If you're on vacation, then you're on vacation. If you're at work, then you're working. It's obvious, right?
But what if the thing you do at work is also your biggest hobby outside of work?
What if the line between the workday and the evening is blurry and muddled, and your thoughts constantly bounce back and forth between technology and spending time with friends and family?
For many employees, this may not be a problem. For those of us who work in programming, however, it's something we're used to. At least, I am.
And now summer vacation is coming up, the longest stretch of the year where we're supposed to take a well-deserved break from work, hang out with friends, and relax on the beach. So why is it so difficult to put aside the programming we do at work every single day?
Everyone is going to code during the vacation
Last year I happened to ask some members of my local Norwegian group for coding professionals on facebook what they were planning to learn the next couple of months.
I forgot that summer vacation was coming up in a few weeks, though, so I figured I would only get salty replies. But no, Norwegian developers had plenty of plans to squeeze everything from languages to frameworks and libraries into their schedules, between barbecuing and summer festivals listening to Kygo.
All to improve their profession.
"Why are you asking about this, isn't vacation sacred? Isn't it obvious that people take a break from work? Won't people get angry?" asked my buddy Ole Petter, who works in a completely different profession, journalism, but happens to be a member of the group. In his industry, work and leisure time do not mix.
That's not the case in the developer industry. We choose to spend our free time on our profession, programming.
Only one person answered in the thread that they would leave their summer vacation as a vacation.
Imposter syndrome in the fall
It's difficult to answer for other developers' motivations for choosing programming during the summer vacation, but I know my own.
The programming world is gigantic. There's always something new to learn, and there's always something I feel I know less about than my colleagues or am curious about. And my laptop is always there, on the bench charging or on my lap. It often accompanies me on holiday trips too. "I will bring it just in case," I think to myself. What if there's a crisis at work?
But there's rarely any crisis. Instead, I end up tinkering with "new cool" things like Sanity and Next.js. This summer, I feel like I need to look into TypeScript.
Summer vacation feels like a huge opportunity to catch up on everything I should have learned in the spring so that I don't show up in August with the biggest imposter syndrome ever. That's why year after year, I've programmed during the summer vacation. Both because I enjoy it and because I feel like I need to do it.
At least turn off Slack
And that's precisely the point. Using vacation time for programming is self-imposed. It's something you choose for yourself.
If you ask your boss, he or she is unlikely to say that you should be programming this summer. "Please go to the beach" is probably a more likely response. Everything you want to learn, you can probably learn in the fall at work, right? Your boss probably wants you to take time off so that you can come back refreshed and with renewed energy.
So promise me that if you do choose to code this summer, you'll turn off email, Slack, and anything else you're not getting paid to do during your vacation. Only do what you find fun yourself.
But ideally, you should turn off the whole thing. Coding is fun, but there are so many other fun things to do too. So take a real vacation. You deserve it this year, and I deserve it this year.
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