I do the opposite. Across C, Python and Go, I was prepared and had a good understanding of the languages and stdlibs before joining through reading books and working through the exercises.
It worked very well for me, on joining my knowledge of the languages and their stdlibs was respectable, and I could hit the ground running and get patches accepted easily. I could also in each languages case fix weirdness they had in their code because their own knowledge had gaps. That impressed people and made a pretty good first impression.
It's probably not universally true, but in my observation learning on the job much more commonly ends up resulting in sizable gaps in language knowledge.
If you've got a role working in $LANG, I don't see how upskilling in $LANG before you join is a trap. It's commonly knowledge with lasting value that offers returns across jobs.
I've never worked with C++, I hear hints that it's too big to actually learn and instead one must learn a subset. Maybe that's true, and the article more applies there.
Agreed. Personally I'm always grateful when someone joins and brings along a good up-to-date idea of how our particular languages/frameworks are used and taught by the rest of the world. It's so easy for a big internal codebase to devolve over time into a bunch of weird patterns, and forcing some newcomer/outsider perspectives onto it is a great corrective force.
It worked very well for me, on joining my knowledge of the languages and their stdlibs was respectable, and I could hit the ground running and get patches accepted easily. I could also in each languages case fix weirdness they had in their code because their own knowledge had gaps. That impressed people and made a pretty good first impression.
It's probably not universally true, but in my observation learning on the job much more commonly ends up resulting in sizable gaps in language knowledge.
If you've got a role working in $LANG, I don't see how upskilling in $LANG before you join is a trap. It's commonly knowledge with lasting value that offers returns across jobs.
I've never worked with C++, I hear hints that it's too big to actually learn and instead one must learn a subset. Maybe that's true, and the article more applies there.