/me sighs
Come on. Isn't this getting old for anyone else? Do you check if your dentist goes to dentist meetups, or extracts teeth in his spare time? All you're doing with this question is asking "are you one of us".
Come on. Isn't this getting old for anyone else? Do you check if your dentist goes to dentist meetups, or extracts teeth in his spare time? All you're doing with this question is asking "are you one of us".
The accountants I know spend a lot of unpaid overtime meeting clients (networking being the key professional skill for Big 4 accountants).
Pretty much every profession has some kind of out-of-hours way of progressing their career which some people chose to engage in and some people don't.
The problem is that in every field you are competing against people who are willing to work 18+ hours a day, 7 days a week pushing their career forward.
You either need to match that or find some other way to compete that doesn't require as much of a time commitment. Or be happy that the market is hot enough that even without working too hard you can still get a pretty good job!
For example, my local butcher is a 'geek butcher'. He tries new cuts, goes to butchery meetups at food festivals, try tosource new things, etc; result is that he's really good at what he's doing, and he gets quite a few loyal customers.
Ever since a dentist fucked up and caused me a lot of pain and to spend a lot of money to fix the damage, I've become very careful about how I chose health care professionals. And while I don't know enough about dentistry to judge seeing a dentist go to conference documents himself on the newest techniques and teach or present at conferences is a good signal to find out if he is good.
There are people who are passionate about what they do and they are people who don't care all that much in almost every case the passionate ones will be better.
Learning and practicing on the job is one thing, expecting it in the remaining 1/3 of your life is too much.
You can be a fine developer who just clocks in and out. But if I had a choice (and sometime I don't). I would choose the guy who loves what they do and does it in their "spare" time.
My experience has not borne this out, either in development (which I've been doing professionally for almost 20 years) or in music (which I've been doing amateur-ly all my life). Passion is a very weak indicator of skill, community involvement is even weaker
Passion overtime + participation = improving knowledge.
A new person who is passionate, will quickly outpace the person who is not.
Software development is a creative endeavor in a constantly changing field, and unless I'm asking my dentist to do experimental tooth enhancements, I wouldn't consider her job nearly as creative.
I would never hire (and have never hired) a designer who didn't have a portfolio. I would never hire a developer who didn't have any code to show me. Most code available to show is only open source these days - as companies don't want their employees showing proprietary source to 3rd parties.
I would never work for such an employer.
I've hired over 40 people and given hundreds of interviews over the course of my career. I learned early on that unless I can see some examples, then it is a random draw. The truth is that people give false impressions of their abilities on their resume (whether intentional or not).
As a development manager who still writes code, I have deep perspective of both sides of the table. I would never work for an employer who didn't want to see any code - because who knows what kind of talent I'd be working with?
A person doesn't have to posses all these things to write good code. But they would be a great fit on the teams I like to work with.