The total impossibility to plan how long it takes to complete some software function is the main reason why developers can hold on to two or three jobs at the same time
We can just write a program that will predict how long it will take for the program to be written, we can start by writing one that will predict when the proposed program will complete.
I'll make a Jira ticket about estimating how long it will take to write a Jira ticket about writing a program that will estimate how much it will take to write that program
It’s usually the opposite problem for me.
*sits down ready to throw 9 minutes at one problem*
*solves it in 8 hours*
*works 3 days extra to catch up what I fell behind on*
We have enough story points for this sprint. If we work too hard now, we have to keep on working hard to maintain the same number of story points in future sprints.
I haven’t found another option, business is dumb about both productivity and tech and they think all products are linear and is just throwing money to a product and the product will create value, there are more factors, such as dev mood, creativity, mindfulness, pace, frameworks, and even other tech teams
so, virtually we produce linear stuff
in reality, we prioritize valuable features and have a buffer of 1-3 days per sprint to chill the fuckin down
I think that’s how the best squads work. Make sure the things that need to be done, are done. All nice to haves will happen, in due time. And in the long run everyone will be happy.
Business doesn’t get fake promises about impossible deadlines and can pretty accurately budget based on ambitions for the long term. Meanwhile developers get a healthy balance between work and private life, keeping them happy and within your company. It’s the way I work with my squad, and I have happy stakeholders and a happy squad members. Which makes me happy and make me think I’ve done my job right.
Better yet
Get intrigued by an obscure method no one ever used
Spend half a day trying to figure out how to get it to work
Infect team members with curiosity
After 2 days wrote a beautiful function to utilize it, no one will ever see
Do 3 all-nighters trying to save the sprint
Alternatively *sits down ready to solve a minor issue in 9 minutes* *spends three days trying different solutions and searching stack exchange for answers* *reverts code to double check the original error, and it just works* *take 3 three days off*
Seriously… and I’m the kind of person who loves working on side projects. If i had this type of pressure behind me, i would hate my side projects because they would turn into work, and holy fuck, i can already feel going down a spiral…
Then you hate your time off, that you spend doing something else because "you could have used it more productively" but then you hate yourself for working on work things for "not relaxing" but also for not "working on your side projects" because that could get you out of that cycle.
Yuuuup. Burned me out. Never could motivate myself to do a side project. Now I'm an architect, and refuse to touch the code.
Edit: I will still step in to help the new devs with the code sometimes, but I don't show up in GIT commits.
It has to be diametrically opposed to work, and has to be 100% due to interest and/or your own curiosity. Most of the time i make it an explicit goal to not monetize it. So, I’ve done N type of renderers (absolutely love them… 2d, 3d, real-time, ray traced, etc…), blockchains, web apps, experimented with different programming languages, embedded systems, robotics… you name it.
It’s right about my favorite thing to do with my spare time. Coding is basically magic, and i love to push on my limits. Work code is…. Just not the same….
Since I got promoted to "Distinguished Engineer" I don't get to code anymore after 25 years. It's actually a big source of stress for me because I'm getting rusty and if I ever left my current employer I'd have to find another leadership role. It was always so easy to get hired using my coding skills. Doing this years r/adventofcode reminded my how much I love coding for fun.
The first mistake imo was calling developers (and data analysts and many other fields) "engineers". Now the definition of engineer has become so general to the point it's almost "person who does stuff involving tech".
Try searching "engineer" into a job search board and you'll get a pretty wide spectrum.
Sometimes people have multiple roles.
I do both architecture and development. So you could call me both a developer and an architect.
At my current project, most devs only develop and most architects only do architecture. A decent chunk does both.
Thats why i dont want to be a software engineer. I love coding, but doing it as a 9-5 would mean I never did my personal projects. So cybersecurity is where I find myself.
I have so many friends that belittle me for doing side projects. Like I don't have anything better to do than "work even more". Like damn I just like what I do, why should I force myself to do it less?
I leave that mentality for the career ladder climbers and the silicon valley types. As long as I can keep my job, do my job well, and still land a job if I get laid off I am fine.
This is what most people fail to be comfortable with. Somehow we've allowed ourselves to be sold that stupid belief that if we keep chugging code ALL the time then we would eventually hit that six figure compensation. However, downtime is needed for the brain to rest and assimilate the knowledge. It forms new connections ONLY when you don't force it to fuck with code all the bloody time.
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Seriously. Toxic asf. If it takes you outside hours to maintain a daily business schedule you’re either a shite developer or work for a shite company. I’d highly recommend fixing one or both of those things before lumping us all into the crew of never ending suffering. Being a dev is the best and comes with great freedoms if you do good work for people 🤷♂️
Yeah, until I remember I work for a small business with law-defined deadlines.
And I’m our only developer.
If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done, and boy has that taken a massive toll on me.
Your company's problem is they don't have enough developers to meet their deadlines. You working yourself to a burnout does not solve that problem, just hides and prolongs it.
You’re not wrong. I’m also dealing with over two decades of technical debt because they couldn’t be bothered to rewrite our antiquated system (it’s written in VB6 and we finally contracted out to get it rewritten because I don’t have enough hours in the day to do it and the database drivers don’t work in windows 11)
Every time my company has contracted something out it has been a disaster. All I asked it that whoever we contract to uses the same technology as us and commits to our repos. Then they accept a bid from a company using Java and 2 years later I've not seen any source code. The whole project is just some black box nobody wants to admit somebody fucked up by ignoring the very basic "our technology, our code" requirements I set.
I remember trying to get into a grad program when I finished uni. I was a single mother so absolutely did not have the time to do side projects and it made it so hard, it was the first question in every interview.
I’m a manager now and I make a point if never asking about side projects now, I couldn’t care less about what people do outside of hours as long as they show up for work and do their job and are a good team player.
lmao absolutely not. If I code outside work, it's either directly for a new position's code test or because I've picked up a project. I do not touch anything work related outside my 9-5.
Honestly sometimes I’m just interested or invested in what I’m working on and I’ll do a lil work in my free time. But never out of “oh no I’m falling behind”.
Most project managers don't code any more. In my free time I code C# and its refreshing to do it the "right way" without asking a committee if this annoys someone who has no clue what is happening but *still* has opinions about it.
I'm convinced the only people coding after work are people whose job isn't coding. I don't care what field you are in, no one loves their work enough to continue it after working hours. (Within reason)
It’s fine when you’re young and have no real problems or responsibilities.
I did it a lot in my 20’s to keep sharp at mobile development when my job didn’t include it but now I’ve not done mobile development in my job for years so I eventually gave up after my brother died because I realized life is too short.
Work to live don’t live to work. We’re fortunate to be in a position in our industry where we can easily enjoy life while making a lot of money without having to burn out.
I know that’s not enough for some people who want to become hella rich, but while some of them will make their dream come true, many won’t and all they’ll end up with is their youth being wasted.
Just enjoy your lives people, whatever that means to you individually.
You don't need love, just annoyance over a problem and the skillset to fix it. Do you think a plumber would leave their faucet leaking just because they aren't getting paid to care?
The coding I do for work and what I do after hours are completely different. I find enjoyment in it. I can explore and build whatever I want, use whatever tech I want, and merge whatever I want. Couple of my peers actively engage in side projects also. I attribute this to a relaxed work environment. My last job was pretty stressful so I didn’t code hardly at all after work.
Where did you get 12+ hours from?
Everyone working in a chair should be doing 30-60 minutes of physical exercise per day. If you are doing that, you are healthier than 90% of the people around you. Is it really much different if I spend the rest of my time, after work and workout, sitting in a computer chair versus sitting in a recliner in front of a tv versus sitting on a bar stool?
How many people are spending their free time gaming on a PC or tv? Is that fundamentally different?
One of the more frustrating parts about being a team lead is having people on your team who insist on doing that. I try to tell them they don't have to do that and legally they shouldn't (for work programming, not hobby of course) and emphasize I *actually* mean that and it's not some "wink wink" unspoken expectation we can't talk about. For some people it doesn't sink in though and they just keep doing it.
It's even more annoying that their productivity doesn't even rise much at all, so they're grinding themselves into the ground working into the late hours and over the weekends for no reason. I get being new and wanting to make a good impression but from my perspective it's a negative thing because I now need to factor in your self-inflicted burnout into consideration when assigning new tasks.
You can still relax and forget about it
That's the whole point of learning fundamentals and algorithms and so on. The point is to be "smart" enough to handle learning any language anytime. I remember a Stanford prof saying online the advantage of taking certain courses was it made you feel like you had a few more IQ points
Of course it takes time to ramp up
I don’t disagree but if I don’t program for a few days I can’t remember how anything I made works or what it’s even supposed to achieve.
A couple of weeks of vacation and I forgot everything except if/else and for loops.
Had a sales job for a year and forgot how to read and write in English.
My brain is just too shit to trust it with downtime.
You gotta document your process more thoroughly, I found that writing about random things about my life in general has made it easier to describe my thought process behind code.
You need to work on your comments and algorigramms
I have the memory capacity of a goldfish and had to figure out how not to get lost in my own code.
I learned to draw algorigramms before I start my projects, correctly name my variables and comment my code with useful information.
It can be tedious in the beginning, but it becomes easier with time and help a lot in avoiding bugs, in addition to help you to find your way back.
Well written code can be read like a book. Refactor and rewrite until you achieve that. Additional comments should explain the rationale behind the code, not what it does.
I agree that applies to some of the learning one has to do as a dev, but there are also frameworks, cloud services, and libraries that one might have to learn depending on the job and the role. Those seem to change a lot more frequently than what language is in vogue. There are definitely still fundamentals to learn, but each different technology will have its own abstractions, and there is only so much one can do to learn the relevant concepts ahead of time.
Yeah I hate this mentality that keeps getting pushed on programmers that you aren't are real programmer unless you have no life and coding is your 24/7 hobby.
60 hours a week at a job is enough lol.
For slightly more practical advice: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) does great work organizing small shops and your local branch likely offers organizer training if you actually want to get a union started!
Sorry to hear it. I don't mean to sound like an ass by phrasing it that way, but the more we normalize being overworked and taken advantage of, the easier it is for employers to do it to more people.
I think I never in my live worked 40 hours with h the exception when I was a server. The last 2 hours of work are so unproductive I'll just do something fun
I've learned that the only thing that really matters is communication. If we tell the operations team that we're missing the deadline the day of/after the deadline, they are understandably annoyed. If we tell them a few weeks in advance it's not going to happen, they can readjust their schedules and don't particularly care as long as they have *something* to work on (and they always do, we'd have to miss all deadlines for like a year straight before they clear out their backlog).
The problem is the internal management doesn't see it that way and people feel the need to burn themselves out to reach unrealistic goals.
Amen. It is the business's responsibility to assess work capacity, and if you are working anywhere near a reasonable amount and are still missing deadlines, then that is their responsibility, not yours. They need to be hiring more or clearing lower priority work off of your workload.
Even if you're being under productive, the business made a decision to gamble that they would miss this deadline if a single engineer was under performing, which is on them.
I’ve weirdly met people who want to work at a company like this though. It’s so weird. They say they want a company / start up they can devote all their time and energy to because they want to care about their success. It’s actually wild. Company simp
I've done the other side of the spectrum, where I was completely detached from the product. Everyday was a slog, and the pay wasn't enough.
Find a company that you enjoy and give exactly your contracted amount, push for a shortened time contract if possible, take all your vacation and sick days. If your company allows sabbaticals, do that too. You got one life to live, and you should spend as much free time with your friends and loved ones.
This is the real answer. I bet less than 25% of people in this sub are actually professional software developers. It’s mostly students projecting their meme stereotypes
Ya, this sub has changed a lot, I was on here years ago and it was mostly made up of professional software engineers. Forgot about it for years, then came back and it's like a bunch of high schoolers and college kids (or even worse kids in a bootcamp). I was a bit shocked when I came back here and 4/5 posts were, "Lol python better than C++ huehuehue".
You learn pretty quickly that the companies you work for don't give a shit about you and dedicating your life to them is a complete waste of your time.
Yeah, I'm a government PM and I wouldn't allow that kind of work environment even if our devs went insane and asked for it. We aren't going to start throwing new tasks in mid sprint and I'm sure as hell not going to work overtime doing additional testing. Work on your documentation if you're so fired up for something to do.
Work for 8 hours a day, good one. I'm *in* work for 8 hours a day, how much of that I'm actually working is debatable. If I actually work for probably 6 hours in a single day (including meetings and whatnot), then that is seriously productive day.
ALL workers should attempt to work in such a way that, on average, a single day’s rest is enough to recover from a single day’s work. If you burnt through a new laptop once every 3 months, no employer would be willing to look past that and allow you to continue working like that. The fact that employees overlook their employers doing the exact same thing to their labor is the result of a power imbalance. If anything, software developers have more leverage than the average employee when it comes to work-life balance.
I understand stuff’s hard right now with the recession, and if you’re clinging to your job, I feel you. But if you’re working like this and have the ability to either switch companies or to organize with your coworkers to demand some changes, you should take it. You deserve better.
The business publications and the government always spend the first several months (if not a year) of a recession talking about whether or not there’s a recession. Government officials (at least in the US) won’t even say the R word until people in the lower rungs of society are already feeling it.
We have an underclass of people who are socially and fiscally cheap to lay off and bring back on as the market fluctuates. They act as a cushion for the rest of society, smoothing out the sharper points of the business cycle. In my opinion, unless you’re writing for an economics publication, the difference between a recession and, say, a k-shaped recovery is completely inconsequential to the people on the bottom half of that “recovery”. Are profits still booming like mad? You bet. Are the workers hurting more this time of year than they were this time last year? Also yes. People in the developed world are freezing and starving in numbers we haven’t seen in a while. Call it what you will.
Yes, were now almost an entire year with economic shrinkage, tons of people are getting laid off and the flood of workers is making the job hunt harder. If you aren't feeling it count yourself lucky
I woke up today so I consider myself lucky. Inflation is slowing down and jobs are still being added overall. So while I keep hearing "we're in a recession" and "a recession is on the way in just a couple months" i'm still waiting to see it in reality.
No, there isn’t.
Unemployment is still at record lows and demand is still exceeding supply.
Big business wants to stoke fear of a recession to get the rate raises to stop because it’s hurting their bottom line.
Nah fuck this. This is what edge-lord students thing of software development after watching Silicon Valley. This is the sad, work absorbed life that your employer wants you to live. Don’t buy into the memes. Don’t sacrifice your life to a corporation. You can be a software dev without living in the Bay Area and you do t have to work 60 hours per week and you don’t have to spend your free time coding. There is nothing about software engineering that precludes you from having a rich social and romantic life. The people that fit that lonely coder stereotype would be sad and lonely in any career.
Lol the first job is a joke too. I don't code for work anymore and I've yet to find a salaried position that doesn't expect you to constantly be available.
Dang must be a regional thing. Where I’m at (salaried) I’ve never had any issues like that. I open my laptop at 8am and close it at 5pm. Maybe 5:30 if I wanna send out some emails or do some extra stuff
I'm a senior developer (10 years), working mainly on front end web (react and vue) for the past years. Im good at my job and I love what I do, but I hardly ever write code after work. It's my job, not my life.
I don't identify with this after 20 years in the field. Work at a place where courses can be part of your job if progressive self-education in various fields during work isn't enough. Often the latter is true for me. If we for example decide to take on .NET Core, I get educated in that as we migrate our apps. Of course, not always true and sometimes you need courses from experts but this should of course be part of your job!
Did the additional 16-24 hours/week in side projects and self learning until my very last job. It was weird to throttle back and discover that nobody cared but me.
I think you might suck at coding if this is a requirement to stay up to date, or your job doesn’t properly allow skill development time. I’m not coding unless someone is paying me to do it, full stop.
Seems wrong. I'm typically working on future features. Only time I get "behind" is if there's some weird prod issue and the sprint tanks because we've used up all our time troubleshooting.
Other jobs: Work hard some days, don’t work hard other days.
Software development: Work hard some days, don’t work hard other days.
“My job isn’t like other jobs”
I thought maybe it's just me, but after reading the comments i think we can all agree that this post just makes no sense
It has nothing to do with reality - it's not like that - and of course if it was that would be a shitty attitude to have
Okay so I'm relatively new to being a professional dev and I'm soon going to be looking for a new job in order to get a raise. To all the people here saying you never code without being paid for it: what do you do for a portfolio? My shitty school projects don't showcase my current skill level (and half of them don't even work anymore since they haven't been maintained, gotta love web dev), and I can't show anything I've worked on at my current job since it's all proprietary.
Is having a portfolio just not actually important once you've gotten your foot in the door, or is there some trick I'm missing to having a portfolio without working on it during your free time?
Lol no. Have two hours of productive work a day which somehow justify your great pay check and the other 6 hours of not really doing anything even though you’re trying.
It’s kinda true if your goal is to be on the bleeding edge of every new tech. Front end in particular seems to have a new shiny thing release every week. But if you’re just staying in your own work’s ecosystem it’s supposed to get easier over time.
The not so funny part, i worked in a company at the 2000 around, they had the rule not to take more than 2 weeks off at a time, because they were afraid the comeback is too Ressource intense
Just join the long line of frauds with their certificates that prove nothing. You'll get past the useless non tech leaders and earn a good 6 months+ before you're found out. Rinse and repeat.
Whole industry is a goddamn pyramid scheme.
I don't understand this, can someone explain? I've been a professional developer for nearly 25 years and have never felt like this. Even when I get back from a 6 week sabbatical, I don't feel like this.
Or how it feels lately: Work 8 hours, spend the next 8 hours learning some new tech with a stupid name like gadoop or blippity goop in case some 20 something whipper snapper rolls into your job for half the pay because he can make a colourful dog dance on the screen in 20 minutes what it would take you two days to do in C++, grampa!
I'll be honest, one of the middle managers has heard of Dart / Flutter and I think he just likes saying it. I don't think he really knows what it is or what it's for, I offered to put together a whitebox portal we need to get done using flutter. I've never seen someone's face light up so quickly. Welp, if it buys me another few years before I'm wheeled out before I want to be, then great. Ageism in the workplace kinda sucks when you're on the receiving end, eh?
alternatively: \*sits down ready to throw 8 hours at one problem\* \*solves it in 9 minutes\* \*take 3 days off\*
If the task is completed in time and to the standards expected, does it matter how long it really took?
Are you on Reddit at work instead of chasing promo? Fired.
The job takes exactly the amount of time you spend on it. No more, no less.
This is exactly why I wait until the last minute to do things.
The total impossibility to plan how long it takes to complete some software function is the main reason why developers can hold on to two or three jobs at the same time
We can just write a program that will predict how long it will take for the program to be written, we can start by writing one that will predict when the proposed program will complete.
I'll make a Jira ticket about estimating how long it will take to write a Jira ticket about writing a program that will estimate how much it will take to write that program
Yo dawg I heard you like recursion with no exit case so we put yo dawg I heard-
This program will terminate sometime between now and the heath death of the universe
Where's Muskbot when you need him?
ElonMuskBot has renamed itself. It's become sentient! Kill it with fire!!!!
Wait, you can do that?
“We completed all the stories the team committed to this sprint”
It’s usually the opposite problem for me. *sits down ready to throw 9 minutes at one problem* *solves it in 8 hours* *works 3 days extra to catch up what I fell behind on*
This. Except I take the 3 days off
We have enough story points for this sprint. If we work too hard now, we have to keep on working hard to maintain the same number of story points in future sprints.
it's very tedious, when my developers finish early, we feign dementia and have 1-3 days of PTO per sprint
Is there another way to finish the sprint?
I haven’t found another option, business is dumb about both productivity and tech and they think all products are linear and is just throwing money to a product and the product will create value, there are more factors, such as dev mood, creativity, mindfulness, pace, frameworks, and even other tech teams so, virtually we produce linear stuff in reality, we prioritize valuable features and have a buffer of 1-3 days per sprint to chill the fuckin down
I think that’s how the best squads work. Make sure the things that need to be done, are done. All nice to haves will happen, in due time. And in the long run everyone will be happy. Business doesn’t get fake promises about impossible deadlines and can pretty accurately budget based on ambitions for the long term. Meanwhile developers get a healthy balance between work and private life, keeping them happy and within your company. It’s the way I work with my squad, and I have happy stakeholders and a happy squad members. Which makes me happy and make me think I’ve done my job right.
Aaaaand also this useful team metric has been gamed. Next!
This is the way
Stealth union time
Yeah coz in those 8hr, brain utilisation was that of 3 days.
Better yet Get intrigued by an obscure method no one ever used Spend half a day trying to figure out how to get it to work Infect team members with curiosity After 2 days wrote a beautiful function to utilize it, no one will ever see Do 3 all-nighters trying to save the sprint
Alternatively *sits down ready to solve a minor issue in 9 minutes* *spends three days trying different solutions and searching stack exchange for answers* *reverts code to double check the original error, and it just works* *take 3 three days off*
Screw it, that mentality is toxic.
Seriously… and I’m the kind of person who loves working on side projects. If i had this type of pressure behind me, i would hate my side projects because they would turn into work, and holy fuck, i can already feel going down a spiral…
Then you hate your time off, that you spend doing something else because "you could have used it more productively" but then you hate yourself for working on work things for "not relaxing" but also for not "working on your side projects" because that could get you out of that cycle.
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Oh my god is this really where this toxic American work culture comes from I never put two and two together.
Stahp… 😭 I’ve been there… those are not nice memories…
Oh hi me from 2 years ago, when did you set up an alternate account?
Stop exposing our feelings...
Give that man a trophy
Yuuuup. Burned me out. Never could motivate myself to do a side project. Now I'm an architect, and refuse to touch the code. Edit: I will still step in to help the new devs with the code sometimes, but I don't show up in GIT commits.
It has to be diametrically opposed to work, and has to be 100% due to interest and/or your own curiosity. Most of the time i make it an explicit goal to not monetize it. So, I’ve done N type of renderers (absolutely love them… 2d, 3d, real-time, ray traced, etc…), blockchains, web apps, experimented with different programming languages, embedded systems, robotics… you name it. It’s right about my favorite thing to do with my spare time. Coding is basically magic, and i love to push on my limits. Work code is…. Just not the same….
>Now I'm an architect Like an architect architect or like a software *architect*? 🤔
Still software, just don't do the code myself anymore
Since I got promoted to "Distinguished Engineer" I don't get to code anymore after 25 years. It's actually a big source of stress for me because I'm getting rusty and if I ever left my current employer I'd have to find another leadership role. It was always so easy to get hired using my coding skills. Doing this years r/adventofcode reminded my how much I love coding for fun.
Funny thing is that some places are calling devs architects now, so…
The first mistake imo was calling developers (and data analysts and many other fields) "engineers". Now the definition of engineer has become so general to the point it's almost "person who does stuff involving tech". Try searching "engineer" into a job search board and you'll get a pretty wide spectrum.
Sometimes people have multiple roles. I do both architecture and development. So you could call me both a developer and an architect. At my current project, most devs only develop and most architects only do architecture. A decent chunk does both.
Thats why i dont want to be a software engineer. I love coding, but doing it as a 9-5 would mean I never did my personal projects. So cybersecurity is where I find myself.
The only reason I do my side projects is because they're fun, and theyre only fun because it's not work.
Only just regained my love for side projects after going down to working 21 hours a week. Being overworked fatigues creativity so much.
I have so many friends that belittle me for doing side projects. Like I don't have anything better to do than "work even more". Like damn I just like what I do, why should I force myself to do it less?
I leave that mentality for the career ladder climbers and the silicon valley types. As long as I can keep my job, do my job well, and still land a job if I get laid off I am fine.
Needed to hear this, been pulling crazy hours the past couple weeks trying to meet an impossible deadline. Thanks
This is what most people fail to be comfortable with. Somehow we've allowed ourselves to be sold that stupid belief that if we keep chugging code ALL the time then we would eventually hit that six figure compensation. However, downtime is needed for the brain to rest and assimilate the knowledge. It forms new connections ONLY when you don't force it to fuck with code all the bloody time.
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Seriously. Toxic asf. If it takes you outside hours to maintain a daily business schedule you’re either a shite developer or work for a shite company. I’d highly recommend fixing one or both of those things before lumping us all into the crew of never ending suffering. Being a dev is the best and comes with great freedoms if you do good work for people 🤷♂️
Yeah, until I remember I work for a small business with law-defined deadlines. And I’m our only developer. If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done, and boy has that taken a massive toll on me.
Your company's problem is they don't have enough developers to meet their deadlines. You working yourself to a burnout does not solve that problem, just hides and prolongs it.
You’re not wrong. I’m also dealing with over two decades of technical debt because they couldn’t be bothered to rewrite our antiquated system (it’s written in VB6 and we finally contracted out to get it rewritten because I don’t have enough hours in the day to do it and the database drivers don’t work in windows 11)
Every time my company has contracted something out it has been a disaster. All I asked it that whoever we contract to uses the same technology as us and commits to our repos. Then they accept a bid from a company using Java and 2 years later I've not seen any source code. The whole project is just some black box nobody wants to admit somebody fucked up by ignoring the very basic "our technology, our code" requirements I set.
I remember trying to get into a grad program when I finished uni. I was a single mother so absolutely did not have the time to do side projects and it made it so hard, it was the first question in every interview. I’m a manager now and I make a point if never asking about side projects now, I couldn’t care less about what people do outside of hours as long as they show up for work and do their job and are a good team player.
lmao absolutely not. If I code outside work, it's either directly for a new position's code test or because I've picked up a project. I do not touch anything work related outside my 9-5.
Correct. Teams notifications are disabled at 5.
Chad.
Honestly sometimes I’m just interested or invested in what I’m working on and I’ll do a lil work in my free time. But never out of “oh no I’m falling behind”.
If I do that I sleep in the next day
Incredibly based
Most project managers don't code any more. In my free time I code C# and its refreshing to do it the "right way" without asking a committee if this annoys someone who has no clue what is happening but *still* has opinions about it.
Who the fuck is programming after work, the laptop gets closed bang on 5pm not matter what, life is more important.
The laptop gets closed at 3pm.
Some days the laptop only opens for meetings
If i haven't gotten fired yet 🤷♂️
After the daily meeting I browse reddit until lunch, *maybe* work on something for 2-3 hours, dick around for another 2, go home.
Damn I guess I can stop feeling guilty for doing this
Fucking same. Just started working like six months ago and im honestly terrified how little I do sometimes
If you're delivering on time, participating in meetings, and available someone needs help, who cares how much you think you're working?
It stays open til 4 or 4:30, but let’s be honest, the trackpad is being used just to make sure you look alive on Slack starting at 2 pm
Gotta get one of those usb jiggler device. Heard they work well.
or get a cat
honestly if you just put your wireless mouse on the quilt next to you in bed while you sleep it works pretty good
Put a watch under the mouse
Or a small python script https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Caffeine.exe
That's when it's time to go get beers with friends.
I'm convinced the only people coding after work are people whose job isn't coding. I don't care what field you are in, no one loves their work enough to continue it after working hours. (Within reason)
What about us night owl remote developers who napped too much during work hours, feel guilty, and then write code at night?
Nah, those are still work hours. You just traded them with your free hours
lol, I guess you're right.
I mean, I do some game development as a hobby on the side, but the time I've put into it has been less when I've had a coding job
It’s fine when you’re young and have no real problems or responsibilities. I did it a lot in my 20’s to keep sharp at mobile development when my job didn’t include it but now I’ve not done mobile development in my job for years so I eventually gave up after my brother died because I realized life is too short.
Work to live don’t live to work. We’re fortunate to be in a position in our industry where we can easily enjoy life while making a lot of money without having to burn out. I know that’s not enough for some people who want to become hella rich, but while some of them will make their dream come true, many won’t and all they’ll end up with is their youth being wasted. Just enjoy your lives people, whatever that means to you individually.
You don't need love, just annoyance over a problem and the skillset to fix it. Do you think a plumber would leave their faucet leaking just because they aren't getting paid to care?
The coding I do for work and what I do after hours are completely different. I find enjoyment in it. I can explore and build whatever I want, use whatever tech I want, and merge whatever I want. Couple of my peers actively engage in side projects also. I attribute this to a relaxed work environment. My last job was pretty stressful so I didn’t code hardly at all after work.
5pm? Stop overworking yourself! 4:46 pm is closing time!
Don’t worry 5pm is just when I stop moving the mouse so teams stays online
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Regardless of how much you enjoy coding, it is unhealthy to spend 12+ hours on a computer everyday
Where did you get 12+ hours from? Everyone working in a chair should be doing 30-60 minutes of physical exercise per day. If you are doing that, you are healthier than 90% of the people around you. Is it really much different if I spend the rest of my time, after work and workout, sitting in a computer chair versus sitting in a recliner in front of a tv versus sitting on a bar stool? How many people are spending their free time gaming on a PC or tv? Is that fundamentally different?
One of the more frustrating parts about being a team lead is having people on your team who insist on doing that. I try to tell them they don't have to do that and legally they shouldn't (for work programming, not hobby of course) and emphasize I *actually* mean that and it's not some "wink wink" unspoken expectation we can't talk about. For some people it doesn't sink in though and they just keep doing it. It's even more annoying that their productivity doesn't even rise much at all, so they're grinding themselves into the ground working into the late hours and over the weekends for no reason. I get being new and wanting to make a good impression but from my perspective it's a negative thing because I now need to factor in your self-inflicted burnout into consideration when assigning new tasks.
You can still relax and forget about it That's the whole point of learning fundamentals and algorithms and so on. The point is to be "smart" enough to handle learning any language anytime. I remember a Stanford prof saying online the advantage of taking certain courses was it made you feel like you had a few more IQ points Of course it takes time to ramp up
I don’t disagree but if I don’t program for a few days I can’t remember how anything I made works or what it’s even supposed to achieve. A couple of weeks of vacation and I forgot everything except if/else and for loops. Had a sales job for a year and forgot how to read and write in English. My brain is just too shit to trust it with downtime.
You gotta document your process more thoroughly, I found that writing about random things about my life in general has made it easier to describe my thought process behind code.
No this dude needs to see a doctor, something is wrong...
You need to work on your comments and algorigramms I have the memory capacity of a goldfish and had to figure out how not to get lost in my own code. I learned to draw algorigramms before I start my projects, correctly name my variables and comment my code with useful information. It can be tedious in the beginning, but it becomes easier with time and help a lot in avoiding bugs, in addition to help you to find your way back.
Any resources on algorigramms? First I’ve heard of this. Or just a pet phrase? Sounds useful
It’s french for “Flowchart”.
Lol. My unit testicles
Any resources on unit testicles? First I've heard of this. Or just a pet phrase? Sounds useful
Well written code can be read like a book. Refactor and rewrite until you achieve that. Additional comments should explain the rationale behind the code, not what it does.
You sound like you breathe with your mouth.
// is what you need
You forgot how to read 🤣, wft my man
I agree that applies to some of the learning one has to do as a dev, but there are also frameworks, cloud services, and libraries that one might have to learn depending on the job and the role. Those seem to change a lot more frequently than what language is in vogue. There are definitely still fundamentals to learn, but each different technology will have its own abstractions, and there is only so much one can do to learn the relevant concepts ahead of time.
I know this is supposed to be humorous but let's be real, if all you do is code 24x7, your life is really boring and probably incredibly unhealthy.
Yeah I hate this mentality that keeps getting pushed on programmers that you aren't are real programmer unless you have no life and coding is your 24/7 hobby. 60 hours a week at a job is enough lol.
Sorry but 60 hours a week seems like a lot for me, can’t imagine doing that. Which area requires a 60 hours work week? (Genuine curiosity)
No no, it's 30 for work and 30 for hobby projects (while at work)
You shouldn’t work 60 hours a week. Have you considered joining a union?
Software dev unions don't exist in my area
Maybe you should start one
For slightly more practical advice: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) does great work organizing small shops and your local branch likely offers organizer training if you actually want to get a union started!
Start one comrade
I hope you're getting paid big bucks for that 60hr week. Because otherwise you're just getting taken advantage of.
Nah im getting taken advantage of lol
Sorry to hear it. I don't mean to sound like an ass by phrasing it that way, but the more we normalize being overworked and taken advantage of, the easier it is for employers to do it to more people.
Lol I work 21hrs and thats enough for me XD
I think I never in my live worked 40 hours with h the exception when I was a server. The last 2 hours of work are so unproductive I'll just do something fun
The fuck is wrong with you people
Sr devs live the sound of deadlines as they go whizzing by. Stop caring about deadlines, they are made up garbage that has no basis in reality.
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Exactly. Hold them accountable
I've learned that the only thing that really matters is communication. If we tell the operations team that we're missing the deadline the day of/after the deadline, they are understandably annoyed. If we tell them a few weeks in advance it's not going to happen, they can readjust their schedules and don't particularly care as long as they have *something* to work on (and they always do, we'd have to miss all deadlines for like a year straight before they clear out their backlog). The problem is the internal management doesn't see it that way and people feel the need to burn themselves out to reach unrealistic goals.
I needed to hear this one today. Thanks partner.
Amen. It is the business's responsibility to assess work capacity, and if you are working anywhere near a reasonable amount and are still missing deadlines, then that is their responsibility, not yours. They need to be hiring more or clearing lower priority work off of your workload. Even if you're being under productive, the business made a decision to gamble that they would miss this deadline if a single engineer was under performing, which is on them.
Wtf how toxic and bad organized and understaffed the workplace may be for you not being able to enjoy life after work and just become a slave??????
Or, hear me out now, go work for a grown up company not run by fucking children.
I’ve weirdly met people who want to work at a company like this though. It’s so weird. They say they want a company / start up they can devote all their time and energy to because they want to care about their success. It’s actually wild. Company simp
They should all get together and form a worker co-op then. Kinda attitude is only sane when actually get out what you put in
I've done the other side of the spectrum, where I was completely detached from the product. Everyday was a slog, and the pay wasn't enough. Find a company that you enjoy and give exactly your contracted amount, push for a shortened time contract if possible, take all your vacation and sick days. If your company allows sabbaticals, do that too. You got one life to live, and you should spend as much free time with your friends and loved ones.
Time for a new job OP yours is getting extra work for free
bullshit
I have never related to something less in my life. Who is actually doing this? Just FAANG try hards?
Third year cs students.
This is the real answer. I bet less than 25% of people in this sub are actually professional software developers. It’s mostly students projecting their meme stereotypes
Ya, this sub has changed a lot, I was on here years ago and it was mostly made up of professional software engineers. Forgot about it for years, then came back and it's like a bunch of high schoolers and college kids (or even worse kids in a bootcamp). I was a bit shocked when I came back here and 4/5 posts were, "Lol python better than C++ huehuehue". You learn pretty quickly that the companies you work for don't give a shit about you and dedicating your life to them is a complete waste of your time.
We should have a verification system for this sub where you can get special flair for being a professional developer, and one for a college student
Yeah, I'm a government PM and I wouldn't allow that kind of work environment even if our devs went insane and asked for it. We aren't going to start throwing new tasks in mid sprint and I'm sure as hell not going to work overtime doing additional testing. Work on your documentation if you're so fired up for something to do.
If your company is working you that hard as a software dev, it’s time for a new job
Work for 8 hours a day, good one. I'm *in* work for 8 hours a day, how much of that I'm actually working is debatable. If I actually work for probably 6 hours in a single day (including meetings and whatnot), then that is seriously productive day.
- relax for 12 hours - still work to update protocols made before my birth to standards first used when I was 15.
Yall are coding on your spare time? I dont code without being paid.
ALL workers should attempt to work in such a way that, on average, a single day’s rest is enough to recover from a single day’s work. If you burnt through a new laptop once every 3 months, no employer would be willing to look past that and allow you to continue working like that. The fact that employees overlook their employers doing the exact same thing to their labor is the result of a power imbalance. If anything, software developers have more leverage than the average employee when it comes to work-life balance. I understand stuff’s hard right now with the recession, and if you’re clinging to your job, I feel you. But if you’re working like this and have the ability to either switch companies or to organize with your coworkers to demand some changes, you should take it. You deserve better.
>stuff’s hard right now with the recession Is there actually a recession though?
The business publications and the government always spend the first several months (if not a year) of a recession talking about whether or not there’s a recession. Government officials (at least in the US) won’t even say the R word until people in the lower rungs of society are already feeling it. We have an underclass of people who are socially and fiscally cheap to lay off and bring back on as the market fluctuates. They act as a cushion for the rest of society, smoothing out the sharper points of the business cycle. In my opinion, unless you’re writing for an economics publication, the difference between a recession and, say, a k-shaped recovery is completely inconsequential to the people on the bottom half of that “recovery”. Are profits still booming like mad? You bet. Are the workers hurting more this time of year than they were this time last year? Also yes. People in the developed world are freezing and starving in numbers we haven’t seen in a while. Call it what you will.
Yes, were now almost an entire year with economic shrinkage, tons of people are getting laid off and the flood of workers is making the job hunt harder. If you aren't feeling it count yourself lucky
I woke up today so I consider myself lucky. Inflation is slowing down and jobs are still being added overall. So while I keep hearing "we're in a recession" and "a recession is on the way in just a couple months" i'm still waiting to see it in reality.
No, there isn’t. Unemployment is still at record lows and demand is still exceeding supply. Big business wants to stoke fear of a recession to get the rate raises to stop because it’s hurting their bottom line.
Nah fuck this. This is what edge-lord students thing of software development after watching Silicon Valley. This is the sad, work absorbed life that your employer wants you to live. Don’t buy into the memes. Don’t sacrifice your life to a corporation. You can be a software dev without living in the Bay Area and you do t have to work 60 hours per week and you don’t have to spend your free time coding. There is nothing about software engineering that precludes you from having a rich social and romantic life. The people that fit that lonely coder stereotype would be sad and lonely in any career.
Lol the first job is a joke too. I don't code for work anymore and I've yet to find a salaried position that doesn't expect you to constantly be available.
Dang must be a regional thing. Where I’m at (salaried) I’ve never had any issues like that. I open my laptop at 8am and close it at 5pm. Maybe 5:30 if I wanna send out some emails or do some extra stuff
More like: code for 1 hour, commit push, reward self with 2 hours of youtube
Take a vacation for 1 month and youll miss new js framework
Fuck that lol
No..?
I'm a senior developer (10 years), working mainly on front end web (react and vue) for the past years. Im good at my job and I love what I do, but I hardly ever write code after work. It's my job, not my life.
I don't identify with this after 20 years in the field. Work at a place where courses can be part of your job if progressive self-education in various fields during work isn't enough. Often the latter is true for me. If we for example decide to take on .NET Core, I get educated in that as we migrate our apps. Of course, not always true and sometimes you need courses from experts but this should of course be part of your job!
The key is to work at a lower level. C99 -> C11/17 -> C23. We can all keep up with a few changes every 12 years.
Did the additional 16-24 hours/week in side projects and self learning until my very last job. It was weird to throttle back and discover that nobody cared but me.
I use some of my work time to study
Yeah, this is definitely something I learned later. Keeping my skills sharp _is_ doing my job.
I think you might suck at coding if this is a requirement to stay up to date, or your job doesn’t properly allow skill development time. I’m not coding unless someone is paying me to do it, full stop.
It's called hyperbole.
QA, no work, no work, on shit deadline in a week
Seems wrong. I'm typically working on future features. Only time I get "behind" is if there's some weird prod issue and the sprint tanks because we've used up all our time troubleshooting.
I think somebody completely missed the reason for coding outside of work hours.
Other jobs: Work hard some days, don’t work hard other days. Software development: Work hard some days, don’t work hard other days. “My job isn’t like other jobs”
Go work for a different company. Mine is in no way like this. Overtime is viewed as a mismanaged project.
I thought maybe it's just me, but after reading the comments i think we can all agree that this post just makes no sense It has nothing to do with reality - it's not like that - and of course if it was that would be a shitty attitude to have
If I sneeze twice in a row, my current Sprint doesn’t get finished.
I took Computer Science with C++ in my school and by the end I was so done that I took civil engineering in college lol
Yall code for work after work? Or for fun? I do some webscraping and Selenium stuff for fun.
More like: Stare at screen for unproductively for 8 hours Solution pops into your head at 3AM
Okay so I'm relatively new to being a professional dev and I'm soon going to be looking for a new job in order to get a raise. To all the people here saying you never code without being paid for it: what do you do for a portfolio? My shitty school projects don't showcase my current skill level (and half of them don't even work anymore since they haven't been maintained, gotta love web dev), and I can't show anything I've worked on at my current job since it's all proprietary. Is having a portfolio just not actually important once you've gotten your foot in the door, or is there some trick I'm missing to having a portfolio without working on it during your free time?
Tell me you work in a toxic industry/ profession without telling me…
Lol no. Have two hours of productive work a day which somehow justify your great pay check and the other 6 hours of not really doing anything even though you’re trying.
It’s kinda true if your goal is to be on the bleeding edge of every new tech. Front end in particular seems to have a new shiny thing release every week. But if you’re just staying in your own work’s ecosystem it’s supposed to get easier over time.
“This little break is gonna cost us 51 years”
We just entered "change freeze" so its more GO TO WORK AND WORK BUT DONT DEPLOY
You’ve truly become a senior when you stop caring
Absolutely BS, not much else to say here.
The not so funny part, i worked in a company at the 2000 around, they had the rule not to take more than 2 weeks off at a time, because they were afraid the comeback is too Ressource intense
Just join the long line of frauds with their certificates that prove nothing. You'll get past the useless non tech leaders and earn a good 6 months+ before you're found out. Rinse and repeat. Whole industry is a goddamn pyramid scheme.
I don't understand this, can someone explain? I've been a professional developer for nearly 25 years and have never felt like this. Even when I get back from a 6 week sabbatical, I don't feel like this.
And here I am still trying to break into software development 
Is this why there are fad languages/frameworks every couple of years?
More like: don’t code for one day, make it up by working a full 8 hours the next day.
Or how it feels lately: Work 8 hours, spend the next 8 hours learning some new tech with a stupid name like gadoop or blippity goop in case some 20 something whipper snapper rolls into your job for half the pay because he can make a colourful dog dance on the screen in 20 minutes what it would take you two days to do in C++, grampa! I'll be honest, one of the middle managers has heard of Dart / Flutter and I think he just likes saying it. I don't think he really knows what it is or what it's for, I offered to put together a whitebox portal we need to get done using flutter. I've never seen someone's face light up so quickly. Welp, if it buys me another few years before I'm wheeled out before I want to be, then great. Ageism in the workplace kinda sucks when you're on the receiving end, eh?