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by itamarst 3439 days ago
A lot of the technology on the bleeding edge will be gone in a couple of years. AngularJS v1 used to be the next big thing, now it's obsolete. Who knows if v2 will stick around.

So following the latest technology in detail is unnecessary. Far more useful is just having a broad sense of what tools are available out there; it takes less time, and it's more useful since it gives you access to a broader set of tools on-demand.

Beyond technology, the things that persist are much more fundamental skills:

1. Ability to read a new code base, and ability to quickly learn a new technology.

If you can do this you don't need to worry about new technologies since you can always learn them as needed. E.g I just wrote a patch for a Ruby project (Sinatra) at work even though I don't really know Ruby and never saw the codebase before. It got accepted, too.

2. Ability to figure out what the real problem is, what the real business goal is. This makes you a really valuable employee.

Technology is just a tool. More fundamental skills are your real value.

More detailed write-up on how to keep up without giving up your life: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/01/11/your-job-is-not-your...

1 comments

While Angular 1 might be 'obselete', there's still a lot of corporations out there with tons of Angular 1 code, and most of them are not going to be upgrading anytime soon. Angular 2 is enough of a paradigm shift that it would require rewriting those apps from scratch, pretty much, and there won't be a business need to do so for another 5+ years for a lot of these companies.

We're still doing new apps in Angular 1 here, because everyone knows it, we can reuse more code, we know most of its quirks and how to squeeze performance out of it, and we can get the apps out the door a lot faster. Eventually we will have a new project where we decide to use something more current, though.

The point is not that Angular 1 is bad somehow.

The point is that trying to keep up with all bleeding edge technology is a waste of time, because it's constantly being replaced.

While at the same time you need to learn whatever technology you use at work, which may not be the latest-and-greatest.