This confirms a deeply held belief of mine, which is that the principle task of a professional software engineer is to research, both in terms of creating a theory of the system you're working on, and researching how to solve problems with computers generally. The industry changes every day, and the languages and frameworks you started with will not last long in this business environment with some many evolutionary pressures. The esteemed Jeremy Howard mentioned parenthetically once in a lecture how for all his career he spent at least 50% of his time at work simply hitting the books, hacking, discovering new ways to program. I took this advice to heart midway through my career and it has been most helpful to my earnings.