well, I think "learn deeply" there means really learning from the ground up, while you seem to associate it with investing time (which you need to do anyways).

well, I think "learn deeply" there means really learning from the ground up, while you seem to associate it with investing time (which you need to do anyways). I think he argues that for employment in IT it might be better to invest time in learning build systems or webframeworks or firewalls, than learning from the ground up (starting with C/TCP-IP). Bad analogy: if you build a house, you study engineering (or carrying stuff), rather than theoretical mechanics. Once you are involved in the business, the deeper levels will inevitable show themselves at some point. I think this has its merits (and actually I think, it suits me), but without any guidance your measurable and marketable progress is slow. For example, I build my scientific softwarestacks with spack, debugging build failures. Net result is, that I got into a random project of a colleague, fixed his C++-Makefile without having more than basic C-knowledge.