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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

An important lesson for me was that doing side projects during my free time didn't make me a better developer at work. Writing a video game or even a webapp without the constraints of working on a team and having business needs that you don't get to choose. Partitioning "work programming" and "home programming" as two separate skills in my mind has been very useful.

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My experience had been the opposite. Most techniques, patterns and tricks I learned in pet projects improved my work code. Of course, this is only work's code part, other business stuff like meetings, constraints, etc. didn't get affected so much.

Yeah that's what they're saying I think. Programming outside works helps your programming inside work sure. But for many (most?), programming ability isn't the limiting factor on how effective you are as a _developer_ at work.

Which is something I consider a big scam pulled on the people entering this workforce. You expect to be using your brain to build great, useful things - but in practice, you're expected to be a people person collaborating on doing mostly crap job under tight deadline pressure. No surprise burnout is a problem in this industry.

I mean spread awareness but that's pretty much every job. I've done a lot of kinds of work in my life but this is pretty much the easiest. At least we're paid well and respected. All the other kinds of work were just as hard under as much or more pressure and also for poverty wages. I'll stick with this one lol.

You're absolutely right. We have it quite good, all things considered. It's not like I'd have chosen another career if someone told me how the real world works up front - but it would've saved me a few years of pain due to mismatched expectations.

I was thinking about this recently. Loving to code and getting better at designing and implementing code only goes so far in the industry. To really "level up" you have to learn a whole bunch of other things related to project management, communications, and politics.

I use fun side projects to really level up my software design skills because I can take on bigger tasks and have total freedom to experiment with different designs. I don't think I'd be the programmer I am today without all the side projects I've done over the last 20 years. On the other hand, work has taught me how to work on a team, how to communicate well, how to make political trade-offs, and more.

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