| I'm 21 years into my career myself, so the web is younger than my carrer. At this point, I do full stack development as well. And... I think you are taking on more than you need to for the discussion at hand. If you are an excellent JS programmer, you don't need to keep up on the latest libraries. You can code what you need yourself. Sure, maybe you do something from scratch that could have been done with a newer library, but the 10 hours you lose there is more than made up by not having to do those 15 hours a week keeping up. Likewise on your other tech points. Constantly churning your toolkit doesn't speed you up. It slows you down. There is a balance to be found where you keep up "enough", but still focus the majority of your time on delivering work. I choose to spend a day or so each month trying to keep up, then roll with what I know for a while. Likewise with some of your other activities. Meetups and business models? They may help you be a consultant, but that is adding yet a 4th role to the topic at hand. Many of your other points also apply more to a consultant than a heads-down designer/coder. In general, it sounds like you are trying to be an even rarer breed. More power to ya, but it may be overkill for most people. |