Now, I do feel different about academia though. I could understand doing fundamental research and dedicating most of your living hours to those problems. But i guess I just feel like the research mission is infinitely more valuable than the corporate one. I say this having never had the chance to really contribute anything meaningful to any company I've worked for, and never having worked for a company who's mission felt personally fulfilling to me.
I'm glad that there are people who work their butts off for work in important places but I just can't imagine doing that myself and not just disintegrating with regret when I turned 65.
I'm the guy who reads books about my career (not about my work) outside of work (in my free-time) and during working hours as well. I love my career (computer science) and I love reading well-known tech/cs books. I don't do it to be the "best employee". I couldn't care less about what I do at work (I, like 99% of the people here, work for a totally useless tech company that nobody would care about if it disappeared tomorrow). What I do at work is stupid distributed systems in Go + Kafka + postgres + k8s (totally uninteresting stuff, but pays very well though). I genuinely enjoy readings books from Stevens, Kerrisk, Kleppmann, etc., just like I enjoy reading sci-fi/drama/etc. novels. I usually end up learning stuff that's actually useful at work, and once in a while I apply such knowledge at work, but I do it only for the raises and promotions.
There are people out there who doesn't give a fuck about tech companies, but care deeply about tech.
Sure, there's room for external learning, especially at companies where software isn't the primary focus, but almost none of the best software architects I know spend much of their time reading about architecture.
Speaking personally, I've learned more about architecture from reading code and system design interview prep materials than I ever did from any book. The closest I found to a useful book was the "architecure of open source applications" series which is essentially reading code with a senior eng to walk you through it.