Work hard at work as in spend time learning the stack, tools etc your team uses after you get home Work hard outside of work as in spend time as in picking up new skills that might but usually don’t relate back to your actual job
Side gig
Agreed, this. Side gigs augment the compensation. Take gigs to learn new skills ... and charge top dollar while learning!
Leetcode at work. Leetcode at home.
Where’s the neither option? Life is short; do only what you enjoy.
It really depends. I have had great success with side projects for the company. Like creating them new tools outside of my main responsibility. I get top revs and something like 4x the max official pay rise. My own non-comp open source projects gain no traction and providing prs for other open source projects is tiresome. I feel I'm getting direct benefit and mention this as examples of "above and beyond" in interviews. I would also say anything related to marketing yourself is worth 10x the time however, I just don't have the stomach for so much social interaction.
Wat
Yeah I sorta sucked at explaining it. Essentially, if you had free time to work on improving your career, is that time better spent on improving skills/tools you use at your current job (lets say you used MERN, would you keep getting better at that/learn all the ins/outs) or spend time picking up something else like a different stack or LeetCode or system knowledge or something