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JSilvers wrote: It's hard to come out of retirement when grey hairs disqualify you from employment.
I've worked with gray haired people. It's been known to happen.
Jeremy Falcon
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I like to think that, but Her Indoors seems to have a different opinion. Still, having a den in one of the upstairs bedrooms does keep her out for long periods of time. I get the odd visit with a cup of tea mid-morning and -afternoon. Unless she has a job that wants doing!!
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When I have a nice project, like arrgh.js, or writing a book, I can spend almost all my spare time on it.
Other times I prefer to play games and watch movies and not do anything else in my free time.
Currently, I'm into the 15 to 30 hours category, but if you average it out over the years it's probably 5 to 15 hours.
The difference between a programmer who does something, no matter what, in his free time and the programmer who does nothing is huge.
The first probably has an idea of the newest technologies and probably has done something with a few of them.
The latter cannot be talked to in a sensible manner, they'll ask you "what's that?" on every proposal you make. The only time you're asking them the same question is when you're reading their code 
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Sander Rossel wrote: The difference between a programmer who does something, no matter what, in his free time and the programmer who does nothing is huge.The first probably has an idea of the newest technologies and probably has done something with a few of them.The latter cannot be talked to in a sensible manner, they'll ask you "what's that?" on every proposal you make. The only time you're asking them the same question is when you're reading their code
I couldn't disagree more. I don't know any lawyers who go home and do law stuff for fun. I don't know any doctors who go out looking for random people to treat in their spare time. I don't know any truck drivers who drive HGVs on their days off just to keep their hand in.
I like to think that after a quarter of a century, I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm generally up-to-date with new tech but my spare time is far more valuably spent on R&R than working for free.
Slogans aren't solutions.
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You are on CP, actively contributing on forums, asking and answering questions and even writing some tips.
How is that "not doing anything"? 
Or do you do all this during work hours? 
Maybe these people never learned to write proper code in the first place.
Doing the same thing over and over from 9 to 5 and never learning anything is killing in IT.
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Yes, I read stuff and maybe post stuff that relates to work and generally take an interest (I was helping someone design a database schema in the pub last night) but there's no way that I'm actually going to write code when I'm not at work.
I spent many years doing silly hours on the day job and discovered in the process that more can equal an awful lot less. I think that there's an optimum amount of time to be spent doing anything (not exactly sure where I'd quantify it) but going too far past it can be extremely counterproductive in all kinds of ways - possibly even to the point where it becomes far worse than not getting to do enough.
There's a culture within the dev world where it's considered better to say "look at me, I do 23 hours a day!" than it is to say "I've got my work/life balance sorted quite nicely." At some point that has to factor into the high burn-out rate amongst developers.
Slogans aren't solutions.
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Yeah, you are right about that.
However, taking an interest is so much more already than just not doing anything besides your 9 to 5 coding.
I said "a programmer who does something, no matter what, in his free time" which can mean doing as little as reading an article.
I work with full stack .NET web developers who have never heard of anything that we don't use internally.
They haven't heard about Node.js, npm, Angular.js, TypeScript, SASS, .NET Core [insert more popular technologies here]...
If it was up to them we'd still be doing WebForms and jQuery and they wouldn't even know there are better alternatives.
When presented with a problem they just write code (mostly huge if-statements in 1000+ lines functions) until it is "fixed", no Googling from their part.
Luckily, we also have people like you who DO read an occasional article and take a general interest in their job.
They are the people who say "hey, Microsoft released MVC a while ago and it's looking good, perhaps we should give it a try."
Unfortunately, the people who have to implement it just write their WebForms code in MVC (and they wrote their VB code in WebForms, and their COBOL code in VB code, you get the idea)
Then there are people like me who love to code and spend their free time doing stuff they don't really need at work (yet).
Mind you, I'm not working for free.
What I do in my free time is not related to work, but to my own personal interests.
And yes, sometimes I DO get paid for my free-time work
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I think the distinction is more between people who want to keep fresh and those who don't - yes, I've known a fair few who are still happy to do everything in VB6 or something of the sort and often marveled at how excruciatingly boring that must be. Can you imagine spending twenty years doing exactly the same thing every day? That would kill me!
Slogans aren't solutions.
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PeejayAdams wrote: I don't know any lawyers who go home and do law stuff for fun. I don't know any doctors who go out looking for random people to treat in their spare time.
On the contrary, I know several lawyers that are very active in the community, offering evening and weekend consultations for free to women's shelters, doing pro bono work, etc. Similar with doctors, though the restrictions are significant of course, there are still doctors that will hold workshops on healthy diet, informing people about the latest medications, etc.
Marc
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Yes, I know (and heartily applaud) many who do pro bono work but the survey question is about hobby work and I don't know any who do that.
Slogans aren't solutions.
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I totally agreed. When I interviewing candidates, my last question is "What do you do in your free time?" If the candidate say coding or tinkering other related stuff, he is hired. What I've found is that developers who love the trade enough to do hobby on the side are going to be much more in-tune with the skills and technologies. Not only that, he/she going to have much more passion over those that "I only code when I get paid." If a candidate shows any indication that he/she only code while being paid, not hired.
Developers who have creative hobbies on the side will always be better problem solver.
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Do they have a job?
I worked much less on my open source repos but mainly focusing on a private repo. Hopefully to release my free app later this year to earn some advertisement money.
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They calculated per year, not per day... 
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The poll is actually per WEEK.
Although it isn't very clear from the poll
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I interpreted it as hours per project.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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Yep, if you're concentrating that much on your out-of-work projects, you must not be doing a very good job at work. 
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I think is do-able even with a full time job  . Sleep 4 hours a day + no wife and kids.
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Bryian Tan wrote: Sleep 4 hours a day + no wife and kids life.
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Albert Holguin wrote: Yep, if you're concentrating that much on your out-of-work projects, you must not be doing a very good job at work.
I'm thinking they're napping upright while running recorded videos of someone coding.
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6+ hrs each weekday + 15 hrs on Saturday + 15 hrs on Sunday
For those who
1. works on open source project apart from job.
2. trying their startups apart from job.
3. Freelance developer with more bandwidth.
and so on...
Life is a computer program and everyone is the programmer of his own life.
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...and obviously they are not jokers.
Life is a computer program and everyone is the programmer of his own life.
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Yes, and some of us are retired, don't have a "real" job and have taken up coding for pure interest and joy as a hobby.
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but the Code Challenges are helping... 
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