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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.
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.
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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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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.
The point is that you can be pretty darn sure that the person is NOT more skilled or knowledgeable.
You don't know that. Doing something for ~8 hours a day can lower ones intensity to do it in their "free time".
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
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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You don't know that. Doing something for ~8 hours a day can lower ones intensity to do it in their "free time".
What I've found is that I`m more inclined to work on the opposite of what I do at work.
I worked at a place where the code base was a disaster .. there was no planning or design work.. no requirements management.. no semblance of order to anything (though we were working to fix that) .. and I found in my free time I enjoyed coding in a very designed and managed way.. kind of refreshing to work on nice tidy Java code.
Now I work at pretty much the opposite. Every line of code is reviewed and re-reviewed.. then the review process is reviewed and a binder of documentation is produced tying it to the requirements, testing, and phase of the moon. The design process of even a simple change can take months followed by (literally) years of testing. And when I get home.. I immerse myself in Perl and just "code the damn thing already".
On the original point.. it's been my experience that while there are some programmers who are very good at their job despite treating it like a 9 to 5 .. the vast majority of good coders I know at least dabble with stuff at home. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask what (if any) projects a person works on at home. I wouldn't use it as a sole judge of whether they are a good candidate.. but it would certainly factor into things.
As for what a person does (non programming) in their off time.. again.. I think perfectly reasonable. Also on the table in my opinion are what their favourite classes in high school were, what books/movies that like, what music, what they do with their friends on a Friday. When you hire someone into a team.. you arn't just hiring an automaton that is capable of performing a set list of tasks. I've met brilliant programmers whom I'd pass over for a high school kid.. because despite being good at their job.. they would have been a negative person to have around and would make work hell (yes.. having a fun and happy work environment is important..)
Please note that I did say "professional experience". This was not by accident or to make my post appear longer.
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.
It comes to preferences. My job is a job. Not a career. Not a stepping stone. Not a direction to a greater path in my field. Once I've reached a particular spot and I'm happy and/or comfortable with it - that's it. But when all is said and done and I come home for the day, I have more important things to worry about like my family, my hobbies and/or what other fun things I want to do. Not sitting on my arse in front of a computer. Not unless I need to, and those needs are defined by staying relevant in my field, like all fields. Medical, programming, mechanic etc. All else is purely extra and it sounds like this guy doesn't want that extra to be on the computer like a hobby. Can't fault him for that.
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. ;-)
Sure.. but if you have an auto-mechanic who went to community college, learned his stuff.. and now works at a shop and does a good job.. vs a guy who practically lives and breaths cars and spends his off hours fixing up old wrecks.. who is the better candidate.
Not saying the first guy is unemployable.. just that people who have found something they love and see the fact that they can make a living at it is as just a nice bonus tend to be better candidates.
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"
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.
Every top architect I worked around at NeXT and Apple had families and never programmed outside of work. They were normal.
Or they're perfectly competent engineers who know how to learn, have interesting and varied projects at work, and have other interests.
Learning an API doesn't take long. Even learning a new programming language doesn't take long if it's similar enough to one you know. Very few jobs use the same language and API for a particularly long time. The skills they learn in their free time are not all that likely to be relevant to the job that you hire them for. Not programming in your free time doesn't mean not using computers in your free time. Very few problems at home need programming to solve them.
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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It comes to preferences. My job is a job. Not a career. Not a stepping stone. Not a direction to a greater path in my field. Once I've reached a particular spot and I'm happy and/or comfortable with it - that's it.
Sure, that's fine. No one's saying it isn't. It's your choice that your work doesn't overlap with your hobbies.
But for some people, they do overlap. While it might be limiting to say, "I won't hire someone who doesn't code in their spare time," it does act as a reasonable filter. I think it's safe to assume that the set of people who do code in their spare time has very few bad programmers in it. The set of people who don't code in their spare time, however, likely has a much larger proportion of bad programmers. (You could also say that the average quality in the codes-for-fun group is likely higher.)
If you have a limited amount of time and energy to deal with hiring, and your applicant pool is large enough, using a "must code for fun" filter saves you some effort by removing a large population of bad (or even just average, probably) programmers. Does that also remove some great programmers from consideration too? Almost certainly... but it's a trade off. It's a filter with a decent number of false positives, but likely very few false negatives.
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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!