The exponential learning curve from studying off-hours

You work a full hard day, so why bother "studying" off-hours? Because, it has an exponential reward. The trick is to differentiate between daily "grunt" work that just takes time without improving you as a developer, vs. "learning" work, such as experimenting with new technology or patterns or tools.

I've seen endless resumes where the candidate says "I have 5 years experience in technology X", but it's really 1 year of experience repeated 5 times. They've sadly spent their career doing repetitious work, and have nothing new to show for it.

Here's a simplistic case: say you spend 9 hours a day ("45" is the new "40") at work, but 8 hours of that is grunt work – data access plumbing, fix a logic bug, attend yet another meeting where you just sit through it, fill out a timesheet – and you've snuck away only 1 hour to research some new data-performance prototype, that means about 90% of you day is grunt work, and about 10% is advancing your career. If you did 1 hour self-study at night, it's not that you go from 9 hours to 10 hours, but rather from 1 hour to 2 hours, i.e. that extra hour is "cool" stuff for self-study, so it gives your "self-study" a  100% return.

Because I love Excel, here's a chart. "Work hours" is split between "Grunt hours" and "self-study hours". Hence an extra hour or two at night could double your learning curve.

I realize this is very black and white, and live is grey (for example, our jobs aren't neatly divided into "grunt " and "self-study", and 1 hour of self-study may be split into a dozen 5-minute Google queries throughout the day), but the general idea still holds.

Work hours	Grunt hours	Self-study hours	Self-study Percent	Overtime Self-study	Self-study increase
9	9	0	0%	1	Infinite
9	8	1	11%	1	100%
9	8	1	11%	2	200%
9	7	2	22%	1	50%
9	7	2	22%	2	100%

Related to this is the Upward Spiral – that the extra hour of overtime helps you learn a technique that makes your day job much faster. For example, say you spend 4 hours a day writing plumbing code to filter C# objects, but then you study LINQ during the evenings and now can do a 4-hour job in 30 minutes. That theoretically gives you a "surplus" of 3.5 hours. Of course that time gets snatched up by other things, but in general it's reasonable to reinvest part of that time in yet further self-study, i.e.  compound interest for your development career.