This is exactly the problem, but there's still a sweet spot where you can get quickly up to speed on a technical areas adjacent to your specialty and not have small gaps in your own knowledge hold you back from the main task. I was quickly able to do some signal processing for underwater acoustics in C, for example, and don't really plan to become highly proficient in it. I was able to get something workable and move on to other tasks while still getting an idea of what was involved if I ever wanted to come back to it. In the past I would have just read a bunch of existing code.