It is indeed a frustrating problem that affects any of us that have a life outside of work. I work from home most of the time, but even that doesn’t give a lot of opportunity as any time I am not working, I have my kids jumping for my attention and I cannot ignore them, and when they finally go to bed, I am too knackered to do more learning or coding, I still have to do tech support and answer support tickets in the evening as it is LOL.
The only chance I get to learn anything new is when I get a new project to start from scratch, then I can choose to do it in any frameworks or technology and thus learn them as I go along. Sadly this has not happened for a long time and I have only been working on existing legacy code or have been doing contracts like yourself.
I have not yet learnt ANY of the latest frameworks, but to be honest none of them really appealed to me enough to want to, until I found ColdBox, which I do like the look of and do actually want to learn.
As a contractor though you of course also do not have the freedom to learn whatever you want, you have to learn what is being called for. It has only been recently this year that I have seen frameworks as a requirement for contracts, but it was a sudden change and now all of them seem to want modelGlue and ColdSpring at the very least and many also want Flex and Actionscript too. Alas no sign of ColdBox though, so is there any point in learning that?

I guess the only chance you have is to get a contract working from home, then you can save that travel time. Or get yourself some direct clients/projects so you can do them how you wish.
I think we both know that things are not going to change at the place you are working now, where being innovative is frowned upon.

With full time developers on the other hand, it is in the companies interest to keep them up to date including any training required. This is especially true in smaller companies where your tasks are more varied.

So, go full time and convince the company to train you on the things you want to learn. Most have a problem with the pay cut involved but they would need to weigh up whether this is worth keeping up to date with technology.

I am focused on one thing or rather one area and my emlpoyer is not throwing too many things at me, its me who wants to do more than I currently do. End of the day, its down to the developer to keep himself upto date with latest tech.

I also beleive that things have changed completely now, because of the outsurcing . You could walk in to an office with 3 coders sitting there doing nothing and the company might be rolling out major releases every month, because there could be a team of 15 people sitting in some other country doing stuff for them. However, this is a completely different subject, one that could take a full book to cover.

My only point was, if you are a developer and plan to be a developer for next few years, you are gonna learn new things (atleast 1 or 2 ) every year, otherwise you will be left out eventually. And trying to find time outside of your day job is sometimes a struggle.

Good points thought, appreciate you taking the time to write up here.

There are a few problems with that…

The ever present “what if they get hit by a bus” question. If your rock star dev gets seriously jacked or leaves for another company, or goes on vacation (heaven forbid) then you are down one rockstar and all of their knowledge; which seems the most expensive element to regrow.

People without any focus tend to get frazzled jumping between soo many roles. Overly stressed leads to not spending any time learning anything, hating your job and moving on. Both parties loose.

If they can do everything they typically get over resourced to do so, this also leads into doing more scoping and estimating, planning, brainstorming (which is all really cool), and being the general person that answers questions. This can have a tendency of often leaving the only time to get all the normal work done is during your second or third shift.

If your company is big enough to allow for specialists then it totally makes sense. A larger team is able to respond to a lost person easier than a one or two person dev team. Having to cancel a vacation because a project got all loose and the timeline changed really gets old. How many times have you been told(or want to be told); “we’ll make it up to you”

Its hard to keep a jack of all trades dev happy, as a jack of all trades dev its hard to be happy.

Of course in the larger setting there can be similar problems…

Too many chiefs can make getting a decision on a tech project difficult.

Over specialized means if that specific job gets light, the company will look at creative ways to resource you, or at getting rid of you. Having secondary/tertiary skills can help guide them in the “creative resourcing”.

Communication can be a larger problem in a larger team.

You can be slotted for doing only one task, which can be boring and there may not be lots of room to wiggle if thats what you find.

I went from a dev team of maybe 10 in a single office(including management) to a dev team of like 20+ with lots more devs across the world that can jump in and its been great. The learning I’m able to focus on is much more focused and fullfilling to me. I don’t feel trapped where I can’t take a day off.

At this time there’s still a huge demand for web developers; front end and back end so you could probably do whatever you want(depending on where you live and if you’d want to move). I’m sure this will swing full circle again soon enough.

To lots of “a or b” questions I find a common theme.
Jack of all trades or focused skillset? Balance.
Learning all the time, working all the time? Balance.
Working to have balance can be very helpful.

Hopefully some of the above is interesting and provides some additional conversation points.