
I Don't Code in my Free Time - sharms
http://teddziuba.com/2009/10/i-dont-code-in-my-free-time.html
======
gruseom
After reading this and its complacent I've-learned-as-much-as-I-need-and-
besides-I-have-kids attitude, I'd say he does a good job making a case against
himself being a very good programmer. His mechanical analogy (socket wrenches)
for "computer code" (sic) is particularly revealing.

Ironically, none of this has intrinsically to do with his not liking to
program on Saturdays, yet ends up reinforcing the notion that, for whatever
reason, there is a correlation.

I know at least five guys who have small children and hack in their spare
time. Yes, it's a struggle, but they all do it. I also know quite a few with
small children who never do that. They never did before they had kids, either,
but the kids furnish a nice excuse. Kids are handy that way. (Edit: notice how
the author plays this card, even though he already said he almost never
programmed outside of work or class.) Anyway, my point is that the first group
are really good programmers and the second are, by and large, not. Anecodotal
though this may be, I buy the idea of a correlation.

P.S. Another trait that good programmers tend to have is not seeing themselves
as good enough and not getting defensive about proving how good they are.
Exercise to the reader.

~~~
Retric
I find this debate insulting.

I have written web apps and low level networking code and plenty of stuff in
between, aka a web server. I have worked with computers that have less than
1kb of RAM and distributed networks. I have written code 100x faster than a
coworker who was still better than average (30 min vs 7 days). I remember
spending a few days coding something so so our customers did not have to the
post office website to find zip+4 addresses and realizing using them as a
backup was almost pointless because I had a better solution. I love solving
hard problems, and most of the time I don't code at home.

PS: Ok, I did just start working on an iPhone app, but that's mostly because I
stopped coding at work. There is a life outside a compiler and going
snowboarding, watching amine, reading, or any number of other things are just
more fun.

~~~
gruseom
Don't be insulted; it's just an argument on the internet. Besides, the
correlation people like me are claiming is at most a statistical pattern with
lots of room for variation. (You sound like a good programmer regardless. But
what I find endearing in your comment is how you go and spoil your argument by
hacking on an iPhone app in your spare time - and feel obliged by intellectual
honesty to fess up to it!)

Of course, you might also mean that the debate is insulting because it's
pointless. I can understand why it would seem that way. What does it matter
whether someone programs outside of their job or not? It doesn't,
intrinsically.

Here's why I think the subject is interesting anyway: there's no cheap way to
tell who the really good programmers are. This is not just a hard problem,
it's a hard problem that seems like it ought to be an easy one. Why can't you
just devise a test? People have tried to figure this out every which way,
spending many millions, maybe billions in the process. And no one has a good
answer. That's genuinely surprising.

Given that situation, any criterion one can use as a (cheap) proxy for "good
programmer" is of interest, even if it's imperfect.

What makes the "hacks in spare time" correlation with "good programmer"
interesting is not that it captures all of the good programmers. There are
certainly good ones who don't do that; i.e. the test does produce false
negatives. What makes it valuable anyway is that it _excludes the overwhelming
majority of bad programmers_ , the ones for whom it's a job that they aren't
very good at and aren't motivated to get good at, who form 90% if not 99% of
the professional population. In short, the test is interesting because it
excludes many more false positives than it admits false negatives.

A corollary is that all the people who protest "I don't code in my spare time,
yet I am a good programmer" aren't really adding much data to the discussion.
The ones we need to hear about are the bad programmers who do. :)

~~~
d0mine
Even if all good programmers were programming at home the knowledge that a
programmer is coding at home wouldn't give us much.

G - good programmer C - coding at home

    
    
      P(G|C)*P(C) = P(C|G)*P(G)
    
      P(G) = 1% # percent of good programmers among all
      P(C) = 20% # percent of programmers that code at home
      P(C|G) = 100% # assume that all good programmers code at home
    

Probability that a programmer is a good one given that it codes at home:

    
    
      P(G|C) = 1.0 * 0.01 / 0.2 = 5%

~~~
gruseom
_P(G) = 1%_ <\-- Ok, that's in the range I suggested.

 _P(C|G) = 100%_ <\-- More than what I said, but I see your point.

 _P(C) = 20%_ <\-- Whoa, where did you get that? That's just an assumption
that leads immediately to your conclusion.

~~~
Retric
I think 20% is on the low side. But, you really need to define your terms. I
would call 1/3 of all programmers useful, in that they can create more value
then they cost. However, when you have a tiny budget and need to find useful
programmers willing to work long hours for low pay then you really want young
smart programmers with a lot of experience. And they only way to have a lot of
experience at a young age is to do a lot of side projects.

There are plenty of programmer that will blow your mind making 150+k/year,
finding programmers that will blow you mind and are willing to take far less
and a slice of equity is far harder.

PS: There are talented older people that are also under payed, but that's
normally because they are happy where they are. Finding them and getting them
to work for you is hard and expensive.

~~~
gruseom
Good points. It's worth remembering that when it comes to this stuff, we're
all anecdotalizing in the dark. I say that because it sounds like we've had
quite different experiences. (20% of programmers work on side projects sounds
low to you, very high to me.) Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to
properly define these terms, let alone measure them.

------
wheels
_"I love it when twenty-something engineers take such a hard-line position on
something they have so little experience with, like hiring."_

Uhm, the author graduated from college 3 years ago. It took me about 2 minutes
of searching to find out that the "twenty-something" he's referring to
(raganwald) is about 20 years older than him.

<http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba>

[http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pd...](http://reginald.braythwayt.com/RegBraithwaiteGH0909_en_US.pdf)

~~~
unalone
This isn't a response to Raganwald. It's a response to this Reddit thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you_hire_a_programmer_that_does_not_write/)

~~~
raganwald
Yes, especially since I agree with much of what Ted is saying.

p.s. Not that anyone needs further evidence I am imperfect, but if we must
have a bash at it, here are two flaws with my original article that I think
have merit:

1\. I presented a dichotomy between two strategies, first hiring people who
know me or whom I know through networking, the Internet, and so on. Second,
using monster.com and recruiters. Isn't this a false dichotomy?

2\. Although the linkbait headline of my post said something about people who
code outside of work, the post itself actually said something about networks
and communities. Clearly someone can belong to the HN community without coding
oustide of work. According to my headline, I wouldn't hire them. According to
my post, I would. Which is it, Mr. Braithwaite?

~~~
wheels
Note that I didn't actually agree with all points (well, rather the point
implied by the title) of your original article, I just thought that the irony
was thick of someone who appears to be about 24 leading their argument with a
dig about the other side being a bunch of inexperienced 20-somethings.

~~~
unalone
Yeah, I can see that... but I also understand it. I've told people older than
me to grow up before. Sometimes people are older/younger than their age
suggests.

And, in Ted's defense, back when he started writing he was in the right a lot.
I remember his huge article about Meebo, the one that made Uncov famous,
because it was all about bashing people for attention. He made point after
point about Meebo's failure as a service and he was dead right about all of
them. A lot of his earlier posts—the ones about Mahalo and Scoble and Pownce
in particular—were smart, critical, and not entirely derogatory either.

------
derefr
I think that, regardless of whether the hypothetical correlation applies to
Ted, it could survive weakening to eliminate his complaint and still be
useful: "Good coders _have_ coded outside of work at some point, or used
coding to solve non-work-or-school-related problems." it doesn't mean you're
still doing it _now_ when you have -5 hours to spare a day, but it means you
would be if it wasn't a matter of prioitizing. Bad coders don't assign "coding
as a hobby" a priority value--they simply never consider doing it at all.

~~~
EliAndrewC
I don't think we should treat this as a discussion of good coders and bad
coders. "I wouldn't hire someone who ____" is a hiring filter. And ANY
worthwhile hiring filter will be over-aggressive. So it's more a distinction
between groups that contain close to 100% good coders vs groups that contain a
much lower percentage.

The point of a hiring filter is to weed out bad coders, and hirers should
realize that any filter you set that will weed out most/all bad coders will
also weed out a LOT of good ones. So if someone says, "I wouldn't hire someone
who ______", they're NOT necessarily saying, "All people who _____ are bad
programmers".

Instead, the smart hirer is actually saying, "People who _____ are Group A and
everyone else is Group B. Group B contains many great hires, but it's really
difficult to distinguish good hires from bad ones, and Group A has almost no
bad hires. Therefore I'm only hiring from Group A."

------
sjs
> You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning
> Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING.

I feel extremely lucky to not only have known what I wanted to do from a young
age, but enjoy it, and can make good money doing it.

I like to ride my bike, hike, climb mountains, go to the beach, and walk my
dog as well as solve problems, math or otherwise. I really hope for Ted's sake
that he enjoys development at least a little bit. No one wants to work with
people that aren't happy.

~~~
philfreo
I worked with Ted at Google. Trust me, even though his articles have a certain
sarcastic tone to them, he was definitely enjoyable to work with and clearly
did like solving hard problems in development.

His point in this post is that you _can_ do a great job at work but then enjoy
your life outside of work.

~~~
_pius
_His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy
your life outside of work._

Is doing a little coding outside of work mutually exclusive to enjoying your
life? I feel like the article draws a false dichotomy that either you have a
life and don't code at all outside of work or you spend all of your non-work
time coding.

~~~
thenduks
That's my biggest gripe here, too. Why are people so black-and-white about
this? I work 40-60 hours/week depending on what's going on. Sometimes while
working 40 hour weeks I don't write any code at home preferring to do one of
the many other thing I enjoy. Other times I'm practically buried in work and
come home and poke around on a side project. This just varies depending on my
mood and what (if any) interesting stuff has my attention. If you enjoy
something, you'll find time. If you don't enjoy it, why is it your career
again?

If you ask me the whole point of this discussion shouldn't be 'coding at home'
but instead 'giving a crap'. Even _just a little_ passion for your field will
get you a long way in _any_ profession - and I think that is especially true
in creative fields like programming.

Here I am on a Saturday afternoon putting some thinking time into my field...
have I devoted the day to it? Hardly!

You're right on that there's absolutely nothing mutually exclusive about
enjoying coding (and lots of other completely unrelated stuff) as a hobby and
as a career.

------
mustpax
For all this person claims to be wise and experienced, this is a very
contentless and juvenile blog post. The tone is condescending and reeks of
insecurity.

------
maxklein
I agree absolutely with him and I disagree with raganwald. Why is this?

Because there are only so many rockstars you can have in one joint. There are
only so many people who live and breath code you can have in one room before
trouble starts brewing.

Every team needs a crop of solid, dependable and slow developers that do the
boring tasks. The guy who does not mind going over all the functions and
commenting them. The guy who is satisfied to port a C script to Mac OS X, even
though it is mindless bug testing.

And those type of guys don't code at home. If you will never hire such people,
then who will do the boring tasks? Your highly intelligent and highly paid
coders? You recruit them to put them for 3 months working on some inane and
boring database program?

Intellectual diversity is a neccessity in any shop that makes its living from
brainwork.

~~~
weavejester
It seems to me that "boring" often means "potentially automatable".

~~~
maxklein
How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers?
Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another
platform

You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.

~~~
daleharvey
or you just need smarter programs

I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the
need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.

~~~
thenduks
It's what _we_ do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest'
it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm.

In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the
examples given is simply lowering your job security.

~~~
coliveira
I always laugh at people who talk about the job security in writing bad code.
The most secure job is for the one person that knows what he/she is doing,
because they will find another one easily.

------
Virax
"So, I rigged up a Python script to play AOL instant messenger sounds randomly
every 5 to 10 seconds, turned up my speakers, pointed them at the wall, and
went on vacation for a week."

ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME? You write a blog post on hiring and then proceed to
relate a story about how you escalated a personal conflict way beyond reason?
This is precisely the kind of guy you don't want on your team, because working
in the real world involves resolving personal conflict without needlessly
pissing people off.

~~~
uuilly
Ted is like Ali G / Borat / Bruno. It's a lot more fun to sit back and enjoy
the show than it is to scold him for being an ass. Esp when he's so obviously
going out of his way to be an ass. And like Ali G's antics, the AOL script was
_really_ funny. I hope he open sources it.

------
davidw
"Instead, I spend my free time saying nasty things about people who do - it's
easier and more fun!"

Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate
question for an interview, although I would be unhappy if I didn't have at
least a side project or two to hack on, though. I have less time for that now,
with a child, but it's something I need to do.

Oh, and I'd much rather spend my time riding my bicycle than fiddling with it.
My mechanic is way better and faster than I am in any case.

~~~
timwiseman
_Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate
question for an interview,_

Why?

As an interviewer, I think it tells me a great deal. It certainly should not
be the focus of the interview, but I want to know things like: 1\. Will this
candidate mesh well with the existing team? 2\. Is this candidate going to
take the initiative to learn useful things on their own?

It seems to speak quite well to those issues.

------
johnfn
> "You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning
> Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING."

This is pretty depressing since last weekend I was learning Haskell by working
on Project Euler problems.

~~~
mahmud
Why is it depressing? just because some douchebag on the internet said so?

------
jseifer
"I like to spend free time wrenching on a car or a bike, but I don't set out
on Saturday morning and say "I'm going to learn how to use a torque wrench
today, because those things are the future of tools"."

That one made me laugh.

~~~
greentree
Really? I'm getting kind of tired of the tool analogies. They are thrown
around as answers in place of actual thinking and reasoned arguments. The
comparison between learning how to use a torque wrench and learning a language
is absurd.

~~~
crucini
It depends.

Learning a significantly different language can be mind-expanding. Going from
C to Lisp is not just picking up a different tool. More like a brain
transplant.

Going from Java to C# is more ho-hum. There will be no epiphanies. More like
"Oh, Microsoft solved problem X. That's nice."

That really is like replacing a Husky brand wrench with a Craftsman brand
wrench.

------
dasil003
I would hire someone who didn't code in their spare time, but I definitely
wouldn't hire Teddy boy. Who would want that kind of publicity-addicted
blowhard polluting their team?

~~~
nearestneighbor
PR talent is important.

~~~
billswift
Judging by the post he has more of an anti-PR talent.

~~~
tlrobinson
Yet we all know who he is.

~~~
chancho
Fame and Infamy have subtle differences.

------
baguasquirrel
The problem I've noticed with hiring people based on whether or not they code
on their free time is that whether they do so is often dependent on how much
their work/coursework sucks. If it sucks pretty badly (which it usually does),
then the folks who enjoy programming will tend to do as little work as they
possibly can, and save their energy for their side projects.

One interesting thing you can infer from this is, if you're running a shitty
shop, you actually want _bad_ programmers, not good ones. Bad programmers with
a high degree of discipline. I don't mean for this to get sucked into that
_other_ discussion about immigration and employment, but I've long thought
that this is why the big employers like IBM like to hire foreign talent (it's
not for the same reason why _we_ want to keep foreign talent here).

------
jrockway
I am not sure I agree. The main reason is that when all you do is work, you
are only exposed to one codebase, written by one small group of (perhaps
inexperienced) people. You are never going to get any new ideas from that; you
are going to spend your 8-hour day reinventing the wheel and doing things
wrong. You will just continue the same monoculture forever. This may "meet the
business needs" (the favorite excuse of the non-programmer], but it's not
going to be good code.

(You could be taking an interest in outside programming "stuff" at work,
perhaps, but between meetings, lunch, and getting your actual work done, how
much time do you have to learn new programming languages and peruse open-
source projects? Probably not enough. This stuff is _time-consuming_!)

So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in
programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a _great_ one. How
many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday?
How many great artists would rather spend time with their kids than painting?

Not many.

~~~
unalone
Cormac McCarthy famously said he didn't read Proust or Pound, because to him
that wasn't literature, and it wasn't what he wanted to write. There are lots
of artists who famously didn't do much work, because they preferred only to
work when they were inspired.

The moral is that it's possible both to be good and hardworking and good and
not quite so obsessed.

~~~
jrockway
Neither of these are "show up in an office at 9am, work for 8 hours, go home
at 5, not think about anything work-related for 16 hours, repeat", however.

------
adamhowell
After seeing Pressflip, I don't blame him.

~~~
unalone
What a snotty, immature response. Dziuba worked for Google before Pressflip,
and is now working on Milo, which looks pretty sweet.

But I don't blame you for needing to snark at other people after seeing
adamhowell.org.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, but there's only so much one can take of Ted Dziuba's writing before the
urge to respond in kind wells up.

It'd just be simpler if people wouldn't upvote his articles.

~~~
unalone
Ted's an asshole, and most of the time I'm pissed off by his writing. When
Uncov came "back" early last year it was terrible. That said, this article I
agreed with entirely, all respect to raganwald, and it pisses me off that
people would stoop to namecalling rather than discussing it. I think this is
the rare Dziuba piece worth a good debate.

Above all, I can't stand insulting somebody by insulting the work they've
done. Ted is obviously smart, he put a lot of work into Pressflip before
retiring to have a kid, and Pressflip, while not brilliant, wasn't terrible
when I used it. I just didn't see the point to it. Now he's off working on new
things, so he's not exactly lazy or coasting.

~~~
tsetse-fly
Any insults that Ted Dziuba receives are well-deserved.

He's written dozens of trollish articles on how useless other startups are or
how he hopes they'll fail. It seems fair to me that people are insulting his
failure to produce a successful startup when he's spent so long being a
hypocrite. You can't expect to be the Glenn Beck of startups and not be on the
receiving end of the trolling.

Here are some of his headlines from Uncov, incase you've forgotten his work:

    
    
        "Fanboy Driven Development with Arc"
        "Paul Graham, Just Shut Your Face Already"
        "RockYou Dominates The Fake Business World"
        "Surprise, Mahalo Still Blows"
        "Mahalo Is Hawaiian for Useless"
        "Guy Kawasaki Should Stick To Contentless Blog Posts"
        "Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old can do it"
        "Middio: Another Marginally Useful Feature As A Product"
        "WriteWith: Everybody Point and Laugh"
        "YouOS: YouHave To Be Kidding Me"
        "Wellsphere's Fail Tale, Part 2"
        "Firefox Fanboys: The Only People More Dangerous and Less Competent Than ..."
        "Did Enron Cause Web 2.0?"
        "Web 2.0 Amateur Hour: Sputtr"
        "VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail"
    

<http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com>

~~~
unalone
I actually liked all of those articles, except the Paul Graham one, which was
part of later Uncov. Back in the day, Ted had the knack for saying exactly
what needed to be said about a lot of ego-laden fellows. He's more a critic
than he is a builder; I'm one of those weird fellows that thinks a critic is a
valuable part of any ecology.

I'm fine with negativity as long as you're saying something _useful_. The OP
just snarked without any meaningful criticism; I attempted to criticize him
and got downvoted to the depths of Hades, which I guess is how it goes
sometime. For all his numerous failings, I still like Dziuba more than I
dislike him, especially when he insults somebody along with a well-delivered
counterpoint rather than just insulting.

~~~
tsetse-fly
<http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/01/28/lets-all-grow-up/>

------
xtho
I wouldn't hire somebody who publishes a picture named "obama-winning-the-
nobel-proves-that-white-guilt-is-one-of-the-most-awesome-powers-on-earth.jpg"
on his blog (although I'm open to interpretations of that filename).

~~~
jacoblyles
Is it because he thinks that Obama didn't deserve the peace prize, or because
he thinks that white racial guilt is a factor in the President's incredible
popularity?

I guess this is another example of why keeping your political opinions to
yourself if you disagree with the majority is good for your career.

~~~
rimantas
Somehow I doubt norwegians would have any of that white guilt.

~~~
xtho
Swedes.

~~~
MaysonL
Actually, the commitee is five Norwegians, age 58-68, all members or former
members of the Storting (Norwegian parliament). One man, the chairman, four
women.

See:
[http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/member...](http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/nomination_committee/members/)

------
tocomment
Couldn't you spin not coding outside of work into something positive?

Job interview:

What have you coded in your free time?

Me: I spend my free doing X and Y. I find I'm most effective at work if I save
all of my creative energy for the job.

~~~
wooster
_confused look_

"What's 'free time'?"

~~~
Hexstream
A word-for-word translation of "temps libre" from french. Spare time.

Temps is time, libre is free.

------
alex_c
Can we remove "Ted Dziuba" from the title? It's in the URL right after,
anyway.

Coming from a random unknown blogger, I doubt this would've made it to the
front page.

I actually happen to mostly agree with what he says in this post (even though
a lot of it is strawman), but really - who cares?

------
chaosmachine
_"I would not want to work for a company that wouldn't hire me"_

Me either ;)

~~~
maxklein
And I don't want to go out with any hot model that does not want to go out
with me!

------
notlisted
I have a family. I understand where he's coming from, but only to the extent
that I have to balance family time with passionate hobby time, but...

I would not hire a writer that does not write in his free time. I would not
hire a lead singer that does not sing in his free time. I would not hire a
chef that does not cook in his free time. I would not hire a prostitute that
does not have sex in her 'free time'.

OK, that last one is a stretch perhaps, but my point is simple: if someone
loves what they do, the act of doing it is not a chore and never "something
they do for money" but "a state of mind". You can never learn all there is to
know "on the job". Perhaps MANAGERS do not have to manage in their spare time,
but anyone producing tangible stuff better love it.

He sounds like he's trying to tell himself he can still be a good programmer
without putting in the time. I'd like to tell myself the same thing, but
sadly, those days are really gone (it's a slippery slope, it started with a
kiss, a gf, a relationship, living together, marriage, children... pooof!)

~~~
lanaer
I tend not to code in my free time, because whenever I feel like coding, I
apply that effort to a project designed to make me money, so that time becomes
work time.

------
gfunk911
The debate is not really about whether you program in your spare time. It's a
debate about whether you love programming.

1\. People who love doing something are on average going to be much better at
it than people who don't.

2\. People who love something find a way to do it, meaning that programming in
your spare time is a very strong indicator of whether you love programming.

3\. Therefore, whether you program in your spare time is a very strong
indicator of your programming skill.

Whether you program in your spare time is a proxy for whether you love
programming, which is a proxy for your programming skill.

If this author has only coded for pleasure one time in his entire life,
including college (!), then the probabilities say he's overwhelmingly likely
to not be a very good programmer. Maybe he's the exception, I know nothing
about him other than what's in my comment.

------
DaniFong
Maybe the reason this guy is pissed off constantly is because he just doesn't
like his work.

------
cmelbye
This post gave me a chuckle.

 _You know what's more awesome than spending my Saturday afternoon learning
Haskell by hacking away at a few Project Euler problems? Fuck, ANYTHING._

Sorry, why is this guy trying to convince everyone that his hobby is better
than everyone else's?

~~~
Dilpil
If the title of the post didn't disqualify him from my fantasy hiring process,
then certainly this line would.

------
yason
If you code in your spare time, it could simply mean that what you do for work
isn't challenging or satisfying enough. If you're a good programmer you need
to make something beautiful, you need to leave your fingerprint somewhere. If
you can do it at work, good; if you can't, you can't not do in the evenings...

It can be a drag though. Few people can do actual coding more than 5-6 hours a
day when they're in the good shape. Trying to do a good job and still satisfy
your own itches the same day may not be possible, either.

~~~
maigret
Two excellent points! Add to that: I code at work the same type of things I'd
make at home else. That free up some time, and wow, you get paid for that :)

------
ori_b
Me to Ted: And I wouldn't hire you.

Not only are you an asshole (that would be excusable), you are an asshole that
consistently writes articles full of sound and fury, but completely vapid. As
a writer, you are incompetent, albeit rabble-rousing.

To top it off, from what I gleaned from your articles, you know very little
about programming. You consistently seem to misinterpret ideas, either
deliberately in order to mock them on unsound grounds, or simply through
ignorance.

In short, I wouldn't hire a troll.

------
loupgarou21
I work in IT, and the way I see it, there is a certain amount of time that I
want to work on computers. When I'm working work on computers 40 or more hours
a week for work, I'm unlikely to want to spend any of my free time working on
computers. When I've got a lower work load, I tend to spend more time on
personal projects related to computers.

If I were actually a programmer, I would probably fall into the same pattern.

------
chrischen
Well the obedient type is normally what a company would want to hire to work
under it. The crazy people who code in their spare time are more startup-
founder type anyways. And these types have a tendency to fail the hiring
process more often.

------
quizzical
I've met lots of really smart programmers that don't even seem to talk about
coding during lunch, much less program during free time. I'd certainly code
more at home if I didn't have a family and lots of other interests besides
programming.

------
nl
If Ted doesn't code at home, doest he blog about code at home? Or at least
blog about not coding at home? Doesn't that mean he's thinking about it, which
is effectively the same thing?

------
Readmore
then I would not hire you.

------
forgotmypasswd
he works for his startup right? he doesn't have any spare time anyway.

------
jobeirne
So that explains why I've never heard this guy's name before.

------
rlf
AMEN.

------
paul9290
Sorry but I hate the photo on that site!

Yeah it's nature and all but it speaks loudly about the author of that blog!

