No.
Your free time should be about rest and recovery, not about grinding out even more code.
Even if it looks bad on your CV
Your free time should be about rest and recovery, not about grinding out even more code.
Even if it looks bad on your CV
You're an adult, do what you want in your free time.
Edit: softened the response a bit because I do agree with the parent that you also need some rest and relaxation. :P
8 hours per day is already pushing it.
One of the huge benefits of side projects isn't to pad out your CV, but to decouple your career and your professional life from your employer.
When work sucks family, friends and hobbies can be great at taking your mind off of your work problems, but they can't really free you from the fact that one company controls not only your income, but your entire professional identity. When you do work that is recognized outside of your office, you own that work and shitty managers can't take that away.
Not everyone has to be start their own business, but I highly recommend that everyone "owns" something related to their livelihood outside of their 9-5. It means that friends, family and hobbies don't become merely a means of "recovery" from an oppressive job, but things that I can honestly enjoy more because I have an identity outside of my employer.
This view that everyone must be passionate about programming is dangerous. What does "passion" mean - working an extra 4-8 hours every day on some random side-project to prove to a hypothetical future employer that you are "passionate"? I don't know if that is what "passionate" means, but I know that for junior people I have in my team that I will repeatedly bang home the need for work-life balance if I ever catch them sending emails or submitting code late into the evening.
That said, if you enjoy spending all your work time coding and your spare time also coding, sure fine go ahead (and I think that probably all of us go through this from time to time). But I really don't think we should be encouraging that you should be trying to hustle a genuine revenue-generating side business as well as your normal 9 to 5. I fear that it is unhealthy to set these expectations that you need to be working two jobs simultaneously.
I do all kinds of random side things (fewer now that we have kids). None have a purpose to prove anything to a future employer (or anyone else beyond sometimes my family [demonstrating to my kids the value, or even mere possibility, of doing more than passively compnsuming, for example])
Many of humanities greatest scientific discoveries and works of art were 'side projects'.
It's better than lounging around like a lemon doing nothing with your time.
We're setting expectations for and normalising something which is not normal IMHO.
By all means do side projects if you want, but don't feel compelled.
That being said, I think the main point that most people fail to get across about "side projects" is that they don't have to be programming. I play music with a band in the area and would very much consider that to be a side project.
It would be a much healthier exercise if we focused the narrative on doing anything you enjoy outside of work.
Likely way more than what I would get out of trying to build a software product myself.
This quote for example: 'I’ve asked David Wong, working in the cryptocurrency team at Facebook, what would be the best way to be noticed by Facebook? He answered: “Side Projects” and “Blog”.'
To many people with kids, that reads: Facebook doesn't want to hire engineers with families, because the things they care about from folks are diametrically opposed, in many cases, to the time required with children.
I absolutely think that if you have the time and flexibility you should use it. But there are (and should be) other ways to stand out to companies or to create value that don't involve side gigs outside of the normal work day.
It's not particularly compatible with having kids, but it makes you a better musician.
I'm all in favour of finding better ways to let programmers who don't have side projects stand out but I don't think that devaluing side projects is the way to do that.
concerning professional advantages: after spending more than two decades writing software I seriously doubt that a side project gets you professional advantages.
Imho more important are soft skills that are not in the focus of most technically savvy people. Being able do communicate well and being a team player are at least as important in most cases- not everybody builds a new google...
We tend to focus on technical aspects while most fail to see that this is not a purpose in itself (in most cases / companies) but the purpose is to generate business value.
>Imho more important are soft skills that are not in the focus of most technically savvy people.
I find that this is mostly true outside of tech hubs, especially in non tech companies, but not necessarily in tech hubs.
Hard technical skills are much more valued relative to soft skills in, say, Facebook than in, say, an insurance company or HMO based in Houston.
Even if you want to improve yourself professionally, coding is not always the best option for everyone: you can study more the industry, domain you work in, improve your communication skills, build connections, improve your physical and mental states, draw, etc.
I can recommend these guys to pick advice from something like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving...
Why assume that that's the only non-work option out there? There are plenty of productive non-work things that you can focus on. Exercise will benefit you in numerous ways. So will learning about nutrition and how to cook. I would say those are both benefiting the person more than repeating what they do at work for 40+ hours a week.
How much self care you need and what constitutes self care varies tremendously from person to person. High energy people may actually need outlets for that energy so they don't make themselves or other people crazy.
Nadia Commenici was enrolled in gymnastics at age five in part because she was breaking the furniture at home. I have heard that Chuck Norris does two workouts a day and makes everyone crazy if he skips one of them.
If you have it to give, directing it into something productive with potential payoff is good advice. But for other people it's a case of "You can't get blood from a stone."
Most people don't do a great job of speaking to all use cases. They tend to speak to the one with which they are familiar. So then you get these situations where one party says "You should do X!" and some people reply "Absolutely not. You should do Y instead." Both are typically guilty of not including any provisos or qualifiers and talking like it's universal truth.
I do have side projects, most of them never come to an end, after I learned what I wanted about programming language, framework, OS, build system, whatever.
What I am definitely opposed to is the expectation that I have to transform my 40h week into a 60h one just to keep some companies and head hunters happy.
I play with tech when I happen to have some time available to myself away from family and friends, while in business trips and such, and not to fulfill some implicit passion requirement.
I like to refer to my kids as my side projects! As they get older I would like to do things together which to me seems like the best option.
Sometimes it is required by licensing and professional bodies for those occupations, other times it is optional.
Sometimes it is compensated by employers and other times it is not.
It can include: participating in conferences, meetings at informal local professional organizations, independent study through journals or other professional publications, coaching/mentorship, and personal time spent working on career-related research and development.
I expect my doctor to spend at least some time during the week while not seeing patients and attending to administrative tasks browsing professional journals to stay abreast of the the state of the medical art.
I don't understand why there is a reflexive revulsion to software developers having a github where they throw up stuff they've tried out.
Unless software development is less of a professional occupation and more like wage-slave drudgery.
Grocery store cashiers don't typically spend their down time reading the quarterly "Proceedings of the Supermarket Checkout Professional" to stay up-to-date on cash register developments.
Civil engineers do typically read civil engineering journals in their spare time, at least all of the ones I know do. A few nights per week, for a little while, they'll sit in their recliner after dinner and page through a civil engineering magazine and occasionally jot things down in a notebook that interest them.
I don't think programmers are exposed to a level of stress that requires more "rest and recovery" than a physician.
When I program at home, I don't "grind out even more code" in the sense that it's in any way a continuation of what I do at my day job, more than watching TV, reading or browsing the web would be. I work on totally different projects, unrelated to what I do at work, and I do it for myself under no pressure to perform. The playing field is very different.
R&R can be almost anything, but don't make it look like work and certainly don't do it because you think it'll make you a better capitalist.