At some point in my career I discovered - to my horror - that I was learning as much or more new tech at consulting gigs than I did as a salaried employee. Even, I daresay, when I was working at startups.
When I pointed this out to people they didn't believe me. So it turned into a bit of a troll for me to say "yeah I'm going to go consult for a while to build up my skillset" and then watch their eyebrows do gymnastics.
You might assume, as I did, that they hire contractors who already know everything. They hire people with a reasonable skill in a couple areas they don't possess. But to actually contribute you have to drink from the firehose, going deep into the tech you were hired for and the constellation of technologies they use that interact with those things in any way. As soon as you start discovering XY Problems you find they were trying to get you to make X happen because they don't know how to do Y (or didn't know Y was possible) and the clock is ticking.
When I pointed this out to people they didn't believe me. So it turned into a bit of a troll for me to say "yeah I'm going to go consult for a while to build up my skillset" and then watch their eyebrows do gymnastics.
You might assume, as I did, that they hire contractors who already know everything. They hire people with a reasonable skill in a couple areas they don't possess. But to actually contribute you have to drink from the firehose, going deep into the tech you were hired for and the constellation of technologies they use that interact with those things in any way. As soon as you start discovering XY Problems you find they were trying to get you to make X happen because they don't know how to do Y (or didn't know Y was possible) and the clock is ticking.