Most of us spend more time on our day job and its dev problems than we do on extracurricular learning. Finding a job (or academic post) that is set up to help

Most of us spend more time on our day job and its dev problems than we do on extracurricular learning. Finding a job (or academic post) that is set up to help you push yourself consistently is the trick. Most dev jobs don't inherently scale difficulty up to match your constant skill growth. "Good" work (at least the metered, someone-else-is-paying-for-it kind) is subject to a lot of competition.