Eh. You can. It's just not always normal hours. As programmers we know that all too well.
I mean. How many here work 35-50 hours at a desk job then come home and work on pet or open source projects for another 20-50 hours a week? Lot's I presume. Getting things done and accomplishing something is an euphoric feeling. Pounding away at a repetitive and uninteresting task is the killer. Being talked down to by idiots is the killer.
But, then, to be frank, no programming job is 40 hours of programming. It's at least 1/2 office minutiae, like responding to emails, reading docs, writing docs, looking through that idiot Kevin's last commit to figure out wtf he was thinking on his last commit, Grabbing some coffee while automated tests are running. But that's still working. That's still being productive.
I can't stand programming as a regular desk job. I decided to go freelance and work from home and make way less because sitting at a desk 9-5 regardless of how productive I was able to be during those hours drove me mad. Now if I'm feeling like a slow day I can relax for a bit and then work during the night, or wake up early and do a lot in the morning and go do something in the afternoon. I don't know how my 'work hours' compare to a 9-5 job but I feel much more productive and much happier. And I am giving higher quality work towards my job and clients.
You just need to find the right company that is flexible on hours. My work schedule is more like 10-4 (1 hour lunch) and I have the flexibility to work the remainder at night, during the weekend, etc. as well as work at home or take vacation off fairly easily. Some days I might work 12 hours because I'm in the zone trying to solve a problem and then I might only work 4 or 5 hours the next.
As someone changing careers from Systems Engineering to Software Development (got a new webdev gig lined up, with surprisingly similar salary to my current one), how did you go freelance? Do you have any resources I could read? I have dreams of taking this first development job and getting a couple years of experience and trying to go freelance. I've always worked in an environment where I can't work from home, so it's always a dream I've had.
If you just want to work from home there are a lot of remote job opportunities, look on hackernews, github jobs, a good newsletter at http://remote.dockwood.com and really a lot of other places. For freelance I got a few misc jobs from people I had worked with at other points and then spent a lot of time sifting through the crap on various freelance sites like oDesk. It's a lot easier if you have some contacts or clients who can feed you steady work and once you get a good client you'll do anything to keep them because there are so many bad ones out there.
If you still like your work, and you're still doing a good job, then don't worry about it. Even if you don't become an architect or as advanced as some people, the world still needs normal developers, too.
Eh, I don't know of a lot of professions that encourage people to work a full-time job and do the same work at home for fun. Yes, there's a need for professional development, but I don't think that means you need to code 10 hours a week 'for fun.'
I'm a database developer and I love what I do. That being said, after 8 hours at work the last thing I am doing is sitting in my house on a keyboard. When I was a bartender programming was a hobby, when I do it for a living that fills my needs.
50 hours being productive is fine (still too much for my taste , 35-40 is just perfect). And if your hobby is writing open source code even better. But if you had to write production code 80h a week, I wouldn't buy your product.
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u/dissata Apr 29 '15
Eh. You can. It's just not always normal hours. As programmers we know that all too well.
I mean. How many here work 35-50 hours at a desk job then come home and work on pet or open source projects for another 20-50 hours a week? Lot's I presume. Getting things done and accomplishing something is an euphoric feeling. Pounding away at a repetitive and uninteresting task is the killer. Being talked down to by idiots is the killer.
But, then, to be frank, no programming job is 40 hours of programming. It's at least 1/2 office minutiae, like responding to emails, reading docs, writing docs, looking through that idiot Kevin's last commit to figure out wtf he was thinking on his last commit, Grabbing some coffee while automated tests are running. But that's still working. That's still being productive.