This is a commonly held belief but I don’t think it’s true. There is a lot of surface-level technical turnover in software. A lot of “new framework-of-the-month” churn. A lot of project management/methodology fads: Agile and Pair Programming and Test-driven development. The tooling changes slightly every so often. But the fundamental principles and techniques of good software engineering have not changed in decades.

Take a good productive software developer 30 years ago, and time travel him/her here today and they will be productive with very little ramp-up. A bad software developer from 30 years ago will be bad today too.

Learning for its own sake is great, but don’t actively try to create and get on an unnecessary treadmill.