[smokel]

Interestingly, the person at Microsoft states in a reply that even most of them have to pick this up in their spare time. Judging from other replies, it seems that there are quite some differences in how companies approach this.

What I meant with "menial coding" is those jobs where people have to submit TPS reports on how much hours they spend for each customer. Reading a paper such as this one [1] is typically not directly necessary for being a good frontend developer, but it might stimulate someone to develop into a more fruitful employee in the long run. Managers would have to explain to their customer why time is being spent on that, and that requires some vision and creativity, which is not always a given.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762