And the other question is: how do you sustain and nourish this curiosity and gaining of knowledge in regular project work cycles in typical IT departments under

And the other question is: how do you sustain and nourish this curiosity and gaining of knowledge in regular project work cycles in typical IT departments under already more-than-pressing deadlines? Often there are very real issues, however sad and true, why there are so many hacks and "duct type programming" and more often than not, programmers and immediate superiors do not have the luxury of being able to deal with them and instead have to "suck it up". Once you are in "crunch mode" in a death march project curiosity, elegance and sanity are the first casualties right after all of your free time. And apart from that, we as humans are not exactly outstandingly great at betting on the "later benefit" instead of immediate gratification.