Work Hobbies
Work Hobbies
"Work Hobby" is a term I use to describe optional activities at work that I decide to do in addition to my core responsibilities. These are things I'm interested in that also have a potential positive impact to my team or product.
Things that make something a work hobby instead of just work:
- Optional, no deadlines
- Voluntary, done out of interest
- Can be done incrementally in small chunks of time
Work hobbies, like work, can have a positive impact on your career and to your product. They can vary a lot in terms of the types of skills you develop or acquire, whether you work alone or with a group, how technical or non-technical they are, and how flexible they are in terms of time commitments.
Examples:
- Learning how to debug your teams frontend application by writing Cypress tests
- Taking a security reviewer certification course to become a security reviewer
- Joining or leading mentoring circles to grow and help others grow
- Writing operational or debugging tools to speed up resolving bugs
I have a detailed list of work hobbies and examples at the end of this post.
Why or why not work hobbies?
Whether or not work hobbies are a good fit depends on the person and the situation.
Work hobbies are good when:
- You can manage multi-tasking
- You frequently have "idle" time of 15+ minutes between meetings or waiting for deployments
- Your schedule at work is stable and predictable
- Your work culture supports self-driven projects or self-learning
Work hobbies are not good when:
- You joined a new team within the past 6 months
- You are on a performance improvement or focus plan
- You find multi-tasking disruptive
- You prefer fewer projects or tasks to focus on
- You are more effective with team or manager accountability for your work
How to choose work hobbies
If you choose work hobbies strategically, you have the potential to add to your professional portfolio for either promotions or job interviews. Things to consider for work hobbies:
- Am I interested in doing this?
- Is this something that can develop into a skill?
- Is this something that could have a positive impact on my team or product?
- Is this something that I can easily pick up and put down as I have time for at least a few weeks?
Work hobbies tend to produce better results when working on them over a longer period of time - especially considering this might be an hour or two a week, scattered between meetings or deployments.
Interest
You need to be interested in your work hobby otherwise it is just another thing to do. Choose areas you're interested in like learning a specific technology, developing communication skills, or internal networking.
Skills
Choose a work hobby that can develop into a skill or a project showing experience after being worked on for some time. Examples of skills are using framworks or specific languages (ex. Cypress, Javascript), building domain expertise (ex. software security), and leadership skills (ex. mentoring, communication).
Impact
Work hobbies are most successful when they have a positive impact on the product or team. Positive impact can be increased product quality with improvements like end-to-end tests and operational tools or growing the company by mentoring individuals and sharing domain expertise with your team.
Potential Time Investment
Work hobbies have no specific time investment but they are more likely to be successful if they are something you can work on over several months. For example:
- Getting a certification - if a certification course is 15 hours and you're able to do 1 - 2 hours a week, then you'll need 2 - 4 to complete the course.
- Adding end-to-end tests - if adding a single end-to-end test takes 1 hour, you will potentially be able to add a new test every week or every other week. You can convert this into a % increase in automation coverage.
Tips for Work Hobbies
You need to continuously evaluate where you are spending your time and whether you are getting impact out of your work hobbies. When work hobbies fall out of balance, it can have negative personal and professional consequences. Here are some tips to avoid work hobbies going wrong:
- Run your ideas by your manager and mentors to get feedback on impact and career growth
- Plan carefully to make sure partial work won't negatively impact the team or product
- Avoid hard deadlines to keep flexibility
- Trial a new work hobby a few weeks to see if it works with your schedule and expectations
- Do not to let your work hobby take time away from your core responsibilities
- Check-in regularly to make sure you are still motivated and benefiting from your work hobby
- Try tracking your time spent on work hobbies to keep track of spending too much time or too little time on them
Examples of Work Hobbies
Now that the theory is out of the way, let's go into some specific examples of work hobbies.
Employee Resource Groups
Employee resource groups are community driven groups focused on a specific demographic, usually a minority group. For example, "women at
Examples
- Coordinating monthly meetings for your organization's women-in-tech group
- Leading mentorship circles for your organization's new grads onboarding group
- Attending your organization's monthly web accessibility talks
Interest areas
- Mentoring (either as mentee or mentor)
- Leadership (if taking on leadership responsibilities)
- Communication (if taking on communication responsibilities)
- Networking
Impact
- Growing others at the company
- Learning new skills to bring back to the team
- Identifying potential new team members
Career growth
- Communication and leadership skills
- Building your personal network for job opportunities
- Finding mentors in a specific area of growth
Drawbacks
- Low impact to team or product
- Unpredictable or inconsistent benefits
Engineering Standards Committees
Engineering standards committees are groups of technical experts providing guidance in their area of expertise. These committees can vary in terms of how they work. They can consist of maintaining organization-wide documentation, regular committee meetings to vet and set new standards, and providing office hours for consultation across the organization.
Examples
- Security reviewer in a security review committee
- Owner of disaster recovery guidance and documentation for software teams
- Committee lead for coordinating design reviews and design review office hours
Interest areas
- Leadership
- In-depth technical expertise in the area of best practices
- Internal networking
- Org-wide mentoring
Impact
- Increasing the quality of software for the committee subject matter either through reviews or documentation
- Educating engineering teams on best practices
Career Growth
- Keeping up to date with a given area of expertise
- Experience making and communicating organization-wide technical decisions
Drawbacks
- There is a specific time commitment if there are regular meetings or office hours though these usually happen on-demand or on a monthly basis
- These are not a good way to learn the technical area from scratch and instead work best as a way to keep up to date with best practices in an area you are already familiar with
- You generally need to be at or close to senior level for this to be an effective use of your time for career growth
Debugging and Operational Tools
Debugging and operational tools can be used to automate repetitive debugging or automation tasks. These tools can either be used for yourself only or shared with your team.
Note: Some of the debugging and operational examples can be done via AI tooling. It is still worth sharing the output and documenting how and when the tools should be used.
Examples
- Writing a Python script to redrive AWS SQS DLQ messages
- Writing a Gradle script to automatically set up a new development environment
- Creating a common debugging queries page with examples queries for team debugging tools (Kibana, CloudWatch logs, Splunk, SQL, etc.)
Interests
- Scripting language (Python, Gradle Kotlin/Groovy)
- Infrastructure APIs and interfaces (AWS Python SDK, Kibana/Elasticsearch query language)
Impact
- Fast and repeatable debugging for common issues that reduces MTTR for production issues
- Speed up onboarding of new team members from days to hours or weeks to days
Career Growth
- An example of a script or application showing expertise in a specific programming language and/or integration with a specific technology (AWS SDKs, REST) which can be added to your resume skills
- Hands-on experience with specific technologies are skills which can be added to your resume and used in job interviews for system design
Drawbacks
- Good judgement is needed to decide what is worth writing as a script. Small, one-time tasks are not good candidates while complex or repeat tasks are.
- Choosing a different language or tool than what your team normally uses (even if you are interested in it) won't have a positive impact if your team won't use it or can't understand it.
- Risk of over-engineer scripting tools used for lightweight debugging - it's more about having an automated short-cut rather than an entire new application.
Certifications and Courses
Certifications and courses are a great way to fill in time by watching videos for 15 - 30 minutes and working through exercises. They can be found on various platforms as well as for free on some video hosting sites.
Interests
- Getting a certification for a specific technology (AWS Solutions Architect)
- Learning about a new area (Prompt Engineering)
- Gaining a specific new skill (Typescript)
Impact
- Become an expert in AWS and provide code review and design feedback on implementation choices resulting in higher quality or lower cost software
- Contribute to and review generative AI prompt proposal for internal tools resulting in more accurate or efficient use of generative AI (ex. MCP)
Career Growth
- Add certifications, courses, and skills to your resume
- Increase your influence as an expert via design reviews, code reviews, or other opportunities for feedback and discussion
Drawbacks
- Certifications, courses, and intentional skills development are usually not impactful unless your team does not have other experts
- Companies frequently expect people to learn on the job rather than courses unless they are in a consulting or contracting space
Increasing Testing or Monitoring Coverage
Teams often have a backlog of operational work to increase test coverage or improve monitoring or alerting. You can take a look at the backlog and create a mini-project of a group of such tasks to work on while you have time.
Interests
- Learning tests frameworks (ex. Cypress)
- Learning best practices for testing and monitoring
- Learning about monitoring technologies (ex. Datadog)
- Learning about automation technologies (ex. BuildKite)
Impact
- Improved product quality by catching bugs via higher automated test coverage
- Improved product quality by detecting errors faster with higher monitoring coverage
Career Growth
- Learning new technologies to add to your resume (ex. Cypress, Datadog, BuildKite)
- Expertise in testing and/or monitoring best practices through hand-on learning
Drawbacks
- Impact will be delayed as you learn the tools initially
- You need to be careful not to create noisy alarms or flakey tests, which will create perceived negative impact
Participating in Hiring Events
Companies host hiring events or join networking events at conferences to attract new talent. Hiring events can range from visiting a specific university for a college hire interviewing event or staffing a booth at a conference career fair. These events can require travel and are most beneficial when your team is hiring.
You can invest in hiring events by taking interviewer training and preparing interview questions in during your idle time.
Interests
- Internal and external networking
- Developing interviewing skills
- (Maybe) Work travel
- (Maybe) Reconnecting with the university you went to
Impact
- Finding new hires for your team or company
- Becoming a skilled interviewer for your team or company
Career Growth
- Adding technical interviewing as a skill to your resume
- Learning more about technical interviews for your own interviewing or to help others
Drawbacks
- Some companies highly value individuals contributing to the hiring process and others do not. Be careful to research how your company views these contributions before spending too much time on them.
- Companies value having experienced interviewers available so they encourage people new to interviewing to go to these events. However, once you are already an experienced interviewer, they may not be as supportive.
- Hiring events are usually infrequent (1 - 2 times per year) but they take up a bit chunk of time all at once.
Keeping Up to Date with Blogs, Videos, and Podcasts
Keep up to date with your favorite set of blogs or channels is a way for you to stay connected with the evolution of your core skills in the industry. By focusing on the core skills you use at work and the key technologies at your company, you can have impact by reading a blog or watching a video in your idle time at work.
In order for this to have impact, you need to share the content you think is valuable for your team to learn either in a Slack channel or via a team knowledge sharing session.
Interests
- Learning about what's new in language releases (ex. What's new in Python)
- Stating up to date on new frameworks (ex. Spring Developer)
- Listening to tech podcasts
Impact
- Leveling up the team by curating relevant and high quality content for them to read
- Building visibility as a team or org-wide mentor
Career Growth
- Staying up to date with the industry
- Maintaining relevancy in your skills
Drawbacks
- You may not have a high "hit rate" when it comes to sharing content. If you read 10 articles, you may only share 1 that you find valuable to the team.
- If you share too much irrelevant content, you will appear as distracting.
- Similarly, if you share content without clarifying why it is relevant, your team may not look at the content and it will appear distracting
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