> If I'm looking at learning something, my criteria is "will this information still be relevant 10 years from now?"
I don't know, in the tech world there is a ton of stuff with a lifespan shorter than 10 years, but you still often need to learn it.
I mean, I get the point of your post, and I agree having general knowledge is a critical starting point, but at the end of the day you often need to actually put hands to keyboard to get something specific done. For example, it's important to know generic programming concepts, but as someone who switched to the Node world from Java a couple years ago there was a ton of new stuff I had to learn: How Node's threading model worked, the details of the event loop, how Promises and async/await worked, the specifics of Javascript's prototype inheritance model, etc. It took me a long time to feel like I was as proficient in Node as I had been in Java because so many of the critical details are so different.
I don't know, in the tech world there is a ton of stuff with a lifespan shorter than 10 years, but you still often need to learn it.
I mean, I get the point of your post, and I agree having general knowledge is a critical starting point, but at the end of the day you often need to actually put hands to keyboard to get something specific done. For example, it's important to know generic programming concepts, but as someone who switched to the Node world from Java a couple years ago there was a ton of new stuff I had to learn: How Node's threading model worked, the details of the event loop, how Promises and async/await worked, the specifics of Javascript's prototype inheritance model, etc. It took me a long time to feel like I was as proficient in Node as I had been in Java because so many of the critical details are so different.