There are still targets to be met and demands still being made of you. Sure, if you have nothing to do, do something good with your time; that's not always the position people are in.
> Life is more than serving your boss in the office.
Sure, I don't think anyone's saying you exist to serve your boss. But if you have to work a job, why not find one you actually like doing? I think what the OP describes would be a complete drain of my energy, even if I could read a book occasionally; working on actual code during my workday gives me an opportunity to be paid to learn new things and is honestly actually energizing. Why work on a tiny Nix environment on a toy project when I could be setting up a real-world Nix development environment that's deployed across tens of developer laptops, y'know?
> Life is more than serving your boss in the office.
Sure, I don't think anyone's saying you exist to serve your boss. But if you have to work a job, why not find one you actually like doing? I think what the OP describes would be a complete drain of my energy, even if I could read a book occasionally; working on actual code during my workday gives me an opportunity to be paid to learn new things and is honestly actually energizing. Why work on a tiny Nix environment on a toy project when I could be setting up a real-world Nix development environment that's deployed across tens of developer laptops, y'know?