[joshuamorton]

None of your conclusions follow from your premise.

I could just as easily claim that coders who refuse to develop new skills and keep up with a changing environment will eventually find themselves sidelined, due to their inability to adapt to changing needs. Since most of those middle aged people started programming 30 years ago now, they then move into environments where the technologies also haven't evolved in 20-30 years: embedded, aerospace, and dated DB work.

This doesn't preclude people who can evolve from keeping up as mostly-just-coders in a changing world. Calling the complexity inherent in something like facebook "arbitrary" as opposed to the complexity in embedded work as innate just implies that you don't understand the "CS" problems that Facebook (or similar) deal with, and I can imagine that a company like Facebook might not want to hire someone who, for whatever reason, is unable to accurately analyze the complexity of their problem space, especially at a more senior level.

[gfs78]

I find the wording of your last paragraph a little insulting.

Please answer: do you think aerospace, embedded and relational DB engines is dated work that has not evolved?

[joshuamorton]

> I find the wording of your last paragraph a little insulting.

And calling modern app development's probelms " due to arbitrary complexity and they are short term" isn't?

I do think that much of the aerospace technology industry uses dated methods. Same with much of the embedded field. There are certainly places that, for example apply modern best practices to embedded work, but most of those places are the exact same things that you're writing off: Google, Facebook, etc. Have embedded projects that follow best practices.

Focusing on aerospace specifically, I know of plenty of people who work in aerospace and don't use version control. That's plainly unacceptable. And I'd argue that the problems encountered there are much more self-imposed than at a Facebook.

Db engines again depend. There's a number of really cool modern relational database work, but the places where it happens (postgres, Google, cockroach labs) aren't places where someone who isn't interested in self growth are going to succeed.

The tl;dr here is that the impression I get from your comment is that you're describing a developer who let their skills stagnate because they learning things one way and don't want to keep up with changing processes. The fields you mentioned are fields that have such a stigma attached to them, and not unjustly. It doesn't apply to every person or project in those fields, but the people it doesn't apply to would succeed anywhere anyway.