[xyzwave]

You can, but at what cost? When do you see friends, or cook, or exercise, not to mention sleep.

I’m not saying some personal time shouldn’t be dedicated to learning, but if the vast majority of your week is spent on a dead end, the time you have left to keep your skills sharp pales in comparison.

[j33zusjuice]

I’m an infra guy, and I’ve had two unexcellent jobs in a row now where I’m the only Linux person, and the most critical things run on Linux, so I spend the majority of my time on break/fix situations and trying to remember what the fuck I was doing before someone bothered me with another broken service. To make things worse, management was and is chaotic and disorganized that I can’t take time to complete a single project at once (and in the case of my current role, an actual barrier to progress, I’m currently getting blocked on something because I haven’t tested a particular method of copying a script to target hosts for a process that we do only twice a year, the difference is as trivial as using rsync instead of scp, but not exactly since I don’t want to give exact details, just in case!). I can tell that I’m not learning anything, and in many ways, my skills are regressing (as has become apparent through all the interviews I bombed in the last six weeks).

The problem is that I’m so irritated and demotivated by this job that I don’t want to look at a computer after I’m done. I don’t want to be in my office after I’m done. I only go in there if I forgot a drink or something on my desk. I need to figure out a way to upskill outside of work since it’s so clearly not going to happen at work, but the mental “anguish” (not quite anguish, really) makes me want to just shut down at the end of the day.

It’s much better when you get to spend a significant part of your work week building new skills, or at least improving existing skills.