Well.. this assumes that coding (all coding?) is a burden..
I agree with the article in that coding _for_ work, outside of normal work hours, isn't something to strive for. I did that a lot when I was young, but that was not only when it was necessary due to the strained time schedules we had then, it was also because I literally hungered for it. I needed to. So I would go back to work after dinner and hack away to figure out how the OS worked, deep inside, for example. Writing or modifying device drivers, writing tools that extended the OS functionality, that kind of things. Back when things were new.
These days I don't, as a rule, code for work outside of work hours. But I need to code in my spare time. That's when I can do things that really interest me, side projects where I can enter the 'flow', something I nearly never can do at work anymore. I have to go into flow mode now and then to keep up my ability for concentrating on problems (and yes that's necessary to keep up my work performance too). A few years back the constant interrupts at work degraded my performance so much that I spent my three week holiday in various cafeterias, with a laptop and documentation, and worked all day on my hobby project, finally re-learning to enter the flow again. As in "I looked up, and five hours had passed". Myself, laptop computer, documentation, coffee, food available. Happiness.
The article states that by not coding at home you can “have a life, too”, implying you won’t have one if you code at home. This idea is repeated in the article, suggesting to me that it is more than just clickbait.
That’s dumb. Of course you can “have a life”, regardless of whether your hobbies include something you also get paid for. Denigrating folks as not having a “life” for this reason, even as a rhetorical device, is dumb.
I think you might be reading into it too much. It's not an angry article, and it never dismisses people who do like to code outside of work. The title is meant to support people who don't want to code in their free time. Maybe they chose those particular words poorly, but it doesn't take away from the overall premise.
The author even says, after listing activities one might do outside work, "But is it really necessary? That is for you to decide." It's about not needing to feel obligated to be into all that, not disallowing it.
You get better at coding, just like any other skill, the more you do it. So yeah, it's ok to not code at home. But all else being equal, the people who do are better coders.
I think it a lot more nuanced than that. People that go home to work on github repos that are essentially just copy-pasting from HackerRank are not doing themselves any favors. I mean, sure, their repo looks better to HR drones. If that is what they are worries about, no problem.
But if they are really trying to get better, then they have to do 'deliberate' practice. Just grinding through things isn't the end-all-be-all. You have to really be trying.
I know that's a bit glib, but I think that there has been some good work done in this area of 'deliberate' practice recently. Cal Newport, Dan Coyle, Josh Waitzkin, Tom Sterner, and others have written a fair bit about the deliberate part.
> But if they are really trying to get better, then they have to do 'deliberate' practice. Just grinding through things isn't the end-all-be-all. You have to really be trying.
Not only that, but the types of coding you can do at home are often much different than your work. Most hobby projects won't give you a chance to process terabytes of data or serve data to hundreds of millions of clients or send bytes across the country with microwaves. So if your job is related to any of those things, you're not going to improve much at home.
Also, much of what companies value in software developers isn't raw coding ability. You have to be able to work with other people, understand business requirements, convince people to help on your work, etc, etc. From that perspective, somebody who spends their evenings at bars talking to strangers might be building more important career skills than the person who codes all night.
> Not only that, but the types of coding you can do at home are often much different than your work. Most hobby projects won't give you a chance to process terabytes of data or serve data to hundreds of millions of clients or send bytes across the country with microwaves. So if your job is related to any of those things, you're not going to improve much at home.
Then again, most jobs won't give you that chance either.
It can be that coding hobby projects can be your only chance to learn how to write good, readable, maintainable and performant code. If your job involves churning out features for customers or closing tickets, you will not have time for anything other than "your best under time pressure". Hobby projects can give you opportunity to improve the quality of code you produce by default.
On personal projects I have entered a flow state so deep that, when my wife interrupts me to remind me I skipped breakfast and now it's lunchtime, it takes me a few moments to actually be able to understand her. It's like she's speaking a foreign language.
I've done this to lesser extents a few times. Last week I read the comment below and it legit scared me. I've been getting up and walking a lot more because of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699955
You can get tired, cranky and angry easily and fast. It’s much worse if your sleep has been bad recently. You can make really poor decisions and offend people or do stupid things you’ll regret because of non-existent willpower. You can also faint which is dangerous even if you fall down relatively safely, never mind if you crack your head open or if you’re in the middle of doing something even moderately dangerous.
Start fasting by skipping breakfast and work your way up to skipping lunch and then doing a full day fast if you’re going to do it and always stay hydrated. If you’re doing a long fast make sure you’re getting salt too, even if it’s not hot enough that you’re sweating much. Take it easy and go slowly like with starting a new exercise regimen.
Semi related to this, if you do code after work (because you enjoy it), it's OK to code without it being a "startup".
I often get bogged down with "how do I monetize, market, and maintain this", which just kills my motivation. Just because something isn't marketed and monetized doesn't make it invalid; outside of work coding has brought me numerous benefits:
- Learning new things. Not because I feel like if I don't I'll fall behind, but because I like learning things I don't get to experience at work.
- Expressing yourself. I like being able to execute on my vision without worrying about what my employer wants. Or, if its a game I'm making, using that coding to express an artistic vision.
- Meeting people. You can still talk about your project at meetups or online without trying to "sell" it.
I think it's only the HN crowd that tries to look at side-projects from the monetization angle. (How else do you explain the frequent 'what's your side-business' posts? Also, this is a VC's site after all.) There are many computing cultures - people making games for gamejams, working on quines, writing code for GameBoys, contributing to Firefox, Arduino hackers. Maybe finding one of those groups will change your mindset?
I'm curious about the proportion of people who started visiting HN because of ycombinator vs those who came just because someone told them it had good discussions.
> I often get bogged down with "how do I monetize, market, and maintain this", which just kills my motivation.
If someone is thinking that way, then they aren't engaging in a hobby, they're engaging in a startup. That's two different things.
I used to fall into this way of thinking before I recognized what a trap it actually is. Now, when I start a hobby project, I intentionally ignore possible monetization of it. If I feel a strong urge to monetize, then I move it out of my recreation time and into my work time.
Totally this! My father is/was a stage and costume designer in the theatre.
He worked so hard during the week (and weekends - theatre people keep some heavy hours!) that he rarely did many passion projects (though he did manage to fit a few in). But when he did they were on things that we really important to him, and that he gave himself the time to enjoy the process, and results and the iterations to follow.
I think he's always set me to have a good work life balance, and when I look back at the life he built for himself (and for us) it makes me really proud.
Now he's 'retired' he is in over-drive. He and my mother are slowly hand-painting their entire house, nothing is safe from redecoration. He's also painting loads of portraits and writing far more. Great to see a 78 year old man have so much drive and energy for creativity. I hope I do too at his age.
I think this goes deeper than coding, we live in a world of “Give it you’re all”, but really the only thing we should be giving it all for is what makes us happy.
Over the last 25 years of coding, I’ve always stuck to the 9-5 (ish), 5 days a weeks. I’m not rich, but do alright and I’m fairly happy. I actually have time to do things that are not coding outside of work.
The world needs driven people that give it their ‘all’, but we shouldn’t give those a hard time that just give their ‘bit’
I don't think the world needs driven people. Maybe a few, but not many for sure. So maybe things get produced or invented at a slower pace, but people have time to enjoy a meaningful life, well sign me up.
Yes, I aggree, a few driven people is probably enough. There is a really interesting book called 'in praise of slow' which has the idea as its main point
Yes, all of them study law outside of work clients pay them to do; in fact, they are required to do so as a condition of licensing, it's called continuing education requirement.
The same is true of virtually all licensed professionals.
Programmers aren't licensed professionals, so they don't have a licensing requirement for continuing education. But the programmers that are professionals, even if not licensed are doing continuing education anyway, and hands-on projects that aren't for paying clients is frequently a big part of that.
(Now, professionals with good employers will often be paid to do continuing education on work time, and that's true of programmers, too. If you have 20% time, your continuing education projects may not be “side projects”.)
> Whoever said programming side projects should be “full-stress cases”?
That's what the context is here. There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into. Because you love coding so much you can't stop.
Be it your future start-up, or contributing to an open source project (or 3).
Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices. Actually writing a project using it is another level of complexity.
It's the difference between reading and analyzing the arguments of a legal case and reconstructing and presenting the arguments yourself.
> There's a notion in the software development profession that you should have a side project which you put near full-time hours and / or effort into.
There's a common notion that you should be doing practical learning, including side projects, outside of “normal” paid work. It is far less common, however, to encounter the idea that it should be near full-time hours (and it's not clear to me what “full-time effort” distinct from hours even could mean.)
> Studying law is equivalent to reading the tech news / seing what other people are doing / keeping up with best practices.
No, it's not: in fact, this kind of professional reading is often expressly excluded from the definition of activities that apply to continuing legal education requirements. Lawyers do, as a practical matter, need to do the equivalent of what you are talking about, but in addition to not as their CLE requirement.
My wife is an excellent lawyer. She spends "NOWHERE" the same amount of time as I do to stay in touch with whats happening in the field.
She has to read new laws once in a while (sometimes even once per year). To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.
I would not be lyin when i say being a good software developer (in the eyes of industry) costs you around 20h of work extra per week.
> To be relevant I as a Software Developer have to read about new stuff DAILY, while writing to my own blog, do side projects from time to time and learn other stuff i need for my current work.
No, you don't. To be relevant, you just have to know a little JavaScript. You can find a good-paying job with that.
What you described is something that's correlated with personal love in the craft, and which can help you get better at it (then again, it also makes you more frustrated about professional life). You can fake it, of course, if for some reason you feel you need to,.
Yup. I agree about work life balance and not letting your profession consume you. On the other hand "real professions" do have continuing education outside of work, and it does seem to suck. Takes similar, or even more hours than personal coding, and it's probably less enjoyable. There's an argument that programmers should be treated more like licensed professionals, be more liable for mistakes due to negligence, and have more demands placed on them.
Many of my friends ended up becoming doctors, PAs, or nurses and medicine is basically all they talk about, especially the doctors. Their phones are overflowing with medical photos and articles. Get two or more of them together and you're not going to discuss anything besides their field. One volunteers for some Doctors Without Boarders type organization, another teaches classes at a university, I think they almost all do some ad hoc volunteer work from time to time.
I think in most fields the top performers are going to be investing significant effort outside work to practice, learn, and improve themselves throughout their career. Coding is a little bit unique compared to certain professions because it can be done alone and without incurring much additional cost.
> Many of my friends ended up becoming doctors, PAs, or nurses and medicine is basically all they talk about, especially the doctors.
Yes. It's the same with all of the engineers I know (and I suspect it's the same with all professions).
With my engineering friends, we had to set a rule that if we're at a social function that includes people not in our field, "talking shop" is expressly forbidden. This is to prevent a problem that had gotten out of control -- having a handful of people talking about arcane things that nobody else can understand, let alone are interested in.
> I think in most fields the top performers are going to be investing significant effort outside work to practice, learn, and improve themselves throughout their career.
Agreed. I spend a lot of free time reading about and discussing technology. Occasionally teach, occasionally do some advising.
But I rarely have a side project which consumes my time. I guess the equivalent would be a nurse going and taking a shift at another hospital.
> I guess the equivalent would be a nurse going and taking a shift at another hospital.
You're looking at the wrong profession. A nurse can't "just" go and start nursing stuff. Programmers are like carpenters - they can just go and start building stuff for themselves, using the same tools and skills they use at work. Except they also have an industry-imposed, medicine-style continued learning requirement due to how fast the field keeps changing.
> Does a doctor practice medicine outside of his hours? Again, some work at free clinics, but generally no.
Constantly. Besides being on formal call, there are informal consults texted or called in constantly, plus emergencies, plus friends-and-family consults. Plus paperwork for the patients you’ve seen very often takes longer than your “official” hours. And keeping up to date on the relevant literature is not something that happens during work hours.
Very very few docs stop working when their “hours” are up. And I’m not talking about exceptionally driven, ivy-festooned docs - I’m talking about the average schmoe you’d probably look down on.
No. What you describe are still work hours. They can, and often do lead to overtime (paid or not), but its far fetch from wrapping your work at workplace, coming home, and continuing doing the same stuff. At least that's how common doctors's work looks in Switzerland.
All of those professions do plenty of hours of "work" outside of "billable hours".
They all read professional publications in order to keep up with the progress their professions are making. In many cases this is a few hours a day of reading.
For most this is a chore but it's part of being a professional in those professions.
Studying, practicing, and improving your skills are just as much "doing the job" as actually writing code. It's all an essential part of production in the end.
> Do veterinarians like it when you ask them to take a look at your cat when they're not in clinic? No. Almost always no.
My wife(a vet) won't even let me tell people, that aren't very close to me, that she is a vet. It's ridiculous the amount of free advice she gets asked. The worst part about it is that she has had several classmates from vet school that have been sued(and lost) from the free advice they gave to other people outside of work hours. It's a huge liability issue and trust me, the people who want free medical advice are the people who will sue you because you didn't correctly diagnose the problem for free.
I included the vet example because they're almost violent about not wanting to work outside of hours.
For the reason you stated. And some have told me that providing that kind of free advice devalues the profession and enables bad (read cheap) pet owners.
People brought up continuing education requirement, but since you keep asking about doing the stuff they do for work, outside work: lawyers and doctors generally don't, unless they're volunteering or giving out free advice (risky). But that's not necessarily because they don't want to, it's because those are service skills of limited utility outside regular work context.
Consider instead a car mechanic, or a carpenter. It wouldn't be surprising to find a mechanic doing some old car restoration work after hours, or a carpenter making their own trinkets or furniture. Unlike the skills of doctors and lawyers, those skills can be easily applied in personal life.
Software development is a funny trade, with continuing education requirements of medicine and law (though self-imposed, not regulated), but with work type more similar to carpentry or car repair. That is, unless you're working with some very unique hardware or very unique datasets, you can do the same type of work at home that you do at work (and quite likely of better quality, as you're likely to have better working conditions at home).
Most personal coding is done (at least initially) for personal use. Those specialisms you list are not ones most people regularly consume. Software is something virtually everyone in developed countries consumes daily. I think for that reason, a better comparison is whether farmers grow food for themselves, or whether chefs cook their own meals.
I hate that this has become so entrenched, and I hate that my previous jobs don't allow me to use samples from their codebase in my portfolio. I hate feeling like my github or bitbucket are sparse and this is somehow a sin. Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple! Don't force me to waste my precious time making little toys in my spare time to potentially amuse someone. Yes I could make a minesweeper clone in a day, no I don't want to.
Most of the fun of programming for me is the mathematics and theory portion, I like to implement or toy around with algorithms and write little half finished scripts. That is fun for me, but is that presentable? Nope.
> Just give me a takehome project and I will show you how I program, it is really that simple!
I once applied for a job where that was the entry exam: they gave you the specs for a program about a month in advance of your interviews and you were expected to bring in the solution you wrote. The task was intentionally extremely difficult (they specifically warned you about that).
Although I didn't get the job, I really did appreciate that approach to skills testing. I thought it was brilliant.
People are allowed to do whatever they want. Any claims of lack of passion or work ethic are opinions and anecdotes of individual experiences.
There is limited time in a day and in life, you can't spend hours on multiple hobbies and interests without compromise and without eventual burnout within ones capabilities.
Feel like this kind of do's and don'ts of when to spend time and how much time to spend coding is a recurring topic that should be put to bed in the developer world. Those who want to shine above the rest will always and should pursue that goal, those falling below that bar is perfectly fine, it's all about personal wants and needs at the end of the day.
So what happens when your company's roadmap consists of technical slop and they won't pay you to learn things like differentiable programming? Do you think they're going to pay you to write Vue.js until you retire?
This strategy might work for a few years, but is a long-term career hazard. You are in charge of raising your own bar.
Honestly, this is a good reason to consider a job change. You can learn new/other tech on your own, sure... but not nearly as efficiently as you can in-situ.
Besides, the tech itself is rarely the limiting factor.
Currently in this position. I'd rather find another job that cares about giving me the tools and helping me do the tasks they want me to do, just busting my ass in my own time doesn't solve the underlying issue.
If I have a piece of advice to juniors about this is: burnout is real.
I used to have personal projects that didn't pay off in any way beyond personal learning, and they sure were taxing on my life.
Now I have a job that I enjoy and is challenging enough. For the last year I have been making a conscious effort to change how I deal with personal projects. I try to take on tasks that are low effort, and not feel guilty about dropping something if I feel that it doesn't work, or it's starting to require too much from me.
Anecdotally, I've been a professional software engineer for around 10 years at top tech companies. I'm currently have similar pay and seniority as a Google L6. I've very rarely worked more than 9 hours in a day, and in those 10 years, I've spent less than 100 evenings coding on personal projects. So yeah, it's possible for sure.
It is perfectly OK to only code at work, but you need to ensure you are learning and developing at work. Almost all programming related fields are still growing and changing rapidly. To stay relevant you need to invest in learning and self improvement. This can definitely be done as part of your job, but it's also something you can achieve by coding outside of work.
Regardless of how you do it, ensuring that you are continuously learning and staying relevant is important.
While I agree that you should keep learning and growing, I don't agree that its because technology is changing so rapidly. Often times change is equated with "new X framework" that just becomes popular and has no significant advantage over existing tool sets. Also, most companies rarely adopt new technologies, even if it would benefit them, because they've produced so much product using one tool set, that making a change would require too much time. So it's not unreasonable to find companies still working with 20 year technologies (cough vb6) because the install base is so large that an investment to upgrade just isn't worth the cost.
In short, you can make a pretty good living simply maintaining old, existing software and never learning anything really new. After all, people only care that it works and that you fix their perceived issues with it. As long as you keep doing that, you'll be employed.
I became a coder because I find it useful, valuable, and creatively stimulating.
The only time I really enjoy coding, in the sense that 12 hours can pass by in the blink of an eye, is when I'm working on my own things. So by the time I'm done working for ~8 hours a day I'm bursting with excitement for when I get to fire up my development VM and code for another 6 hours.
I get excited learning new things about my field. I get excited encountering and solving new problems. I get excited when I am able to form connections between isolated domains of knowledge and create work that is more valuable than the time I spent on it.
Programming is engineering, but it is also art. I am an engineer, but I am also an artist. I live to create; writing useful applications, making video games and writing music are all ways I do this. My career path has and will continue to be a reflection of these values.
I understand if some people chose to become programmers just for the money. I hope you are at least treating my field with respect and not just getting by with minimal effort while eroding employer/employee trust and dragging down the median salary.
But consider that you could be making money in a field you are truly passionate about, blurring the lines between what is "work" and what is a "personal project". This is what it means to become successful in life, not wads of cash.
I recall this as a standard 'canned' interview question. The goal was to assess if the applicant had a general passion for software development as well as a drive to learn new things. While I had no particular issue with the goal of the question at the time, I always felt it a bit one dimensional. At a different job in a more corporate setting, I find the push to be just the opposite. Time-off is time to unwind, use it as such. I believe companies have found success in this cultural imperative as a means of preventing turnover and burnout.
Personally, I feel like if I didn't develop software outside of work, I would start to see software development as work, rather than a skill, just like being able to write or play a musical instrument.
I think, for your own sake, if you're skilled at something, you should try to use that skill on your own terms. Many arduous professions are the practise of enjoyable skills on someone else's terms (be it an employer or a market): driving, cooking, gardening, etc.
I work in Front-End and have always had side-projects with coding involved (Games, Websites, CLI-Tools).
Some of my career's and company's circumstances (no senior front-end-devs for reviewing and mentoring around, mostly work on classic websites/web-shops) make it necessary. It's the only way to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date and to improve beyond what I do at work.
Coding and building is fun to me, so I was ok with this. After getting kids though, my available home-coding-time shrunk to almost zero.
My employer does allow and pay for conferences/workshops, but there's nothing as good for learning as a real project with more senior team-members, I guess.
I really don't want to leave after 8 years of building reputation and seniority, and start from scratch elsewhere, in a big unknown.
Well, same here on the kids. I wrote /bin/ps for Linux and maintained the procps package for about a decade. I also did significant work on Tux Paint and a little Linux kernel work. I managed just fine with 3 tiny kids and a job, and later with 5 small kids and no job. Adding back a job, I hit my limit. This is one way that Open Source projects die.
Since then, the situation has only gotten more extreme. My family size goes to 11, and yes that is one louder than 10. Soon I'll have a dozen, all homeschooled.
I got one kid interested in following in my footsteps, so sometimes I get to have fun teaching him. Mostly, there just isn't time for anything extra. One factor that helps is that I'm in a different part of the industry. You're in "Front-End", which might mean you need to learn a new javascript framework every year. I mostly write in C, for which the last update was 8 years ago and the last significant update was 20 years ago. When I'm not doing C, I'm doing a wide variety of different kinds of assembly language. That changes, but one is expected to constantly refer to the manual. So really I've gone a quarter century with no significant change. I am pondering the value of learning rust, but I certainly don't have to scramble each year to learn the hot new thing.
Yes. It is ok. I hate that we've made it a norm to expect everyone to have the same hobby -- exactly the thing you do at work, and it better damn well be a hobby that you can monetize.
Some people code and live on the MeetUp circuit when they're not coding. I do those things on rare occasion, but I've got a wife, a small child, and other hobbies.
I like that this article reminds all of us to not normalize overwork.
That said, it seems anti-hustle is becoming the new hussle, and yes, it's ok to code on your own as well if you enjoy it, want to learn, etc. You just shouldn't HAVE to.
It's sad that this has to be said. I have lots of side projects that involve making stuff, music, electronics, restoring old computers and the like. Very occasionally these projects involve writing some code, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
If you want to write code for fun and it makes you happy then go for it! But by no means feel obliged to. It doesn't make you any more or less of a programmer.
On one hand: duh. On the other: if you also code at work as a step on a ladder you'd like to climb, coding more than just at work is a common method of getting ahead of people who don't. Then again, that doesn't require not having a life, so the ultimate position I'd take would be: find a balance but make sure that it doesn't turn in to complacency.
I love to code, and do so not only at work but at home as well.
That said, I was unaware that there are people who feel pressure to code in their off-hours. That's silly. On your own time, you should do whatever helps you live a good life and be happier. If that includes programming, there's nothing wrong with that. If it doesn't, there's also nothing wrong with that.
Idk, I have found the best programmers all love to code. Unless you are a prodigy talent, you are going to have to program a lot on your own to be able to even be good enough to land and keep a job at a good company.
i like 4 hours a day, everyday, weekends too. Even on vacations I like to get 4 hours of coding in and THEN enjoy non-coding activity. But lots of coders seem stuck in i must do a full 8 hours a day M-F only.
> Obviously. But no one is being pressured to not code at home by their peers and employers.
Except everyone is. The people calling us "nerds" having "no life" only recently shut up, and that's because they see how much money this occupation nets and now are silently jealous. But if some of them asks you "what are you up to this weekend", and you say "coding $sideproject", they'll look at you weird.
That's all on top of the social pressure to "not be on the computer so much".
No it's not, not if you want to want to claim to be a true professional.
I have never met a professional that only engages in their craft at work only. Professionals practice their craft all time especially outside work.
Work time is game time. Work time is not the time to engage in Research but strictly development. Unless you work for an R&D lab. It is the engaging in research instead of development that's the cause of software projects failing and having all sorts of issue. When it's D time, it's time to simply apply all the best principles that you know, nothing else.
This means, you must practice (research) off hours.
Can you imagine a math professor that only practices mathematics only when they teach? Or a musician that only plays music only during performance?
It's okay to only code at work if you are just a code monkey and not a professional. In that case, don't expect the high rewards of the industry, don't claim to be a "professional" granted that the definition of a professional is one that does it only for money.
Look at the very best in the industry, just think of them, name em. They all code outside of work. Jeff Dean, Norvig, Linus, Stallman, Carmack, Wolfram
I don't think the post is say that you CAN be the next Jeff Dean, Norvig, Linus, Stallman, Carmack, Wolfram etc. etc. by not coding outside of work. I think they are saying that it's OK not code outside of work, its OK not to be in this very top percent of the profession.
What is a 'True Professional' in the context? I don't think you can compare the top 0.01% of any profession to the rest and say this small percentage are the 'True' professionals and the rest are not. Pretty sure my accountant is not doing accounting in his spare time, he is no less a professional for not doing so.
Spending 100% of work time coding reminds me of the startup world. Eventually it leads to a culture where people get locked in the same patterns and don't try new things. If you work at a larger company, there's always down time for watching conference videos, side projects, etc. I've found encouraging people to spend some of their work time learning makes for better developers.
There's no difference between work and living. it's all the same. This work/life balance is crap. Working 100% of the time is bad, but the idea that your only can work in an allocate piece of time for intellectual work is the most ridiculous thing ever. Doesn't matter if you write music, write code, or writing a book. You work when your mind is ready to go. To refuse to work when your brain is ready is a strong signal that you don't have passion for this. If you're engaged in manual labor then sure, but for all intellectual work there's no boundary. It's perfectly NOT okay to preach these rubbish about being mediocre. The interesting thing is the very people who also code anywhere, tend to be very balanced and also enjoy their life outside of coding.
> No it's not, not if you want to want to claim to be a true professional.
I disagree, although I suspect that I don't know what you mean by "true professional".
> Look at the very best in the industry, just think of them, name em.
Sure, but you don't have to be the very best in the industry to be a legit professional. By definition, the overwhelming majority of highly skilled engineers are not the very best in the industry.
These days I don't, as a rule, code for work outside of work hours. But I need to code in my spare time. That's when I can do things that really interest me, side projects where I can enter the 'flow', something I nearly never can do at work anymore. I have to go into flow mode now and then to keep up my ability for concentrating on problems (and yes that's necessary to keep up my work performance too). A few years back the constant interrupts at work degraded my performance so much that I spent my three week holiday in various cafeterias, with a laptop and documentation, and worked all day on my hobby project, finally re-learning to enter the flow again. As in "I looked up, and five hours had passed". Myself, laptop computer, documentation, coffee, food available. Happiness.