edit: constant practice is definitely important, but relentlessly working is not.

Can you really be called a prodigy if you've been practicing every day for 15 years?

When programmers get beyond a critical daily/weekly threshold, putting in more hours hurts more than it helps. The brain gets tired of solving problems, and when that happens, pushing yourself further is not the answer. The answer is to do something else, especially something involving physical activity, to allow your brain time to recover.

I believe that many programmers fundamentally do not understand this concept, thus they drive themselves crazy trying to push harder and harder. Yes, you may write more lines of code that way, but at what cost?

That said, I have no sympathy for a company that expects to hire a Yo-Yo Ma for the salary of an amateur band member.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/10/19/123385170/eubie-blake-on-piano...

> Show me a master painter who doesn't paint every single chance she gets.

Well, there's Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who decided one day to give up painting and become a poet. While he is remembered more for his paintings than poetry, his poetry carries with it the essence and soul of his paintings as well as the imagery. He decided to paint with words. I don't think he obsessed about writing all the time. As he put it, though, "A sonnet is a moment's monument."[1]

This gets at what I think is an important point though. All of these creative endeavors require real-world knowledge. Hemmingway went out on adventures. For Tolkein, writing fiction was not his day job (teaching about medieval literature and linguistics, however, was). You can see their respective works that the live of the writer and the other obsessions beyond writing are what make the author.

Similarly with programming, yes, it is a technical endeavor and yes it is a creative one. However just like writing the great works of fiction, these don't come out of nothing. They require a context grounded in other knowledge and experience.

[1] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/medievalism/areading.html Note that this was the introductory sonnet to "The House of Life" which chronicals Rosetti falling in love, getting married, coping with his wife's death, and finally finding solace in his religious worldview. The poem, despite its abstract nature is full of classical Greek imagery and something one could probably write volumes about. At the same time, it is an exposition on why he wrote poetry, and it provides the framework for fully understanding the hundred or so sonnets in The House of Life in that way. There are love sonnets, and sonnets which, as he puts it "in Charon's palm it pays the toll to Death" (i.e. allowing the dead and the living to begin to move on).

More than putting in a huge volume of work, you have to work hard and deliberately at improving every day. That doesn't take (and can't be sustained) for more than a few hours a day, and all other activity is nowhere near as important for development.

At the same time, to create something great you do have to stop practicing and go back to what you know best and what inspires you.

I think you'll find most music prodigies spend hours lost in playing beautiful music. Very different from mind-numbing.