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Comment by Haijal | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed this post. I feel the same way, I do love coding and working on software projects doesn't feel like work to me. I spent my high school years and college years(and I graduated years after I should have from taking two years off after freshmen year) working fast food and grocery stores. I know what work feels like.

However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing. This life has so much to offer and experience, I do not have a drive to spend 80 hours, nights and weekends like that. However, if the project calls for it every once in a while, fine, it's not a big deal until the company comes to expect that.

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It’s a bit crazy that the tech industry has grown to demand employees that live for their job and not much else. Maybe it has to do with the high income (when compared to loads of other jobs) and the fact that the world changes so fast that companies rely on employees that keep on educating themselves.

> However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing

Why does everyone think that it requires every spare second you have to write a couple programs and post them on GitHub? Can you spare 1 hour per week? Why would it require every waking hour you have to write a couple scripts and throw them in GitHub?

Some "programmers" are just not good at programming. Actually, that is a vast majority of them. This is why they think it's so hard to have a side project, and it's the same reason companies that actually care about who they hire have to do 20 interviews to find 1 viable candidate.

There are plenty of new people entering the workforce, too. I can't remember the last time I took an Uber/Lyft where the driver wasn't in a coding bootcamp. It scares me just to think about having to be the engineer "training" the new hire at a company that didn't make its interviews hard enough.

(As a corollary, this means that if the engineering interview at a company is objectively easy, that's a RED FLAG, and you should not work there.)

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