People who care enough to learn something because "higher paid or smarter people use it" are the very kind of people who are going to do better on interviews.

People who care enough to learn something because "higher paid or smarter people use it" are the very kind of people who are going to do better on interviews. I've seen plenty of professors say they can tell (generally, that is a strong correlation) whether someone will succeed or fail using a single criteria. One example: When hearing a new word, does the student immediately look it up in a dictionary? That person will go far because they recognize and correct areas where they lack knowledge. Mike Acton of Insomniac Games has one criteria. The only one he's seen actually result in long-term great employees: An insatiable desire to learn. When they hear something they don't know, they go home after work and begin reading. It's basically the same thing as the dictionary. People who are willing to endure the onslaught that is vim or emacs, are willing to sit down and learn things that aren't easy. It doesn't make you a better programmer. It's just a hallmark of an already great programmer. When he was a kid, Linus Torvolds used to write programs with a hex editor and directly writing the opcodes (instead of even using an assembler) into a file. That didn't make him a great programmer but the drive to do things like that when most would go "why bother", is what made him a great developer. It stands to reason that when presented with future obstacles, he applied the same gusto and problem solving skills instead of giving up.