That’s called a hobby. And hobbies are great and lots of fun.

Monetizing hobbies turns them back into a job.

Athena. She’s the goddess of both wisdom and warfare. I can’t fathom a better analogue.

Absolutely. Something that has somehow gotten lost in all the SE grind and staying ahead of the curve is the idea that it is our job’s responsibility to us to help us grow and develop in ways that are useful to the job. We have significant informal education just from tinkering / doing personal projects when we had the time that (my hypothesis) we keep that expectation of ourselves as we enter the workplace. We wrongly believe that it is our responsibility to on our own time learn new things about technology.

When you’re 12, 18, whatever, you’re learning technology because you want to. You’re curious and you branch out into other areas. Maintaining that curiosity in the workplace is excellent. AND, remember that a job is something that takes your labor and turns it into capital. The responsibility of a good organization is to understand what skills it needs (whether because we notice that something is missing / lacking, or because there’s competent leadership), and then to prioritize its use of our time to grow those capabilities. My company gets my 40 hours. They pay me well for it. Unless there’s truly an emergency, they don’t get another minute of my time. They have determined that they make a profit off my salary at the level of work that I provide because we agreed to it.

If a company doesn’t understand that they need to pay me to learn something that they want me to learn, then they are going back on that agreement.

Technology is both my job and my passion. I will spend all weekend messing with things in my home lab if that’s what I want to do, and it often is. Other times I want to disappear into the woods and stare at trees all weekend. Prioritizing your family’s needs and your needs should always come before your employer’s needs.

One of the biggest things you can be learning during this time if you haven’t already (and it’s an intensely uncomfortable thing to learn) is how and what to delegate. My projects don’t take me less time when I’m effective in this, but they do free up mental load for doing only the important grind-y work, and separately thinking about the things that need to be thought about.

Junior devs are scary, and giving them actual responsibility is scary, but it’s also how they get more competent and eventually do more good work than things that need adjustment or rework.

Maximum Derek!

No reason aside from building endless unnecessary complexity, which–let’s be honest–is 90% of the point of running a home lab.

Shit’s broken at work: hate it. Shit’s broken at home: ooh a project!

Joined on a project and the unsupervised junior devs had branches for each developer, even if they were working on the same features. They were copying and pasting each others code into their personal branches to stay up to date.

Spaghetti commits took a while to unwind.

My company finally went to a non expiring multi-word based policy. Took them a major breach but finally some sanity.