> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.

As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering.

Let’s start with, if you don’t let people learn on the job, you have to have at least 20% annual turnover to be only 5 years behind the knowledge curve.

At 10% turnover, you’re 10 years behind. Managers think people shouldn’t be learning on company time, HR tells the board lower turnover is a goal.

Inevitable next step is pausing all productive work to undertake a “Digital Transformation™” to try to replace 20 years of old tech. But the firm won’t know how.