This is what Paul Graham calls the Python Paradox; namely that in 2004, when Python jobs were relatively more rare, you could find smarter Python engineers than Java engineers for any given project.
"[I]f a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job."
I think that's exactly it. The problem is when these articles come out and everybody try to learn Go and use VS Code so they think can become smarter or at least being perceive as such :-P
Both of these are still just very roundabout ways of telling yourself you're awesome because of whatever mildly unusual thing you think you might be doing.
And this comment is just a subtextual justification for making sure you still feel valued for not doing anything unusual.
This could go round and round. The point is that there SEEMS to be a correlation with people who learn things for the sake of learning them and folks who do well at exercises that test for adjacent skills.
you still feel valued for not doing anything unusual
I didn't really express any thoughts or feelings about doing unusual things, real or perceived. Doing unusual things can be great! Telling yourself you are awesome can also be great! I do think, though, that the type of thought expressed in the "The Python Paradox" and related writings (say, the bit about blub language programmers) is pretty lousy. It was lousy then and has aged even more poorly.
One day you wake up and have your own custom firmware on your hacked together laptop which is running a Linux that's using three different package managers on top of custom built kernel and x.
Each step seemed like a good idea but when taken together you wonder what when wrong and when.
He he, nice contrarian opinion. Me like, mucho (and gracias). The other side may also be true, but this one can be too. Folks on here and elsewhere (juveniles of all ages), time to learn about the age-old saw that there is more than one way of looking at it / different strokes for different folks / circumstances alter cases / get out of your echo chamber / filter bubble / etc.
"[I]f a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job."
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html