[JPnyc]

yes, and that problem is in no way limited to the IT field. You can apply it to pretty much anything in our society. But as you implied, it actually ends up costing more in the long run if you don't build something with an eye toward the future as well as toward present-day efficiency. The Internet and the IT field in general is an incredibly fast changing landscape. That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to get into. In the time it takes to learn a technology, that technology could easily be obsolete.

When I was in IT school, we were learning Java servlets. By the time I graduated they were abandoned for JSP. Fortunately it's not such a huge deviation that you would not be able to adapt, but still, it's not precisely what you were learning.