[barefoot]

"If you’re not learning you’re standing still"

This is a large understatement. In our industry, if you're not learning you are drifting backwards rapidly.

I aim for twenty hours a week of (unpaid) reinvestment and learning. Some weeks I still feel like that's not enough to stay current.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

[judofyr]

I’ve had that feeling, and I started making an effort to improve myself. I started time-tracking my side projects (“you can’t improve what you don’t measure”), scheduling time for learning, and set up an automatic summary sent on email every week.

It didn’t work for me at all, and ended up basically killing every joy in my side projects. If I missed a scheduled hour (because I was doing something else fun) I felt like a failure. I could only focus on “I should be working on x” instead of actually thinking about x.

These days I try to not worry too much about what I should learn/produce, and rather work on what interests me at the time. I’m probably not learning at the most effective rate, but at least I’m having fun.

[teacpde]

I share similar experience, I find I can only achieve learning at a high effective rate with strong short-term motivation, and it can become tiring very quickly. On the other hand, I can always enjoy having fun and learn without worrying about effectiveness.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> if you're not learning you are drifting backwards rapidly

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Most of the "new" things in the industry are just rehashes of old things with a different coat of paint and some added abstractions to slow it all down.

[grzm]

Learning doesn’t only mean getting up to speed on the new and shiny. The depth and breadth of past research and papers is often timeless and valuable—more often than not moreso than the shiny. Also deepening one’s own skills in areas one’s already familiar with brings many benefits, and qualifies as learning in my book.

And this doesn’t even touch on learning outside of ones field, which is great for well-roundedness and for discovering parallels one doesn’t necessarily find within a single domain.

[javajosh]

There's lots of new stuff, but (luckily?) very little of it is worth learning. The universe of software is divided into worlds which were each founded with a certain set of assumptions, often long in the past, and everything that comes after is a test of how those assumptions apply to various real problems as they arise. They are essentially (social science) experiments in progress. The latter-day activities of one world are (almost) always inapplicable to other worlds. (The exceptions are very few, for example testing approaches, reactive programming, some functional techniques have managed to spread across worlds).

If you're going for excellence in your world, which is usually the goal of the staff programmer, you're better off focusing on the details of the world you're in - new libraries, releases, details of governance etc. Yes you should learn new languages now and again, to dip your toe in other worlds; that's foundational and good and keeps you agile. But most of the stuff you see on HN isn't foundational, and so you don't really need to pay attention to anything not happening on your world.

[agumonkey]

I did learning for the sake of it; not totally for no reason, I used to crave learning, abstraction, understanding. At one point it wasn't the whole story.

Standing still as rotting is bad obviously, but to me, just seek things that provides a sense of eager. Be it walking, boxing.. "make it" passionating (as in seek what tickles that sense). If semiconductor physics does that, enjoy it. But the emotion is what motivates me now. I think it's more important to replenish that than learning. You'll learn later when you're fulfilled, and probably 10x times better and faster.

[kostarelo]

It depends on how you measure that ROI, so to speak. In the web development industry, yes probably you could spend even more h/w on learning but would that benefit you in any way?

If you have just graduated yes you probably need to catch up especially if you are after a highly paid job, but for the more experienced one, no you don't have to be that anxious about it.

At some point I found my self spending more time on readying newsletters that were landing on my mail daily or weekly. Besides knowing what was that weeks' famous frontend library, it was adding zero to my foundational knowledge. I did felt that way. I just learned to let it go.

Now I am gradually trying to find my pace. The state were I can be aware of what's happening in the industry but also spend enough time on things that matter.

[naasking]

> Some weeks I still feel like that's not enough to stay current.

Staying current is overrated. You'd be better off spending most of those hours on CS fundamentals, written and oral communication skills, and probably exercise.

[MaxBarraclough]

Doesn't that depend on your work?

Many web developers have no choice but to chase fads. The whole industry is based on fad-chasing, after all.