Enjoying programming and having the time outside of work. When it's a passion it all becomes a lot easier.
The problem is that most developers see programming as their 9 to 5 and outside of that, in little free time they have, they have other pursuits and hobbies.
When you see what other programmers achieve who have the time and treat it as an art (Vs work) it's natural for them to have higher productivity.
"problem" is perhaps not the ideal choice of word here. There's nothing inherently wrong with treating programming as a job and doing something else outside that in your free time, in the same way that we don't all have to be accomplished amateur wood-carvers or poets.
Wrong choice of word maybe, but without dedication to the craft outside of the limited work skill set you can't truly expect to expand your skills.
I keep getting asked at appraisals "rate out of 10 your ability to develop new skills", and every time I rate it 6 because I'm not learning anything new. I learnt new skills outside of work because my company doesn't see value in non work related skills.
ML and LLMs was one such skill I picked up in 2022, nobody else was interested when I attempted to start conversations and provided a demo to the department. Roll onto the end of 2023 and it became a hot skill that got me large pay rise and now I'm apparently the expert.
Currently I'm learning new system architectures (e.g dbos.dev) and new programming languages (ts,
rust, haxe), again no value because we already have a barely scalable but stable old system arch, and we're a Java only shop by virtue of that being the only skill other staff know or want to know.
Is that inherently wrong? No. Is it a problem? Well that depends on your perspective.
Comments
Enjoying programming and having the time outside of work. When it's a passion it all becomes a lot easier.
The problem is that most developers see programming as their 9 to 5 and outside of that, in little free time they have, they have other pursuits and hobbies.
When you see what other programmers achieve who have the time and treat it as an art (Vs work) it's natural for them to have higher productivity.
"problem" is perhaps not the ideal choice of word here. There's nothing inherently wrong with treating programming as a job and doing something else outside that in your free time, in the same way that we don't all have to be accomplished amateur wood-carvers or poets.
Wrong choice of word maybe, but without dedication to the craft outside of the limited work skill set you can't truly expect to expand your skills.
I keep getting asked at appraisals "rate out of 10 your ability to develop new skills", and every time I rate it 6 because I'm not learning anything new. I learnt new skills outside of work because my company doesn't see value in non work related skills.
ML and LLMs was one such skill I picked up in 2022, nobody else was interested when I attempted to start conversations and provided a demo to the department. Roll onto the end of 2023 and it became a hot skill that got me large pay rise and now I'm apparently the expert.
Currently I'm learning new system architectures (e.g dbos.dev) and new programming languages (ts, rust, haxe), again no value because we already have a barely scalable but stable old system arch, and we're a Java only shop by virtue of that being the only skill other staff know or want to know.
Is that inherently wrong? No. Is it a problem? Well that depends on your perspective.