The issue I have with on-demand/just-in-time learning is not when you learn, but rather that such learning tends to be self-directed. To repurpose a famous quip

The issue I have with on-demand/just-in-time learning is not when you learn, but rather that such learning tends to be self-directed. To repurpose a famous quip... The person who is their own teacher has a fool for a student. The problem is not whether you are a good student, the problem is that you selected for a teacher someone with no grounding in the subject and no time-tested curriculum to teach from. Sometimes it works well, but you may end up just like me: I did a lot of self-directed teaching about programming, starting with boyhood explorations almost exactly fifty years ago (1972!). Yes, I also have had formal education, but most of what I have actually ended up using has been based on self-directed learning. The result for my N=1 sample is a broken comb profile. I know much more about some things than others, and there are areas of our industry where I am completely ignorant! The reasons for this in my case are that I tend to focus on areas where I already have some exposure/interest, and ignore those that I may not understand or even know exist. "On-demand" learning tends to reinforce this. You are trying to solve a problem, so you ask yourself questions, and then do research to answer the questions you posed to yourself. But this can create a serious XY Problem[1]. As a self-directed learner solving problems when I encounter them, I search for solutions using the knowledge I already have, and I'm completely ignorant of the possibility that I'm solving the wrong problem and ignoring a deeper understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish. This can be fixed in various ways, the most obvious of which is: Ask questions of people with experience that differs from yours. If you are a self-made programmer, you will learn the most by asking questions of people with a formal education. If you are in a three-person YC startup, you will learn the most from people in Enterprise companies. That is true no matter how little you value formal education ("credentialism") or Enterprise businesses ("bloatware crystallized as an organization"). And the other thing I'll mention is to embrace the "XY Problem." I personally am just like so many people you see on the interwebs. If I ask how to solve problem Y, and someone says "Wrong! You actually have problem X, and you solve that in the following way," I often emotionally push back. "Just let me solve Y today," I think, "I'll ready up about X later." But that is the glaring weakness of being a self-directed, on-demand, just-in-time learner. We chase solving problem Y, sometimes aggressively ignorant of X. To be successful as our own teachers, we must be open to learning about X even when our "priority" is solving problem Y. And this is why being respectful of people with different contexts (those with PhDs or those who attend 57 meetings a week) is especially valuable for us. JM2C, YMMV, and especially, if I'm blathering about Y while the real issue with on-demand learning is X, I'm open to your feedback! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem