I can't speak for your colleagues of course, but I find this line of thinking very reasonable: A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April

I can't speak for your colleagues of course, but I find this line of thinking very reasonable: A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession. http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup