Malcolm Gladwell wrote about 10,000 hour rule to achieve “greatness” in any given field requiring skills and expertise. Many dispute this and Anders Ericsson by citing quality vs. quantity of efforts and time. Tim Ferris and others claim that one can have world-class skills in 6 months or less by using creative feedback loop, deliberate practice, and other smarter ways of learning.

Peter Norvig wrote against some books with titles like “Teach Yourself Java in 24 hours”. Books like SICP takes time to read and comprehend. Each year I revisit the book and learn something new. That is only a tiny part of overall learning process and required readings.

Yes, it is possible to learn React and enough javascript to be hired as a fullstack engineer creating PWA or SPA webapps in months. Hopefully that will start the journey to learn deeply about the topic of computer science. And not just as a way to make a living. One needs purpose in the chosen work in life. Beyond quick returns.

I found most Hacker School graduates have not read The Humble Programmer. Granted it was written probably before most of Coding School folks were born. I think it is useful to read about this discipline as presented by Professor Dijkstra at ACM Turing lecture, 1972.