Tangential: I loved the "When programming is your hobby" part of this blog post. Finally someone accepting, and not dissing, people who actually like to code. The advice is spot-on, too: coding > 40h / week is fine, but why give up your freedom of choosing what to work on, when to work on it, and when to take time off, without any compensation?
Yeah, except what this actually means is, "You don't have any interests outside of work and you do not have kids that may take you away from work and you don't have a SO/spouse to tell you that you're being taken advantage of."
It's not really about your interests, it's about you being naive.
This is pretty amazing. OP made a comment about people not hating on those who enjoy coding and you came and called them naive. Plenty of people code outside of work, on personal projects, and are not being taken advantage of.
It's all very nice disparaging people for having found a passion, but when I read Masters of Doom, I didn't pity John Carmack and John Romero and their gang for programming all week, then 'borrowing' work computers to program and play D&D all weekend. I admired them. They found a thing they loved to do with people they loved to do it with.
Other people have to do many things to be happy, but they found it all there! These were incredibly intelligent, incredibly creative people expressing their intelligence and creativity. They weren't lesser men for their passion. It elevated them.
You're right, we shouldn't disparage people for working long hours in pursuit of their passion. But we absolutely should disparage investors and founders who seek to exploit this youthful passion and energy to enrich themselves without fair compensation. The tricky part is actually defining what's fair.
I have children, a SO that helps me see when I'm being taken advantage of, and I love to code. It augments my career (data scientist/economist), gives me interesting problems to solve related or unrelated to my work field, lets me build a personal brand should I want via github, and opens my eyes to more possibilities in the world.
Were it my job to build code, I would probably focus on the other aspects of my current role (statistics, ML, forecasting, etc.).
Keeps the ax sharp, fun to do, and leads to great friendships and networks.
I guess I could spend _all_ my time outside of family and work doing something like strategy board gaming, which I find enormously fun, but I guess I see such things are more like spice in life.
Exactly, just because I love programming in my free time doesn't mean I want to work on enterprise Java company code on Sunday. No, thank you. I have much more interesting personal projects to work on that actually excite me.
True, but what if your work is the thing you'd choose to spend your time on, given the freedom to pick anything.
Other comments suggest that this is referring to a job posting from Andrew Ng's deep learning startup. If that's the case, you might have access to expertise and compute resources that you could only dream about if you were working on a side project.
That's a fair argument, but it doesn't change that the job ad is pretty bad. SpaceX has lots of people working serious overtime because of their belief in company's mission, but it doesn't routinely advertise overtime as a job perk...
Nobody really ever "disses" the people who like to code. What gets talked about are those who spend all that time coding to make someone else rich, instead of doing something for themselves.
