The upside though is that you are usually well paid in this field so a lot of us have the choice of doing less paid work and do impactful work without getting paid. (But yeah, I hear you, it does feel like the system is rigged for depressing results as a whole)
This (developers having significant time to work on hobby/side projects) seems to be pretty common among experiences I read about online (i.e. Hacker News, blogs) but basically unheard of among people I work with/talk to IRL. I'm very curious how people manage to carve out this time? Personally I find it very difficult. It was virtually impossible when I had a full time job - I guess that's what full time means. But now I work freelance, and while I'm able to spend some of my "work" time doing things I want to do vs need to do, I still have a lot of actual work to do and thus find it very hard to do anything meaningful with my "extra" time.
The trick is owning stuff and renting it out. That's the essence of what makes SaaS attractive. You own the software, you rent out access to it, so you get paid without having to spend time working.
> I'm very curious how people manage to carve out this time?
I've never really had a problem finding the time. Like everything else, it's a matter of what tradeoffs you want to make. For instance, I also don't watch TV/Netflix/etc. -- I work on my hobby projects instead. A couple of hours working on something every day yields results far more quickly that you'd think.
But I'll admit, I apply time management lessons I learned from being a single parent. Doing that taught me how much stuff you can really cram into a day.
