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I guess the answer is ”it depends”. If you are supposed to learn the tools - and your manager is aware of this - I see no logical reason why you shouldn’t be able to use your working time for a learning project during your first few months. But obviously that will depend on the company and how ideas like this are generally viewed there. If I were you, and if I was unsure whether my use of time was appropriate, I would ask my manager about it. Or, if you don’t have many issues to work on, just use part of your working hours for learning projects anyways. Personally, I still use up to half of my working hours a week in learning activities, anything from reading to side projects. And that’s okay where I work.
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The time was already allocated for you to learn. It's not really a waste of time as long as you are learning what was discussed and not doing something completely different.
Honestly what other choice do you have to learn the tech? You either build it, or watch tutorials of someone else building it... You gain experience eitherway but doing it yourself is always the better (even though slower) way of learning... Best would be to probably combine those two and build something unrelated to the tutorials, but also read/watch tutorials to learn best practices faster... but anyway, I see now problem with this approach. I did something similar for my onboarding -
I think it's fine.
The worst that can happen is this side project becomes a big deal, and the company asks you to hand it over or shut it down because "it was developed on company time".
I think many of us would be fine with doing that, as if we build something while learning it's usually not that good and later on you can make a similar thing way better in less time if you gave it up and want your own clone.
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Well... Erm...
I just started a new job where in my onboarding, I’m supposed to learn typescript and react. I am also supposed to gain some knowledge of databases. Since I am so new, I don’t really have any meetings. I see my manager maybe 2x a day. I’ve been using my time at work to learn these technologies.
I learn best by doing projects. I recently built a bot that scrapes media off of one site and posts it on another site. I was thinking I could create a react front end in typescript for the bit. I would also add a database to my project (the model for the front end) which contains the post history of the bot.
Would that be appropriate for work? I thought it would be good project to help me learn react. However, I am new to the “corporate” world and I feel like my manager won’t want me to waste company time on my side project.
The only other responsibilities I have are reviewing the source code and watching some onboarding videos
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help
side project
new to job