* I sense that what you work on has a lot to do with how much you learn. If true, how do you end up in an environment where you're learning a lot? Ask during y

* I sense that what you work on has a lot to do with how much you learn. If true, how do you end up in an environment where you're learning a lot? Ask during your interview! If a company has a culture of learning, they'll usually be very upfront about it. * I sense that who you're around has a lot to do with how much you learn (because of guidance and mentorship). How do you end up in an environment where you're surrounded by the right people? Again, you'll have to scope this out during your interview. It's definitely true that you need good teammates in addition to a culture supportive of learning. * Is it a good idea for more experienced programmers to still take classes? Read books? Etc. Definitely. I find that I read more programming books now than when I started learning. The big difference is that I'm reading to learn about new concepts and ideas, rather than "how does this piece of syntax work." * What are the skills worth having? Is it worth learning all the different frameworks? Being familiar with different levels of abstraction (hardware, architecture, systems level, scripting level...)? Drilling math and logic? There's value in everything you listed, but becoming proficient in all of them is a life-long task. Find what interests you and focus on it! In general, how can a programmer learn as much as possible? The key is to spend every waking minute programming. And a related but tangential question, if you're a good programmer, how did you get good? Wrote a lot of code, and constantly critiqued everything from the code I wrote to the tools and processes I used.