| > over the years you've placed bets on longevity of stuff, invested in the ecosystem, only to see those replaced overnight by new projects. As an older dev, I haven't done this. I learned early in my career that it's a mistake to put too many chips into any language or ecosystem, because very few things have any sort of real longevity. This means avoiding dependency on any particular stack, tool, etc. so that I can more easily adjust to the inevitably different demands of the next project. This is how it's always been, and I don't see any reason to think it will change in the future. I have gained a pretty strong professional advantage in doing this, because I am at least competent in a very wide swath of languages and ecosystems, which makes me hirable in a very wide range of companies. > I just want to have one stack and master it. You can do this, though. It's called being a specialist. Even if any given stack is unlikely to be dominant for all that long, if a stack has been used heavily at any point, there will always be a demand for devs who work in it. If you're lucky, it will be a stack that is both rarely used anymore and was used heavily enough that businesses have a large investment in it. That's where the big money is, because there is a limited group of devs who can address a critical (if small in terms of market size) need. |