[banachtarski]

I'm in agreement here. The engineers that will lose out are the ones that think that by learning the latest and greatest frameworks and libraries, they are somehow improving in their mastery.

This is, in fact, stamp collecting. Fewer and fewer engineers feel comfortable doing the basics. Implementing a raw custom data structure, writing a new parser, twiddling bits on a wire, debugging segmentation faults. The new-age programmer is in reality, a scripter who learns hundreds of different ways to do more or less the same thing.

There is no steamroller, but there is stagnation.

[shubb]

Maybe there are lots of types of programmer now. I tend to do the sort of things you mentioned, and look in awe at the amount of api / domain knowledge good Java or web developers have.

Actually, I wonder if the steamroller is age.

I can remember talking to a HR at a company I used to work for. I asked why they spent so much more effort on recruiting graduates and juniors than seniors.

'Seniors cost twice as much as juniors. We need them, but we only need one for every three juniors'

If that means only one in three juniors gets to be a senior, I wonder what happened to the other two. No one hires a junior with ten years experience, so I guess they don't work as programmers anymore. I hope they are project managers. Maybe that explains why project managers are always so angry.

[sokoloff]

They go to work for companies with the opposite philosophy. Some companies do no or very limited entry-level hiring, because they choose to hire programmers who made their mistakes on someone else's dime.

Yes, some also go into technical management or project management roles, but in my base of anecdata, that was either out of a genuine preference or because they realized they weren't all that good at coding. And of course, some leave the field, but this is by no means an industry where only 1 in 3 entrants has a spot 10 years later if they want one. If you're even halfway decent as a coder, you'll have a chair and the music will keep playing for you as long as you reasonably elect.

[etler]

New frameworks are getting simpler and easier all the time. They try to avoid the pitfalls that old ones fell into and thus become easier to learn than the last generation.

It's far far easier than learning a new language, and it's now common knowledge that you shouldn't make hiring decisions based on what specific languages a candidate knows. I haven't seen a trend in the real world forcing people to know new frameworks as a requirement for a job. In fact, I'd say it's less so than needing to know the language.

Many that put that they "know" a framework that I've seen "know" it just by doing a project in it over a weekend.