Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know if the author knows anyone who is an artist, but if they knew an artist it might add perspective on the t-shirt.

There is a type of person who is driven to express their ideas and emotions. They can be moody and quiet or loud and extroverted but they get consumed by the process of creation and go into something like a trance state while creating.

I have been that type of person and when I let myself go, would spend hours and hours writing and rewriting code as the design evolved. I thought I was just oddly broken until I got to college and met an art student sculpting a rock at 3AM on my way back from the computer science building (its a weird thing to hear a rock hammer going 'tink, tink, tink' at 3 in the morning.) I watched in amazement for a while until they stopped and we talked. Turned out they had a very similar "mode" that I did, thinking about the work and then suddenly they could "see it" and at that point they were compelled to chip away the rock and let the rest of the world see it. I felt the same way about programs, all at once it seemed I just "knew" how it should go together and would work through the night banging it out.

It isn't a terrible or horrible thing, its something which is very satisfying. And its also true that no one else may appreciate your creation so you have to be ready to just be happy with creating it :-).

Later in life I met people who were programmers who just "turned it on and off" like a spigot, they go into work, get their assignment, turn on the programming spigot and write code, then turn it off again and go home to their life. Their t-shirt might read "code, get paid, go home."

I read the headline and disagreed, I read the article and realized the author isn't driven to create with code. That is totally understandable, it is a small percentage of the population that is. But the phrase speaks to that small percentage and not to them. Like art, if it doesn't speak to your soul then just ignore it and move on.

Very well said.

It falls somewhat along the lines of "work to live" vs "live to work (or create)."

This is why you choose your company carefully based on its culture and mission. If it's a place that's not doing work that really excites you, they shouldn't expect you to get into that "mode." To some extent the less interesting the work is, the more the company has to spend on perks and salary to get people to even want to work there in the first place.

I think something that needs to be discussed then is not to exclude the spigot people from the hiring process just because they aren't driven to create like you are. Unfortunately, it comes across as attacking you, the creation types while it should be attacking employers who think Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. spigot would be a worse worker than you.

I think that is a really important point. I got dinged[1] on my Intel review for "sand bagging" because I had estimated it would take three months to write an instruction assembler for a chip I was working on validating, I got it done but my manager claimed I had spent almost all the time "goofing off" and then wrote it in the last couple of weeks. Unlike hardware which had all these great milestones to indicate progress, creating a new program was think, think, think, blammo!

This has always been a challenge for me (and at this point I suspect always will). I don't know exactly how I come up with the stuff I do, it just sort of pops into my head. More rigorous people who can write down a series of milestones and check points are great at giving visibility into the process. My workaround has been to work with good project managers when I can and talk to them about what I know and don't know about a project. The "don't knows" become future deliverables, the "knows" become steps that can be done now and shown as progress.

Looking back on my career I have been the most successful in a group which is a mix of types, call them artists and engineers. There is probably a management book out there somewhere that addresses that question.

[1] Or "constructively criticized" using the Intel vernacular.

Yep, this is really common from the people I've met that perform at a high level.

Turning it on and turning it off is what everyone does on a day job, whether they want it or not. But eventually it leads to poor productivity and burnout.

Would you consider freelancing, or creating your own company, as a way out?

What's your solution to this dilemma?

I think pretty much anything, that doesn't involve full-time coding job, works. Be it freelancing, your own company or even a part-time job.

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