> No employer would have paid for me to develop these projects, and yet I learned so many invaluable skills by doing them. I'm going to disagree with you here.

> No employer would have paid for me to develop these projects, and yet I learned so many invaluable skills by doing them. I'm going to disagree with you here. It depends on the employer, and more often, the circumstances at any given time. For example, last week I spent the time writing my own implementations of HOTP/TOTP based on the RFCs [1][2]. I did this all at work while being paid. They also paid me to extract and open source our param validation tools. Both cases served me more than the company, but the company benefited because of the skills I learned while doing both. All of that to say, you're half right - under most circumstances you won't be paid to do a passion project. Though, there are parts of your work for a company where you can make an argument for reinventing the wheel rather than pulling in an existing OSS package. Your employer has to see the value in the long game which too often isn't the case. Cheers. 1. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4226 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4226 2. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238