>We techies - programmers as well as business folks in tech - love to think that a programmer's most valuable skills are their knowledge of programming language

>We techies - programmers as well as business folks in tech - love to think that a programmer's most valuable skills are their knowledge of programming languages. Until recently, this wasn't a common thought beyond the beginner stage. I think the mindset comes from the demand to grind out websites. A short ramp up has become way more important than ability to learn on the job. Programming isn't magic, one of our not-software disciplines has a tradition of learning python so they can make business logic changes to internal tooling we maintain for them. Not that it's hard for them to get on our schedule (they usually preempt our other work), it's just that it's so damn easy for someone smart to pick up python.