Joeyjojo Jr Shabadu writes “If you spend all night writing code on a hobby project, guess what? Come morning you are gonna be sick of looking at the screen.” Um, Joeyjojo, how many real programmers do you know? I know hundreds. If they’re “sick of looking at the screen” it’s because of the JOB. They’re tired of their manager or tired of the project (maybe it’s one of those never-shipping always-changing projects) or sick of the company. They are not tired of writing code. But their hobby is fun and work is a drag. This person needs a new JOB ,not a new sparetime activity.

I’d rather hire the guy who LIKES to write code than the one who says “Yes, I’m a programmer in my job but at home I never turn on a computer. I look forward to the day when I never see another line of code!” I’ve known people like that. They have a problem. I would never want to work with them on my team.

Often quoted explanation is that “we want balanced candidates”. So I guess my place is never looking for “star” developers :D.

Good luck with your lawsuits..

Back in 2001, when I was living in San Francisco and working as a developer evangelist (natch!) with Cory Doctorow at the startup he co-founded, OpenCola, we were in talks with eBay and got a tour of their offices.

Many of the people doing customer service were also eBay sellers — in fact, many of eBay’s hires were originally sellers who’d attracted the company’s attention and ended up getting hired that way. We met an Elvis memorabilia expert, who bought and sold Elvis merch and was also a service rep. She had a cube that could’ve easily been a shrine to Elvis; it was far better than the Elvis display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was all about Elvis; her work at eBay was simply a “how” — a way to channel her love and knowledge of all things Elvis into fulfilling work.

I think this is the point that the article was trying to make: if you can set things up so that you’re essentially getting paid to do your hobby, you’ll be more motivated and perhaps even become a star at what you do for a living. That’s how I feel about my Developer Evangelist position — I still stop myself every now and again and say: “What a minute: I get paid to noddle with computers, talk tech and schmooze?”

That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it: money for your hobby and Visual Studio for free.

(And if you’re looking for more reading material, feel free to check out this entry from a couple of days ago titled Winning the Gnu).