I get the feeling that trying to live as if being a dev is not a lifestyle is a lie. Not that you can’t have other hobbies as a dev, but development needs to be your first hobby as well as your career if you are going to achieve anything in this industry.

Or, perhaps people have a whole range of priorities. And those priorities change over the course of a career. Sometimes work is more important, sometimes private life. Like any other job. Consider The Long view.

Love that epiphany moment 😀

Succeeding in this field requires constant study. 10s of thousands of hours over decades. The average top end dev will spend at least 600 hours a year studying and experimenting outside of work just to keep up with the churn.

@rutee07 honestly that’s been me lately. But I have to change. Yea doing maintenance on apps written by other developers with a, erm, “wide range” of skill levels has been one thing, it has paid the bills, but I’m just some self study and refinement away from really hitting that upper echelon, at least in my area. Natural aptitude for code accidentally set a glass ceiling for myself. I got good enough quickly and now I have to actually put in work.

@monkeyboy I agree but I think to really stay at the top you have to be studying and refining a lot. However, being at the top isn’t always important, to your point.

Development needs to be your first hobby? Really?

Well to that extremely prejudiced statement dear sir, I give you the D!

@rutee07 but do we really have that filter? I've met more than enough devs that barely qualify as such. You know, the "developing means spewing crap into an editor 9-to-5, then going home" type and they still kept their jobs.

Us more competent devs might agree that such devs do more harm than good, but they don't seem to be filtered out of the industry.

@rutee07 that escalated quickly.

A superior of mine once told me, many years back, in my first job, that he though one ought to be out of the dev job by the age of 30 at the latest.

In hindsight, I think he made a fair point, if you want to escape the treadmill of "dev lifestyle", that's one way out, being promoted to a position that is essentially about telling others what to code.

The same is true these days for all those SCRUM positions, you don't have to keep up with the latest and greatest coding fads if you're not actually coding, at least much less so.

The other way is, in my experience, to just settle down somewhere, be self-reliant and just forget about the latest and greatest to a large degree.

Many innovations in software dev in the last 20 years are essentially just about switching things that have proven themselves capable, but with some caveats, with other new shiny things thought to be more capable, but who came with other caveats yet to be discovered. Once they are, on to the next approach...

Clarification: I still haven't managed to do either myself. 😒

@VaderNT
If only their bosses knew what they actually hired was a stackoverflow message adapter.

@rutee07
> I'm a problem solver. :D

You certainly are 😂

> If you play it right, you can use the high number of incompetent developers as leverage to get better job offers

Interestingly, I just recently read a blog entry following a similar line of thought. It basically argued "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", so become king, make the most out of it.

I don't feel this way. I'm bored to death with building yet another CRUD backend and mundane questions like "is testing worth it?". Essentially, I'm interested in building really cool, really advanced shit. But I neither find a job nor coworkers for that.

@SortOfTested thanks, that made me laugh! 😂 The term nails it. I'm so gonna use it.