<story><title>The more you learn, the faster you can learn</title><url>http://pranay.gp/how-to-learn-things-at-1000x-the-speed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meuk</author><text>I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven&amp;#x27;t learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don&amp;#x27;t expect so.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;m thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loup-vaillant</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve learned one important thing on the job: how &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to do things. That&amp;#x27;s more important than it sounds. I noticed for instance that I developed a taste for simplicity over the years that wasn&amp;#x27;t there when I started. Now junior programmers can read my code.&lt;p&gt;Domain specific knowledge (so I can talk to the customer) I generally learn on the job. But it&amp;#x27;s not generally applicable, to other domains, and thus other jobs.&lt;p&gt;Technical, generally applicable knowledge? Mostly on my own time. Companies don&amp;#x27;t want to pay you to learn. They want you to apply your knowledge. I suspect this explains in part why they can&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>The more you learn, the faster you can learn</title><url>http://pranay.gp/how-to-learn-things-at-1000x-the-speed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meuk</author><text>I found that companies always pretend to be all about learning, but in practice I haven&amp;#x27;t learned a damn thing after leaving uni, except the idiosyncrasies of their code. Maybe it gets better in senior positions (I spent 7 years in uni and have only 2 years of working experience), but I don&amp;#x27;t expect so.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;m thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>formalsystem</author><text>&amp;gt; I miss the time in uni where I was learning new things every week. I&amp;#x27;m thinking of taking a year off just to learn new things.&lt;p&gt;Even at the senior level I don&amp;#x27;t think you&amp;#x27;ll get what you&amp;#x27;re looking for. Unless you&amp;#x27;re leading new research efforts, it won&amp;#x27;t make much sense to move you away from a system that you only understand.&lt;p&gt;A friend convinced me to quit my job a year ago and I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;re learning which which will help raise your profile. It takes a couple of days to really to the gist of any CS&amp;#x2F;Math field if you have access to the right resources and the right amount of free time.&lt;p&gt;So taking time off doesn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;ll have a unique skillset by the time you&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;If you wanna chat, email me, it&amp;#x27;s in my profile.</text></comment>