I also thought so. But I have yet to experience one start-up project that doesn't demand so much of your time that you worry you won't get to take the 10 minute walk to the super market today. If you can do that, you can easily with the same amount of energy work a side project.
Because of this, it's hard to do much else that requires willpower after putting in a day's work as a programmer. You can do habitual things just fine; or procrastinative things. But, outside of those two activity-classes, it's hard to even do the most enjoyable of things—like, for example, watching a serious, dramatic movie—because you won't get anything out of such activities if you don't invest some emotional energy into them, and you've just plum run out.
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In a more technical sense, it's my understanding that the activity of programming somehow "uses up" a lot of dopamine, and so gradually depletes one's available store of dopamine over the course of the day in much the same way that stress, cold environments, and surprising loud noises are known to.
Thus, a neurotypical person who spends eight hours programming in a day, will end up effectively equivalent in behavior/mentality to a person with ADHD for the rest of the day, until they can sleep it off and recover.
(This means you could probably restore your "spoons" by taking ADHD medication just after leaving work... but that seems ill-advised, for multiple reasons.)
Yes, after 6 hours of hard software engineering work your capacity for the day is pretty much exhausted and you start doing bad work, but if you put these bad additional hours into your day job or your hobby doesn't make much difference energy wise.
Can you link a news article or study about the similarities between programmers at the end of the day and adults with ADHD? Just curious... for a friend... ;)
