Programmers tend to enjoy their profession

I’m fascinated by the percentage of computer programmers whose primary hobby is: programming computers! A number of them have web servers in their homes with their own web sites built on them. Generally the sites consist of nothing more than family pictures, stories, vacation accounts and the like.

Similarly, when I first discovered the number solitaire game called Sudoku, I was certain that a large number of computer programmers had powered up their laptops and, simply for their own amusement, written programs in programming languages such as Java Script to both generate and solve Sudoku puzzles. (I know that a few dozen years ago, I surely would have done so.)

The most significant examples are the open source code projects. One such project is LINUX, a UNIX based operating system.

Beginning in about 1970, UNIX was developed by a group of programmers at Bell Labs (the research and development arm of AT&T.) The development of the new Operating System was initiated, at least partly, because a computer game ran too slowly on another computer with a different operating system. The small group of programmers, who did the original development, at first did so without any financial support from Bell Labs.

In other words, they did the development primarily for their own amusement.

Or course, eventually UNIX became a fully-supported product of AT&T with its own large staff of developers.

LINUX is a UNIX-like operating system that has been developed mainly by software developers working on the code in their own free time. According to the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINUX, in 2001 a study of the most commonly used version of LINUX available at that time was performed. The study found that that particular version of the operating system contained 30 million lines-of-code (the most commonly used measure of the size of a computer program). By one measure this is equivalent to eight thousand man-years of development time, which can be equated to something like $1.08 Billion in monetary terms. In the years since 2001, both the number of lines-of-code and the number of man-hours invested in the project have grown considerably.

Think for a few moments about that - individuals working together to apply some eight thousand man-years of their professional skills in their own free time creating something with intellectual propery worth over a billion dollars! And, of course, those numbers have only gone up in the years since then.

Moreover, many claim that LINUX, particularly as a server operating system, is more robust and reliable than Microsoft Windows. This is clear evidence that the programmers who are freely contributing their time are very serious about what they are doing and are not compromising their professional efforts because they are not being paid for that time..

And the LINUX development is just a miunuscule part of the many hours that programmers spend on their “hobby” – which is the same as their profession.

There are probably other professions in which such a relationship between personal and professional interests exists. I have heard that some auto mechanics buy older card in disrepair and restore them in their spare time.

But such examples are surely the exception rather than the rule. At the other extreme, I’ve never heard of a ditch digger digging ditches as a hobby.

An important and related point is that there is a strong correlation between the skill of any particular programmer and the amount of time that programmer spends coding as a hobby. Really that only makes sense, of course. People tend to have hobbies involving things that they do well.

Implications:

Software developers tend not to mind working extra hours, as long as the work is challenging and they are convinced that the extra hours are important for the project. Because of their attachment to their families there are limits to the amount of extra work that they will do. It helps a great deal if they can work from home.

Furthermore, look for the programmers who have their own web site and who let you know that they write their own programs at home. Those are the programmers more likely to be your most enthusiastic software developers.