A friend of mine is a retired doctor, and told me that he studied music theory during down-time at the ER. Also, shopkeepers and anybody else who depends on walk-in customers or has intermittent demand.

> Also, shopkeepers and anybody else who depends on walk-in customers or has intermittent demand.

Until you have a boss demanding to do cleanup or whatever during low-demand times because they're too beancouter-ish to hire staff dedicated to keep up appearance.

Yeah apparently they never had a boss who loved to say "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean".

Government work. Almost impossible to get fired from there, and the work ethic is near nothing.

As soon as I'm rich enough I'm going to go back and work at a university lab. It's so much better.

Jobs that require creativity should allow for free time, to let inspiration come to you rather than try to summon it. I think programming is one of those jobs. And if you are always coding, always against a schedule, it's easy to burn out because you went against the essence of your work.

Most programming jobs are as creative as brick laying. So yeah there is some wiggle room to put your own style but you are just implementing CRUD(in it's different complexities and variations) and integrating APIs.

Are you sure CRUD is as creative as brick laying? They can't just copy paste stuff from Stackoverflow when they run into problems :)

Once you get the option choose between using browser native fetch or Axios, the sky is the limit.

in brick laying your brain can wander and think about other things, listen to the music and imagine you are living in perfect world without any problems at home. Your hands will be tired, but your brain can take a rest

in most programming jobs, even though you are doing CRUD, your brain should direct you into specific direction (open file.js, put after if (x > 0) block and so on), which tires your brain.

consulting firms have "bench" periods where consultants are expected to learn new things and train themselves up. some take that time to work on side projects; others learn entirely new things