[ido]

    Very few of those newer projects are going to 
    look much like the 20yr old one you cut your 
    teeth on early in your careerr.

Maybe I'm too young to comment, but my first job as a developer was almost 18 years ago now & even tho I'm no longer using the same language & tools a lot of the challenges of software engineering are the same now as it was then (and you learn using new stuff incrementally anyway).

Overall the experience of developing a comparable-scale project in java on tomcat in 2001 is not that different from a modern one in ES6 on node.js in 2019.

[jacobsenscott]

I've been doing this about the same amount of time, and yes, everything is the same as it was 20 years ago. Frameworks come and go, but they aren't that different. And you are hopefully mostly writing application code not framework glue. So the framework doesn't matter.

All the popular languages are sadly still descendants of C, just with variations on the strongly/weakly typed spectrum, and if functions are first or second class.

The hard stuff is still identifying requirements, managing expectations, and writing code that can adapt to changing requirements overtime. None of the hard stuff has anything to do with the language or framework you are using.