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

Fuzziness

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I first answered "60-90 minutes", then changed it to "over two hours", because I decided that the programming language I've been hacking on for the past 6 months counts (since I'm having to teach myself more compiler development skills, I've had a compiler job in the past, and I'd love to have one in the future). It easily comes to two hours a day, since I hack on the train.

Aso, when I'm at work and waiting for the compiler and/or running regression tests, I usually read CS papers—sometimes on compilers, sometimes on Lisp, sometimes on completely unrelated stuff that just might be cool to play with someday.

And then there's grad school, with 2.5 hours in class, plus about 2-3 hours of reading and programming. I'm almost done with that, though—I'm on my last course, and only 2 classes to go.