I totally agree. But how do you balance this with the need for looking good on the job market? If you want to stay employable you are almost forced to participate in this craziness.
+1 where I live the jobs with the highest pay grade are for some fancy frameworks. If I've been doing PHP for 5 years on an 10yo framework in a company that didn't feel the need to upgrade to anything. The day I want to find an other job I'm going to be confronted with opportunities that required mastering the latest technologies and I won't find something within my pay range because of this. That is the reality where I live
Futhermore, how am I supposed to learn and practice all this new stuff when my company doesn't allow time to learn anything ? Is home projects enough to fill professionnal requirements for mastering a technology ?
It's not easy to stay away
I used to do that. But right now I am in a high pressure job that sucks up a lot of energy but I don't learn anything new. When I come home these days the last thing I want to do is to spend more time on the computer. I need to do something active or just sleep to maintain my health.
I've been working with Clojure for the past decade, and haven't had to deal with any of the craziness.
The job market is smaller, but so is the pool of developers. Companies tend to be more flexible because of that and are often open to remote work. I'd much rather work in a sane niche market than deal with the mainstream churn.
Isn't it fair to say, though, that you're not the average Clojure dev? I mean you have a book and a web framework to your name so that puts you way ahead of the pack. As an average Clojure dev I've found it very difficult to find work.
That's just a result of me having been working with the same tech for a long time. When I was starting out with Clojure it was a lot more niche than it is now, and finding jobs was much harder. The whole reason I published a book was due to lack of beginner resources being available. So I don't think there's anything special about me, it's just that I was stubborn about wanting to work with Clojure and didn't get dissuaded until I made that a reality.
We have local Clojure meetup in town, and when I first started going there pretty much everybody was using Clojure as a hobby. Today, we have a bunch of companies using it in production, and all of them are actively hiring. The last three coop students I had all ended up getting Clojure jobs. I imagine this varies based on where you live of course, but another option is to simply introduce Clojure at a place that's using something else. That's where Clojure jobs come from in the first place at the end of the day.
It's nice to have found a niche you like. I thought I had a found one with the medical device I work on but it turns out the work is rather unpleasant and the hiring situation is not great either.
Sadly I agree as well. Instead of mastering the tools we have we need to make half arsed versions of everything because we don't have a mastery of this years trend.