alt Hacker News> WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby?
I think programming has more commonality with other creative, 'soft' jobs like graphic design (which itself can involve programming), architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye.
Many of these roles require that applicants have some sort of portfolio that can be perused by the interviewer freely. I feel co-opting that word—'portfolio'—would do us software developers a big favour instead of trivialising outside-of-work programming as 'side projects' or 'hobbies'.
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I got to see where architects build bridges over weekends as an hobby.
>architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye.
I disagree. Programing is more engineering than art. Art doesn't have source code. You can show the final painting and I can show the final product I worked on but not the source code I wrote as that belongs to my employer. Also, most art like paintings are not done by large teams, so you can show what you did in that painting but in a large SW projects, I can't show what exactly form the final product I did and what else was done by my team.
Most of my valuable work in programing is engineering, especially fixing bugs, not creating portfolios to show off. I have nothing publicly to show off, mostly because firstly, it's private to my former employers, and secondly because code gets outdated and replaced fast, most of what I worte in the past probably doesn't run today anymore, but have made my employers happy and wealthy.