Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happy About It?

Re:Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happ... by ralferoo on Saturday March 14, 2026 @06:43AM (#47375299)

As well as the peer comment about Gladwell (10k hours is considered the point you've mastered a skill), it's also a far more honest metric about how much time you've spent actually programming.

Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

I personally would only measure my experience in years, because it's approaching 3 decades full-time in industry (plus an additional decade of cutting my teeth during school and university), but I can certainly see that earlier on in a career it's a useful metric in comparison to the 10,000 hours.

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Re:Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happ... by hrimfaxi on Saturday March 14, 2026 @11:39AM (#47377764)

> Maybe you were writing code, make design choices and debugging 8 hours a day. Maybe you were primarily doing something else and only writing code for an hour a day. Who would be the better programmer? The first guy with one year of experience or the second guy with 7 years?

So your logic is that the grandparent specified hours because they spent that many hours specifically programming, and not by just multiplying the number of years by the number of hours in a year?

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Re:Coders Coded Their Job Away. Why Are So Many of Them Happ... by ralferoo on Saturday March 14, 2026 @12:08PM (#47378075)

I don't know exactly how they arrived at their 20k hours figure, all I'm saying is that it didn't seem a controversial way of expressing their experience level, and assumed it was intended to be a comparison to the typical 10k hours needed for mastery of a craft.

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