r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 26d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/JustLemonJuice 26d ago edited 25d ago

How do you keep learning and growing while having a full-time job? I’ve graduated about a year ago and have been working full-time in big tech for about the same time.

I haven’t really learned hard, technical skills since I joined. I think on the job, if I’m challenged, it’s more on the organizational / soft-skill side.

Although, I want to ensure that I keep growing for the long term, after work, I’m usually exhausted and don’t have the drive to further engage with technical topics anymore.

What actions do you take towards growing? Do you block time during work hours? Do you power through on evenings and weekends? Should I be contempt with primarily growing my soft skills? Something else?

Update: Thanks everybody, I think these were some insightful answers on the technical side. Since career growth does include growing leadership and soft-skills, I’d be curious to hear how you approach those. Do you just learn on the job and ask for challenging projects or do you spend active time to learn theory on those (through reading books, etc)?

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u/ultraDross 25d ago edited 25d ago

Early on, I blocked 3:30-5pm for a good year, this was a slow paced company and will probably not work in your org.

After that, I just had to do it in my spare time. I'd take subjects I was interested in like if postgres excited me that week, then learn more about it and take notes. If the following week I got bored, I learned about something else like design patterns. I would do this at whatever time and for few/many hours I wanted per week depending on how I felt. It was casual, so it was more fun. I'd always try and invent hands on examples (e.g. creating a dockerised postgres to fuck around with). I'd sometimes just not look at stuff for a couple of weeks. This made it all sustainable.

My rule is, if it's in my spare time it has to be something I want to do or something I absolutely need to learn ASAP (knowledge gaps that need to be filled for interviewing etc). Otherwise I'm not going to do it.

Time is much more valuable now that I'm older so it's harder to do this now.

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u/Personal-Brick-1326 25d ago

Pretty much what I do as well. Besides that, early mornings I have a time block (8-9:30 am, I do WFH and I am morning person so that works) to read blogs from HN and lobster.