Yeah I agree, it depends on what part of your job you consider “work”.

+1 to everything Brent said.

My job is about 60-80% pleasant. I don’t sit in boring meetings at home. I don’t read boring emails. I don’t write boring documentation. I don’t rush to fix bugs when I don’t feel like it just because some arbitrary milestone is coming up. That stuff costs money, and Yahoo is willing to pay enough to get me to do it (a small amount of the time, anyway).

Apart from that stuff, my job and my free time are quite a bit like one another. I really enjoy a lot of aspects of the project I’m working on, and have even spent a few weekends happily hacking away on it. In fact, in some ways, my dayjob work is more fun, because I have a bunch of friends who are working on it with me.

It seems like we’re all saying roughly the same thing in slightly different words, no?

To me the work/life balance is separating the parts of your job that you wouldn’t normally want to do outside of work (like the specific projects you need to finish). But the learning, tinkering, etc, that’s our hobby. That isn’t going to stop when you go home. We’re just lucky enough to have turned it into a successful career.