Going off the title (can't say I followed the argument in the actual article all that well), this is exactly why I have a hard time working on learning things (

Going off the title (can't say I followed the argument in the actual article all that well), this is exactly why I have a hard time working on learning things (i.e. new frameworks, languages, etc...) in my free time. For the most part, at this stage in my career, everything I know I've learned on the job. In other words, I was receiving meaningful income while learning. Why would I want to learn for free? Also, I'll add, it's a much quicker process to learn while working with other people who are already skilled at what you're learning. I don't constantly have that feeling that I'm putting in a bunch of time doing things the wrong way and getting a false sense that I'm making any real progress. What's the saying? Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. My last job, I picked up Python (coming from Ruby, which helped a lot) and because of code review, I had a bunch of people every time I wrote code telling me what I was doing right and wrong. That made it incredibly easy to go from 0 to somewhere above average and I was paid to do it. Currently, I'm very interested in clojure and go for various reasons. I have a feeling it might be a bit harder to find a job where I can learn either of those, however. Now, I'm curious how people will respond to this attitude here. I'm guessing I'll get accused of lacking passion because if I was passionate, I'd want to do all this stuff on my own. I can truly say I enjoy writing software and the act of creation that comes along with that; I just like to get paid when I do it.