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Prime time is a relative construct - it's a kind of realization of the rat race that assumes that the world is moving in a directed sense "towards" a goal and you are left behind if you don't stay directly, vigorously competitive and master the very latest thing, as if school never ended and you are just proceeding to grade 13, 14, 15... It can be somewhat true societally speaking, but also insensible as a creature that is part of society. Computers are still basically doing the things everyone predicted they would back in the 70's. The tooling is nicer, but the paradigms of how they should be programmed have crawled forward very slowly relative to the research of that time. So what, exactly, has actually changed? Why do we not have to learn for 50 years to have jobs in software? Most of what changes in industry is just a "meta strategy", like when you leave an online multiplayer game for a bit and come back and see that everyone is using different builds. Train the muscle memory for that build and suddenly you are competitive again, inside of a year or two. Like when a prize fighter comes out of retirement for a big matchup. Getting ahead of that and reaching a higher grade of achievement is all in doing the minimum of meta churn and instead finding the thing that differentiates if you go deeper with it than anyone else and solve hairier issues - being the artist who works with unusual media or processes. And if you're feeling like you aren't working on the right things, then the answer is not desperation, it's to engage with some philosophy and find more logical coherence in how you see yourself, your identity, goals and how you pursue them. What school prepared you for was to know a few things about computers, not to "be a programmer". Being a programmer is ongoing maintenance, a thing of doing enough rote work to still be inside the meta. That's all. |