Comment by chime

I learn on and off the job. Everyone benefitted including my past employers when I learned on the job. They weren’t paying me to perform based on my existing knowledge. They were paying me to solve problems and if that meant I needed to learn a new tech or skill, that was their cost of doing business.

I have a number of young devs working for me and I give them the same advice. None them knew how to handle sessions using JWT tokens, use pgvector, or run our containers on Fly.io when they were hired. They learned it on the job, on the clock, and I am so proud of them for it.

I’ve been learning since early 90s and have frankly forgotten more than I remember but none of that matters. What matters to me is if you can solve problems, even if you need a bit of guidance and coaching from others. If your current employer doesn’t feel that way, I hope you can find one that does someday. It is why I am still coding three decades later.