&gt;If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product&#x2F;service - then it would cease to be &quot;work&quot;, and would instead be a &quot;hobby&#x2F;internship&#x2F;volunteer&#x2F;education&#x2F;experience&quot;.<p>I think there are a few places where you can fight for this experience. One at a (extremely well-funded) University lab where you are paid a Software Engineer salary to work on computational research problems. Two at a (extremely lenient) company where you are allowed the freedom. like 50% time to take classes on company-time and company-dime and&#x2F;or pursue your own open source projects that tickles personal intellectual interest, not the company&#x27;s production needs.<p>I will however add, being at a place that does offer a 20% time and tuition credit to take your own independent class of choosing, attend journal club&#x2F;internal machine-learning and algorithm group classes or pursue a open-source project. It is very very hard to take the initiative because it&#x27;s much easier just to cruise and do 80% of the work in the 100% allotted time. Especially after the first year of novelty of given the opportunity.<p>So regardless of wherever your workplace, I think whether a person really pushes their own intellectual boundaries is more the person&#x27;s aptitude to apply themselves than their work environment&#x2F;culture.