Yes, I'm incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart.
But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I'll also refuse a lot of gigs outright.
You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can't expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addition to your team.
Besides, even I don't know all the answers. I can't. The field of IT moves too quickly. I have to select what to learn, and what I set aside as "something I can google". There is no other choice, because we are limited in time and space.
But beyond that, you may want to sacrifice efficiency in some (or many) areas to preserve your energy, divide it in several activities, or just keep it to do something else that is not learning related.
That's if you limit the scope of the article to IT only though.
If you extend the scope to your entire life it's vastly different. It's easy to feel smart because you have all the (written) knowledge of the world at the tips of your fingers at any time.
I know people who constantly talk about articles they read earlier in the day, etc ... information get diluted from 10s studies, to an article, to a recap of the article this guy read, to this guy talking about the 10% of the article he remembers.
Sure it's fun and interesting but it's not "learning" or "knowledge", in 2 weeks he won't even remember it.
Actually, I find having a superficial knowledge of a lot of topics pretty useful as well. It opens perspectives, and opportunities. And there is not enough time in a day to read everything, listen to everything, watch everything, practice everything. Shortcuts are fine.
But as you say, "It's easy to feel smart". That's the real problem: you don't know what you don't know, and you should not get cocky.
I completely agree on that, but as you said, there is just so many things to read / watch / learn, and it's so easily reachable that we often end up with "choice paralysis".
I don't have a crystallised opinion on the subject but instinctively I'd argue that picking a few topics and getting a good in depth knowledge of them is more valuable than splitting your attention span on so many things that in 10 years from now you won't really have anything to show.
Personally I see that as any other kind of distractions, it's easy to hop on from topics to topics, learn the absolute minimum about it, get our quick fix of dopamine making us feel good about "learning something" while you haven't actually learned anything valuable and will most likely forget about it in the next days or weeks. Not saying that we should avoid that at all cost, but it's nice to be aware of it.
Edit: seems like I could end all my posts by a quote from Seneca.
"Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read. "But," you reply, "I wish to dip first into one book and then into another." I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before."
Yes, I'm incredibly more productive in Python because I know the stdlib and most frameworks and tools API by heart.
But it took me 10 years of practice, and my daily rate is way more than it used to be. I'll also refuse a lot of gigs outright.
You want juniors to be able to work too, and you can't expect them to know the entire world. Yet they can be useful, worth the money, and a great addition to your team.
Besides, even I don't know all the answers. I can't. The field of IT moves too quickly. I have to select what to learn, and what I set aside as "something I can google". There is no other choice, because we are limited in time and space.
But beyond that, you may want to sacrifice efficiency in some (or many) areas to preserve your energy, divide it in several activities, or just keep it to do something else that is not learning related.