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Comment by throwaway456789 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why that was a prerequisite. I program for 60 hours a week. So what if I don't want to do it on the weekends too.

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Depending on your situation, maybe you could try to push some new technologies to your current company? (could be hard, depends what company, I guess you work in finance, well that's double hard then)

Anyway, personal anecdote: I know a guy who was a Java programmer for almost a decade, in a Java-heavy corporate environment. The company's been also investing in frontend for a while. Being bored with Java development, he learnt JS, and started following angularjs (stackoverflow, github issues etc.) in his spare time (a bit in the morning, a bit in the evening, just regularly), and within a year, with the support of a senior manager, basically became a "free-electron" angular evangelist inside the company.

The transition was pretty fluent, now he works on angular-related stuff full-time.

Unfortunately, tinkering in your off-hours is a key way for programmers to keep their skills current. The industry changes rapidly and the skills that were most marketable over the past 10 years are not the same as those that will be most marketable over the next 10. If you're not changing jobs constantly, the rate of tech change at your workplace is unlikely to be enough to keep your skills marketable. So you need to tinker.

This is one reason why people 40+ with kids tend to migrate into management. Their technical skills are getting rusty and having kids decimates your ability to take on major tinkering projects that help you learn new skills. However, their people skills are evergreen and even sharpened by their experience as parents.

Why is this not true in other professions? Why don't hospitals give preference to surgeons who like to dissect frogs in their spare time or build better scalpels on their garage workbench?

I know you are being rhetorical but to those that don't know it's because surgeons have a proper profession that protects surgeons from management/lobbyists/politicians etc bossing them around.

Software developers don't have such protection and any mention of such a thing will get you blackballed within the industry by employers and ostracized by peers as most have bought in to the narrative that cooperating is bad for the individual.

However, my SO is a physician and they spend A LOT of time on skill mastery beyond med school and residency, however, their keeper is their profession, not their employer which is a major difference.

I think average surgeon's skills are probably pretty sharp (pun intended), however, in my experience the knowledge of a regular small-town GP's indeed usually is not very up-to-date.

Regarding the OP's question: new hip languages and frameworks evolve way faster than human body, and "it works" is more important in medicine than "iterate and fail fast" (hopefully:)

My personal theory is also that partially the high expectations are due to open source / hacker ethos (there's generally no medical open source movement, or in any profession outside of IT AFAIK, at least on such scale). The cycle goes like this:

- some folks want to do something cool for fun and/or to get some fame for showing it to the public, or get famous for inventing a known lib/framework

- companies see they're smart and hire them

- other companies follow the trend, and require open source contributions or at least building space shuttle over the weekend

- a number of devs don't want to lag behind, so they join the bandwagon, and they create even more cool stuff and even more open source MVC frameworks

- now, the cycle reinforces itself, everyone is doing cool stuff and contributing to opensource, if you don't, you're excluded

edit: fixed typos

I don't think software is all that exceptional in this regard. Any profession has certain visible achievements that distinguish its world-class members. For software, it's cool open source projects; for chefs, it's creating a great restaurant; for doctors, it's publishing influential novel research.

In each of these fields, the visible achievement isn't exactly the same as great performance in the field. You can get unlucky in scientific research and end up with nothing publishable; you can cook mediocre food but market it really well; or you can create the latest trendy build system instead of just mastering Gnu Make.

The misleading thing may be the assumption that most successful open source software projects are done by unpaid hackers on their own time. Perhaps that used to be the case, but many of the hot open source projects in recent history -- from Rails to Docker to React to Swift -- are built on the clock by successful programmers employed at big and small companies. But software is unusual in that serious contributions can be made by people without any institutional support.

> However, my SO is a physician and they spend A LOT of time on skill mastery beyond med school and residency, however, their keeper is their profession, not their employer which is a major difference.

I spend a lot of time outside my job on skill mastery as well. I do not do it in ways or domains that translate into pretty Github portfolios.

Good point. This is possible for surgeons because medicine is a stricter hierarchy of professions that software: you decide to become a surgeon or a nurse or a PA early in your career, compete for that privilege, and don't change. Advanced specialist doctors often work in teaching hospitals and devote a large chunk of their time to research; at lower-level medical professions, you might get continuing education credits. These tiers are well established over many years in the industry and the schools that train the next generations of participants.

I'd say that top achievers in the software industry can also command similar benefits, but the mechanism is different. Instead of leveraging a credential into research and leveraging cool research stories into grant funding, software people get to do what they want by leveraging hard work, luck, and great stories about what they can do into great jobs or investor dollars. There are pros and cons to each system, but one big virtue of the less structured software world is that it tends to respond to market opportunity a lot more efficiently than something like medicine.

Doctors are already required to perform continuing education beyond their normal work duties (ie still meet their quotas). These requirements have actually been getting more and more onerous over the years. My mother works in primary care, and the house always has medical related magazines and journals all over the place.

So if you are in medicine, you are required to at least go through the motions of keeping up on things.

Because surgeons are already workaholics with insane work/life balance issues, perhaps? Same for many other professions.

What? Doctors have to do a crazy amount of education in off-work hours.

I find my singleness/childlessness to be a MAJOR strategic advantage in the modern workplace. Because I can travel more and take on clients outside of the HQ area, I provide a value that other people can't. Still moved into management, but I can also stay on top of new technologies and remain agile.

Indeed so what, but do you program on weekends anyway? At least sometimes? Earlier in the thread you complained about golden handcuffs. That indicates there's something you'd rather be doing than your work, but the pay is too good to leave. I scratch my own itches with occasional weekend or night coding and usually it's for the fun of it, learning or keeping up with the trends can be a side benefit but not the goal. Often I work with one-off projects like coding a game using a new engine in a functional language. If I didn't need or like money as much I might just do these fun projects all the time. I think this personality of programming-as-hobby is pretty common in the field, and when we run into people who program strictly on the job and never any other time, who started programming only in college when they decided to get a degree and only did work for assignments or internships before getting hired, they may be really talented programmers on the job (which is why you can say "so what") but something feels off culturally. It'd be like meeting a guitarist who rocks with the best of them on stage while being paid but never plays off-the-clock or seems to have any interest in the instrument or the scene or the genres of play beyond their ability to make money. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7423626 makes the point well that for many programmers, we're just potheads whose potheadery became valuable.

60? Isn't that already your weekends?

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