People like to throw around this kind of advice often. Hanging around people who "get shit done" is a privilege that not everyone has. What happens when you go to a cheap college in Mexico where none of the computer science teachers have ever worked in a large scale application and most haven't even written one in their lives? How do you apply this advice when 90% of your classmates can't read a sentence of english and learning something unusual like python and deploying a toy app on some server not only puts you ahead by miles of the rest of your class but also of the rest of your entire generation? Some communities don't have this kind of people. Is someone in this position supposed to ditch everyone around him/her?