Poll: Ongoing professional self-education

[jducoeur]

I was reflecting today about how much work time I spend just *learning* stuff. As far as I'm concerned, that isn't optional: the programming business will happily steamroller you if you don't work hard to keep up with it, so I spend a considerable amount of time learning random programming languages and such, as well as the enormous amount I spend reading into new technologies for what I'm going to do next. (For instance, I spent nearly the entire past week teaching myself a new language and a new software package.) This leads me to be curious about how much time others spend in this. So let's have a poll!
[Poll #1310015]

Comments

[richenza.livejournal.com]

Not sure how accurate my average daily time is. Whenever I get bored at work, someone gives me a project which requires teaching myself a new skill. I'm currently learning MySQL, and there's hope in the IT department that I will learn Perl.

I'm a bit skeptical about that, since I haven't done anything like writing code since grade school. (I wrote a BASIC program that drew a butterfly.) Plus, current trend here is that learning happens when someone hands me an 800 page book and assumes that I will read it all eventually.