You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it.
Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow.
Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways.
But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!
I've seen this on Reddit a fair bit too but there's this sort of anti "10x-er" attitude. It makes logical sense to me that if someone spends more time practising a skill, then they would be more proficient and thus worth paying more. Yet there's a lot of pushback against that thought process because it is biased or something. Obviously there's more to a candidate than purely 'coding' skill but I find it weird that a company would want to explicitly avoid an indicator of time spent honing skill X purely because it discredits other people. I guess in an idealistic world it makes sense but the real world never quite lives up to the ideals.
I've found that a lot of hiring is explicitly biased against skill. The root cause is mostly the hirer wanting "people like me". Or, at least, not discriminating against "people like me".
I'm sure a lot of people who hire developers think of themselves as people who could write open source but don't have the time.
This also accounts for why stuff like leetcode persists (the hirers were successfully selected by that process), why top colleges are often preferred and even why the profession is predominantly white/male.
> You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing?
Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense.
To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises.
At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.
> I'm pretty sure almost nobody actually codes 8 hours at work.
The non-coding parts of work are necessary on oss projects too. In any case, programmers work being mostly coding + code review is pretty normal.
> Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.
That is nowhere near guaranteed and more likely to not be true. In particular, if you focus on maintaining the same software, it will be more of the same after a while.
> IME a far greater % is coding. There's also a lot of OSS people involved who don't code who help out with the other stuff.
It was not my experience. In work, the proportion of coding was bigger then when I maintained open source one. Mostly because company paid people to do other stuff. In OSS, afaik, it is was more of rare to have dedicated tester or to get already analyzed input. Also, the planning, organization, documentation, keeping tickets clean, decision making and so on are all on you. The ratio of project work is the same.
> It'll still be different to what you do at your day job and will necessitate picking up a different set of skills and a different perspective.
Maybe yes, maybe not. And after a while of maintaining the same software, you already maxed out what you learned. Moreover, you can learn new stuff without having side project. It has advantages, because then you dont have to finish and polish stuff. You just learn or try what interests you.
Lastly, side project is really not that dissimilar then working on the job - meaning job+side amounts to 10 hours a day work basically. It means your hourly effectivity will go down exactly like all studies on crunch predicts. You will get tired and slow.
as someone heading towards 5 years developing, I'm not sure it's as straightforward as you think (and if it is, I'd love advice on how to improve). In my career so far my work has roughly gone in phases of backend, frontend, devops/infrastructure. I've been able to improve my soft skills of learning how different organizations work, learning how to network and collaborate, learning how to learn, etc, and improve my technical skills of development, learning about best practices, etc, based on the particular technologies I work with at a given time. But I haven't had the chance to just spend 5 years progressively leveling up my java backend or javascript frontend skills. As a result I don't think I would qualify for a senior developer level quite yet. But by that token, perhaps I'm also not the best person to say whether or not this is the typical path for a sr dev or not
Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow.
Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways.
But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!