[bumby]

I think it’s the same process, just at a higher velocity.

Jobs have always been at risk of obsolescence. Jobs either require continual learning (typically the “professions”, e.g., physician, lawyer,...) or were at risk for being irrelevant. In the past, the pace of irrelevance was often slow enough to span a lifetime or multiple generations so people could still make a (slowly dwindling) living. Now the turnover just seems much faster that irrelevance can come at multiple times in ones career.

What’s the quote? “There future will belong to those who learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

[agumonkey]

One thing though, if even programming (a somehow advanced human endeavour) gets deprecated then something is wrong with our culture.

[bumby]

I agree, but think that statement does a disservice to programming by treating it as a monolithic domain. It’s telling a mechanical engineer “mechanical things will never deprecate”. That’s true, but doesn’t help the ME whose career may have been built in, say, a fossil fuel power plant.

[agumonkey]

I have a feeling that anybody in physically based engineering will never lose use of his knowledge. You don't spend time using trendy inventions at the pace of computing. Many programmers fiddle with plumbing onto <framework-of-the-day> until they get a new position. Not a lot to remember beside social reflexes and 'best practices'.

[bumby]

The pace is certainly different but I’ve found most engineers lose those skills that aren’t directly relevant to their job at hand. Ask that power plant engineer to do fluid dynamics and they’d likely be lost. The physical engineering disciplines are often hyper-specialized as well

[agumonkey]

Sure you forget but if you come into a fluid dynamic problem, you know that the universe didn't move to a new paradigm, I assume it's a different feeling to know that you can revisit the knowledge instead of navigating a totally new structure.

[bumby]

Do you feel the fundamental precepts of programming don’t generally hold true regardless of the application of the technology?