Comment by reedF211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reedF211 | Hacker News Reader

A good programmer should wake up at 6 am in the morning get a solid 2.5hrs of coding done by 8:30 am, at 8:30 leave for work, work till 6 (it goes without saying that the lunchbreak must be spent trying to learn the Haskell or if you are feeling lazy answering questions on stackoverflow). Commute from 6 to 6:30 (it's a bonus if you listen to a technical podcast during this time and no stuff like TWIT does not count, perhaps audio lectures from the Advanced Algorithms course on MIT OCW). 6:30 to 7:00 time for supper and excellent time to catchup on r/programming and hackernews. 7-8:30pm is the time for relaxation by doing some recreational mathematics, doing problems from project Euler and that proof from The Art of Computer Programming excercises which you have been itching to get a go at! 8:30pm to 1 am code contribute to that open-source project, write patches for the Linux kernal and continue working on your startup.

Anyone who does less programming that what is mentioned above cannot call himself a "good programmer", I would have serious reservations in calling that person even a mediocre programmer.

Once you've got a family, that changes my friend ... you need to set aside at least an hour a night to teach your kids how to code.

And if you don't have a family, but are planning one, ensure that the other potential parent can pass your technical interview.

Funny story - Bill Gates' first question to his wife was said to be "What was your math SAT?"

Well, not that funny, when they first met she was a MS employee. He didn't pick her up in a bar with that line!

PS Would that work?

This would probably make for a good card in the "30 Day Rejection Therapy" app...

If they are born without knowing how to code, drop them off at the fire station.

I call BS. There's a continuous five-hour stretch between 1 AM and 6 AM when you're not being productive.

You should at least set up some script to automatically refactor your code or search for prime numbers or something during that time.

Be careful, you can't unfind some primes.

I guess not everybody caught the irony

Don't you mean sarcasm or are you being ironic?

Sarcasm is a form of irony - one meaning of irony is saying one thing, and meaning another. "Sure, that's a great idea" is both sarcastic and ironic (although not ironic in the sense people most commonly use the word, which non-ironically, is not that ironic).

http://sarchasm.net/

I catch the irony, but I'm not confident that it really contributes to the discussion here. Look at the comment thread it's produced: practically nothing of any consequence or interest.

Yes. Good programmers must also be humorless drones that post disapprovingly when others are clearly enjoying themselves.

Humor is funny. That post was a sarcastic expression of an obvious truth. Neither the tone nor the obviousness was what I come to HN for.

I tried... but that's a description of what now I consider my sad-teen-years.

Where did you find my schedule?

Hats off to you, sir. That is the most excellent troll post that I have seen in a very long time. Well done!

Ridiculous.

You should already know Haskell (and ML), and be writing your own research language.

Does that mean you code in the shower?

Shower? Have you ever smelt a REAL programmer?

Well played. :)

Oh man I hope you're joking!

That's funny. When you're 20 and just starting out you need that sort of intensive learning.

When you're 30 and you're seeing the same thing with a new name for the 2nd or 3rd time it takes a lot less effort and time to keep up.

I don't think anyone needs that amount of intensive learning. Eight solid hours a day is plenty to be an expert after a couple of years.

Then you're an expert. For about three months. Meanwhile while you're up to speed, things outside your organization are changing. If you're not paying attention, you end up with the proverbial "10 years of experience" comprised of 10 years of the same experience. I've seen several of my friends who just coded at work find themselves without jobs when times got tight, and unable to find a new job because they had out of date skills.

Investing in my skillset on my own time with my own rules is an investment in me. I don't particularly care if it makes me a better programmer - it's a contingency plan to make sure I can support my family in both good times and bad.

I think it varies wildly upon the situation. I've had 3 full time corporate jobs and not one of them required enough depth of knowledge to become an expert at anything besides SQL. I've pretty much learned all that is necessary to add any random feature requested to the codebase I work with so I could let my skills stagnate for years here and be no worse off at this job. IMO, doing so would eventually make me a bad programmer.

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