Over the last ten years I spend many hours to keep up-to-date with the web platform: Reading articles, writing articles, trying out new web platform features, listening to web development podcasts, using Twitter to stay in the loop, watching conference talks, reading books, reading RSS feeds.
Out of interest, I asked on Twitter how much time my followers spend on keeping up-to-date with the web platform. Most spend 0-5 hours, about a quarter spend 5-10 hours, and 11% spend 10 or more hours.
About 40% of all respondents spend more than five hours a week of their leisure time. I guess there aren’t many other professions where people spend so much unpaid time to get better at their jobs.
As a follow-up, I asked the same question, this time how much time of their paid/work time they spend keeping up-to-date. 75% spend 0-5 hours, 10% 5-10 hours, 7% 10-20 hours, and 7% spend more than 20 hours a week. It seems some companies enable employees to spend time (some quite a lot) trying out new things, and keeping up-to-date, while most don’t.
What about me? In average, I spend about 5-10 hours a week doing all this, as a freelancer this all happens in my leisure time, all unpaid. Somewhere in 2021 I reduced this to 1-2 hours, after realizing I am on my way to burn-out, spending so much time of my leisure time on keeping up-to-date.
On the one hand it’s great that the web platform evolves so quickly nowadays, on the other hand it’s getting really hard to keep up-to-date with all new features. And there is more, new frameworks, new build tools, new coding approaches, new plugins. I had to realize that is’s impossible to try out and learn everything. Nobody is able to keep up-to-date with everything; That’s okay.