38 hours a week at work practicing your profession isn't good enough for you.
I'm a welder by trade. Occasionally I do a spot of welding at home, but the 38 to 60 hours a week I've spent twenty years doing has made me a vastly better metal fabricator than the few side projects I've done.
But I can rant endlessly to you about my other interests, some of which tie in nicely to a wider-perspective-of-life than just metal fabrication, and it's those other interests that have proven to set me apart from the pack and advanced my career way more.
Could you just ask a person what fun or interesting or challenging things they've worked on, whether in their paid line of work or as a side-project, and leave aside your value judgements about what they do outside of work.
Core point: stop thinking your experience generalises to the whole population.
> Occasionally I do a spot of welding at home, but the 38 to 60 hours a week I've spent twenty years doing has made me a vastly better metal fabricator than the few side projects I've done.
Now imagine you're just starting and you want to get hired as a spot welder.
You don't work 38 to 60 hours a week welding, though. You do something else for a living. But you want to move onto welding.
In that case, besides spending their personal time doing side projects, how do you expect someone to work on their skills?
Welding isn't a really good comparison. I'm not sure there's much new coming out the world of welding, and you probably hit peak skill 3-5 years into your career. Neither of those assumptions hold for programmers. The field is constantly changing, the 'best practices' are evolving and you (should) never really hit the day where you're never going to get better anymore.
Welding actually has many specialized tools and processes, alloys also evolve. Tools have different trade-offs, and a large number of geometric and performance considerations - from environmental concerns (how much oil will spill?) to environment concerns (how do you weld under a blizzard on top of a pole?) there is a lot to learn and keep up with; and can easily, easily take a decade+ master.
Your basic hobbyist weld is like hello-world. As a side note, one sign of a bad engineer is one who underestimates difficulties in fields outside their expertise.
Like most professions you can become as skilled at it as you wish, depending on your willingness to work to get better. There are a lot of different types of welding, lots of different pieces of equipment to learn and master, and way more different materials to work with than most people realize.
Also, different situations present different challenges (like the fact that you have to be mindful of how your welds can warp the material).
I personally only know some the details second-hand (have professional welders in my family), but I know I'd want the guy with 20 years of experience over the one with 5, if I had something challenging I needed fixed.
>The field is constantly changing, the 'best practices' are evolving
A lot of that is self-inflicted, though. How many javascript frameworks, all solving essentially the same problem, are there? It's just change for change's sake.
Whenever we're tempted to reach that conclusion, we should consider that there might be something going on that we don't understand. In the case of JS frameworks, I think developers really are still figuring out the best way to implement a dynamic UI that's both efficient and maintainable.
What exactly are browsers inhibiting? The DOM is really no different from the object-oriented tree of widgets provided by a platform GUI framework like Cocoa. And even on the native side, the question of the best way to design a UI framework is far from settled; see for instance the recent interest in reactive UIs in the Rust community.
I'm a welder by trade. Occasionally I do a spot of welding at home, but the 38 to 60 hours a week I've spent twenty years doing has made me a vastly better metal fabricator than the few side projects I've done.
But I can rant endlessly to you about my other interests, some of which tie in nicely to a wider-perspective-of-life than just metal fabrication, and it's those other interests that have proven to set me apart from the pack and advanced my career way more.
Could you just ask a person what fun or interesting or challenging things they've worked on, whether in their paid line of work or as a side-project, and leave aside your value judgements about what they do outside of work.
Core point: stop thinking your experience generalises to the whole population.