I very rarely see anyone try anything different in a 9-5 setting. People leave university, join their first job, and spend 3 years learning how to develop in o

I very rarely see anyone try anything different in a 9-5 setting. People leave university, join their first job, and spend 3 years learning how to develop in one way, and only one way. At-work choices are rarely choices, because you just do the next thing the same way as you did the last thing. If you step out of line, management will reel you back in. A 'big' change is switching from Spring to Micronaut (or vice versa). Some examples: I have pretty strong opinions about ORMs vs SQL. It would be interesting to discuss that on the job with someone who knows both well. But the guy you'll be talking to won't have tried SQL (beyond that academic thing they learnt at uni). Discussions about languages and types? "Java is good because it has types and JS doesn't" was the level of discourse I got at my first serious job. Having side projects at least indicates that they can try things out first-hand, own their own feedback loop, experience some surprises, and not just mindlessly cargo-cult "best-practices".