> He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge. Some of my best work and graduate school assignments had started off by being handed an RFC (or a la

> He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge. Some of my best work and graduate school assignments had started off by being handed an RFC (or a language, or a third party library, or a paper, etc...), asked to become an expert on it, and then implement it (or in the case of a library to re-factor old NIH-y code to use that library, etc...). Learning isn't useful as preparation for something else, but it's extremely rewarding in it of itself.