The author is right. I met these kind of "programmers". When I started working at my current company, I was promised that I can learn from senior Python develop

The author is right. I met these kind of "programmers". When I started working at my current company, I was promised that I can learn from senior Python developers with 5-10 years of experience. I had 2 years of experience at that time. They couldn't teach me a single thing about Python in 10 months. They write code without any basic knowledge what is happening. They don't even know the tools the other developers wrote. Example 1: Guy (10 years experience) is running an svn admin command on the main production repository he never tried before, (never read the manual for it) realize it doesn't do what he thought it would do, and press CTRL-C wildly. Example 2: I set up Jenkins for automating deployment, installed a couple of plugins for it. Guy (5 years experience) made a deployment job using a plugin without reading (or asking me) anything about it FOR THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. Took hours to find out he thought the field does one thing but it's purpose nowhere near. A couple of minutes reading upfront would have spared 3-4 hours of unnecessary work and frustration for him. Example 3: Guy (10 years experience) wants to write an XML parser which deals with unicode. Randomly(!) putting encode() and decode() calls and cursing that accented characters doesn't appear correctly. I explained to him how he should approached the problem and he succeeded at the and. I'm not sure he could have made the program work correctly or if he did, he was not able to know WHY. Example 4: Guy (10 years experience) comes to me asking help about locale switching in Python. I never used that part of the standard library, so I just opened up the Python documentation and worked out the solution in 5-10 minutes (he sitting next to me). He did not even looked up the documentation for the function he was calling. I'm pretty sure he wasted more than 10 minutes trying to solve the problem... I had an "AHA" moment when I realized if I read upfront much more (documentation, manual, any kind of help page) about the topic I'm about to use, I can finish much-much faster and understand the problem from the first moment much more deeply. I started learning Python by reading the whole tutorial [0] upfront and learning Django by reading everything in the documentation, like I was learning for an exam. In two years I gained much more knowledge about Python than any of these guys. [0]: https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/ https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/