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Comment by frign | Hacker News Reader

   "What about other areas and under-the-covers code that just
   needs rework? Just do what I do, and work on it on your own
   time."

Yeah because doing unpaid work for your company is the way to go.

Get a life and learn to leave work at work.

It's not the developer's fault if the manager is not dedicating enough man-hours to finish something, only to find out later on that messy code eats up many more man-hours than having it written cleanly the first time with much lower maintenance costs later on.

If developers don't man up and let the managers crash and fail for it, they will be supporting greed and exploitation in the workplace and probably make it worse.

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> messy code eats up many more man-hours than having it written cleanly the first time

I think it's more accurate to assume that a company/team doesn't have the ability to write it cleanly until proven otherwise, and a manager/developer blame game signals the company's lack of this ability (this says nothing about an individual manager or developer's ability when taken alone or in a different context - due to multiplicative factors, a team is often much better or much worse than the sum of its members)

Not if you love your work and you are lucky enough to work for a good company that you really want to contribute to.

I think its a bit rude for you to suggest someone who brings some work home has no life. Many developers are passionate about their job, they love learning and most importantly they love a good challenge. You don't stop thinking about a challenge at work as soon as the clock hits 5.

Perhaps this is a great contrast between individuals that pushed themselves into programming for a job and people who fell in love with it and got a job out of it.

Its also a shane that the former is what most people find themselves in. A means to an end in a world that isnt very kind to everyone.

That's not the only two groups in question here.

There are those that spend off-time programming, just not for their employer's tasks.

The quid-pro-quo of employee-employer loyalty is largely gone these days, so it's not unreasonable to only work the hours you're compensated for.

Why would loyalty have any impact on gifting your employer free work? You can be loyal without giving away things for free.

Perhaps we're using the term in two different contexts.

I'm using the term loyalty for lack of a better term. There was a time when employees would often go above and beyond for their employers, because the reverse was also often true. Roughly, the shift away from the "lifetime employment" model.

Things like:

- Somewhere in the 1980's, when layoffs started to happen even in relatively financially healthy companies

- The move from pensions to 401k's

- The shift of a higher percentage of healthcare costs to the employee's portion

- More focus on hiring outsiders into higher level positions, versus training/placing internal candidates

Specifically, I might be incented to occasionally "work for free" if I thought the company would, for example, not lay me off during a particularly rough financial period.

Ah, I see. Personally, I think it's a bit healthier regardless to see your employment as a fair exchange of time for money, and not read anything else into it. There's no confusion about who owes what -- it's all spelled out for you.

What is the connection between "people who fell in love" with programming and donating your time to a for profit enterprise? If you love what you do, that's wonderful. However, work (and time) should be compensated for.

It's actually the difference between professionals, who know how to negotiate and get compensation for their work, and naive exploited people who will get the short end of the stick in most deals and get dropped like dead weight when the company downsizes without a second thought for all their gift contributions...

I fell in love with programming but I think it's ridiculous to gift my free time to my employer. During my free time I'd rather write my own software (or open source) that has a chance of either benefiting humanity or getting me rich.

I think that people who work on their employer's projects during their own time are unimaginative - they could be writing their own software for their own benefit but they instead choose to make their employer rich and not see any of that compensation themselves.

This is of course assuming you're drawing a salary from the company and you're not mostly paid in equity, in which case putting in free hours might make more sense if you can make the product profitable.

I think perpetuating this stereotype is pretty bad for programmers everywhere. You can be a good programmer and passionate about your job and still not gift your time to your company without compensation. Work-life-balance is really important if you don't want to burn out after five years.

I am pretty much in agreement with you.

However I am curious how others feel about learning on your own time. I do a fair bit of that (and the company often benefits as a result) but there is hardly a set line between working and learning in our line of work, its definitely a continuum.

If you are passionate about coding, work on free software or build a team with which you work on stuff.

This is much more rewarding than doing unpaid work for your boss on code that will probably never see the light of day anyway.

There is a lot to learn by collaborating with other people on code projects of this nature.

I'd say learning is a bit different, it might benefit your current employer but it also benefits your future employment prospects so it makes sense for you to study it in your own time. Working on your employer's work probably doesn't.

I love what I do and really enjoy contributing to what the company I work for does (web based education software). But I absolutely don't rewrite bits of the codebase or develop new features in my free time.

I love programming and working out how to solve a problem, but if it something my employer makes money off then they can give me the time to fix it. In my own time, I work on my own projects and challenges. Be it the automation bot I have running in my house or the games that me and a few friends create.

Doing work stuff in your own time can - and does - lead to the expectation that you'll do it more, so the business accounts for that and will possibly even count it against others that don't do it.

Jeez people, I also disagree with oolongCat, but is the heavy downvoting really warranted?

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