I think there's a misunderstanding; I'm not saying people profit from the tools. They profit from consulting for companies who have adopted the technology, whic

I think there's a misunderstanding; I'm not saying people profit from the tools. They profit from consulting for companies who have adopted the technology, which is a very, very lucrative field. Just look at the Rails consulting shops. edit: I just re-read my previous statement and you're absolutely correct in your analysis of what I actually said vs what I meant. I've since changed the post to read "technology" instead of "tool." What I meant to imply was that technologies like React and AngularJS were lucrative, not the supporting tools like gulp, grunt or npm. > "ugh that seems super hard and likely to result in many hours of unpaid labor, I'll just work around these issues and get back to work". I agree with you on that score. Unfortunately, unpaid labor on the side is an expectation of startup web development these days. Companies do not want you learning new technologies on the clock. They expect you to do that on your own. They expect you to contribute to and/or run your own open source projects. Just last week, my boss told me straight up that I was expected to make something that the company owns and profits from on my own unpaid free time to further my understanding of one of their core technologies. The "or else" was implied, of course.