If you're going to be programming long enough, saving yourself a few minutes a day by mastering your tools is a real and genuine benefit. When you intend on co

If you're going to be programming long enough, saving yourself a few minutes a day by mastering your tools is a real and genuine benefit. When you intend on continuing a career in programming, you're already committed to investing time into deeply learning novel things as you need them to keep up with work -- a new language, a new library, a new system, a new subfield of study -- so it's not as if your work is nothing but trying to complete your current project, as fast as possible. You shouldn't spend a week learning about an IDE feature in the middle of your project, but you should eventually spend ten minutes to learn to write a macro instead of making the same change seventy times, and maybe you should spend an hour and a half wiring your editor up to your favorite static analyzers and compiler so that you can test and debug your code quickly over the next month.