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A comment on Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job. Parent comment

Re:Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus o... by brundolf on Monday October 12, 2020 @04:35PM (#24759151)
That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of smart, capable, hardworking programmers who enjoy their jobs and aren't just taking the easy-street, but have enough else going on in their lives that they don't want to spend their free time writing code. I say this as someone who does write lots of code outside of work: it is not fair to gate people based on the number of side-projects they have. It's not even a reasonable indicator of job performance.
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Re:Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus o... by mdructor on Monday October 12, 2020 @07:00PM (#24760499)
Isn't it reasonable to assume the person spending a lot of extra time programming will generally become a better programmer than someone who doesn't? I'm aware that there are many factors that have nothing to do with raw programming skills which are factors of job performance. But considering the day to day duties of most junior/ic roles often consists mostly of programming, shouldn't this extra time spent programming make them, at least eventually, better, more efficient developers on-the-clock?
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