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Comment by JorgeGT | Hacker News Reader

I think no one has said it yet, but I believe the diversity you bring with your non-standard hobbies is a very valuable resource. Diversity being missed by people looking "culture fits" of workers who like the same exact things.

For instance the fact that you write novels for fun suggests me you would be able to write good, long documentation or manuals if required. I've known good programmers absolutely incapable of communicating their ideas in writing to other human beings.

Some, when told that they needed to prepare a detailed, well written technical report on the software they are building for a client, looked like if they had received a death sentence.

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>I think no one has said it yet, but I believe the diversity you bring with your non-standard hobbies is a very valuable resource. Diversity being missed by people looking "culture fits" of workers who like the same exact things.

Ha ha, good point. I agree, seen it happen more than once. Some people don't feel comfortable with anyone who is in some way different, even regarding likes about (often trivial) things such as tastes in food or music or sports, etc. Insecurity, I call it. Linus (of Charlie Brown / Peanuts comic fame, not Linux) and his security blanket come to mind. Images:

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=charlie+brown+linus+charac...

Having a breadth of non-technical knowledge (dare I say, "soft skills") also improves your value as a developer insofar as you may be better positioned to discuss requirements with people, and to understand the reasons why you're developing the things you are (i.e. not "tech for techs sake")

Also, people launching art projects, participating in active art communities, etc. have generally better "people skills" that introverts who prefer to spend the weekend at home doing technical side projects (like me!).

This is a highly valuable work skill for a technical worker if he/she has the need to work with clients, present updates or discuss requirements, much more than having a few small GitHub repos. By focusing in side projects you can be filtering out these skills in your workforce.

Exactly! My best ideas come through exposure to broad topics of interests, synthesizing knowledge. Implementing approach from a different domain, seeing events in a movie that trigger an idea, reading about the ways living organisms optimise resources, etc. Not to mention social events on any subject when talking to professionals from other domains triggers solution to a long lasting problem. I also recall research on the positive overall benefits of turning our brain off/away/down for a while. ... Yet I also admit the need for highly specialized work-force too, some stages or activities require narrowly trained carthorsers where a creative mind would be just damaging a realization process. All depends on the situation.

Possibly the author is better off this position.

> Not to mention social events on any subject when talking to professionals from other domains triggers solution to a long lasting problem.

This is becoming more and more important as science/technology keeps getting compartmentalized. Not to go as far as the medical doctor who rediscovered numerical integration [1], but I have the certainty that in my research I'm doing many things in a horribly inefficient way, out of ignorance. Just the other day I learned about k-d trees and sped up a piece of software in my lab by an order of magnitude...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613

That's besides the point. The poor guy just wants a life outside work.

I've always liked essay writing. I mean, not so much as an assignment, but they're satisfying to bring together; from perfecting the construction of individual sentences, to structuring the flow of paragraphs.

To that end, I quite like writing documentation, especially after finishing a large milestone. It's a good break from just coding, while also being very helpful for the team as a whole.

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