Glad to see others bringing up concerns about the obsession with extracurricular learning in the industry. It’s pressure on people to do work at home, cleverly

Glad to see others bringing up concerns about the obsession with extracurricular learning in the industry. It’s pressure on people to do work at home, cleverly worded to not sound like a requirement. Yes, in depth learning takes a lot of time and is needed to become a better engineer, but that qualifies as WORK which should be compensated for, just like how delivering features is work. Throughout my career I have actively encouraged teammates to slow down and really understand problem domains, because the industry default they tend to be used to is to rush to completion. All that being said, you just have to play the game a little bit too if you want to maximize your hireability. Find some dumb errors in doc sites for popular projects to check off the “OSS contributor” box. Have code in your GitHub account be public, hell just go fork some projects and never do anything with them, better than nothing and takes zero time. Add tasteful color and styling to your resume, etc. Feels superficial, it is! But in a competitive market it’s worth it and all of the above is mostly one-off work, not a “code is my lifestyle” transformation. Be honest if asked about it though, don’t lie about being a Rails core contributor because you forked Rails.