Comment by BeetleB

> I was clear that the junior should be learning and experimenting. That's different from saying yes to everything and grinding it out. The juniors in my group, for example, are the ones leading the LLM charge and learning the new tooling ahead of management's awareness of them, so almost by definition they're not just filling their time taking orders from management. That's exactly how they should be spending their excess capacity.

Agreed that they should explore and experiment and learn. And they should do that at 40 hours a week on the job (I did!).

Not all jobs allow for it. Change jobs if that's the case. Chances are your pay will be the same and more, and you'll have more time for this. You simply don't need to stay and work evenings to do this.