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Ted Dziuba Says, "I Don't Code In My Free Time"
theodp writes "When he gets some free time away from his gigs at startup Milo and The Register, you won't catch Ted Dziuba doing any recreational programming. And he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't hire those who don't code in their spare time. 'You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems?' asks Dziuba. 'F***, ANYTHING.'"
Also:
Who cares?
... in computers. Isn't that worth something when weighing up job candidates? Sorry , but if this guy doesn't realise that someone who is interested in what they do as a day job will probably put in more effort that someone who's just a clock watching for-the-money type then frankly he's an idiot. This rule applies to ANY profession, not just programming.
When I worked as a spaghetti cook and eating spaghetti every night for three years, I didn't eat spaghetti for the next seven years.
When I worked as video game tester for six years, I very rarely played video games at home. After 40 to 80 hours a week testing games, I wanted to do something different with my time.
I been resisting offers to do technical writing since I write fiction in my off times. An ideal job is one that you can separate from your personal life.
I mean, you wouldn't hire a gardener who had a garden of his own - would you?
Schmuck.
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So he would want to work for those who do hire people who don't code in their spare time? Or would want to work for those who don't hire people who do code in their spare time? Or what?
And Who's on first, right?
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Personally I try to avoid companies that care that much about what I do in MY time in general. If I'm not on the clock, its none of your fucking business. If I decide to learn a new language on my own, it is irrelevant until I start using it at work, in which case I expect my going above and beyond to be noticed. If it is required that I learn something new for work, I sure as hell had better be paid by the company for it one way or another (even if it just means doing the learning during company time).
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I agree with Ted - you can code in your dungeon, or you could go out, make friends, play with your kids, work on your hobbies, volunteer at a charity, learn how to cook, make a well rounded life for yourself.
Code probably fulfills a need to do puzzles and keep the brain entertained, but the world is so much bigger, and computers aren't going to keep you happy in your old age.
So he's saying he doesn't like programmers who enjoy what they do? Interesting.
I've never known a *good* programmer who doesn't write code as a hobby.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Work is the boring stuff. You're fixing tedious bugs in tedious applications dealing with tedious real world problems like the cover page of the new TPS report. It's like a ski instructor that have to deal with all the horribly inexperienced people doing things all wrong or at least it's nothing like cruising along freely yourself. Obviously after a long day on the job I understand that this person would just want to go home, eat a pizza and do something completely different. But I'd be concerned about the coder that didn't have any pet projects, any interest in coding outside work like a ski instructor that never just goes skiing. No deadlines, no pressure, no dealing with poor specs, annoying customers or superiors. If you don't ever tinker with anything under those conditions I really don't see you giving it your best during work hours either. I don't mean that you need to have a long list of "public" off-hours coding experience that can be validated and put on your CV, just as a personality treat.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When you're looking to hire a gardener, do you examine his previous work, or do you make sure he spends at least x hours a day tending his own garden?
If you do the latter, you're the bigger schmuck.
I'd also like to point out, that this Ted fellow did not say "I'd never work someplace where any of the other employees code at home". He says "I don't want to work someplace where coding at home is _a requirement_". There's a big difference.
What this guy probably doesn't know, is that just about all coders that actually are any good at their job, love the endless unlimited possibilities their knowledge provides so much that they simply don't give a fuck about whether somebody is paying them to do it or not. They _HAVE_TO_CREATE_. They _HAVE_TO_SOLVE_PROBLEMS_. They simply cannot be stopped.
While there may be many not-so-good programmers that love to code in their spare time, I have actually _NEVER_ met any good programmer/engineer/developer/whatever that DOESN'T WANT to code in their spare time. I don't think they exist. However, I do think many exist that THINK they're a good programmer. Probably this Ted Dziuba guy is one of them. I'd never hire him.
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He's 26. He has ~3 years professional experience. What exactly qualifies as years of experience in your eyes, because from where I'm sitting he's a green horn. Not that I agree with the notion that you have to code in your offtime to be worth a crap.
That said: I'm a sysadmin. My work machines run beautifully, my own laptop is held together by the stickers ... a lotta mechanics' cars are the same. *They* can drive them, no-one else is safe to.
The household network is pretty functional, though. And the teenagers' Windows boxes are locked the hell down, the kids' accounts are unprivileged user and their mother has the admin password ...
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The point is that you can be pretty darn sure that the person is NOT more skilled or knowledgeable.
Though imperfect, desire to hack on personal projects is a damn good lameness filter.
twoDigitIq says: "I don't have any free time. I'm always coding. I haven't had a day off in a fucking month." And again, nobody gives a shit when he says that.
There's an old example / argument about this issue and it goes like this: "Would you hire (or go to) a neurosurgeon who practices in his spare time?".
It's a little extreme but I feel it gets the point through - creative yet sensitive work makes people burn up faster.
-- Sig down
What about a car mechanic who enjoys working on cars, will do the job to the best of his ability because it's a matter of personal pride, and gets paid for it?
You don't get to pretend that a greedy, unethical moron is the only alternative to somebody who spends their spare time programming. Nothing about programming in your spare time means you'll take more pride in your work than somebody who does it when paid; nothing about doing it for a living means you don't enjoy working on it in your non-spare time; nothing about being paid means that your only satisfaction is the money.
Maybe if he were independently wealthy, he'd program in the hobbyist manner for 30 hours a week, but since he does that much programming at work, he's entirely fulfilled in that regard. Or maybe he wouldn't, because it could be that he likes and takes professional pride in programming, but he likes long cross-country hiking trips even more (but sadly for him, nobody will pay him for that), so he does that in preference to programming.
If you read the article, it sounds like the "Ted" that wrote it is in the second category, where he enjoys programming but not to the exclusion of enjoying other things. ALSO, turns out he's interested in automotive repair in his spare time, so what do you know about that. You'll also find that he's an incredible asshole and proud of it, which *is* a reason I'd avoid hiring him.
No, you don't stop growing. If there's no significant personal growth involved in your day job, and you work on IT, you are working at the wrong place. You are probably doing some tedious, rudimentary task. Or can't do more.
All of IT, especially coding, is a job where your actual job is to learn as much as possible, to provide the best possible solution, for the least amount of actual work. Intelligent laziness for the win! Simplified means: Keep it simple, Stupid, or the KISS principle on pragmatic level.
It takes any idiot to make things more bigger, more complex but it takes a real genius to make things simpler.
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If you don't program in your spare time, you either:
- Don't touch computers in your spare time, meaning I will sometimes need to explain to you how to open the Internet. I don't want you to work in the same department as me.
- or - Don't use programming to solve problems on your computer at home. Why should I expect you to see programming as a solution to problems you spot at work? Sounds like someone who would either say "that's not part of my job description!" or who (more importantly) wouldn't think to mention it, since they'd never even think of applying their supposed skills to a problem.
- or - at the very least, have no experience programming outside of whatever niche you've been stuck in for the past five, ten, fifteen, etc, years. The job was for "C Programmer" not "The macros and function library of a specific twenty-year-old example of bit-rot Programmer"
It's also worth noting that everyone who says they don't program at home does horribly on the rest of the interview, without fail, while most people who say they do program at home wind up doing quite well.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Please note that I did say "professional experience". This was not by accident or to make my post appear longer.
Those of you who don't have kids, won't get it.
I know, because it's not like we don't have any siblings with kids or friends with kids or were kids ourselves. We know nothing about kids, or parenting, or... what is it you call it? Family?
Please never, ever, ever say this. It is so unbelievably insulting. I actually can think of a couple childless people I know who seemed to be clueless about the lifestyle of coworkers with kids, but I can count them on one hand.
No, I don't know personally what it's like to be responsible for someone's physical and emotional well-being, but I've seen it done, and it looks pretty hard. I don't whine about coworkers with kids until it seems like they use it as a blanket excuse for why they can't do anything even when every other parent is fine with it. You know exactly what I'm talking about (unless you're the one who is always dropping the ball "because of the kids"). It's a mean trick to play on someone, to make them feel like they are directly harming the development of a little child by asking that someone pull their weight.
Then there's the other side. My wife and I can't have kids. That's okay with us; we've gotten over being depressed about it, and have just decided to be active with our families in other ways in the hopes that maybe a niece or nephew might visit us in the nursing home, or at least pick up our ashes. But try selling that to a boss if you don't have kids. People without kids still have families and still want to be connected to them, but unless those family members fell out of your own crotch, they don't really count. It's not like I'm saying "I can't make it to that meeting; my dad has the sniffles." But "Any way I can get out of that unscheduled meeting you threw right in the middle of my family reunion weekend?"
Ugh, why am I even bothering?
Those of you who have kids won't get it. ;-)
The managers you work for, to keep their jobs and get raises, are literally vultures these days. If you come up with something really neat, and the bosses think it might somehow fit into what the company might want, to keep YOUR job, you turn it over to them. Unpaid hours of development = the company making profit just so you can keep your job?
The main reason back in the old days that the unions didn't get so much as a foothold into the tech culture is because tech companies were smart enough to treat their talent really, really well. (If you weren't, well, sorry about your misfortune, but you were in the minority.) You got paid solid pay much higher than the area average, you got full benefits, you had a degree of job security, and you could goof off from time to time and no one held it against you. Over the last 5 years, I've noticed the total number of months I've actually worked for pay drop to literally 6 months a year. I've had "jobs" where I discovered I was competing against an offshore team for consulting teams (and obviously losing because I was unwilling to work for 10 bucks an hour). Benefits? Haven't had even remotely decent coverage for many years. And the last few jobs I've worked, I was (along with my team) highly pressured to "innovate" on my own time in order to keep my job. In order to keep my contract position with no benefits, I was expected to "take ownership" of things on my own time.
An auto shop is not going to threaten to fire their contract employees if they don't work overtime for free. You won't see that in most industries. But because a lot of developers are basically pussies and won't stand up, get together, and fight back, companies are going to do this more and more because they can get away with stealing the fruits of labor YOU create on YOUR OWN time. No, developers are more willing to lay down, call themselves libertarians, rag on the unions, bitch and moan about having no free hours in their days, cry when they get laid off, and stay in that cycle until they drop dead.
I'm just surprised that this kid is burned out already. Usually takes several more years of being used like a whore by managers who contribute nothing more than their ability to lie and cover their own asses. He must be REALLY smart.
"If You're Good At Something, Never Do It For Free"
This guy sounds similar to myself. If the job is a 9-5 coding, I don't want to spend my free time coding. If my 9-5 is working on cars, I don't want to spend my free time working on cars. If my 9-5 is being a doctor, I don't want to spend my free time working in the clinic.
On the one hand, I totally get that. In fact, in college I seriously considered not becoming a programmer for a living, specifically because I didn't want to ruin my enjoyment of it...
On the other hand - I think there are certain advantages to making your work something that you naturally enjoy. It's like Scotty on the old Star Trek. There was that one episode where he got a day off and all he wanted to do was read technical journals related to his job... I can relate to that, too. I didn't start learning about computers so I could get a job as a programmer, I became a programmer because I enjoy computers and I enjoy solving problems. I became a programmer because I wanted to be a programmer - and found it convenient that I could make money with that skill.
Now as for whether you hire someone based on whether they program in their free time - I'd agree that seems a bit silly. I expect it could be helpful to see what sorts of things they've done (like the programmers' equivalent of a portfolio) but in the end, when it comes to a job, what counts is whether they can and will do the work. Damned if I know how you judge that, though. I'm just a programmer. :)
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> If I hire an electrician, I expect his house to have proper wiring.
All I can say (from personal experience with having a flat in a house where both the owner and the son were electricians) is: good luck with that.
Almost every business executive who works all week long at 45+ hours a week doesn't want to keep working on the weekend when they get home. They've learned the value of personal time in which you can do whatever you want that doesn't have to do with what you do for the majority of your life's time. I'm totally in agreement with this guy. Who in the hell would want to spend that many hours a week working their ass off coding just to finally get a few days to relax and do something else, ANYTHING else, only to end up doing the same thing. Spending 80 hours a week coding, in any capacity, is a road to all kinds of mental health problems. When the weekend comes (whatever the weekend may be for you), get the hell away from what you do all week and do something else. It will be good for you!