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Devil's advocate: the "state of the art" tech will always be what's fastest to implementation for high-travel use cases, and that's not a totally bad thing. If you got good at machining or injection molds, would that prevent you from buying a 3d printer? No. You wouldn't stop practicing the other tools after learning the 3d printer either. Why I pull the devil's advocate here is because I completely feel your sentiment in my bones, but I rationalize it against a stack that's later and in opposition to yours. I began 10 years ago from Objective-C and Ruby on Rails on Heroku. I was slinging early iOS apps and websites like a mofo. My shit was air tight inside and out. Then suddenly everyone wanted Swift. And Node. On AWS. For no fucking reason, they didn't even code. So I kinda took a break and flew planes. Then a side project app of mine got some public attention and I had to suddenly become an growth eng, data eng, web dev, Chrome Extension dev, and make quick changes to my site and app to have a chance at capturing the traffic that was giving me an opportunity for success. I brought on 2 friends who just got a CS degree but didn't know what git was, and we worked 14 hours a day "squeezing the rock" trying to keep shit on the rails as we got more traffic. Saving time meant we'd allow ourselves out of the house for a moment. By the end, we had a spaghetti trail of Reacts and Reduxes, Swift, Kotlin, Firebase databases and Cloud Functions, Python Notebooks, paying a ton for simple analytics visuals... but we got the job done, and on time, which usually never happens. We've since learned how to write it more affordably to scale the Firebase backend on budget, and it's pretty easy to hire devs to service it. Now I'll probably never rebuild that tech stack, ever. But on my most recent project where I needed to have a rich web app and mobile apps like ASAP, I StackOverflow'd a bunch of NextJS, Vercel, and React Native stuff. I'm using some CSS thing called Tailwind because it's easier to look up than plain CSS. I jammed that into some other thing called Styled Components so I can just put CSS/HTML in the same file. I'm hair-on-fire productive. I can whip up a fully featured multi-platform app in 72 hours by myself (that's free until a like 100+ users), then spend the next few months iteratively widening bottlenecks. I know this might not work for 100k+ requests/sec (although it definitely does) or legacy businesses, but the point is: if your tech is getting replaced it's because something else has a faster 0-60. Your skillset is still totally necessary for so many applications, but if you want to stick with your tools, you will stick with companies from the time that tech had the fastest iteration speed. |