Your advice is great, with one caveat: early in your career, people hire you for your potential, so being able to pick things up quickly is the most important s

Your advice is great, with one caveat: early in your career, people hire you for your potential, so being able to pick things up quickly is the most important skill you need, maybe the only one. Later on, they hire you for your ability to do things. Picking things up quickly is important, but also knowing areas in depth becomes equally important. So, by all means, people should learn the concepts from other languages. But then, they should also go deep into various areas. Knowing C++ well enough to write portable, efficient, maintainable code, and developing the habits so that's natural, is a good skill to have.