This article comes down to “as a developer not all my experience is relevant anymore, but some still is, and you should stay up to date”. That’s never not been the case.
You're not wrong, it has always been true, but actually internalizing it as you grow older is hard, and rare.
It is very difficult to let go of some hard-earned experience and acknowledge that it's no longer much of a factor.
There are lots of examples, but the one that springs to mind is download file size. 30 years ago that was critical. Today, meh, 10 megs or 20 megs doesn't matter.
No clearly (before all us old folks have a heart attack), yes size still matters to a point. But in truth that point is waaaay higher than we'd like to admit.
And of course this is not limited to tech. It applies to every industry. My dad bemoans the fact that he can't tinker on his car the way he did in my youth.
The real secret is not in knowing the summary of the post, the really hard part is in figuring out what still applies and what is obsolete.
A lengthy preamble and then just… an advice to keep kicking, remain curious, tinker around and see how things are now, adjust to the new situation?
Am I missing something? Because it was always like that, you stop exploring and playing with new stuff and in just a blink you’re no longer relevant. (Which sucks if you’re burnt out or depressed.)
Ultimately he's pointing out the scope of the changes is significantly different. It's nothing like before when you could've kept up by learning new programming languages and frameworks.
Where we're going, programming languages and frameworks are rapidly losing relevance.
Ultimately it's still the same thing - problem solving in specific domains.
Languages and frameworks and libraries and IDEs and agent systems are all - in the end - just some new tooling, they were always the lower-hanging fruit. Cool, fancy, do novel magic, open paths previously unknown or thought impractical or unrealistic, but still - it's just some new ideas and instruments and ways how to use those efficiently - all to write programs that match our needs and fulfill our expectations, making things happen.
Nothing about underlying principles of software engineering had changed - some methods became more feasible, ML got really hot (and very rightfully so), but overall software projects are still software projects. Just recently I've looked at some machine-assisted software development courses and it was just the same good old "use your head, try your best to do things right or bad things happen, and here are the important gotchas of the day that you're best to constantly stay mindful about" material, just with "the machine can very rapidly produce code now, but it's not your code until you comprehend it" flavor, followed with a showcase of capabilities and features of newest tools on the market.
In my understanding, the eternal hustle still stays the same: find a passion, get into something, keep up with others, continuously learn new stuff, try to think something of your own and share, try to produce valuable things that others are willing to pay for, repeat until you can't anymore. Current state of "AI" doesn't disrupt this at all. Although it pushes the tempo up, and the times are stressful even without it.
It's really interesting where we draw the boundary of originality. That there is significant controversy about who originated the particular words of the serenity prayer surprised me, because I've always thought of that prayer as simply a particularly catchy rephrasing of the most well-remembered sections of Epictetus' Enchiridion
I think now more than ever it's actually meta-epistemology that's valuable in making decisions. There are significant shifts in the technology landscapes that should make you question your heuristics about costs and tools and effort, yes. Also, there are significant shifts in the information landscapes, slightly less new ones in my opinion, that should make you question your trust in conventional wisdom, expertise, and what appears to you to be popular opinion. There are significant shifts in the relative levels of risk that should make you question your priorities, economically, politically, socially, and logistically. It is overwhelming for so much to change so fast and despite this unpredictability on the object level, I see people's meta-heuristics thrashing about in what seem to be pretty predictable ways. Some people are taking a reactionary posture and think we need to double down on our existing biases and shut down everything unfamiliar. Some people take an iconoclastic posture and say all extant knowledge is worthless and we should be maximally novelty-seeking. Needing to question and evolve and adapt our epistemology is... to be frank pretty obvious. The devil at this layer of abstraction is in the details just as it is elsewhere, in how to actually do this productively instead of flailing. Humility and balance is good advice, but it's so general as to basically be tautological. I think the best tools I've learned are about noticing my own momentum. Knowing the right level of friction to try a different approach rather than beat my head against a wall. Being able to tell that a new approach is going to work before it has completely worked. That is, to me, the challenge before most of us
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