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Comment by charlesism | Hacker News Reader

I get what you're saying, and with most other CEOs I would agree, but it doesn't really compute in his case. Considering the amount of time he has spent for the past decade+ evangelizing the developer side of things, and how obviously he empathizes with life as a developer... I'm happy to accept whatever he says at face value. He's a good egg.

Also, thank you for giving me the opportunity to post something positive about someone in tech! I'm generally the one being cynical and negative, so it's a nice change :)

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I guess I'm not in the habit of accepting anything anyone says at face value. It doesn't mean he's running some long-running conspiracy, it's simply a reminder that his perspective comes from a particular position.

  > I'm not in the habit of accepting anything anyone says at face value.

Well, that is generally a wise approach. The only reason I'm defending him is that I mentally pegged him a long time ago as an unusually decent guy. To be fair, I only know him from his writings and public speaking, but that has been consistently developer-minded.

I have met him and he is generally a very decent guy, but like I said his perspective is informed by specific experiences.

That is probably true, but then you also have to look at the merit of those experiences. His fight has essentially been trying to make programming a "respected profession", where you contributions and time is respected. If that's the environment you're trying to create, then side projects are less important. Since your best work, excitement and learning is supposed to happen at work. Side projects might even undermine your efforts since programmers at worse workplaces compensate by having more exciting side projects. So I think the perspective is less that side projects are bad and more that work should be good enough that side projects (that leads to commercial products rather than hobbies) become unnecessary.

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