It happened to me several times.
I was learning programming mainly from youtube videos. Gatsby was gaining popularity at that time and tutorials popped out from many developers. I just learned react.js and thought I should learn it since everyone is praising and making tutorials about it. I saw a full tutorial of 4+ hours and made a blog with it. After that, I realized, that even though gatsby is a good technology I wasn’t interested in the benefits that gatsby provides. React was good enough for me.
Similarly, I learned MongoDB and GraphQL. Till now I never used these technologies.
I think I in a way wasted my time with these technologies that interest me, even though I learned something from them. I consider that a waste of time if am not learning out of interest or it’s not useful now. I can learn other things that interest me or it’s useful at that time.
I am not against learning new things that interest me and I am not saying that if something isn’t useful right away then it’s a waste of time. I am questioning the trust we put on people(content creators) whose influencing our choice to learn things. Just like we question our education system and it’s curriculum which decides what should a kid learn. I think that content creators sometimes suggests or create hype not because something is an crucial skill/ worth learning rather for their own benefit.
I think developers from various experiences and expertise levels, especially newbies are the victim of this hype created by content creators.Beginners get the idea that perhaps to be a developer I also have to learn those popular technologies which add extra stairs in becoming a developer. It’s unnecessary!