Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer peopleโs questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer peopleโs questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
We want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better, and to empower everyone to share their knowledge.
How is their personal life, family life, friends, work environment and everything that you can think that a programmer does throughout the day?
Fun
All of the above doesnโt leave much time for fun. To keep my sanity, I squeeze every bit of free time out of life to ensure that Iโm not missing out on opportunities. Of course spending time with my family is fun, but for the sake of separation Iโll be excluding that time from this section (I feel I did the Family section justice). As part of my free time at home I enjoy building side projects. I love creating beautiful web applications that could benefit the lives of others. My passion is creating things for others through programming. I love the feeling I get when someone enjoys something Iโve made. I canโt get enough of it. Iโve started hundreds of side projects, โfinishedโ a few (is a project ever really finished?) and am working on a promising one right now. I love it and canโt get enough, but I pace myself so that I donโt squander precious time with my family.
Friends
Thanks to the reality of what Iโve stated above, time with my friends has come to a halt as of late. I donโt boil this down to being a programmer, though. Itโs much more aligned with a change in priorities. In the past year Iโve graduated from college, gotten married, and brought our first-born into the world. Combine those three with getting plunged into the working world and itโs a lot at once. I might be an edge case, and I hope to change it someday, but as of right now thatโs life.
Family
For programmers whose work isnโt the most important area of their life, the family is. In my case, everything I do is motivated by my family. I donโt currently get to spend as much time with my wife and son as Iโd like, but I hope to be in a position that allows me to spend more time them relatively soon. Iโm lucky in that I work about 45 hours a week right now (some developers work much, much more) which gives me around 123 hours to spend elsewhere. Not bad relative to some programmers.
Work
Work for a programmer is their bread and butter. Itโs usually where we get to program the most. In my case, I program, review/monitor analytics, look for new areas to collect data on, and implement all of the above each day. I also take breaks to keep my sanity and drink copious amounts of coffee (a lot of decaf, though, I like the taste). I tried to write a chronological hour-by-hour timeline, but failed since my days can vary wildly.
The work environment for a developer can vary from terrible to downright entertaining. Most companies know that a happy, comfortable programmer is an efficient one. The ones that donโt know this typically canโt keep programmers on board for very long.
Monday to Friday: I work around 18 hours per day and I donโt even notice they were so many hours. I recover my dignity this way.
Friday night to Sunday: I hit vodka like thereโs no tomorrow, probably do some crazy things in some club. I loose my dignity somewhere I donโt recall.
Repeat.
Corollary: Dignity is a renewable resource.