To follow this advice, you have to: A) Be the type of person who can focus on only one thing B) Love not learning or doing other fun things because a career trumps all things in life C) Like putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping your career or skill is always relevant D) Love being the best you can be for the benefit of your boss E) Want to work in a career for the rest of your life

Of course the most successful people you mentor are the ones who are only doing what you are guiding them to do and aren't distracted by life, it doesn't mean they are better.

This sounds like propaganda given by the CEO to have more effective employees. There is no doubt that focus can help you improve and get there faster, but at what cost and with what life goals?

Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.

Original post was about having hobbies and not feeling guilty about not turning them into side businesses. It would be better if our culture was set as a default to say "that's awesome, it's so good you could sell it if you were so inclined, but feel no pressure to do so, I just want you to know it's that good", instead of saying "you should make a store/service to sell your hobby" and make people feel bad, even though it's just a compliment.

> To follow this advice, you have to: A) Be the type of person who can focus on only one thing B) Love not learning or doing other fun things because a career trumps all things in life C) Like putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping your career or skill is always relevant D) Love being the best you can be for the benefit of your boss E) Want to work in a career for the rest of your life

Or, work toward finding a job and career that you enjoy.

Doing occasional side projects for fun is fine. Doing side coding projects as a form of escapism because your job isn't aligned with what you actually want to be doing all day is a fool's errand. The time is better spent searching for a job that comes closer to what you want to do.

> Side hustles can be fun, profitable and life changing. We've got at least 3 that has allowed my partner to reduce her work hours to 4 days a week and generates half of her salary. We can buy fun stuff and business expense it and if we continue to improve we can gain more control and freedom.

Of course - If you're starting a small business then that's something else entirely.

The vast majority of side projects that I see aren't profitable small businesses, though.

I think it really depends on how idealistic you are. I don't think I'll ever find a job that satisfies me completely. I just have too many creative ideas that don't fit neatly into a regular dev job. I've also found that "devoting" myself to my job itself can lead to burn out. There's only so much you can control within a job. Even trying to find a better job takes work and does not guarantee you'll be happier in the new role. There's always something that you won't like in it.

In my opinion, it's better for your mental health to treat your job as a job and get as much as you can out of it in terms of money and improving your skills. I think with enough time in the industry, you eventually figure this out.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing side projects as a form as escapism if your job isn't aligned to what you want to do. Life is what you make it. There's no "correct" way to live.

> B) Love not learning or doing other fun things because a career trumps all things in life

I think that this dismisses the joy of learning things that are unrelated to your day job or any hustle. I enjoy woodworking, turning it into a side hustle where I need to justify expenses would suck the joy out of it. I do something that is not work, recharge, and it is intellectually stimulating even if it is nothing like my day job in software.

I think there's always inherent tradeoffs to specialization vs. generalization, and side projects/side hustles are more of a generalization technique. It feels rather akin to the "exploration vs exploitation" tradeoff in AI; do you search the space for better opportunities, or maximally refine the opportunity you have?

Specialization is great, if the specialty you choose ends up being important or highly in-demand. For example, everyone wants to be the Geoffrey Hinton of the 21st century, a luminary in deep learning. Not too many people want to be the Geoffrey Hinton of 1986, publishing back-propagation into an AI winter and subsequent decades-long disinterest. It's hard to know which one you'll be (or in the above, both!)

Side projects and hustles allow you to broaden your toolbox and see potentially interesting crossovers. "It's like [X] for [Y]!" is a cliche startup pitch at this point, but it's true that a lot of cool ideas arise from applying principles of one field in a widely disparate area.

I don't think that it's particularly wrong to choose one route or the other--I admire the specialists I know, even as I know that's not something I can replicate. I'm too enamored of the possibilities, and cognizant of the brevity of my lifespan, to be able to commit like that.

> I think there's always inherent tradeoffs to specialization vs. generalization, and side projects/side hustles are more of a generalization technique.

That's the theory behind side projects, but it's a false dichotomy.

Side projects are, by definition, something you do on the side. Your primary day job requires attention whether or not you do any side projects. Side projects are additive on top of the work of your day job, but subtractive out of your pool of free time and energy.

Side projects always start with good intentions of broadening horizons, but people generally realize that they only have so many intensely productive hours in a day. Do you allocate your most productive hours to your job? Or to a side project? It's tempting to say "both" but in practice that will spread someone's finite energy too thin across both domains.

Students tend to go wrong when they think that side projects are the key to unlocking their next big job opportunity. When they start to burn out in their dayjob, they think they're just a couple of side projects away from qualifying for an opportunity that will make them happy. The trap is that being burned out at a dayjob and adding the additional work of side projects only worsens the burnout. They get stuck thinking they need to finish the side projects before they change jobs, but they can't complete the side projects because they're too burned out from jobs and a side project. In these cases, I encourage people to drop the side projects and just apply to jobs. It works better than most people expect.

"Your primary day job requires attention whether or not you do any side projects. Side projects are additive on top of the work of your day job, but subtractive out of your pool of free time and energy."

For most people doing the side-hustle thing (and basically all of them doing it successfully), the calculus is "Put in the minimum amount of effort in my day job, get my R&R in the remaining time at work, and spend my mornings/nights/weekends working on the side hustle" vs. "Remain fully engaged mentally for the 8 hours I'm at work, relax when I come home, don't do the side hustle." That's why many employers hate side hustles.

I can't say which one is a better strategy, because it depends on the circumstances. Certainly the bulk of my lifetime income & assets comes from giving my all to my projects at Google, delivering successfully on them, and getting promoted a couple times. But before then I worked at a couple of startups and there was basically zero opportunity for a raise or promotion, because the company wasn't growing and there was no money to be had. And I got the Google job in part because of side projects (non-monetizable, but they showed I knew my CS and could work with a modern tech stack) done after work.

> For most people doing the side-hustle thing (and basically all of them doing it successfully), the calculus is "Put in the minimum amount of effort in my day job, get my R&R in the remaining time at work, and spend my mornings/nights/weekends working on the side hustle"

Yes, this is the real problem.

Side projects for fun and learning is fine. Nothing wrong with exploring new ideas as long as you're having fun.

But somehow side projects have become synonymous with compensating for misaligned careers. I see too many people working all day (or avoiding work all day) then coming home to work all evening and weekend. Then they wonder why they're burned out and not getting promotions at work.

Side projects can be a springboard to career advancement if executed carefully, but for every 1 side project success story I probably see 10 other people with side projects that never do anything other than drain their free time and add more mental work to their TODO list every day.

I know it’s all hypothetical, but do you think the startups would have grown if you had focused solely on growing them rather than the side projects? I know that the median case has bigcorp earnings outpacing startups but in my startup experience (main source of my assets) the early engineers who were super plugged in made an outsized impact on our outcomes that turned into a good financial outcome for them.

Maybe the principle is different though (not startup can bigco)... I did a bunch of side projects in school and at bigco before concentrating focus, so in a way we both went broad then had success going deep.

Just thinking out loud, I think we agree.

> do you think the startups would have grown if you had focused solely on growing them rather than the side projects?

Nope. I actually developed two products for the second of the startups, which was the time period I was working on the side projects. The CEO (my boss) and I are still on good terms, and he knew about the side projects while I was working on them.

Startups usually fail because nobody wants what they're building, i.e. the startup should never have been founded in the first place. Certainly this was the case for this one: we were doing a platform for hedge fund algorithmic trading, but hedge funds are usually very resistant to running their code on someone else's platform, both because of lock-in/competitive reasons and because their code & algorithms are their crown jewels and they're very sensitive about running that on other people's infrastructure.

makes sense, thanks for color!

I agree with you 100% that "side projects as an antidote for burning out on your primary job" is a dangerous place to be, and I've been there several times in my career with deleterious effects. I agree with your recommendation to take that as a warning flag and instead change your job, that is the right call in that situation.

On the other hand, I do find a lot of enjoyment in fields that, today, are dominated by "winner takes all" dynamics and extremely low probabilities of (financial) success (e.g. most creative fields). I don't mind diversifying my time between a primary job that, while not burnout-land, is also a bit boring and reliable, and a secondary that, while incredibly unlikely to "strike gold", is rejuvenating of my creative energies. I do have to be careful that it does not drift into the maladaption that you note though.

And sometimes you want to actually write code every once in a while instead of scribing another three-hour quarterly planning meeting during mandatory training week. Being able to work on your own projects at your own pace and make something out of it is incredibly enjoyable, even if it takes some of your productive hours away from work.

I guess what I'm saying is: hobbies are good, too.

It depends on the nature of the side project (vs. side hustle), its relationship to your day job, and your employer's rules (and attitude). In my case I've done a number of tech-related books. My employer knew about (and encouraged) them. And we've had a tacit understanding that I wouldn't be doing these purely on my own time and I'd continue to work on my "day job." It was never a problem and worked out for both of us.

I certainly know people who do similar things around open source projects.

Yup +1, I agree with you and the OP. If you work for a huge company your skill set may be extremely narrow. Buy having lots of side project will at the very least give you a talking point if you want to change to another company that might not have the exact position you were working at your current company

>> If you work for a huge company your skill set may be extremely narrow.

In my experience working for a huge company makes it very easy to broaden your skills. You can change teams, take on mentorship and recruiting, lead teams, lead initiatives, switch from front- to backend at different times, and learn from a large number of people - all from the "comfort" of the company you are already in.

Well thirty years later we can see that it worked out really well for him. The most rewarding things in life take time. Like building up interest on stocks. Time preferences are strongly associated with lifetime outcomes. All the best opportunities exist in identifying truths that exist outside the realm of social consensus. You can build your specialization in an environment free of competition. Waiting for the social consensus to change takes decades. Once it does you're in a good position to reap the economic benefits that follow.

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) has this concept of a talent stack. The idea is you want to develop talents that are synergystic. So for example, web development might be one talent, which can get you in the door. But if you add database development, backend technologies, etc., now you can be a full stack developer. But if you go further afield and start developing public speaking skills, or people skills, now you're moving into a lot more possibilities. Point being, if all you did was focus on being really good at web development you plateau at "valuable employee". So I would say that developing talents outside of your core competencies is absolutely critical.

I would say intense focus on one thing reaches a point of diminishing returns. The key is to recognize when you have mostly tapped that vein and develop something else. That doesn't have to be a github project, often you want something far afield, especially to avoid burnout. it can be speaking classes, or improv classes, or even fitness, or electronics, or whatever, anything that helps your stack.

It seems mixing cause and effects in many cases. It could also be that most successful people focus on only one thing because they are successful they can just afford to do only thing and reap exponential rewards. For people like me in mediocre career / jobs in mature industries, doing best at job just means writing even more half-assed CRUD micro services.

The best possible thing that could happen by totally dedicated to job would at best be one more promotion to keep working on same mediocre stuff or manage a team doing that for few thousand dollars more. And it is not even blaming management as there are only limited opportunities in saturated industry and far more folks are chasing them.

Even those half finished projects have given me more knowledge and experience than mind numbing "next generation technology" training that corporate got a great deal on by some discount instructors.

Now it could all have been different if I joined a hyper-growth industry at right time. I might have gone far by just knowing one thing. At that point I could be proselytizing younger people that "you've got to focus on just one thing and you will make it big"

I saw exact example of this by listening to a SVP in my office who apparently rose through ranks by "sheer hard work, grit and focus". However to me it was pretty clear he joined company just at the time when industry as a whole about to enter massive growth. Of course he isn't gonna say how stars were aligned and he just got massively lucky. It is for others to see what it really was.

I am the polar opposite of this and I am going rather well with it. Which means: I am happy with what I am doing, I am happy with the money it produces, I am happy with the way customers interact with me.

And quite frankly it would very likely bore me to focus one one thing only. I am not on this planet to get bored with my life or hunt for some mythical sunlit uplands by betting all my time and energy onto one thing, unable to keep a healthy distance riding it into a ditch because I want it to suceed too much. I want the things I create to be objectively good. For this I have to be able to keep a distance to them. Making them the sole center of my life would prevent me from that.

Apart from that I am easily the most productive person in my social environment, parts of which are of the "only focusing on one thing"-crowd. However I don't think my approach works for everyone. There are types who need these context switches and there are types who need that focus.

You are facing the right direction, but went off onto the wrong track with the day-trading stuff. The first part of your argument can be a true distraction, as it is avoidance. It’s the same as spending hours making a checklist of tasks, instead of doing the actual tasks.

The second part of your argument is not the same. Trading stocks has nothing to do with programming, so much so that you can’t even use it to lie to yourself that ‘yes indeed, today I have chipped away at being a better programmer by trading these stocks’. It certainly can steal your attention, but it can never ever be used as a form of self manipulation (therefore, not a problem if you do it in moderation, like everything else in life).

It’s the first type of distraction that can destroy your soul if you indulge in it.

I did my job very well for more than a handful of companies - all was great until it came to promotions and pay raises. It is possible that I suck at negotiating, but there is only so much of those that companies can/will give.

I don’t know if side hustles are the answer, but I know from experience however hard you work, there is a limit to awards at your job. Plus, employers do not care about their employees in general. Anyone who believes they care is just delusional.

Focusing on one thing is good, the trick is picking the right thing to focus on.

I'm reminded of the story of the joint interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

The interviewer asked each of them to write down the one thing that contributed most to their success. Both independently wrote "focus".

https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/bill-gates-warren-buffett-rev...

I remember reading the book The Goal in business school. What impressed me the most, was that the most efficient path to achieving a goal, is often non-intuitive, and sometimes even involves making destructive choices - choices that outside observers would find absurd and distasteful.

https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...

It's not only about choosing a singular goal, it's also about meticulously calculating your path there.

Don't follow the herd. The pack is FULL of jack-of-all-trades that have a smattering of random skills they picked up. Make literally every life choice with directionality and planning.

You’re last sentence is totally accurate, but I think there’s a balance with diversification and focus.

Failure is likely, success can be huge, that means my emphasis is on learning and have as many at bats as possible. How I imagine the best strategy is:

Try a lot of things learning as much as you can > prune what isn’t working and focus on what is (more and more of your fixed pie of time dedicated to the best opportunity) > continue until you pass your goal of success > then diversify again to maintain that level of success

You don’t focus on something too much until it’s proven itself, otherwise you’re far more likely to waste too much time on failures. Once you “really have something validated” (this is its own conversation), then you focus more and more on it driving it to its potential.

Diversification finds the potential winners and learns the fastest, focus makes that winner reach its potential.

I am not sure many people don't want to focus. Some of us simply can't because they need to feed their families. Thus, the question for me at least, is not if I want to focus, but when. When can my side hustle generate enough income so that I can stop having a day job? The other option is to get external funding, which has its own set of problems.

By the way, many businesses have been built like that. Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight, the founder, worked as an accountant during the day for many years while building his shoe empire.

In other words, lobotomize yourself for work.

When I'm interviewing, I love to hear about someone's homebrewing or swing dancing, or bread baking, or homeassistant setup, or whatever. Not because it's a "hustle" but just because it's a sign that they a) are an interesting person who gets into interesting stuff, and b) are someone capable of following through. Putting this stuff on your CV invites that conversation in the interview.

My personality seem not to allow me to just do one thing. Even today, I have a couple of jobs and I enjoy the variety of challenges. It's also risk management - basically any of my jobs could fail and it would not really affect me, which allows me to have a certain distance to each of the activities as well.

> It's also risk management - basically any of my jobs could fail and it would not really affect me, which allows me to have a certain distance to each of the activities as well.

Yep, this is huge for me.

My "real job" is as a software developer, like most of us here. My side hustles are many and varied: portrait photography, vinyl decals, custom garments, metalworking, leather working, drone stuff (photography, photogrammetry, volumetric, even FPV and racing), etc.

I've had a few instances where I've found myself suddenly without employment for one reason or another. It's stressful, but it's not the emergency that it would be if not for all of my hobbies/hustles. I can spend a couple of days refreshing contacts and easily expect to be making enough money doing drone stuff alone to pay my bills and put food on my family's table.

I always understood the side project thing as a way to develop skills that you don't develop at work. I'm never really going to improve writing simple python stuffor crud. I have no reason to get better once I'm at the point completing my job satisfactorily or even have opportunities to get out of my comfort zone as far as programing goes. I have no way of knowing what I don't know.

When I was working on side stuff all the time, I was getting better rapidly, finding new ideas, solving problems in better ways and just always out of my comfort zone. I stopped because I did get burned out a bit. The focus was never resume filler though.

This is Key, coming from someone who is guilty from this myself, but also are in a relationship with someone who us completely opposite and has a 100% focus on their work and academic field. For most of us, being really good at a job simply requires 100% focus. If that is your aim, then make sure the other things you do in life help you relativt and be ready for a new day.

For me, I've realized that I dont have it in me to be 100% focused on one thing, which is great - then I can manage my expectations and goal, however I still try to be mindfull and not try to do to much.

I'll definitely agree with you in some ways. Two or three years into a career, no one is looking at your GitHub. But when you're just in college, a quick look through your GitHub can be a decent filtering function that I frequently use when I visited colleges on recruiting trips. A follow up conversation about some of your favorite projects and what's something interesting you've learned or done recently helps me catch those who don't have a GitHub or have lots of projects that aren't really theirs.

Just a quote I like from Great at Work: "Do less, then obsess"

Unrelated: How does one find a mentor/mentoring group? I've been thinking about it a lot lately, how for the first time in my career I'm without someone I would call a "mentor" and how that's probably not great for personal growth. It seems artificial to look for someone to call a mentor, as opposed to happening upon a person that you look up to and makes you feel inspired to grow. Can you shed some info on how a mentoring group works?

I'd like if you expanded on how you found your mentoring group, thank you in advance!

So essentially... work hard play hard?