[bsder]

> Nothing is easy anymore.

I don't agree with that completely.

I do agree with the fact that the half-life of programming knowledge is far too short.

We flip through languages, technologies, etc. before anybody actually gets truly proficient with them.

[james_s_tayler]

Some advice that I heard awhile back that I'm glad I followed is to devote different percentages of your learning budget towards technologies with different half-lives.

Stuff that has an incredibly long half life like SQL/Database internals, or OS fundamentals, networking fundamentals, CS fundamentals will serve you well basically your whole career. So even a little bit of time dedicated to these over the long run is time pretty well invested.

A larger portion of learning goes on to the treadmill of technological churn, but that's either stuff you are learning now in order to get your next job working with it or are learning now as a result of getting a job that gave you the opportunity to work with it.

The middle ground is getting deeply familiar with libraries/frameworks that have a medium term half life. Usually that's some form of data access.