> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time.
Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well.
I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?
the amount of programming/hour you get at a job vs on a hobby project is very different, though, and tends to go down as you get more responsibility.
Not that the other work you do instead of programming, like problem decomposition, spec authoring, review, etc., isn’t useful for improving your programming skills, but not having to coordinate with anyone means you can just write code on a hobby project.
I recently lead a project and even with a tight schedule and trying to focus on implementing as much as possible I spent maybe 30% of my time programming.
Note further that I don’t really do any programming outside of work and don’t think it’s necessary or even useful to spend that much extra time programming. Iterating implementation ideas like a scientist is the only way I’ve improved and that’s fairly independent of time spent.
Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well.
I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?