How Much Of My Life Has Been Eaten By Computers?

10 year old omegastick was downright skeptical when some guy on an Internet forum said that he could make his own video games by typing words into a text file. Nevertheless, he downloaded a pirated copy of Quest (2006 archive) and so began the predominant occupation of his life.

Rumor has it that it takes ~10,000 hours to become a “world-class” expert in a skill. It will soon be 20 years since I started telling the computer to do things, and I certainly don’t feel like a world-class expert. Probably not even a “country-class” expert. Maybe a “street-class” expert. I’m probably the best programmer in my building, at least, right? Right?

To put my mind at ease, I set about calculating how many hours I’ve actually spent programming. I want to define “programming” pretty broadly for the same reason I tell my employer: pressing buttons on the keyboard is only one small slice of the task, so bathroom breaks spent thinking about architecture are definitely billable. I will consider study time, software-related meetings, and time spent arguing discussing architecture specifics with teammates as “programming” for the purpose of this article. I’m going to play it pretty fast and loose though, these are ballpark estimates.

As a kid, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Quest was pretty short-lived, but I quickly moved onto QBASIC, then Python (which is still my daily driver to this day!), HTML, and CSS (my MySpace page looked sick). From the ages 10-17 I estimate I spent around 1-2 hours a week coding. It was sporadic. There were times that I’d get super motivated and spend 8 hours a day making a “really cool” text game, but I would also forget about programming entirely for months at a time.

As much as League of Legends tried to take over the life of university student omegastick, I somehow still found time to do both coursework and personal projects. I’m going to estimate 50% of my coursework as “programming” (the rest being unimportant details like “ethics” and “developing a career”) as I buckled down and studied for… maybe like a couple of hours a day. Hey, at least that meant I was doing lots of extracurricular work, right? (no, I mostly played video games)

Sooner or later, though, those halcyon days of playing video games 8 hours a day had to come to an end. Suddenly, there was this guy (my boss) who kept asking me to write code to make a robot do stuff like pick up bottles and poke my coworkers in the face (okay he didn’t ask me to do the last one, that was for fun). At least he was giving me money, I guess. That lead to a consistent 4-8 hours a day of programming-related work and another 1-3 hours at home half-finishing personal projects.

So, given all that, where are we at?

Somewhere between 12,000 and 24,000 hours. Not bad! That’s at least probably more than anyone else in my apartment block!

- omegastick