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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

No, no we don't. Not all of us. Generalizing like that is why software development hiring often goes off the rails. Every shop looks for beer & pizza loving, video game-playing, hobby-programming guys who dabble in maker projects and there's a whole world of people out there who are top-notch programmers but have families, non-technical hobbies, and just in general have lives different from the stereotypical brogrammer culture.

Personally, I program a little bit for my own purposes, but nothing more complicated than simple custom script-like utilities to automate things I do all the time. Sometimes I'll put a little time into creating a toy project to learn a new technology, but otherwise I really like to go home and not think about programming for a while. I like to give my brain different things to do to keep it challenged but not bored.

Step out of the bubble/box sometime, meet people different from yourself.

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Is this my only hobby? Nope. But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars? I would. Mind you, I wouldn't go into a big corporate shop Monday-Friday 9:00am-5:00pm and write random crap that some middle manager thinks he needs by the end of the month, but I'd gladly write code. At it's finest, it's an art.

Let's use photographers as another example. Any good photographer would still spend a lot of their time in photography even if they had a billion dollars. They probably wouldn't take the exact same wedding photos every Weekend though.

You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration.

I know there's lots of people who are flooding into this field now just because it pays well, which is understandable, and they might even do a good job and even take pride in their work, but if it's just a job then they aren't ever going to do as well as someone who actually wants to do this for fun. And working with people who are doing it as "just a job" kind of sucks the joy out of the work itself.

> But, would you write code if you had a billion dollars?

Probably. I enjoy writing code and the challenges associated with designing a solution. If I had unlimited money (meaning I didn't have to work), I would probably write code in my spare time. I do think that it is fun.

> You really can't be a REALLY good programmer without side projects where you get to play around with new technologies, with no deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration.

Guess I'll never be one of those really good programmers for the rest of my life. I do like to program, but I have a laundry list of hobbies that doesn't consist of programming. I already do it for a living 40 hours a week.

> You really can’t be a REALLY good company without innovation (side) projects where you play around with new technologies, with no expected results or deadlines, no managers, no infrastructure, just exploration.

There, fixed it.

That's the way it would change. Some places are a lot more open to 'directionless' work and others are amazingly focused on deadlines and the like. If a place is cool with you spending X% of your time on open source work that may or may not be directly related to your 'real' work than that's a much nicer place to be.

Code is (can be) an art just as much as tax preparation can be an art. But at the end of the project, for most of the rest of the world, it's just a means to an end.

I've written some very elegant code in my life that I later revisited and was very proud of. But as a life's achievement? No way.

Most code you will ever write will be thrown away or not used. And of the percentage that is used, most of that could have been written less wonderfully by a more crude programmer and still met the requirements.

Programming is not hard. Good programming is not hard. Good solutions can be difficult to achieve, but that is less about the difficulty in writing good code than it is about understanding the many different objectives and variables in a situation and reconciling that with the legacy or other constraints.

Who am I to judge where someone finds their self worth. But at the end of a decade of doing something, maybe it's good to look around and as, "What is this worth to humanity - even some small subset of?"

There are too many "photographers", but at least they can show their work to the general population and evoke some kind of emotional response (other than, "ooh, that looks sooo boring"). There are many, many exceptional musicians who will never make a living with their music, but at least they bring joy to listeners. Meanwhile, Github fills up with the latest Javascript version of something that's already been done a million times (and could probably have been done with Unix shell scripts).

> There are many, many exceptional musicians who will never make a living with their music, but at least they bring joy to listeners.

Over the years I've come to realize that there is an astonishing abundance of musical talent out there that will never be even a blip on the radar of the Music Industry. Big labels prefer to package and sell the slightly newer Same Old Thing with mass appeal. I could spend the rest of my life listening to musicians with zero name recognition and never feel like I've missed any good music.

That slightly new Same Old Thing is what the current software developer hiring process gets. Yeah, I got all the right buzzwords (this year) on my resumé, but last year I had all the right buzzwords, too, but I was pretty much doing the same thing then, and the year before that, back to the early part of my career. Granted you don't see much demand for cvs and Perl with Sybase on OS/2 these days, but github and ruby/python with PostgresSQL on Amazon RDS are incremental updates, not radically new.

How many skilled programmers are there out there with little-to-no background in these tools, but have the ability to solve real world problems like a programming Richard Feynman.

Maybe they're trying to hire people with some intersection between work and passion. If I had two similarly qualified candidates but one has a huge interest in coding on the side, I'd be inclined to pick her over the other one if I were a hiring manager.

And to be fair, I've had many ask me for side projects and whatnot (with me providing nothing) and have still received offers from them after an interview. Sometimes, these things are just nice to haves. From a recruiter's perspective, why not ask?

No one said anything about a brogramming culture but you seem very incensed. Step down from the soap box and take a breath or two.

One can be passionate at work without enjoying coding on their free time.

Exactly! I used to be a climate scientist, and wrote open source libraries on my free time. I now work as a software engineer, and I love my job. But on my free time I now make music.

That's fair, but a hiring manager might be more easily able to see this overlap if you have some recent side projects.

And again, I'm not even the type to code for fun at home (at least not since my first two years out of college). My significant other never codes for fun but is probably one of the most talented programmers I know. I'm just stating some reasons why one might ask this as an interviewer.

The absence of side projects doesn't indicate a lack of passion but the opposite of this is mostly true.

He should be mad. The idea that what you are professionally capable of needs to be proven or accentuated with spare-time projects is nonsense and needs to die. What someone does with their personal time should have no bearing on their professional life - if all of that spare-time coding sharpens their skills, that should be self-evident during the interviewing process and give them an advantage anyway.

If I were hiring, I would ask, "What things outside of development do you like to do?"

I don't have evidence to back this up, but I strongly believe a team of well-rounded people will out perform a group of extreme nerds over time.

To me, brogramming culture includes the beer & pizza, maker, video game-playing, hobby programmer type. There's more to it, but imagine a software company that includes no people with interests in any of those activities. Do you know any like that?

thank you, just so true

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