[kevinconroy]

Who says you have to be the one to do it? What conferences exist? What books? Online courses? You don't have to be the professor, but you do need to be their advisor and point them in the right direction to learn, grow, and thrive.

[jnwatson]

Sometimes there aren't conferences, books, or courses. There are lots of problems out there without solutions you can take courses for. Board bring up, performance, and lots of problems that fall into the bucket of "machine learning" require knowledge, cleverness, and lots of persistence.

There's also the set of problems that are best learned at universities. Normally, one doesn't have time for a developer to catch up on their missing compilers or cryptography class (this is particularly a problem since perhaps a quarter of programmers have CS degrees, and a quarter of them went to a decent program). If I were asked to debug a clock skew problem on a particular VHDL design, it would take me a long time to learn enough to even approach the problem.