Most products ship when the firmware reaches the "No obvious bugs" milestone. Sometimes they ship when the planned shipping date is reached, whether there are obvious bugs in it or not. A competent organisation will only ship a product when all the verification tests have been passed, and that's what I mean by "Doing it right". Learning how to design testable code and investing in test tools and the skills needed to use them is much more valuable than learning another programming language. Unfortunately this may be a skill that's hard to sell to an employer.

As for learning C/C++ for ARM Cortex, which is where a lot of action is, you can download the free evaluation versions of IAR or Keil. You can choose between time limited or code size limited (good enough for small projects).