As for our industry, I don't disagree with you but I'd be a bit more nuanced. I'm not pressured to work long hours. But I often feel that if I want to reach my goals, I need an occasional coding marathon (which I don't mind because I do like coding, like everybody else doing this job I suppose).

An occasional coding marathon is fine. I've done it myself, but I don't expect it of anyone else, and if it became a routine expectation (as it seems to be with the author of this post), I would consider it a major red flag.

If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm makes you sick, why did you pick it?

I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the day or weekend or vacation, because I find it interesting. Why would I work in something of no interest to me?

Working outside of business hours is not the same as overworking.

I have some days packed with meetings and calls, and I actually find it refreshing/relaxing to work on more down to earth matters in the evenings or weekend.

Sometimes I even take vacations just to code on some work-related projects that I find super interesting and wouldn't have enough focused/dedicated time on normal business days.

Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO. I choose my work places because I genuinely like what I would do there.

I will even go further: If I end up with colleagues that are _not_ genuinely interested in what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job, I don't want to work with these people. Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand that there are gruntwork places out there, where the job is writing braindead CRUD apps all day long, and I wouldn't want to think about it after-work. But then again, I wouldn't work there on the first place.

    Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain
    after 6pm.

1. Thinking about work

or

2. Shutting your brain down

If I want to go hack on some Clojure after work, when the day job is in Python, then what's wrong with that?

That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

Realistically, you will spend more engineering time on your job than on your hobby project.

From my experience, that means my out-of-working-hours projects tend to be driven by needs or limitations I encounter at work.

I then find it more optimal to embrace and leverage that relationship between during-working-hours and out-of-working-hours projects.

This is the best of both worlds, you get work on more green field projects, have flexibility to choose what you work on, under the constraint that it solves something for your job, but under the assumption that your side projects are anyway often inspired by work, it's a fit by construction.

Let me give you an example:

Some years ago I used to manage some high performance computing cluster, with storage nodes attached to compute nodes as the jobs were very IO intensive. We used glusterfs, which at the time got acquired by RH and maintenance stopped. Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition). That's an example of an out-of-working-hours project, inspired by work, that got used at work, and thus counts as work, while still being very interesting.

This is just an example, but overall I kept that mentality and have been doing that kind of things for more than a decade. You just need to find the right job where you have 1) interesting problems to solve that inspires you to do more 2) the freedom to push your projects 3) the drive to work out of office hours to prove that your projects are worth it and push them.

All the colleagues I have respect for do the same. And someone that does not have this spirit, for me, is not someone I want to work with.

    That is of course perfectly fine, but to me that represents a
    not-so-ideal fit between your interests and your job.

    Me and a coworker started to dig into glusterfs to solve our
    issues. We spent months reading the code on our free time, reading
    papers on distributed filesystems, fixing issues in our fork
    (hoping that RH would pick up maintenance after the transition).

I love programming, but I love my family even more.

Do you spend 100% of the your non-working hours with them?

I manage to have a job, spend time with my wife, my kid, learn guitar, code & think on my free time, and I run 3 times a week.

I don't watch TV though ;}

I do 1 to 3 runs per week, between 45m and 1h15 each.

I have a guitar teacher coming 2h/week, the rest of my practice is random: could be from 0 to 6h per week.

Since I basically WFH 100%, I have no commute time, which helps a lot.

> what we do to at least think about interesting problems in their free time, then it's a bozo job

> Overall the whole hard distinction between work and non-work is overstated IMHO

Look, I continue to code and study in my free time, and I am still passionate about learning SoftEng and CompSci fundamentals, but the shit you're saying sounds super-sad and I definitely wouldn't want to work with someone who takes vacations to work on _work_ problems, either.

I'll take a seasoned and passionate engineer who has a family (even though I don't have one!) and has to work around that any time of day. In the vein of what GP was saying, bounds on limited resources like time can produce very effective work habits and conversely, seeing time as an unbounded resource (which is a phallacy anyway) sounds like the recipe to have a culture of sociopaths.

I worked 7 years about 60-70 hours each weak for customers which „are so important“ to work at weekends.

No one will give you the time back you could have spend better by developing yourself, family time or staring your own carrier. But working for a company is most of the times lost time.

Yeah, not quite as quick off the mark as you youngsters :-).

I posted a similar comment to yours in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27065714

Grass is always greener.

That's great and so do I, but I still don't see that as reason to work in my free time. I do some personal projects as well, and those are usually even more interesting but also more beneficial for myself. Of course I still think about stuff from work now and then, maybe I see an interesting solution when casually surfing the web, but I'm not going to do more about that than write a note for the next work day.

> Nothing great has been achieved by teams where people shut down their brain after 6pm.

Citation needed

- management pretending to be a wagie as a psyop

- extremely privileged and never had to grit your teeth to pay the bills

- going to have a rude awakening when the crop of younger millennials and Gen Z hits your workplace and you realize these bright young things with dreams and desires are only in software because it’s one of the few lucrative careers left in this proto-fascist shithole of a dying civilization.

As far as fascism goes, as you say, these things need time… but I’m sure a yet unwritten history book can enlighten you, right next to the passage on the gen Z backlash.

This is not really relevant, I was merely provoking emotional response for rhetorical effect (a useful and effective tool in the business/realpolitik toolkit)

And I’m sure these younger engineers are happy collecting their paycheques, scheming their schemes and thinking of what to disrupt next with all the free time they have because they roll their eyes at guff like the parent comment. Maybe that’s how we can all be happy.

    If you're so uninterested by your work that thinking about it after 6pm
    makes you sick, why did you pick it?

    I've been in the industry for 15 years, coding since 25+ years, and I very
    often think, code, read about work or work related things at any time of the
    day or weekend or vacation

You are admitting that you do think about code outside working hours, though you don't consider it to be work because.. it's code for a hobby project?

That's not a valid point to me. What if your job was open enough that you could find dozens of interesting fun things to code on the side?

That's the job you should be looking for.

    What if your job was open enough that you could find dozens of interesting
    fun things to code on the side?

    I have  some days  packed with meetings  and calls, and  I actually  find it
    refreshing/relaxing to work on more down to earth matters in the evenings or
    weekend.

Mine is.

I love being a software engineer, still, my family is orders or magnitude more important than my employer’s codebase. I really don’t care about my code architecture issues at work when I play Legos with my son or when I ask my wife if she had a good day while cooking together.

And I say that while currently working for a good employer on interesting topics.

I'm describing passion.

> love being a software engineer, still, my family is orders or magnitude more important

It's not mutually exclusive...

I wake up at 6am, usually because that's the time my son wakes up. I spend around 30m with him until my wife takes over.

Then I work on some stuff from 6:30 to 8:30 before the rush of the day starts.

My wife does her morning yoga starting at 8:30 so I take care of my son from 8:30 until the nany arrives at 9am.

I do my work day WFH (with some pauses to play with my son or chat with my wife) until 6pm, then stop to spend time with my son before he goes to bed around 7pm.

I cook, eat and discuss with my wife between 7pm and 9pm.

We usually then head to the sofa where she watches a movie and I sit next to her reading/coding.

She will go to bed around 10pm, I usually continue to work/code/read until 11pm/midnight.

3 times a week I swap the cooking part to go running for an hour. Or I do it at lunch time.

Overall I spend quite some time with my wife and child, while still working between 2 and 6 hours more per day.

I really don't think I have a crazy schedule, nor that I don't spend enough time with my wife or child, or doing sport.

And there is also quality vs quantity. Each family is obviously different.

As friendly advice, have an open conversation with your wife about that. Speaking from personal experience, I definitely had months where I thought I was balancing my time well enough and my wife disagreed.

It's as though the absence of religion in modern life has left a vacuum of comradery and dogmatism, so they let work fill it.

Keep in mind that many people are passionate about multiple things and it is ok that they are not coding related. Please, just don’t assume I am not passionate about my job if I spent “only” 8 hours a day on it on average. There are just more things I am passionate about and I have only one life to live.

I have multiple competing interests and code + tech adjacent skills are the ones that people will pay for. I also didn't pick it: I'm a 2nd generation programmer and it was taught to me as a basic life skill starting as a toddler.

Not everybody gets into a profession for the same reasons or in the same way.

I would love to be paid to pursue my passions full-time, but that opportunity has not yet arisen. So I split my time accordingly between doing what earns me a living and doing what I actually enjoy in life.

So you don't really stop working at 6pm..

And it’s not about wether I like my work or not, it’s just that I have more important things to think about or that I just let my mind wander.

I already spent most of the day on the problem, and that exceeds my natural interest in it.

I think I'd like a job with truly flexible hours: work all evening on something if it's occupying my thoughts anyway, but then get a full 'evening' to chill, full night's sleep, and start the next day when I'm ready. I can do the former, but I'm still going to be expected to dial in ~to pointlessly summarise it~ for stand-up in the morning. (No I don't have young children, yes yes this wouldn't work for everybody.)

I've started billing that. Not always, rarely in full, but I bill some of it. It's not just for the money but started more like "what exactly do I work? Best way to know is to bill it".

I often think about code at night but only in the context of a personal project.

Taking care of your headspace and unwinding at end of the day should be one of the most important routines in a programmer’s life.

Honestly even 99% of non-nuclear reactor code doesn't need on call. Most of the time it can wait until the morning. Amazon? Sure, have on call. Your app that's used by businesses during the business day? Fix it tomorrow.

If I'm managing this one, then you're definitely going home on time and getting a break from work each day.

I tried to tell him: Nobody asked this of him. He didn't need to prove himself, it wasn't on his back if we didn't meet the deadline, it wasn't worth sacrificing his health and the relationship with his wife and more than likely burning out before 30.

When I start a new job nowadays I don't install teams or slack or connect my work email to my phone. If I have messages waiting in the morning I just address them then. If anyone complains, oh well.