| Two parts. I guess as a mid 40s developer I could share what you shouldn’t do and should do based on my experience. I’m also nowhere near Silicon Valley startup or FAANG culture. I have lived in a major metropolitan area for 20 years where there has always been a vibrant job market for developers. I spent 9 years at a company in the 200x’s that stayed stuck in 2002 - C++, VB6, Perl hosted on IIS, classic ASP, etc. I didn’t know anything about modern development practices. Can you imagine what would have happened if I stayed another 10 years like another developer did? Last I heard they were transitioning to VB.Net and were still using Perl. So yeah, I know first hand what it looks like to let your skills stagnate and find yourself barely marketable. When I finally left, I took a job as what for all intents and purposes was a junior .Net developer instead of a higher paying position as a C++ developer because I knew the market was moving away from C++ (at least the local market). I spent the next decade watching the job boards, talking to recruiters and making sure my resume was matching the skills in demands and changing jobs about every two years as I learned all I could from one company and always for nice bump in salary. I didn’t mean to jump on the “newest” technology just to keep up with industry trends. As much as I love Hashicorp’s Nomad and so used it since it worked with more than just Docker, I would never suggest anyone learn it if they already know kubernetes. That’s where the market is. So yeah, it is about being able to find a job quickly and being more marketable to employers. My own m.o. is to be a true “full stack developer/architect”. By full stack knowing a marketable technology on each layer - - web - server - database (RDMS/NoSQL) - cloud hosting and knowing netops/devops/ and development using their cloud native features. - continuous integration/deployment best practices. - and just general best practices. You don’t have to jump on the new and shiny, the further you go down the stack, the more stable it. Sure things are always being added at each level but you don’t see the rapid changes like you do in JS land. As far as learning things that pay less, I’m not a strong front end developer. Companies pay me because I can go very deep in the stack and can guide development and architecture from the back end. Web developers are a dime a dozen and pay seems to be stagnating for them. But I still want to learn the latest web frameworks to be more marketable in a pinch even though they are getting paid less than what I make now. we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable I wasn’t thinking about keeping thier skills up so they could keep their job at IBM, jobs are disposable and interchangeable if you stay marketable. Someone in technology with marketable skills can have a job before thier next mortgage payment is due if they are either in the right part of the country or are willing to move. |