> > Your employer is sponsoring a lot of your learnings in a specific area, so he's entitled to all your ideas in that area
> No, he is not on either count.
Yes they are... are you honestly trying to tell us you've learned jack all at your current employer? No new frameworks, coding practices, algorithms? Learnt absolutely nothing about how various patterns of software writing pan out in production?
If you've learned absolutely nothing, you have to be one of the most useless developers your employer has. I find that impossible to believe.
> > that's what your paid for.
> I don't know you, but I'm paid for the work I produce, I'd be really happy if I could be paid for learning stuff and not doing shit.
No, you're being paid for your skills and abilities. That includes your learning ability. It's not "learning stuff and not doing shit", it's "learn stuff as you're doing shit". Everyone does it. A company can't guarantee where or what it's going to be working on next year or so, the market always changes. What they do have is staff capital, including hopefully a team of capable programmers that can do whatever the changing market requires, be it picking up a new language, optimising algorithms, etc. That's what people hiring and employing staff are looking for.
If you're not bringing all your abilities to the job, including your ability to learn, then you've been working under really crappy bosses who have been letting you get away with it.
In this particular case he's working on a CI system both in his day job and his out-of-hours work. Are you seriously trying to tell us he learned absolutely nothing about CI during the day time, and only learned stuff out-of-hours? That he gained absolutely nothing from his colleagues? Operational aspects of the software? UI?