Strategies to keep learning (without tuning It in a second job)
I see a lot of experienced developers who seem dissatisfied.
For me, part of that frustration comes from not having enough opportunities at work to learn genuinely new concepts, tools, or areas of engineering. It feels like more and more of my time goes into execution and solving variations of problems I already know how to solve.
Even worse, sometimes an LLM produces a solution and we simply don't have the time to properly understand its trade-offs, implications, or failure modes before moving on.
Obviously, you can learn outside of work, but I don't really like the idea that staying intellectually engaged in my profession should require having a second job in the evenings.
How do you handle this? I think there are several facets to it, for instance:
- At the team/company level, have you seen practices that actually create room for learning rather than just paying lip service to it?
- Do you deliberately choose projects or jobs based on their learning potential?
- And at some point, do you simply accept that work is mostly about applying what you already know, while developing new skills in your free time?