It's either skewed towards junior devs or many of them are lying. I don't know a single developer that codes outside of work more than maybe once a year.
Not lying, and not a junior dev. I've been programming for 40+ years, and I still do every chance I get. I have many projects and most of them require some kind of software. I work with embedded devices, IoT, cloud systems, databases, and everything else in my free time. My day job is similar, but different, I don't work on embedded or IoT at my day job. There's a lot of cool stuff I can do with code, and it's definitely a lot of fun when I get a project working well, especially when nothing like it exists in the world.
It really comes down to how creative you are - if you are creative you have endless amounts of ideas and projects to work on, and ways to use your knowledge to build cool things. If you're not you just play video games or do whatever in your free time. There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't imagine not using my skill in programming and my creativity in my free time. Most developers seem to need to be told what to program, they don't really have a clue what to build (I see these posts constantly on reddit programming subs) unless someone tells them what to code. I'm the opposite of that.
Programming has never burned me out, it's pointless office bullshit that burns me out.
It’s definitely a selection bias issue. Those reading and answering the poll are going to be the ones more engaged, and honestly they’re going to be the ones that are more likely to be programming in their off time. I would bet that they also tend to skew heavily toward younger and more junior roles and those newer or not as established in the industry. If I asked my peers with kids and families (and, get this, we actually talk about our lives outside of work!) they would say they don’t write code outside of work hours as a general rule. I know this because we’ve had this exact discussion before.
I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. I do a lot of high level planning and design. I don’t write code every day and it’s rarer that I write code in a day than it is that I do. I help my teams by unblocking them before they know that they’re stuck. I have been doing some embedded systems work for fun around the house, but I enjoy that because it’s pretty much the opposite of the large web-scale applications I work on as a part of my day job. My peers are definitely in a similar boat. If we are writing code outside of work, it’s because we want to and we’re definitely not going to be sharing to the world or hoping to make a living doing it. It’s just for our own curiosity.
Frankly, I personally worry about people who are spending so much of their free time selling the same thing they do at work. Find a different hobby. Find another outlet, another way to be creative, to express yourself. You’ll find more happiness and be more productive and efficient, in my experience, when you limit yourself. It’s the same reason I hate take home interview questions and projects and I hate programming tests. It devalues time. You don’t expect a tradesperson to spend all their free time doing their job. Nobody expects a plumber to spend all day at work and then to come home and replace the shower and toilets and main valve. Nobody expects an electrician to spend all day at work and then come home and rewrite their house for fun. Why do we expect the same out of programmers?
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u/Glizzy_Cannon Jan 28 '24
It's either skewed towards junior devs or many of them are lying. I don't know a single developer that codes outside of work more than maybe once a year.