I think if it's something you enjoy, you should absolutely code in your free time and write blog posts, etc. But if coding isn't your hobby, that's ok too. For some people, it's just their job. I enjoy it as both a job and a hobby, but I appreciate companies that allocate some time for learning and career growth time during work hours.
If a company expects side project work, they should provide some of those learning hours on the clock. The learning may not always directly benefit the company but it will often come back and indirectly benefit them.
Totally agree. It shouldn't be mandatory to stay up to date to do some coding in your free time and it would be the best to support and motivate your employees to work on some projects besides their daily work.
Getting to know new Devs, new technologies or other approaches is crucial in a way, but hard to do by simply reading stuff without getting your hands on. But with private life, family and job it might be hard to accomplish if you are not 120% into the hobby of coding.
At one company we had the discussion to contribute to some database orchestration framework because we heavily used it. These discussions, in my opinion, should be the discussions to have. Do we as a company have people that contribute to the library / framework we are using? Not only do we improve the lib of our product, but also get insight in it and its technologies and as a consequence also give something back to the community we are relying on.
It's something between idealistic and what some companies want. Some people might get scared by reading job offers with requirements in the web-/cloud-section when they did desktop application the past 10 years and haven't had the time to get their hands and feet into web-applications.
If a company expects side project work, they should provide some of those learning hours on the clock.
Yes. And related to this, if your company requires you to learn something new for your job (for example, attend training on a new system) that needs to be on the paid, clock time. If it's not, time to leave.
I think if it's something you enjoy, you should absolutely code in your free time and write blog posts, etc. But if coding isn't your hobby, that's ok too. For some people, it's just their job. I enjoy it as both a job and a hobby, but I appreciate companies that allocate some time for learning and career growth time during work hours.
If a company expects side project work, they should provide some of those learning hours on the clock. The learning may not always directly benefit the company but it will often come back and indirectly benefit them.
I like the idea of a company helping you grow and learn. That would definitely be the right balance.
Totally agree. It shouldn't be mandatory to stay up to date to do some coding in your free time and it would be the best to support and motivate your employees to work on some projects besides their daily work.
Getting to know new Devs, new technologies or other approaches is crucial in a way, but hard to do by simply reading stuff without getting your hands on. But with private life, family and job it might be hard to accomplish if you are not 120% into the hobby of coding.
At one company we had the discussion to contribute to some database orchestration framework because we heavily used it. These discussions, in my opinion, should be the discussions to have. Do we as a company have people that contribute to the library / framework we are using? Not only do we improve the lib of our product, but also get insight in it and its technologies and as a consequence also give something back to the community we are relying on.
It's something between idealistic and what some companies want. Some people might get scared by reading job offers with requirements in the web-/cloud-section when they did desktop application the past 10 years and haven't had the time to get their hands and feet into web-applications.
Right. Good point, companies will also benefit from employees documenting (aka blogging) and building tools (aka open source). It's a win-win.
Yes. And related to this, if your company requires you to learn something new for your job (for example, attend training on a new system) that needs to be on the paid, clock time. If it's not, time to leave.
Definitely. They should also give economical support to attend conferences or other useful meetings.
Oh geez, yes. I've seen a lot of unbalance with this across departments.