Doing What You Love
Recently I had an interesting conversation with a couple guys at my client site. One of mentioned he heard about my presentation at a recent user group and also saw my invite I sent out for an internal Domain Driven Design study group and asked “How come you like work so much?” The other guy then said “I think it’s something that is just different about Americans versus people from other countries… they’re workaholics man! I mean, I heard that Ryan always works weekends.”
I simply corrected them… yes, Ryan is a workaholic and in my opinion he is overexerting himself. But I don’t consider my programming, reading, and speaking that I do on the side as work; I just love software development and it’s something that has interested me, both from a technical and social standpoint. It just so happens that my job has me doing something that I love (although dealing with a mess of legacy code isn’t always enjoyable). There’s a huge difference between working all the time and doing what you like to do in your free time; and you won’t catch me “working” at work more than forty hours a week.
I think it’s important that people do what they love to do because at that point their job isn’t just something they do through the week while waiting for the weekend to arrive. One of the best stakeholders I ever worked with on a project was a guy from marketing and guess what he does in his free time? We were out at dinner once when he and the rest of the product owner team was in town he confessed what he does when he gets home from the gym after work: he plops down in front of the TV and watches recordings of commercials that were recorded throughout the day. He doesn’t watch any shows or movies… just the commercials. Another friend of ours is a math professor and she enjoys solving math problems in her spare time. I know I would go nuts if I spent my leisure time solving math problems! But it is what she likes to do and her job just happens to be related to what she likes to do.
Now, I don’t think that in order to be a productive developer (or even just a really good developer) you have to code in your free time all the time and this guy really misses the point. I definitely don’t think that companies should make it a requirement that they hire only people who code in their free time because otherwise they might miss some really good developers who just do what they like to do in their free time. But I think that someone who really enjoys software development and spends their free time improving their skills at their craft and doing it just for fun often happen to be much more remarkable.
Enjoying software development in your free time doesn’t always mean you’re going to really love your job. As Chad Folwer once pointed out, What Would You Rather Be Doing? However I think that when you do something you love you will find it fulfilling and sooner or later you really will either land the job you love or you will motivate radical changes at your current workplace to make enjoyable not just for yourself, but for the people you work with as well.
Are you doing what you enjoy doing?
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