[leobelle]

My favorite reply so far. I'm 37 and am starting to worry. I haven't run into any issues yet.

I have noticed though that experience become a liability. If you wrote JavaScript for IE 6, a lot of the optimizations and things one did to make sure things worked in IE 6 are no longer necessary. One should be ready to let go of things as soon as they aren't necessary anymore. Always keep learning and know why you do the things you do with code.

[geon]

Yes. Just keep leveling up, and one day you will be an über-developer that can solve any problem by thinking about it for 2 weeks, then spend an afternoon writing a 100 line bash script.

Sort of. All that experience adds up.

[_random_]

It's funny: I was betting on WPF at the time but it seems dead now, with only some XAML knowledge transferable. Still have to do JS, but at least Angular doesn't suck too much.

[nawitus]

Here's a tip: never bet on something proprietary.

[jussij]

Here's my 20+ years of experience working as a contract in Australia.

In all that time I've only ever worked with proprietary tools and have never had trouble getting high paying contract work.

I would say I've done very well betting on something proprietary.

[hkarthik]

Parent comment had to be qualified a bit: Never bet on anything proprietary which doesn't offer significant advantages over non-proprietary competitors.

[nextw33k]

Sliverlight would be a great example of that.

[gaius]

LOL. I know guys who have worked the last 20 years on Oracle, and they'll have no trouble finding work for 20 more. The same for Visual C++. Or a whole host of other things. The world isn't as simple as GNU ideology would have you believe.

[roel_v]

Yeah, like that article from yesterday about the Perl6 guys doubling down because in 18 months when Perl6 was done, the speaking/writing/consulting gravy train was coming...

[chadcf]

I've always done this naturally, some days I read a blurb about some technology I used to use and realize, huh, I used to do that all the time but haven't touched it in years.

I think one of the key things is to have a passion for learning. I've always been bored doing the same thing over and over. Learning new technologies, design patterns, architectures, skills, etc is what interest me. That also, coincidentally, is what keeps me up to date and productive.