God's truth - the honest, God's truth, is that between a standing start with 0 experience and a senior programmer there is very little actual INFORMATION.
Everything else is teachers and documentation and compiler errors being stupid.
For example when starting with C++ who starts out with the importance of semicolons, how you have to not leave them off, find the missing semicolon, and have a teacher watch over you pointing out your missing semicolons? Nobody. You get a stupid abstract sentence : "statements are terminated by semicolons" after some bullshit definition of a statement. You can spend 90 minutes looking at definitions of the latter without acquiring a skill that the former could show in - not an exaggeration - 17 seconds.
17 seconds : 90 minutes is 1:317, so 3 years becomes 3 days of someone actually showing you.
You know it's true. You've seen it!