I have recently found that video codecs (and other forms of modern compression) are indeed difficult to casually pick up in one's spare time, but if a company i

I have recently found that video codecs (and other forms of modern compression) are indeed difficult to casually pick up in one's spare time, but if a company is willing to dedicate even a modest amount of an existing team member's time to training new hires I would expect this to go fine. The weird thing is that almost no company does this (or, within each company, almost no team does this, and individual team leads or engineers may rebel by doing this and then be punished when perf comes around)