While it might be a bad rule as stated, I took it as a tongue-in-cheek way of getting at a much better rule: Avoid Learning Everything New. Or maybe, for the sake of a better acronym, Stop Learning Ephemeral Dreck. It's certainly good to expose oneself to new ideas. Sometimes it's worthwhile to dive deeper into something different. The problem is that a lot of programmers make neophilia into a lifestyle, forever distracting themselves and never learning anything really well. Scratch the surface, get some quick wins at something that's still new to everybody, move on to the next thing. Avoid any domain or technology where true experts can show you up. That's just another way to succeed as a poor programmer. Good programmers have at least some breadth and some depth in a few areas.