I feel like since I am working, I am just getting dumber. I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I'm thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.
Domain specific knowledge (so I can talk to the customer) I generally learn on the job. But it's not generally applicable, to other domains, and thus other jobs.
Technical, generally applicable knowledge? Mostly on my own time. Companies don't want to pay you to learn. They want you to apply your knowledge. I suspect this explains in part why they can't retain employees: they learn nothing, they get bored, so they leave. Changing gig at least lets you learn a couple new things the first few months.
If your work doesn’t get more interesting you’ll adapt to fight the boredom by becoming dumber. You have to fight that somehow if you value your mind.
This matches my experience also. And is transversal to all fields.
If you feel like this is happening, it is time for a change.
Regretfully I've lost weeks and months to this mindless monotony over the last year. Thankfully Friday is my last day, and I start a post-graduate course in October which should be a splash of cold water for my brain. In short, I'm very much in support of your second point.
Startups allowed me to extend myself and tap back into that motivation and drive from my younger years to try new things and push myself to learn faster.
Even at the senior level I don't think you'll get what you're looking for. Unless you're leading new research efforts, it won't make much sense to move you away from a system that you only understand.
A friend convinced me to quit my job a year ago and I'd highly recommend it. If you can afford it, quitting your job to learn new things can be a really valuable investment. There are so many new fields and textbooks out that could each easily turn into an interesting OSS project and some income. You can write a book about all the new stuff you're learning which which will help raise your profile. It takes a couple of days to really to the gist of any CS/Math field if you have access to the right resources and the right amount of free time.
So taking time off doesn't have to be a career hit, you need time to explore new fields (all the interesting ones are initially hard to grok) but you'll have a unique skillset by the time you're on the other side and will probably make more money if you decide to get a job again. This has only really been true post-internet.
If you wanna chat, email me, it's in my profile.
My own experience has been pretty different. I took time off of my work to run a business. we even wrote a book [1] - Now, uh, I needed to run that business, on an emotional level, I mean. but it was a hugely bad idea financially.
When you show up to an interview after spending years running your own company? I mean, I'm sure it's different if you are management, but as an IC? Even though I had written a book[1] it was like I was unemployed for that time. There's no way my wages are anywhere near they would have been had I spent more of that time working for other people.
I mean, my own case would have come out differently if I was able to sell my company to someone big, which may have come down to a few obvious unforced errors of mine?
I mean, sure, sometimes it's still worth it to take time off of work to do something else... but don't say it's not a career hit. It is a huge career hit and you need to include that in the equation.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Book-Xen-Practical-System-Administrat...
(When doing the "is it worth it" math on writing books, consider the shelf-life; that shelf life doesn't just apply to sales, it also applies to the reputation boost. My own recommendation to my younger self would have been to get a job while the buzz for the book was at it's height.)
I'll send you a mail!
If you want to learn, try to start at an 8 person company where you basically have to do everything yourself. Let's see if you still learn nothing when you get thrown in the water in all kinds of different topics.
I'm sorry you feel that way :(
> idiosyncrasies of their code
I've only had about 6 months of processional work experience, 3 months of which have been open source code, so even just learning _their_ code had a huge learning impact on me because I saw it as "wow, this is how code works in production". I think I learnt less about code itself though honestly, and instead learnt the systems and how those people thought about things. A lot of my code reviews on other people's PRs were "Could you explain to me why you did things this way" since I was just learning.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm less than a year out of uni and am still learning new things every week. Taking a year off doesn't sound like a terrible idea - though I know I personally couldn't motivate myself and would end up just playing DotA the whole day ️
I'd love to keep chatting if you'd like and talk about it and how we could learn stuff. Wanna DM me?
Bad move
* I've learned a lot about architecture and scaling * Maintainability of systems is something typically that people learn with experience * there's a lot to learn from code reviews * we have DataArch reviews, SecArch reviews, and I've got to learn so much from each of those (Akamai)
Apart from that - talking about Akamai specifically where I work - * there's a program I'm currently enrolled in called "Intrapreneurship" where we are trained on all aspects of the business - marketing, finance, product management etc. in which I have learned so much * I recently became a people manager - so there's a lot of training associated to that
So, if you feel you are not learning - it might be specific to your experience or a set of companies - but there are definitely companies which invest in their people - so actively look out for such opportunities.