This doesn't seem to take into account that professional athletes and musicians work very few hours in a year. Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, working for four 15-minute sessions, seventeen times a year.
Learning, training, practicing, teaching, rehearsing, performing are just several different modalities of (the) work, with distinct proportions depending on the job and the role(s).
It's not because one's not in a 9-5 office job that it's not work either.
Your plumber, or locksmith, or carpenter, or physician is also often performing for you only a few minutes/hours. You may think you're watching/paying for this performance only, but you're really watching all the experience that goes into this performance, that is the result of their previous studies, training, and practice and other performances.
The "difference" with a "typical" office job is that you don't get to have them in the single same place all the time, and watch/see them work through all those modalities, sanctioned by some manager. It's much more open than that.
What is amazing is how normalised the "controlling" factory/office work culture has become.
The problem is considering that only your office boss work view is the one that qualifies as work.
The problem is also considering that a software engineer performance is in writing code/investigating bugs, whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit. In some cases, you will need to spend a whole week of going back to fundamentals or training or other, to be able to solve your issue in a few hours on Friday.
I guess we solved that problem then. We're comparing apples to oranges and wondering why oranges don't have edible skin.
>The problem is considering that only your office boss work view is the one that qualifies as work.
So you're suggesting that more programmers should practice in their free time?
>The problem is also considering that a software engineer performance is in writing code/investigating bugs, whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit.
You can argue we're always performing or never performing in that case. Or perhaps our "performance" is crunch for a deadline, or right after a product shislps.
Either way, it's fundamentally different from practice/performance scheduling of athletes or musicians. Performance should be a place where you put 110% into an act, often in a burst. Physically or mentally, we can't afford to operate at 110% every day. That's why there's often a rest day for musicians/athletes. Knowledge workers is much more spotty.
This whole line of reasoning is ridiculous and smells like something said by people who know fuck all about athletics and musicianship.
In all these professions, and many more, we're expected to maintain a certain level of performance (or capacity for performance) whether we're officially given the time for it at work and whether we're paid for it or not.
I also don't see how you can possibly in good faith compare "public performance" to whatever you think the equivalent "performance" is as a developer.
It sounds disrespectful and unnecessary, honestly.
I never met a company that didn't expect to have this in the schedule and budget for their employees.
Given the breadth of technologies and the pace of the industry, I don't get how a tech-dependent company could afford not to.
The only exceptions so far have been FAAMG, but all of them also have it as optional not mandatory and rarely encourage it tbh.
Also, contracting doesn't usually let you bill training as part of the work. That's just "research" for the problem.
Seriously, this is the source of “rest and vest” as a mentality and why some companies, I.e Microsoft, are seen as tech retirement homes. They hire the brilliant lazy.
Yes, there really are a lot of FAANG caliber engineers who don’t work much harder than you described. Yes really.
I don't think they meant to say that NFL players loafs around all year except for a cumulative 17 hours.
Versus, say, a touring rock band that gets a cut of the performance revenue. I don't think there's anyone paying them a multi-year contract salary.
It means all of their job is concentrated in a few hours per year, so they have to be damn good at it. In order to do that, they need training, which is most of their working time. For most other jobs, there is much less time to train, and it doesn't matter as much because what counts is the average performance, not just a few key moments.
For programming, the parallel would be competitive programming. A competitive programmer will spend days studying algorithms like no one else, because it will matter for the hour or two of the competition. For typical programmers the loss of productivity for not knowing the algorithms is less than the time spent studying them.
Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, constantly measured on their performance against their peers.