Of course that's your prerogative, but their claim still holds true. If you never ship your own projects, you're still a person that never ships.

What you do at your day job doesn't matter, (unless you work for yourself), if you ship while at work, your work is a place that ships. Not you.

> What you do at your day job doesn't matter, (unless you work for yourself), if you ship while at work, your work is a place that ships. Not you.

Naw, this is just a toxic take.

A project is a project, whether it's a solo one or collaborative. Whether it's "personal" or professional. 99.9999% of software that actually gets widely used (because it's useful to many people) has more than 1 coder, and arbitrarily deciding that the only "real" coding you can claim to is unpaid solo coding is a weird gate to keep.

Does the Sistine Chapel not make Michelangelo "someone who completes paintings" because he was doing paid work for the Vatican? Please.

Don’t worry, there’s no conflict there. We don’t ship at my day job either ;)

But really my point was that you can still derive a lot of satisfaction from a project without shipping it.

Absolutely!