Of course the most successful people you mentor are the ones who are only doing what you are guiding them to do and aren't distracted by life, it doesn't mean they are better.
This sounds like propaganda given by the CEO to have more effective employees. There is no doubt that focus can help you improve and get there faster, but at what cost and with what life goals?
Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.
Original post was about having hobbies and not feeling guilty about not turning them into side businesses. It would be better if our culture was set as a default to say "that's awesome, it's so good you could sell it if you were so inclined, but feel no pressure to do so, I just want you to know it's that good", instead of saying "you should make a store/service to sell your hobby" and make people feel bad, even though it's just a compliment.
Or, work toward finding a job and career that you enjoy.
Doing occasional side projects for fun is fine. Doing side coding projects as a form of escapism because your job isn't aligned with what you actually want to be doing all day is a fool's errand. The time is better spent searching for a job that comes closer to what you want to do.
> Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.
Of course - If you're starting a small business then that's something else entirely.
The vast majority of side projects that I see aren't profitable small businesses, though.
In my opinion, it's better for your mental health to treat your job as a job and get as much as you can out of it in terms of money and improving your skills. I think with enough time in the industry, you eventually figure this out.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing side projects as a form as escapism if your job isn't aligned to what you want to do. Life is what you make it. There's no "correct" way to live.
I think that this dismisses the joy of learning things that are unrelated to your day job or any hustle. I enjoy woodworking, turning it into a side hustle where I need to justify expenses would suck the joy out of it. I do something that is not work, recharge, and it is intellectually stimulating even if it is nothing like my day job in software.
Specialization is great, if the specialty you choose ends up being important or highly in-demand. For example, everyone wants to be the Geoffrey Hinton of the 21st century, a luminary in deep learning. Not too many people want to be the Geoffrey Hinton of 1986, publishing back-propagation into an AI winter and subsequent decades-long disinterest. It's hard to know which one you'll be (or in the above, both!)
Side projects and hustles allow you to broaden your toolbox and see potentially interesting crossovers. "It's like [X] for [Y]!" is a cliche startup pitch at this point, but it's true that a lot of cool ideas arise from applying principles of one field in a widely disparate area.
I don't think that it's particularly wrong to choose one route or the other--I admire the specialists I know, even as I know that's not something I can replicate. I'm too enamored of the possibilities, and cognizant of the brevity of my lifespan, to be able to commit like that.
That's the theory behind side projects, but it's a false dichotomy.
Side projects are, by definition, something you do on the side. Your primary day job requires attention whether or not you do any side projects. Side projects are additive on top of the work of your day job, but subtractive out of your pool of free time and energy.
Side projects always start with good intentions of broadening horizons, but people generally realize that they only have so many intensely productive hours in a day. Do you allocate your most productive hours to your job? Or to a side project? It's tempting to say "both" but in practice that will spread someone's finite energy too thin across both domains.
Students tend to go wrong when they think that side projects are the key to unlocking their next big job opportunity. When they start to burn out in their dayjob, they think they're just a couple of side projects away from qualifying for an opportunity that will make them happy. The trap is that being burned out at a dayjob and adding the additional work of side projects only worsens the burnout. They get stuck thinking they need to finish the side projects before they change jobs, but they can't complete the side projects because they're too burned out from jobs and a side project. In these cases, I encourage people to drop the side projects and just apply to jobs. It works better than most people expect.
For most people doing the side-hustle thing (and basically all of them doing it successfully), the calculus is "Put in the minimum amount of effort in my day job, get my R&R in the remaining time at work, and spend my mornings/nights/weekends working on the side hustle" vs. "Remain fully engaged mentally for the 8 hours I'm at work, relax when I come home, don't do the side hustle." That's why many employers hate side hustles.
I can't say which one is a better strategy, because it depends on the circumstances. Certainly the bulk of my lifetime income & assets comes from giving my all to my projects at Google, delivering successfully on them, and getting promoted a couple times. But before then I worked at a couple of startups and there was basically zero opportunity for a raise or promotion, because the company wasn't growing and there was no money to be had. And I got the Google job in part because of side projects (non-monetizable, but they showed I knew my CS and could work with a modern tech stack) done after work.
Yes, this is the real problem.
Side projects for fun and learning is fine. Nothing wrong with exploring new ideas as long as you're having fun.
But somehow side projects have become synonymous with compensating for misaligned careers. I see too many people working all day (or avoiding work all day) then coming home to work all evening and weekend. Then they wonder why they're burned out and not getting promotions at work.
Side projects can be a springboard to career advancement if executed carefully, but for every 1 side project success story I probably see 10 other people with side projects that never do anything other than drain their free time and add more mental work to their TODO list every day.
Maybe the principle is different though (not startup can bigco)... I did a bunch of side projects in school and at bigco before concentrating focus, so in a way we both went broad then had success going deep.
Just thinking out loud, I think we agree.
Nope. I actually developed two products for the second of the startups, which was the time period I was working on the side projects. The CEO (my boss) and I are still on good terms, and he knew about the side projects while I was working on them.
Startups usually fail because nobody wants what they're building, i.e. the startup should never have been founded in the first place. Certainly this was the case for this one: we were doing a platform for hedge fund algorithmic trading, but hedge funds are usually very resistant to running their code on someone else's platform, both because of lock-in/competitive reasons and because their code & algorithms are their crown jewels and they're very sensitive about running that on other people's infrastructure.
On the other hand, I do find a lot of enjoyment in fields that, today, are dominated by "winner takes all" dynamics and extremely low probabilities of (financial) success (e.g. most creative fields). I don't mind diversifying my time between a primary job that, while not burnout-land, is also a bit boring and reliable, and a secondary that, while incredibly unlikely to "strike gold", is rejuvenating of my creative energies. I do have to be careful that it does not drift into the maladaption that you note though.
I guess what I'm saying is: hobbies are good, too.
I certainly know people who do similar things around open source projects.
In my experience working for a huge company makes it very easy to broaden your skills. You can change teams, take on mentorship and recruiting, lead teams, lead initiatives, switch from front- to backend at different times, and learn from a large number of people - all from the "comfort" of the company you are already in.
I would say intense focus on one thing reaches a point of diminishing returns. The key is to recognize when you have mostly tapped that vein and develop something else. That doesn't have to be a github project, often you want something far afield, especially to avoid burnout. it can be speaking classes, or improv classes, or even fitness, or electronics, or whatever, anything that helps your stack.
The best possible thing that could happen by totally dedicated to job would at best be one more promotion to keep working on same mediocre stuff or manage a team doing that for few thousand dollars more. And it is not even blaming management as there are only limited opportunities in saturated industry and far more folks are chasing them.
Even those half finished projects have given me more knowledge and experience than mind numbing "next generation technology" training that corporate got a great deal on by some discount instructors.
Now it could all have been different if I joined a hyper-growth industry at right time. I might have gone far by just knowing one thing. At that point I could be proselytizing younger people that "you've got to focus on just one thing and you will make it big"
I saw exact example of this by listening to a SVP in my office who apparently rose through ranks by "sheer hard work, grit and focus". However to me it was pretty clear he joined company just at the time when industry as a whole about to enter massive growth. Of course he isn't gonna say how stars were aligned and he just got massively lucky. It is for others to see what it really was.
And quite frankly it would very likely bore me to focus one one thing only. I am not on this planet to get bored with my life or hunt for some mythical sunlit uplands by betting all my time and energy onto one thing, unable to keep a healthy distance riding it into a ditch because I want it to suceed too much. I want the things I create to be objectively good. For this I have to be able to keep a distance to them. Making them the sole center of my life would prevent me from that.
Apart from that I am easily the most productive person in my social environment, parts of which are of the "only focusing on one thing"-crowd. However I don't think my approach works for everyone. There are types who need these context switches and there are types who need that focus.
The second part of your argument is not the same. Trading stocks has nothing to do with programming, so much so that you can’t even use it to lie to yourself that ‘yes indeed, today I have chipped away at being a better programmer by trading these stocks’. It certainly can steal your attention, but it can never ever be used as a form of self manipulation (therefore, not a problem if you do it in moderation, like everything else in life).
It’s the first type of distraction that can destroy your soul if you indulge in it.
I don’t know if side hustles are the answer, but I know from experience however hard you work, there is a limit to awards at your job. Plus, employers do not care about their employees in general. Anyone who believes they care is just delusional.
Focusing on one thing is good, the trick is picking the right thing to focus on.
The interviewer asked each of them to write down the one thing that contributed most to their success. Both independently wrote "focus".
https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/bill-gates-warren-buffett-rev...
I remember reading the book The Goal in business school. What impressed me the most, was that the most efficient path to achieving a goal, is often non-intuitive, and sometimes even involves making destructive choices - choices that outside observers would find absurd and distasteful.
https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...
It's not only about choosing a singular goal, it's also about meticulously calculating your path there.
Don't follow the herd. The pack is FULL of jack-of-all-trades that have a smattering of random skills they picked up. Make literally every life choice with directionality and planning.
Failure is likely, success can be huge, that means my emphasis is on learning and have as many at bats as possible. How I imagine the best strategy is:
Try a lot of things learning as much as you can > prune what isn’t working and focus on what is (more and more of your fixed pie of time dedicated to the best opportunity) > continue until you pass your goal of success > then diversify again to maintain that level of success
You don’t focus on something too much until it’s proven itself, otherwise you’re far more likely to waste too much time on failures. Once you “really have something validated” (this is its own conversation), then you focus more and more on it driving it to its potential.
Diversification finds the potential winners and learns the fastest, focus makes that winner reach its potential.
By the way, many businesses have been built like that. Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight, the founder, worked as an accountant during the day for many years while building his shoe empire.
Yep, this is huge for me.
My "real job" is as a software developer, like most of us here. My side hustles are many and varied: portrait photography, vinyl decals, custom garments, metalworking, leather working, drone stuff (photography, photogrammetry, volumetric, even FPV and racing), etc.
I've had a few instances where I've found myself suddenly without employment for one reason or another. It's stressful, but it's not the emergency that it would be if not for all of my hobbies/hustles. I can spend a couple of days refreshing contacts and easily expect to be making enough money doing drone stuff alone to pay my bills and put food on my family's table.
When I was working on side stuff all the time, I was getting better rapidly, finding new ideas, solving problems in better ways and just always out of my comfort zone. I stopped because I did get burned out a bit. The focus was never resume filler though.
For me, I've realized that I dont have it in me to be 100% focused on one thing, which is great - then I can manage my expectations and goal, however I still try to be mindfull and not try to do to much.
Somewhere along the line, tech students got the idea that the key to success is to have many side projects and side hustles going at once. While it is true that in very narrow, specific cases something like a GitHub project could fill in gaps in a resume, it's rare that companies even look at GitHub work as the deciding factor in a hiring decision. It's too easy to let your energy, attention, and motivation get diluted across too many side projects. The problem is amplified when people start entering relationships and eventually having kids, further diluting their limited time and energy.
Some of the worst offenders are things that don't necessarily feel like a side hustle but nevertheless drain inordinate amounts of time. Daytrading stocks and cryptocurrencies commonly traps people into constantly checking their phone, Twitter, and portfolio to avoid losing money or missing out on breaking news. The pocket change most people make (or lose) on day trading is lost in the noise relative to a successful tech career.
The best advice I have for career success is to pick one thing at a time and focus intently on it. Use your off time to do anything else: Social activities, physical activities, or even simply relax and recharge for the next day.
It's better to do one thing well (usually your job) rather accumulate a lot of half-finished side projects or side hustles that are constantly stealing attention.