Or more absurdly: Do plumbers re-do their home drain piping as a hobby because of their passion for PVC? Do landscapers go home and trim hedges after hours for fun? Do doctors spend their off-ours doing minor surgery in order to have "remarkable careers"? Maybe some do, but it's not expected. Why is it that software practitioners are expected to always be coding in their free time and working on side projects?

> Do doctors spend their off-ours doing minor surgery in order to have "remarkable careers"?

Quite a few go to the Third World to perform surgery for free — and, not coincidentally, increase their skills.

Yes, but that's not concurrent with working a full-time paid position either. When the go to another country with a group like MSF that is basically their full-time job, paid or not.

But, relatively speaking, a tiny fraction. I have yet to meet a doctor personally who has done this.

> Why is it that software practitioners are expected to always be coding in their free time and working on side projects?

They aren't, and plenty of places don't expect and look for that; OTOH, there are enough in the field that do do that, and enough of a perception that is correlated to ability to deliver value, that places looking for the best often do use both doing that, and the evidence of the work done doing that, as a signal.

OTOH, if you want to get a boring, fairly low paying (compared to Silicon Valley tech-co standards) job as an internal enterprise developer at BigNonTechCo (or BigGov), you probably don't need to worry about it.

I think the key is that the correlation to ability is merely perceived. Has this ever been shown? Do people who code side projects in their free time actually tend to provide more value at work than people who don't? That would be interesting to find out.

That sounds like an excellent side-project!

Excellent analogy, I'm going to use this.

Or project managing the oss projects us coders are expected to contribute too.

Seriously spend 2 hrs creating a simple program on github. use a timeless language like Java or C++. Then you can tick the I have a github box and that'll sort you for a few years.

Prior to interview push a bunch of commits backdated over the last 6 months.

> Prior to interview push a bunch of commits backdated over the last 6 months.

That's a bit dishonest, isn't it? If you'll lie to look more productive you'll ultimately lie on the job, and that makes you a liability, not an asset.

It's not a lie per se as you wouldn't make any claims in the cv etc. about how often you work on the project. Just here is my github url: xyz

I don't need to do this myself as I often have commits from tinkering and being a perfectionist. But for the time strapped it could be useful. Remember it's about impressions. You could do 1 min a day with commit for 60 days and that'll look better on github than a single.one hour session. Even if the code commited is ultimately the same

I guess I'm predisposed to be against such...how to put it nicely..."enhanced truths". The organization I work for considers honesty to be the most important aspect in an employee; you can be the very best at what you do but if you lie for any reason you're out the door.

It's far better to be honest right out of the gate, even if you think it reveals a flaw or deficiency, rather than found to be a liar in the future just because you wanted to look better for your interview.

Well, a lot of people might do those things (I do) but it's not to boost my resume.

> Do managers spend their off-hours coaching kids sports teams and running charities in order to boast their resumes?

Yes, actually (and also to increase their social networks).

Yes actually.