Comment Re:Sucks to be you! (Score 1) 516
The last thing I want to do after a long hard day's work of coding is to go home and do another N hours of coding. Not interesting. Now on the other hand, if your work having a slow period, I can see the interest in doing programming after office hours. Speaking of slow, I spent 8 months in my last job begging for work to do and they couldn't come up with anything, so when I went home at night, I worked on writing an open source library to exercise my brain instead of spending it on work work.
PS: In the end, I wasn't fired laid off; the company was just that dysfunctional.
Coding within an established body of legacy code in the office can be a mentally separate activity from branching out into a new area in which one doesn't yet have any experience. I might spend all day at work trying to figure out where another programmer's bug is using a 3rd party API, and find I can spend time a few days a week learning about developing for a platform I haven't worked in professionally. It's never a guarantee, though, I'm definitely inclined to agree with your main point. It's worth mentioning and then emphasizing, because if it works, it works.