[ahelwer]

I’ve found corporate software environments anathema to learning. The daily standup will not reward “yesterday I learned how to use a debugger” or “yesterday I spent time reading documentation” but it does reward “yesterday I spent hours grinding out the root cause of a bug”. There are other reasons, of course - but fundamentally the messaging is to get it done with as little learning as possible. You should know it all already! Learning, it should also be said, is very very hard when you are burnt out. And most of the learning capacity is used up learning non-transferable knowledge about internal-only APIs and systems you will never use again.

The solution is probably employer-funded sabbaticals but since those are rare people just settle for quitting and poking around at their own projects for a while.

Now that I’m more of what you’d call a “senior” developer I realize the absolute importance of taking time to set up your development environment so compiling, debugging, unit tests, prototyping etc. are as seamless as possible - the benefits to productivity and general happiness are manifold! But having the clout to invest more “non-productive” time upfront so your overall productivity is much higher is not usually afforded to devs fresh out of school who tend to just grind it out.