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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

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d--b

Personally, I am over side projects.

Did them, the games, the websites, the failed startup thing.

I just do other things now.

Building finance stuff during the day, doing little computer outside work (a bit of 3D printing here and there).

It’s fine. My career’s fine. The work doesn’t suffer from it.

Do I have the spark? Idk, I feel I am too old for that spark shit. There is work to do, I do it. If it’s tedious, I’ll drag me feet a while, but eventually it’ll be done. It’s just work.

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I think both viewpoints are valid. It's perfectly fine to see your work as a craft which you hone in your personal time, and also see it as a means to an end where you clock in, get the job done, and clock out. It's also understandable that the amount of personal time we have to dedicate to it, and even interest, can vary over time.

That said, I think your day job is more enjoyable when you see your work as a craft. It becomes less of a chore, you feel more engaged, and generally happier, which ultimately has a positive impact on your work and your colleagues. This has been my very fuzzy experience over the years, going through periods of both, but there are no definitive perspectives either way.

About the work being more enjoyable when seeing it as a craft: I think it only is more enjoyable, if you can somehow bring part of your craftsmanship into it, and are not overly limited by other people or the sprint or management or any of the other many factors that ruin the fun, like time available, terrible inherited codebase that would take weeks or months to fix, and so on.

Well, sure, there are aspects of the work that can suck the joy out of it, but that's part of it. :) Even in personal projects I can create a codebase that's difficult to work with, or depend on third party code and tools that I don't particularly enjoy. The tricky task is navigating in and around these hurdles, knowing how and when to address them, and ultimately, simply accepting them. If your expectation is constant enjoyment, you'll be disappointed not just at work, but at life in general.

That said, I struggle with this as well, so I'm speaking more aspirationally than from a place of wisdom. :)

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