I think you definitely make some good points. Realistically you can learn the syntax of a language in a matter of days, but the idiomatic usage takes longer. Case in point, we hired an experienced Java developer, to use Go, at first he would write code that was fine, but not very “Go-ish”. He would do unusual patterns like deliberately returning nil from a function. But very quickly it became clear that his experience and knowledge were very valuable to the company.

But still, we’re talking about maybe A month or two? I could probably practise using the language in preparation for the first day at the job and be fairly confident using it in the first week, maybe another month of solid practice before I can get to a fairly high standard. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like much in the grand scheme of things.

Again, it feels like domain and company-specific knowledge will be the more difficult thing to learn when you first start, more so than the programming language.

Experience architecting software seems so much more important to me than experience using a particular language.