> Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid,
You just got done saying how you spent all this time with your Dad fixing stuff, but you don't want to spend 4-5 days fixing stuff because you want to spend time with your wife and kid... Why not just work together? Jobs like that have lots of different parts, from demolition to making lunch. It's much more fun as a family than for Dad to go off and do it alone.
> how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
If your work involves creativity you'll use that experience thousands of times. Every detail of the process is a metaphor for all kinds of things. There's no border in my head between coding, business, gardening, and homebuilding. All of those practices self-reinforce. Things I learn in one domain constantly solve problems in others.
There is this idea in the tech world that the most stimulating environment for solving coding problems is a sterile office with a bunch of computers, and non-stop exposure to the concrete problem space. But I find a few minutes in the garden, a long walk, a break to cook lunch... these are often much more fertile areas for me to solve challenging questions.
Most software management processes just value "did today's widget do it's behavior", and don't encourage people to solve the higher level challenges in their codebase. Those are opportunities which can offer 100x increases in productivity, but most tech managers would rather get 20 widgets built than suffer watching an engineer smoking pot and making elaborate meals in the kitchen for two weeks and then two weeks refactoring things that already worked into a (seemingly arbitrarily) different shape.
My kid is 3. Try installing flooring or doing any type of home repair with a 3 year old running around. Good luck.
Sure, it's good to have hobbies. I like to forage mushrooms, cook, hike, photograph, etc., and I agree they are stimulating, creative, whatever. Who's arguing otherwise? I don't follow. My dad's only real hobby was working on the house and yard. One could argue that's less stimulating than having hobbies spanning a more diverse set of skills. Also, maybe parents should occasionally consider what hobbies their children want to do.
I have installed flooring a few times in my life. I have never consciously used that experience in other facets of life. All it taught me is that I would rather spend my time doing something else. I don't find it particularly satisfying or enjoyable. Let's say I have 5 more instances of wanting new flooring in my life. What I'm saying is I'd prefer to have 25 days where I can choose how I want to spend time rather than spend those 25 days installing flooring to save $4000. I think most of my peer group thinks similarly, whereas I think many middle class people would have made the opposite decision a generation ago.
My point was not that you should only be coding or sitting in an office or something. I don't know where you got that idea. My point was that I don't inherently value self-sufficiency when it comes to home/yard/car maintenance – at least not to the same degree that previous generations did.
And obviously all of this is on a spectrum, right? I think it's important to know how to change a tire or jump a battery, if you drive often. I know how to change my own oil but rarely choose to. I don't know how to, say, change my brake pads. It's probably easy, but it's not something that comes up often enough that I care about learning – and not an area I want to test my amateur abilities.
EDIT: Anyway, I'm not trying to argue, though I acknowledge I am bristly in the text above. I actually agree with most of what you said. You're totally right that as my daughter gets older, there's more opportunity for the family to do projects together, and if she enjoys learning how to install a new light fixture or whatever, that can be a hobby for us to do together. Though I still wouldn't view it as inherently much more valuable than other hobbies, like camping or painting, and that's where I think my viewpoint differs from my parents' or grandparents'.
You just got done saying how you spent all this time with your Dad fixing stuff, but you don't want to spend 4-5 days fixing stuff because you want to spend time with your wife and kid... Why not just work together? Jobs like that have lots of different parts, from demolition to making lunch. It's much more fun as a family than for Dad to go off and do it alone.
> how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
If your work involves creativity you'll use that experience thousands of times. Every detail of the process is a metaphor for all kinds of things. There's no border in my head between coding, business, gardening, and homebuilding. All of those practices self-reinforce. Things I learn in one domain constantly solve problems in others.
There is this idea in the tech world that the most stimulating environment for solving coding problems is a sterile office with a bunch of computers, and non-stop exposure to the concrete problem space. But I find a few minutes in the garden, a long walk, a break to cook lunch... these are often much more fertile areas for me to solve challenging questions.
Most software management processes just value "did today's widget do it's behavior", and don't encourage people to solve the higher level challenges in their codebase. Those are opportunities which can offer 100x increases in productivity, but most tech managers would rather get 20 widgets built than suffer watching an engineer smoking pot and making elaborate meals in the kitchen for two weeks and then two weeks refactoring things that already worked into a (seemingly arbitrarily) different shape.