After reading the FAQ and the answers in Why is "what language should I learn" considered off-topic?, I feel that there is still a hole in the discussion, namely how can we help all those people that are genuinely asking for advice on how to progress their careers in terms of language knowledge?
It seems that there are a lot of college-level people asking this question and getting immediately closed as off-topic. I don't see that response as being particularly helpful, so I'd like to see some discussion around how we could update the FAQ or provide some useful feedback to the person asking the question.
More senior stackoverflow/programmers users know that in the real world knowing any particular language is not as important as knowing a range of languages, environments and toolkits. Juniors, however, do not know this. This is not limited to the software world, either. People will also agonize over whether to learn French or Spanish, or to study inorganic chemistry vs biochemistry etc. In each case it doesn't really matter except in specific circumstances (e.g. if you really want to work at the French embassy, or you only ever want to work with Android) as long as you learn something.
It is perfectly reasonable for a college kid to ask "what should I learn" or "where should I focus my effort" and so on, and for them many of the reasons why these are considered off-topic questions are irrelevant. To quote one of the answers from the Why is "what language should I learn" considered off-topic? question:
What does it depend on? Well this is an incomplete list:
What languages you already know
What problem you want to solve
What environment you have to solve the problem in
What language the company you're about to join uses
and so on.
For college kids only the first point is relevent (and even then only vaguely - college kids are unlikely to be an expert in any language yet). They're not looking to solve a particular problem or join a particular company, and without some industry experience they will have no idea what "and so on" encompasses.
I think they're attempting to ask a deeper question "How does one become a strong, employable developer" but they don't know how to ask it. They mistakenly think that choice of language is the most important thing.
How can we help the junior users to understand this without discouraging them with an immediate "this is off-topic, go away"? It could be as simple as a canned response that points them to a website hosting a good discussion of what makes a good developer (I know, I know, that's subjective and argumentative in itself).