[jandrewrogers]

This is an excellent point. The frontier moves quickly, leaving a wake of commoditized skills behind it, but there used to be identifiable, well-paid skills that people chose precisely because the frontier moved slowly. While my instinct is to say that the frontier moves more quickly now, I have a suspicion that this less true than I think it is and what has really changed is that everything has a fast-moving frontier now.

For example, the evolution and development of the Internet technology in the 1990s occurred at an incredible pace that is as fast as anything I've seen since, but back then you could switch to being e.g. an Oracle DBA if you wanted to avoid the chaos, and many people did. Those safe harbors have become rare in tech and the relative pay for them declines every year.