I used to spend a lot of my spare time on side projects, thinking I'd hit on something successful eventually.
Now, I'm in my 40s and I'm like "Done with work; I think I'll go for a walk and then take a nap."
Now, I'm in my 40s and I'm like "Done with work; I think I'll go for a walk and then take a nap."
I'm in my early thirties and never had any side projects. After busting my ass coding like hell for 6 years in university and after 8 hours of coding at work per day, I was always seeking to do non-coding activities in my free time: trying out new hobbies, going for a walk, having drinks with friends and going dancing, dating, witching a movie, jerking off, cooking, reading, hiking, SLEEPING! etc.
This hurt my chances of getting into flashy well paying VC funded agile scale-ups where every applicant was a 20-something with a huge GitHub portfolio, but, and I hope I don't offend anyone, life is too short to spend my free time doing things I don't enjoy, just to look good in front of $COMPANY, that will lay you off the next day if 'line goes down', so I narrow my job search at companies where coding is done for the paycheck, not for the lifestyle.
I do spend my free time sometimes tinkering with various linux distros and DEs, and sometimes reverse engineering, but moistly working on hardware projects to build to increase my comfort around the house like a tap-water to air apartment AC cooling unit for the summer. I've always been a hands-on kind of tinkerer, with physical things, not with code, since I can't touch it.
Another good option is a uni gig in their tech department. You’ll have to put up with absolutely scads of incompetence, probably a change control board, crap pay plus you’ll get pay freezes during downturns, but the lifestyle and benefits are absurdly good — I know people who show up for a couple meetings in the morning, leave for a three hour lunch and then go home every day — and you’ll usually be getting a pension. Highly recommend going this route when you’ve made your egg and are ten years out from retirement.
In which country is this? Where I live now in Europe I've never seen jobs that let you get away with that. Maybe those people you know are well connected with the bosses that they're allowed such lax work behavior.