[doomslice]

> > No self development

> Typically the people who say this are the people who are most likely not to get much from free time to learn new stuff. if you are the type of engineer to learn new stuff then formal training and free time is not going to change your ability to pick things up. If you come to me and say I could not learn X because I had no free time, I am generally sceptical.

I used to feel the same way -- I would spend practically all of my time after work reading about new technologies, best practices, and trying them out in some prototypes that I could then apply to my work. Then I got married. Then I had twins. My priorities have shifted so much that if I'm not given the chance to explore and learn _during_ work, then I'm probably not going to do it anymore. Many companies allow this without explicitly calling it 20% time; other companies will tell you that any time not spent working on a story is wasted time.