>Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”.
No, but you probably can in 6 months. Whereas if you hadn't even touched any language and UI framework before, it would have taken you a few years.
Does it have to happen "in a few days" to matter? Or the hyperbole is to argue that past experience with different languages and their concepts, and SDKs and their architecture doesn't help going forward, because each of them is some kind of unique snowflake?
Note how the parent said: "As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology".
If you havent' done that with any technology for a full 15 years in some domain, and so can't adapt to the current framework used quickly, it's not like this refutes the parent's comment.
The parent described a situation where you serially learn new technologies and move on, which means there's a lot of concepts that transfer fine, and things that gradually change that you can more easily pick up in much smaller time. If you had done Android development in 2018, it wouldn't be that different to 2023.
No, but you probably can in 6 months. Whereas if you hadn't even touched any language and UI framework before, it would have taken you a few years.
Does it have to happen "in a few days" to matter? Or the hyperbole is to argue that past experience with different languages and their concepts, and SDKs and their architecture doesn't help going forward, because each of them is some kind of unique snowflake?