A 20min job is 20mins often because it took hundreds - or in the case of professionals, thousands - of hours of learning, practicing, and experimenting.
Of course everyone’s utility function is different, but my free time is at a heavy heavy premium. I’m happy to spend money where it gets me time in return.
My growth today in IT has very little to do with IT, I'm taking much lessons from other industries. Want to learn to build reliable systems, serious study the airline industry, how do they build such reliable systems? Want to learn how to troubleshoot and solve problems fast? How does your typical ER work?
There's much to learn from cross pollinating ideas from other fields. Most of us in IT are not just lovers of computers, but just builders. We are lucky to be born in this time in history, 100 yrs ago, we might be building cars or other sort of mechanical devices.
I truly do not care about repairing fridges. Not even a little bit. Yes I’m an engineer. Still don’t care. Don’t care about repairing my car either.
Some people feel so righteous about repair for some reason and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Why would someone want to impose how they spend their time on other people? If you enjoy it, that’s great keep doing it! Doesn’t mean I have to spend my time that way.
I’m just going to get the thing fixed (even if it costs more money) and just move on with my life.
To you point though, if I was really into something then I might be up for it! But fridges? Low on my list.
And then people wonder why they are miserable.
People are not owning cars, they're Ubering. People are not buying movies, they're using Netflix. People are not owning homes, they're renting and using Airbnb. People are not cleaning their spaces, they're using Task Rabbit. etc etc.. The uptick in nomad lifestyle also means not being able to carry all the tools around. People are becoming mobile and specialists; being really good at something that pays decently well but knowing less of how to do a little bit of everything because it doesn't further their career. Jack of all trades are the minority and generally curious people that love learning new things which isn't for everyone.
For me I've found once I accumulated the skill, just doing it myself was often faster and easier.
I understand the value of free time and all that, but I bet even in your day job you gradually cultivate side skills that are not your core work function, you just use them every now and again in the process of your work.