Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out
This has always been my pet peeve with jobs that won&#x27;t hire people without &#x27;5-7 years experience with X&#x27; - the vast majority of these jobs do not need an EXPERT on <i>language x</i>, or <i>framework y</i>. If they do, the rest of this post does not apply.<p>You can learn enough of a language to be dangerous in just a couple weeks. Enough to be productive in 2-3 months. However, there are 3 other things you have to learn:<p>1. How the code for the project you are hired for works. How it&#x27;s laid out. All the weird shit about it.<p>2. How the framework&#x2F;libraries used by the project works. Nothing to do with the project, but maybe you haven&#x27;t used Angular, Swing, or Boost before.<p>3. How the data is laid out, and how it gets in&#x2F;out of your system. What database tables are there, what&#x27;s the workflow.<p>Those 3 things are the hard part and what take 6-12 months. Learning Javascript, Ruby, or whatever language is the least of your worries.