Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You

This is absolutely true, at least from my perspective. All of the programming jobs I've had in my career have been for medium- to freaking-huge companies, and most of my projects at those jobs have required me to do a ton of self-teaching to get up to speed on a bunch of technical (or scientific, or mathematical) stuff that I had no previous exposure to, in order to get my job done. On only one occasion did I ever get any training for anything, and that was just for two days.

I guess that's a combination "back in my day/get off my lawn" statement, plus a little whining, and maybe a humblebrag, but I don't think that's an unusual story at all for software developers.

I interned at IBM during grad school with a team of consultants that all did enterprise Java stuff for financial institutions- that was very different. IBM would frequently send those developers away for a week or more at a time, multiple times a year, to get training on specific technologies. I'm not sure how common that is anywhere other than IBM though, or if IBM even does that anymore. Maybe Google does it? I don't know.

Sometimes I deal with developers who either can't or won't teach themselves anything, and can't or won't learn by doing. They absolutely need someone to hold their hand and explain things to them every step of the way, and they will just throw their hands up in the air and fail before putting any time into trying to read up on whatever topic is giving them trouble. I don't know what to attribute this to, so I'm trying really hard to not jump to the conclusion that they suck or they don't care or whatever. I'm sure a lot of them do just suck at their jobs and/or just don't care, but maybe some of them have genuine problems with learning that aren't their fault. The only thing I can say for sure is that this is a trait that is a major impediment to their careers and getting their jobs done without sucking up too much of their cow-orkers' time (as we all know, orking cows requires long stretches of uninterrupted concentration).

TL;DR Spot on, and being able to develop your own technical skills to keep up to date and expand your horizons is absolutely critical to being a really successful developer. You are also the only person that you can count on to do this for you. You can't really count on any employer, even some mythical ideal company with bottomless resources that treats each employee as a magical snowflake, to do this. Even if your company does provide training, it's not necessarily going to be the training you want or need to receive.

If it has nothing to do with a way to increase production, then the company has no business by investing in you learning that. BUT, if the company can benefit from you learning those skills, then it could be a missed oportunity not give you the resources to do it (learning it while on the company's time).

Of course it's all a product of culture and supply-demand (systemic), if there are enough great programmers that are willing to learn everything on their own time, then of course it will become the norm that programmers should learn everything on their own time. And, of course, that's great for the employers.

This is basically the choice I finally had to make for myself over the last couple years.

It was just three years ago that my main responsibility was maintaining code on a black & yellow terminal for a VMS server. Another couple years and I could have easily have been one of those people pushed out of the industry with no easy way back in.

Although my company has provide an avenue for me to transition to doing things with the LAMP stack it is still in some sense legacy. It's a large website base that started over a decade ago.

I have made the choice that I'm done with being legacy and am doing whatever I can to learn current tech. I will even be willing sometime later this year to get a new job at a junior level just I can cut loose the legacy code crap I am tied to. At this point it feels mostly like a bunch of anchors holding me down. I want a new job where I can learn from the people around me and truly be focused on my direction.

I disagree with that and the notion of constantly learning new languages on your own. I happen to know couple of companies that were unable to find Perl developers, so they decided to train their own and now they see it as the only way to hire such developers. What you know is no longer a requirement for them, just be good at learning things and preferably have a CS degree. And I see this becoming a norm in a heavily fragmented future of software development.

You may as well say that your job advancement is your responsibility and not your employer's. And it would be true, strictly speaking you're rarely owed promotion - even if you perform incredibly well, there are no guarantees. However, someone could still not wish to work in a dead-end job.

It feels to me that that's the sense in which the young man's comments were meant. It doesn't seem unreasonable in that light. So the compensation he'd like isn't entirely monetary in nature, that's hardly unique.