[lectrick]

There's also lots of money to be made in pivoting/combining your career learned lessons to date and applying them to a different area.

For example, you could take all that great knowledge about unit testing you learned in the Ruby space, and jump into Cobol and in all likelihood you will not only be able to share a new thing or two to some Cobol folks, you might contribute to far better maintained Cobol code.

The new ideas tend to congregate to the language-du-jour.

Of course, most of the "new ideas" were done on Smalltalk and Lisp years ago, but I digress.

[humanrebar]

For the most part that's true, but (for example) unit testing isn't as important in Haskell as it is in Ruby (due to stricter typing rules). Even something simple like mocking an interface requires a lot of boilerplate in C.

That being said, there are probably some things that can be pivoted. The value is in having attempted them in pilot projects so that you already know what works.