I feel that there is a huge gap between this writing and my daily experience as a developer. I've been thanked for my work and I'm understood to be a valuable a

I feel that there is a huge gap between this writing and my daily experience as a developer. I've been thanked for my work and I'm understood to be a valuable asset for my employer in my role as a software engineer - and never I've been required to have extracurricular development to facilitate my career progress. Maybe the fact that my work has fairly deep domain knowledge requirements and I know my stuff pretty well puts me in this category - but I don't know. I like coding in my free time as a way to explore subjects though, so I do this anyway (but nothing that could be considered good software engineering, good engineering is grueling work while fast prototyping is fun.)