So what do you do after paid hours?<\/p>\n
Let me guess.\u00a0 You code up web sites in Fortran on Rails because that’s the best language in the world;\u00a0 you spend hours and hours at night figuring out the next cool thing for EJB 4 even though you’ve never done EJB before, or maybe you read blog after blog like Slashdot and Joel on Software and forums about Agile because you da man.<\/p>\n
Me too.\u00a0 Just wrote my first Frails plugin that takes dot matrix printer output and converts it to ascii.<\/p>\n
No matter what you do, even if its something as meaningless as spending time with your family (remember I am a sarcastic beast), we all share one thing:\u00a0 it’s OUR free time.\u00a0 Not the company’s, and no one else’s.<\/p>\n
I raise this point because I’ve noticed several times over the years in the industry that a lot of people looking for a code slinger aren’t good willed.\u00a0 You have to remember:\u00a0 the world is about sales, and you are a product.\u00a0 Bottom line.<\/p>\n
In the past years I’ve donated tons of time to companies, people, non-profs, and made estimates, code contributions, and set up old hardware to “save a buck.”\u00a0\u00a0 But the worst, the WORST thing that happens is when someone willingly misguides you to get free labor and expertise out of you.\u00a0 And this happens quite a bit.\u00a0 Us coders aren’t doctors but this is a lot like the free advice giving doctors cringe at.<\/p>\n
One time there was a person at my job who wanted “help with a site” and made it sound like they were helping a friend.\u00a0 Pretty soon they wanted to meet during work of all things to talk about it in meeting rooms, and since they came in early I heard from others this person was working on the site.\u00a0 I gave about 8 hours then heard they might be billing and not telling me.\u00a0 And had the audacity to say “I was in it for the money” laying a guilt trip — on a professional hack, um, I mean software engineer.<\/p>\n
Imagine.<\/p>\n
A few times at jobs I’ve been approached to help people “learn” a technology outside of work or flat out work on their business idea without being told it was that, or being offered partnership.<\/p>\n
And how many Big Places want the type of employee that works “for free” — extra overtime because “you love your work”?\u00a0\u00a0 This especially has been a piece of contention with me because it literally breaks contracts (hour work for hour pay).<\/p>\n
So I have a warning to the younger developers out there:\u00a0 step lightly when committing your time.\u00a0 Focus on doing a good job at work, enjoy <\/em>being the junior and stay away from the time-wolves who want your labor for free.<\/p>\n If you would like a project outside of work, make sure it pays or that’s it has visible assets so you can use it on your resume.\u00a0\u00a0 And if you need to learn a new technology don’t leech onto people’s free time, learn it yourself.\u00a0 Take a look at all the great developers around you and look at Gates and Jobs.\u00a0\u00a0 they did it outside the box on their own.\u00a0 Just keep it in mind, that’s all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So what do you do after paid hours? Let me guess.\u00a0 You code up web sites in Fortran on Rails because that’s the best language in the world;\u00a0 you spend hours and hours at night figuring out the next cool thing for EJB 4 even though you’ve never done EJB before, or maybe you read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}