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Comment by tsukurimashou | Hacker News Reader

Considering the amount of people in this industry that don't know what they are doing, sure it is "OK".

Just don't be surprised that people doing code outside of work will probably get better jobs / get hired more easily.

Some people are really passionate about the field, and don't really see it as "working" I think it is important for these people to have both professional projects and personal ones.

But like a lot of people that are passionate about something, a few of them will end up being light years ahead of people just doing it for money, or seeing it as a "regular job" just like any other job.

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> Just don't be surprised that people doing code outside of work will probably get better jobs / get hired more easily.

Not really. Last time I was looking for job nobody cared about my personal projects. Like, they did not care at all. I have them.

But also, honestly, people I knew who spend a lot of time on their passion project systematically were not the most performing at work. They either tended to use work for socialization and chat a lot. Or were otherwise burn out (always working but slowly and not producing that much).

I guess that you cant really lie to yourself - working on passion project outside of work for 20 hours a week is exactly the same as working additional 20 hours on the job - consequences in low effectivity and tiredness are exactly the same.

I think the at-home project thing is perhaps a poor example. A person who does any number of things outside of work to refine their skills (which could be a passion project), would be expected to advance their career faster than somebody who only put any effort into their skills 9-5. Only some employers will care about personal projects, but all of them will care about your marketable skills.

I'm skeptical about that, because I've lost count of people coding outside of their programming job that have no clue on how to produce reasonable code. Perhaps it sounds good to potential employers that they code in their spare time, but it's not an indication of competency in my experience.

It’s really weird if you think about it. The ratio of people that do work related activities in their free time seems rather high for programmers. On the other hand, we are plagued with opportunists that want a high paying job and don’t know what they’re doing.

If you look at it from a hobbies / interests point of view, coding is one of the few hobbies where there are a lot of jobs around and well paid ones at that. Professional sports are a hobby that for some sports is very well paid, but the competition is way harder and the jobs available far less.

Not really. The trick is to always work for a company using marketable tech. Once you’ve been in the field for awhile, you can find a job where the “must haves” are things you are good at and the “nice to haves” are things you want to learn.

Because salary compression and inversion are real, you will probably have to keep job hopping.

Hard skills are surprisingly small percentage of the overall picture of the person from employment perspective. An excellent coder who is hard to manage, discuss, doesn't work well in team, or has trouble to simply do as asked for next 2 months because its a priority for the company but definitely not fun, is... passable for many companies, the bigger the more true.

In my experience, quite a few of these hardcore coders lack in 'human' aspects. The employer can go an extra mile to manage them appropriately (ie keep their work fun), but its an extra overhead that many don't want to undertake.

But of course the group of those who have good people, communication and/or management skills are usually priceless for the employer.

To some extend, I think that we also tend assume that to hard to communicate with people have higher skills then they have. They are less right then they like to pretend, but people don't like to question them.

Quite a lot of these issues is their inability to deal with requirements as they are or construct they are unused to without temper tamtrum.

Everyone is more effective on fun tasks, faster when allowed to skip uncomfortable requirements and looks smarter if no one dares to ask him questions or disagree.

You must be working in a different environment than me. The most common failure mode I see of devs is a lack of technical chops. Followed by communication skills, and not internalizing business goals. Don't see doesn't work well in a team, or had trouble doing as asked very often if at all.

But I work in Enterprise tech so maybe it's different.

>Hard skills are surprisingly small percentage of the overall picture of the person from employment perspective.

This is true outside of tech hubs and in companies with non technical management. What is true in Oklahoma City and Paris isn't necessarily true in SF/NYC

Being passionate is not the same thing as being a talented professional.

Having a passion for something may or may not convert to career competence, depending on the person.

The problem is that it's very hard to quantify programming talent, and it's easy to signal passion - hence passion is used as a false cipher for competence, although likely with some correlation at least.

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