<story><title>I don&apos;t program in my spare time. Does that make me a bad developer?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/48698/i-dont-program-in-my-spare-time-does-that-make-me-a-bad-developer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The right question is, What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a good question, but it does lead me to a thought... why does it seem like most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work appears to be side projects?  Let me explain.&lt;p&gt;Most of the programmers who produce large products, don&apos;t do much in the way of side projects.  Carmack seems to be heads down on Rage.  I don&apos;t see a Carmack GitHub project. Nothing from Tim Sweeney either.  I don&apos;t see anything from the devs that did GTA or Halo or RDR or the latest Mario game.&lt;p&gt;What about David Cutler?  Linus -- he did Git, I guess a side project(?) -- other stuff?  Any of the iOS architects have GitHub side projects?  WebOS architects?&lt;p&gt;It seems like we have two classes of devs.  Those that ship large products.  Whether its iOS or Grand Theft Auto 5.  And devs that ship little projects.  Small startups, little tools here and there.  The overlap between the two seems rather small.</text></item><item><author>raganwald</author><text>Correlation does not equal causation. Asking whether not programming in your spare time makes you a bad developer is the wrong question. The right question is, &lt;i&gt;What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pursue that something and you may end up programming in your spare time. Or starting a company such that your side project is your job. Or finding something really exciting to do at your current job. Or whatever. In words much older than our civilization: &quot;Do not follow in the footsteps of the Sages. &lt;i&gt;Seek what they sought.&lt;/i&gt;&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raganwald</author><text>&lt;i&gt;why does it seem like most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work appears to be side projects?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s easy to see why most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work &lt;i&gt;appears&lt;/i&gt; to be side projects: This is a trivial consequence of the fact that the vast majority of the software developed on this planet is &quot;dark matter.&quot; It&apos;s developed inside companies, and even if you know I work for IBM on DB2, it&apos;s hard to see from the outside whether I&apos;m a coding machine by day or whether I write emails from 8-5 and code side projects from 5-8.&lt;p&gt;In the universe of software projects, we&apos;re mostly talking about side projects that are visible things like Github repositories, and mostly talking about day gigs that are invisible. If we want to drop the word &quot;appears&quot; from your first statement, we need to include side projects that aren&apos;t on Github (like startups being developed on nights and week-ends while the authors go to work &quot;for the man&quot; M-F 9-5).&lt;p&gt;We then need to compare all of the side projects to all of the code these people write during their day gigs, whether it&apos;s highly visible stuff like Linux or &quot;invisible&quot; like the internals of an ATM locator for an online bank.&lt;p&gt;If we don&apos;t include all of the side projects and we don&apos;t include all of the day gigs, it is very easy for our skewed sample to have many examples where the authors &lt;i&gt;appear&lt;/i&gt; to do most of their work on their side projects.&lt;p&gt;Please don&apos;t assume from this that I disagree with where you seem to be taking the conversation. If we see that things are not always as they seem, we also must accept the idea that even if people with side projects &lt;i&gt;appear&lt;/i&gt; to be good programmers, it might be that the high-profile examples we find on HN or who blog are not representative of programmers as a whole. It is very dangerous to draw conclusions about the correlation between a side project and talent based on an incomplete sample. I think we agree on this here and in another thread elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;As they say... The plural of anecdote is not &quot;data.&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>I don&apos;t program in my spare time. Does that make me a bad developer?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/48698/i-dont-program-in-my-spare-time-does-that-make-me-a-bad-developer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The right question is, What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a good question, but it does lead me to a thought... why does it seem like most side projects are done by people for whom the predominance of their work appears to be side projects?  Let me explain.&lt;p&gt;Most of the programmers who produce large products, don&apos;t do much in the way of side projects.  Carmack seems to be heads down on Rage.  I don&apos;t see a Carmack GitHub project. Nothing from Tim Sweeney either.  I don&apos;t see anything from the devs that did GTA or Halo or RDR or the latest Mario game.&lt;p&gt;What about David Cutler?  Linus -- he did Git, I guess a side project(?) -- other stuff?  Any of the iOS architects have GitHub side projects?  WebOS architects?&lt;p&gt;It seems like we have two classes of devs.  Those that ship large products.  Whether its iOS or Grand Theft Auto 5.  And devs that ship little projects.  Small startups, little tools here and there.  The overlap between the two seems rather small.</text></item><item><author>raganwald</author><text>Correlation does not equal causation. Asking whether not programming in your spare time makes you a bad developer is the wrong question. The right question is, &lt;i&gt;What is it about certain/many good developers that leads them to program in their spare time?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pursue that something and you may end up programming in your spare time. Or starting a company such that your side project is your job. Or finding something really exciting to do at your current job. Or whatever. In words much older than our civilization: &quot;Do not follow in the footsteps of the Sages. &lt;i&gt;Seek what they sought.&lt;/i&gt;&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bad_user</author><text>Linus cooking up Git - that&apos;s not a side project; that&apos;s what he does for earning a living. They needed Git as a replacement for BitKeeper. I do admire Linus, when he sets his mind on something, he gets things done.&lt;p&gt;But, about people working for big companies, since you are talking about iOS / WebOS, etc... these people do many times have side projects, but they are internal and in the context of the company they work for, not public. And the cool thing about a big company (versus a startup) is that deadlines are more relaxed (you do have more free time) and you can switch projects when bored to death.</text></comment>