The firm kept its knowledge behind a gate, and the gate was a paywall. If I had a question, I paid for the answer. That gate is gone. The knowledge is available for everyone now.
So is mine. So, in time, is the one around what you're here to learn. Which raises the obvious question. If the knowledge is free, why are you sitting here learning Java?
Let me sell you a car.
You walk onto my lot. You ask why you should buy the one in front of you. I tell you it has an engine.
You leave. Of course you leave. You don't buy a car because it has an engine, isn't it?
Not because the engine doesn't matter. Because the engine is assumed. You buy on mileage. On reliability. On safety. On the seats, the sunroof, the cameras, on how the thing drives.
Now run it the other way. Leather seats. Sunroof. Cameras everywhere. Beautiful. No engine. It doesn't matter what else it has. The car is useless.
That's the exact shape of technical fundamentals right now, and it's an awkward shape, so hold it carefully. With it, you're not going to get a job. You have to build other things on top. Without it, you're not going to get a job at all. It's kind of an interesting paradox.
The arithmetic is short. Ten times zero is zero. A hundred times zero is zero. A million times zero is zero. If you're zero on the knowledge, the tooling can only add zero to you. It just arrives faster now.
And I mean specific things, not a general feeling of competence. What an algorithm actually is. Why there are classes, and why there are packages. What the back end is doing that the front end isn't. Where your money physically sits at the moment a screen tells you it's in your account, and why it isn't mixing with somebody else's.
If the tooling wrote a hundred lines for you tonight, what exactly would you check before you let it out of the room?
If nothing came to mind, that's the honest answer and it's the entire reason the next six months exist. You can't evaluate what you don't understand. Evaluation is the part of this job that hasn't been handed to a machine, and it's the part somebody pays you for.