I definitely don’t believe in the “10x Engineer” (individual contributor) - yes they do exist but are so rare they aren’t worth talking about. I do believe in being a force multiplier as a team lead/mentor.
The big picture however is still valid. Concepts and paradigms hold for decades. We still use TCP/IP. Computers still use the Von Neumann Architecture.
Looking at the details however, AWS is just a fancy GUI over time sharing on a mainframe. C# is just new syntax for concepts that are older than I am. While mobile brings new challenges, you now don't have to deal with the challenge of customers connected through a 330 baud modem.
In 1995, when I wrote my first paid for application in college, Internet was a thing for most colleges where I did some work on a HyperCard based Gopher server (long story), that wouldn’t have been possible in 10 years earlier.
In 2006, I was writing field service software for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices, architecting for semi connected smart devices is a completely different mindset than terminal programming or desktop programming. That wasn’t feasible before hardware became cheap and at least 2G was ubiquitous.
Even then what we could do, pales in comparison to the type of field service implementation I did in 2016 when mobile computing was much more capable, much cheaper and you could get a cheap Android devices and 3G/4G was common place.
But people thinking cloud computing is just “sharing mainframes” and don’t rearchirect either their systems or their processes is how we end up with “lift and shifters” and organizations spending way too much money on infrastructure and staff.
Also anyone who equates managing AWS to a “GUI” kind of makes my point, if you’re managing your AWS infrastructure from a GUI - you’re doing it wrong. 10-15 years ago you didn’t set up your entire data center by running a CloudFormation template or any other type of infrastructure as code.
I don't buy it. 10 years is about when you start moving into the actual expert category. Note I said start.
At 35, I finally had real, full control over multiple languages, could pick up CLR and understand and implement any algorithm in it, finally understood exactly why concurrency was so damn hard and how to mitigate that, and would pass practically every interview with flying colors. I could finally drive my tools with some facility and started to realize gdb was my friend.
At 45, I can predict the errors I and others are likely to make and take steps to mitigate them up front--although I still get irritated that I when I make the mistake anyway. My comments are now psychic--my team often remarks how "I just thought that I could really use a comment explaining this-and, behold, there it was". I can reduce interviewers to tears and can surprise all but the most knowledgeable experts in their own domains. I reach for gdb far more often, but am still frustrated at how much I don't know about it.
I still only consider myself an "expert" in very few subdomains--none of them involving programming languages.
One of my heavy hitter software guys once said: "Your code is the most straightforward code I have ever read." I apologized for being so simple. His laughing response: "Don't apologize. That was a compliment, dumbass."
You may be an expert in multiple languages but as the article said, if the company is looking for Ruby developers to write a CRUD app, they no more care that I spent years doing C than they do the years I spent doing 65C02 assembly in the 80s.
No matter how many subdomains you are an expert in, if the company doesn’t need that experience, it doesn’t matter.