10 ms·

I’ve always learned on the job and have never asked permission. I guess I’m lucky that I haven’t worked in the type of places where somebody’s looking over my s

I’ve always learned on the job and have never asked permission. I guess I’m lucky that I haven’t worked in the type of places where somebody’s looking over my shoulder every minute of the day. Somewhere around an hour a day every day and I’ve been doing it for years and nobody has ever said anything about it. I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work and I read them when they come in. I sometimes watch a conference talk about implementing something similar to whatever I’m scheduled to do next. If I were running a company I’d expect this of all high level employees. It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field.

sasper 7y ago
As an engineering manager, this is what I expect my top performers to do and encourage my junior folks to do the same. It benefits the IC, the delivery team, and the company at large. You can't heads-down slam out code for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Be responsible with your time and use it to push forward the vision & mission of the company by taking your professional development into your own hands.
- philjr 7y ago
  110% agreed I've always felt a level of entitlement around that. You (the business) want me to learn and get better. You get more value over time that way.
  - hkmurakami 7y ago
    I think we're lucky that many companies have this attitude. I've experienced the polar opposite in a Japanese bigco where we were given extensive material to learn (generally about the industry, or certifications), and it was very clearly understood that we were to learn the material off company time. As an American naturally I had an allergic reaction to this culture.
    - ddek 7y ago
      Friend of mine is a senior exec for the Fujitsu Europe. I met him doing the Haute Route, a two-week ski tour in the Alps. He says the amount of persuading he had to do to the global execs that being off-grid for two weeks might have it's benefits almost made it futile. I can't help but wonder if this attitude has inhibited japanese progress.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  To be honest, it's impossible to survive in tech if you are not constantly keeping up to date.
- holmboy_ 7y ago
  Continuing education in software engineering has always been a challenge for me. While my current employer allows for 20% time to learn new things, I find that I'm just unable to. Many employers (not all) place constraints on what one can do with that time. Typically the biggest constraint is that it must relate to the business in some way. As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it. Not only that, but if you choose to learn on your own time, finding a lesson to fit in your daily routine is also tricky, especially if you're caring for a family or have other commitments. Couple that with uncertainty about what to learn next, it can become overwhelming just to get started. Very recently, I started working on a project[1] to address this exact issue. The project is to help established software engineers progress their careers, learn new concepts, and refresh their existing knowledge with daily bite-size software engineering lessons designed to fit in their daily routines. [1] https://www.dailyswe.com https://www.dailyswe.com
  - jimbokun 7y ago
    "As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it." Unless you use load balancers in non-trivial ways at scale and really need to understand the ins and outs of how they work to utilize them effectively.
    - commandlinefan 7y ago
      Well, you know that, and I know that, and OP knows that. But it’s likely that OP’s boss not only doesn’t know that, but is mentally incapable of comprehending it. And even if he does (my boss is actually a sharp developer who does understand what’s going on), remember that we all have 8 bosses at any time.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      You can't generally predict how that knowledge will be useful, load balances don't exist in a vacuum, he might learn about packet structure, fail over and all kind of other stuff directly applicable
- tobych 7y ago
  What's IC?
  - sasper 7y ago
    Individual contributor. It's a fancy management word for SWE or anyone else in a non-management role.
    - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
      Ug...ok, I'll be that guy: what's an SWE?
      - coffeefirst 7y ago
        Software Engineer. I have no idea who started using these acronyms but they definitely forgot they're new and not universal.
        SenHeng 7y ago
        I guess the W is to differentiate it from Systems Engineer? We use SE here in Japan for both software engineers and system engineers. How are they difference? The latter is older and seems to have originated from people doing architectural, consulting type of work. Fun fact, consulting/contracting businesses here and also known as SES, System Engineer (as a) Service.
        pjscott 7y ago
        I haven't heard SE outside of a Japanese context, so this may just be a case of different countries randomly picking different acronyms.
    - SenHeng 7y ago
      A simpler, more universal word might be grunt.
ThaJay 7y ago
Very much this. If the management culture at your workplace is so sick they feel the need to make this behaviour a problem, there are probably other things wrong with the culture there.
- Sammi 7y ago
  Yes it is a huge red flag in general. If your company discourages learning on the job, you run, cause the company is only heading down hill.
mgr86 7y ago
> I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work -- Are these an internal thing for your organization? is it Just joining a mailing list for X language? Or is there some aggregation service you could share?
- NeonVice 7y ago
  I found this good curated list: https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters
- senko 7y ago
  Folks over at CooperPress maintain several dev weekly newsletters with pretty good overview of week's news: https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/
turowicz 7y ago
This over anything else. I wouldn't get to be a CTO multiple times if I wasn't in this mindset.
PunchTornado 7y ago
I sort of felt embarrassed when my manager told me to stop solving so many tickets and spend more time learning and improving my skills. He was so right.
leshow 7y ago
Me too. The company benefits in the long run. I've never had any complaints. In general I've found no one ever complains if you spend time learning.
protonimitate 7y ago
I've started using Friday as a "personal development" day at work. I do not write any code on Friday (unless it's a severe production level issue). Instead, I spend the mornings reviewing PRs that I wasn't included on (to keep up with whats happening, but also to learn more about how other people write and review code) and the afternoons are spent reading/researching/online classes. This has really helped me avoid burn out. I go into the weekend less exhausted and more motivated to return on Monday and implement new stuff. It has also helped generate some inspiration for weekend/personal projects.
- swiley 7y ago
  This is a brilliant idea! Hopefully it becomes popular.
- paracyst 7y ago
  This sounds like a good idea that I would really like to try, for my own sanity if for nothing else. For me, the issue—imagined or not—would arise in the Friday morning daily stand-up. I’m not sure it would go over well if I said that I intend to spend part of the day doing PRs (this is fine and expected) and the other part learning/researching (likely not). Oh the joys of the JIRA sweatshop. We have JIRA pulled up on the big screen TV and the product guys cycle through the status of each dev team members’ items during each daily standup. This is my first development job, surely it’s not like this everywhere?
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    It's not like that everywhere > product guys cycle through the status of each dev team members’ items during each daily standup Something has gone horrible off the rails. Standup is supposed to be a quick time for every team member to raise any blockers primarily, with a quick "here's what I did, here's what I'm doing" type blurb. The benefit of standup is identifying blockers and if engineers are getting mired in problems (so you can fix those issues outside of standup).
    - organsnyder 7y ago
uxp100 7y ago
I used to do this, and then we "switched to be more agile." (This just meant using JIRA and tracking sprint efficiency wrong). Companies do think "It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field" and they might even claim that learning and development on the job is important, but when it comes time to log JIRA hours, they tend to show how much they really believe in this.
- hamandcheese 7y ago
  Maybe make tickets for your learning activities?
  - uxp100 7y ago
    Heh, would not go over well. Now that we have JIRA, tickets are not just watched by my boss, but my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss, and a few dedicated project managers of some kind.
    - kedean 7y ago
      Yuck. When my company started pushing for more "agility" and my team moved to a sprint structure, I was lucky enough to have personal leverage as a senior team member. Early on I made it clear that tickets and sprints exclusively exist for the team to plan and manage expectations, and that I wasn't going to hold with upper management using them as leverage over anybody. To support that, I had to interrupt stand-ups a few times when someone would start iterating through tickets for progress instead of letting people report. I wish misuse of these tools wasn't so widespread, but it was to be expected.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Use code words.
    - ShroudedNight 7y ago
      > ...tickets are not just watched by my boss, but my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss... Are all these people really hired for their competency? The amount of wasted time this describes is staggering. Even at the worst of times, ticket interaction by even a skip-level was a sign of mounting org-wide desperation.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
What does "learned on the job" mean, though? Were you reading Stackoverflow? Taking a digital course and watching lecture videos? Reading a textbook with a pencil and paper out? Attending in-person trainings? All of these things are scrutinized very differently in the workplace.
- Ragib_Zaman 7y ago
  Exactly. Lots of places will not blink an eye if you are reading a blog post on something you'll be able to apply within a week. Having a textbook with pen and paper out to learn something that may not bring fruit for several months is a different story.
tikiman163 7y ago
You're correct that it's our own responsibility to be on top of whatever is going on and to train ourselves. However, plenty of companies think that expect for training scheduled and provided by the company, that it's not appropriate to train ourselves on the clock. Personally I agree with you, and find that discouraging people from training themselves during business hours just results in most employees not fully applying themselves.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> never asked permission That's a key thing. Even in the most high pressure environments, where "project management professionals" are breathing down your neck for "deliverables" it is your responsibility to learn stuff and evolve. It's nice if there's time and resources for people to better themselves, but these are typically limited to activities which are "related" to one's work function and are subject to "approval" from people whose interest in your career stops hard at what you can do for them in the roles they assume you're best-suited for. The good news is most places are NOT rank-and-yank hellscapes where every minute you do something that's not on somebody's gantt chart will cause you harm in the long term. In most places you can lift your nose off the grindstone... but you have to be willing to impose your own self-direction and structure.
megaframe 7y ago
Same but I've also been in places where they do look over your shoulder and I ended up fighting the tide. Everyone around me was in a constant panic mode, so I slowed my work output for 2 weeks (most I could get away with without ending up in a room talking about my work performance) where I studied and optimized the tasks consuming most of my time. Then automated them (this involved working what felt like two jobs at once pushing well over 80h a week).... When I finished I had so much free time I could finally start doing the interesting projects and my work output was consistently 2x my co-workers. I considered explaining this to management but they had just admonished a co-worker for not doing the thing they asked and trying to improve process. So I kept it to myself. Obviously this was a bit of a toxic work environment (early in my career) and I was luckily switched out of this group. My point is that you can fight bad management to make a better working environment for yourself but it takes a lot of effort and you need to be strategic in what you tell them as it can backfire.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > look over your shoulder I suspect that one of the drivers behind open offices is to make it easy to “catch” people who are “wasting time” learning on the job.
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
I really think this is the way to do it and it's also how I've always approached this. So much so that now the other members of the team I'm on joke about how I'm the guy that likes jumping down rabbit holes - which they're perfectly fine with! Something very important to this approach IMHO is paying your learning forward. Mentor other devs, write guides for your team/organization, etc. Make the benefit of your learning visible to everyone else. That means that yes, your learning has to have value to the business and to the team. If that aligns, I can't imagine many problems arising. Your learning becomes an act of giving and taking, rather than just taking, which is a win-win for everyone involved.
surge 7y ago
This is research, it's valid part of anyone's job.
tephra 7y ago
Someone who is great with how to develop good processes at work recently said something that made me think a lot about this as well. Why have WIP limits? Well one of the reasons is to be able to create downtime where you can go watch a video or read a newsletter. So I've been trying to spread this message in my team when someone has asked "The WIP is blocking and I can't really help anywhere at the moment" by answering "Go watch a video or read or take a walk for 10 minutes".
- heymijo 7y ago
  Since you weren't explicit about it, having a PM or manager who a) understands this concept, and b) can communicate it to the team is important and what you did here! I mentioned in a comment above that with the Theory of Constraints in mind, sometimes the right thing to do for an individual contributor at a point in time is, nothing. You went ahead and explicitly turned that into time to learn for them. Bravo.
znq 7y ago
As a remote company we're dedicating a 1-hour video call every week to learning. On top of that we've 2-3 voluntary video calls that we call MJ Talks (similar to TED Talks) talking about all kinds of topics ranging from technical and software related topics, but also health, fitness, personal finance, etc. On top of that we dedicate one week every year to something that we call MJ University. We rent a hotel in a location and fly everyone in to that location. If you're interested on all the details, we've written them up here: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/mj-university-staying-ahead-of-the-curve/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/mj-university-staying-ahead-of-t...
Xelbair 7y ago
Same here - i keep all the deadlines and use the spare time to better myself. Or even implement new ideas in production code. Also latter half of Friday is officially, by company policy, set up for such tasks - learning, and finishing internal tasks that always get pushed back. The more i learn, the better value/cost ratio for my employer. I would immiedetly change jobs if they didn't challenge me, or at least provide an environment where i can learn.

sasper 7y ago

As an engineering manager, this is what I expect my top performers to do and encourage my junior folks to do the same. It benefits the IC, the delivery team, and the company at large. You can't heads-down slam out code for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Be responsible with your time and use it to push forward the vision & mission of the company by taking your professional development into your own hands.

philjr 7y ago
110% agreed I've always felt a level of entitlement around that. You (the business) want me to learn and get better. You get more value over time that way.
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  I think we're lucky that many companies have this attitude. I've experienced the polar opposite in a Japanese bigco where we were given extensive material to learn (generally about the industry, or certifications), and it was very clearly understood that we were to learn the material off company time. As an American naturally I had an allergic reaction to this culture.
  - ddek 7y ago
    Friend of mine is a senior exec for the Fujitsu Europe. I met him doing the Haute Route, a two-week ski tour in the Alps. He says the amount of persuading he had to do to the global execs that being off-grid for two weeks might have it's benefits almost made it futile. I can't help but wonder if this attitude has inhibited japanese progress.
koheripbal 7y ago
To be honest, it's impossible to survive in tech if you are not constantly keeping up to date.
holmboy_ 7y ago
Continuing education in software engineering has always been a challenge for me. While my current employer allows for 20% time to learn new things, I find that I'm just unable to. Many employers (not all) place constraints on what one can do with that time. Typically the biggest constraint is that it must relate to the business in some way. As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it. Not only that, but if you choose to learn on your own time, finding a lesson to fit in your daily routine is also tricky, especially if you're caring for a family or have other commitments. Couple that with uncertainty about what to learn next, it can become overwhelming just to get started. Very recently, I started working on a project[1] to address this exact issue. The project is to help established software engineers progress their careers, learn new concepts, and refresh their existing knowledge with daily bite-size software engineering lessons designed to fit in their daily routines. [1] https://www.dailyswe.com https://www.dailyswe.com
- jimbokun 7y ago
  "As such, it can be hard to justify why you're spending your 20% time learning how load balancers work in nitty-gritty details since it's unlikely you'll be writing one from scratch or helping the company with it." Unless you use load balancers in non-trivial ways at scale and really need to understand the ins and outs of how they work to utilize them effectively.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Well, you know that, and I know that, and OP knows that. But it’s likely that OP’s boss not only doesn’t know that, but is mentally incapable of comprehending it. And even if he does (my boss is actually a sharp developer who does understand what’s going on), remember that we all have 8 bosses at any time.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    You can't generally predict how that knowledge will be useful, load balances don't exist in a vacuum, he might learn about packet structure, fail over and all kind of other stuff directly applicable
tobych 7y ago
What's IC?
- sasper 7y ago
  Individual contributor. It's a fancy management word for SWE or anyone else in a non-management role.
  - ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    Ug...ok, I'll be that guy: what's an SWE?
    - coffeefirst 7y ago
      Software Engineer. I have no idea who started using these acronyms but they definitely forgot they're new and not universal.
      - SenHeng 7y ago
        I guess the W is to differentiate it from Systems Engineer? We use SE here in Japan for both software engineers and system engineers. How are they difference? The latter is older and seems to have originated from people doing architectural, consulting type of work. Fun fact, consulting/contracting businesses here and also known as SES, System Engineer (as a) Service.
        pjscott 7y ago
        I haven't heard SE outside of a Japanese context, so this may just be a case of different countries randomly picking different acronyms.
  - SenHeng 7y ago
    A simpler, more universal word might be grunt.

ThaJay 7y ago

Very much this. If the management culture at your workplace is so sick they feel the need to make this behaviour a problem, there are probably other things wrong with the culture there.

Sammi 7y ago
Yes it is a huge red flag in general. If your company discourages learning on the job, you run, cause the company is only heading down hill.

mgr86 7y ago

> I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work -- Are these an internal thing for your organization? is it Just joining a mailing list for X language? Or is there some aggregation service you could share?

NeonVice 7y ago
I found this good curated list: https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters
senko 7y ago
Folks over at CooperPress maintain several dev weekly newsletters with pretty good overview of week's news: https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/

turowicz 7y ago

This over anything else. I wouldn't get to be a CTO multiple times if I wasn't in this mindset.

PunchTornado 7y ago

I sort of felt embarrassed when my manager told me to stop solving so many tickets and spend more time learning and improving my skills. He was so right.

leshow 7y ago

Me too. The company benefits in the long run. I've never had any complaints. In general I've found no one ever complains if you spend time learning.

protonimitate 7y ago

I've started using Friday as a "personal development" day at work. I do not write any code on Friday (unless it's a severe production level issue). Instead, I spend the mornings reviewing PRs that I wasn't included on (to keep up with whats happening, but also to learn more about how other people write and review code) and the afternoons are spent reading/researching/online classes. This has really helped me avoid burn out. I go into the weekend less exhausted and more motivated to return on Monday and implement new stuff. It has also helped generate some inspiration for weekend/personal projects.

swiley 7y ago
This is a brilliant idea! Hopefully it becomes popular.
paracyst 7y ago
This sounds like a good idea that I would really like to try, for my own sanity if for nothing else. For me, the issue—imagined or not—would arise in the Friday morning daily stand-up. I’m not sure it would go over well if I said that I intend to spend part of the day doing PRs (this is fine and expected) and the other part learning/researching (likely not). Oh the joys of the JIRA sweatshop. We have JIRA pulled up on the big screen TV and the product guys cycle through the status of each dev team members’ items during each daily standup. This is my first development job, surely it’s not like this everywhere?
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  It's not like that everywhere > product guys cycle through the status of each dev team members’ items during each daily standup Something has gone horrible off the rails. Standup is supposed to be a quick time for every team member to raise any blockers primarily, with a quick "here's what I did, here's what I'm doing" type blurb. The benefit of standup is identifying blockers and if engineers are getting mired in problems (so you can fix those issues outside of standup).
  - organsnyder 7y ago

uxp100 7y ago

I used to do this, and then we "switched to be more agile." (This just meant using JIRA and tracking sprint efficiency wrong). Companies do think "It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field" and they might even claim that learning and development on the job is important, but when it comes time to log JIRA hours, they tend to show how much they really believe in this.

hamandcheese 7y ago
Maybe make tickets for your learning activities?
- uxp100 7y ago
  Heh, would not go over well. Now that we have JIRA, tickets are not just watched by my boss, but my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss, and a few dedicated project managers of some kind.
  - kedean 7y ago
    Yuck. When my company started pushing for more "agility" and my team moved to a sprint structure, I was lucky enough to have personal leverage as a senior team member. Early on I made it clear that tickets and sprints exclusively exist for the team to plan and manage expectations, and that I wasn't going to hold with upper management using them as leverage over anybody. To support that, I had to interrupt stand-ups a few times when someone would start iterating through tickets for progress instead of letting people report. I wish misuse of these tools wasn't so widespread, but it was to be expected.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Use code words.
  - ShroudedNight 7y ago
    > ...tickets are not just watched by my boss, but my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss... Are all these people really hired for their competency? The amount of wasted time this describes is staggering. Even at the worst of times, ticket interaction by even a skip-level was a sign of mounting org-wide desperation.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

What does "learned on the job" mean, though? Were you reading Stackoverflow? Taking a digital course and watching lecture videos? Reading a textbook with a pencil and paper out? Attending in-person trainings? All of these things are scrutinized very differently in the workplace.

Ragib_Zaman 7y ago
Exactly. Lots of places will not blink an eye if you are reading a blog post on something you'll be able to apply within a week. Having a textbook with pen and paper out to learn something that may not bring fruit for several months is a different story.

tikiman163 7y ago

You're correct that it's our own responsibility to be on top of whatever is going on and to train ourselves. However, plenty of companies think that expect for training scheduled and provided by the company, that it's not appropriate to train ourselves on the clock. Personally I agree with you, and find that discouraging people from training themselves during business hours just results in most employees not fully applying themselves.

crispyambulance 7y ago

> never asked permission That's a key thing. Even in the most high pressure environments, where "project management professionals" are breathing down your neck for "deliverables" it is your responsibility to learn stuff and evolve. It's nice if there's time and resources for people to better themselves, but these are typically limited to activities which are "related" to one's work function and are subject to "approval" from people whose interest in your career stops hard at what you can do for them in the roles they assume you're best-suited for. The good news is most places are NOT rank-and-yank hellscapes where every minute you do something that's not on somebody's gantt chart will cause you harm in the long term. In most places you can lift your nose off the grindstone... but you have to be willing to impose your own self-direction and structure.

megaframe 7y ago

Same but I've also been in places where they do look over your shoulder and I ended up fighting the tide. Everyone around me was in a constant panic mode, so I slowed my work output for 2 weeks (most I could get away with without ending up in a room talking about my work performance) where I studied and optimized the tasks consuming most of my time. Then automated them (this involved working what felt like two jobs at once pushing well over 80h a week).... When I finished I had so much free time I could finally start doing the interesting projects and my work output was consistently 2x my co-workers. I considered explaining this to management but they had just admonished a co-worker for not doing the thing they asked and trying to improve process. So I kept it to myself. Obviously this was a bit of a toxic work environment (early in my career) and I was luckily switched out of this group. My point is that you can fight bad management to make a better working environment for yourself but it takes a lot of effort and you need to be strategic in what you tell them as it can backfire.

commandlinefan 7y ago
> look over your shoulder I suspect that one of the drivers behind open offices is to make it easy to “catch” people who are “wasting time” learning on the job.

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

I really think this is the way to do it and it's also how I've always approached this. So much so that now the other members of the team I'm on joke about how I'm the guy that likes jumping down rabbit holes - which they're perfectly fine with! Something very important to this approach IMHO is paying your learning forward. Mentor other devs, write guides for your team/organization, etc. Make the benefit of your learning visible to everyone else. That means that yes, your learning has to have value to the business and to the team. If that aligns, I can't imagine many problems arising. Your learning becomes an act of giving and taking, rather than just taking, which is a win-win for everyone involved.

surge 7y ago

This is research, it's valid part of anyone's job.

tephra 7y ago

Someone who is great with how to develop good processes at work recently said something that made me think a lot about this as well. Why have WIP limits? Well one of the reasons is to be able to create downtime where you can go watch a video or read a newsletter. So I've been trying to spread this message in my team when someone has asked "The WIP is blocking and I can't really help anywhere at the moment" by answering "Go watch a video or read or take a walk for 10 minutes".

heymijo 7y ago
Since you weren't explicit about it, having a PM or manager who a) understands this concept, and b) can communicate it to the team is important and what you did here! I mentioned in a comment above that with the Theory of Constraints in mind, sometimes the right thing to do for an individual contributor at a point in time is, nothing. You went ahead and explicitly turned that into time to learn for them. Bravo.

znq 7y ago

As a remote company we're dedicating a 1-hour video call every week to learning. On top of that we've 2-3 voluntary video calls that we call MJ Talks (similar to TED Talks) talking about all kinds of topics ranging from technical and software related topics, but also health, fitness, personal finance, etc. On top of that we dedicate one week every year to something that we call MJ University. We rent a hotel in a location and fly everyone in to that location. If you're interested on all the details, we've written them up here: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/mj-university-staying-ahead-of-the-curve/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/mj-university-staying-ahead-of-t...

Xelbair 7y ago

Same here - i keep all the deadlines and use the spare time to better myself. Or even implement new ideas in production code. Also latter half of Friday is officially, by company policy, set up for such tasks - learning, and finishing internal tasks that always get pushed back. The more i learn, the better value/cost ratio for my employer. I would immiedetly change jobs if they didn't challenge me, or at least provide an environment where i can learn.