My first professional programming job was in 1996. I was writing C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes and reading about undefined and implementation defined behavior on Usenet in comp.lang.c. My second job three years later was writing C and C++ for Windows computers along with MFC and some standard cross platform C++ using the STL.
Recently, there was a blog post submitted on HN with “trick” questions in C where they ask you to describe what the output would be. I immediately recognized all of the code would result in undefined or implementation defined behavior. I call myself still keeping abreast of the latest C and C+ standards out of morbid curiosity even though I have used neither in over a decade, changes have been glacial compared to the front end.
within the past decade I've seen the rise of cloud services*
I know AWS pretty well, from the development, Devops, and even operations/networking side. I hate to be “that guy” but for the most part the cloud is just someone else’s computer where they manage databases, messages services, caching services, monitoring etc.
The largest changes in mindset were infrastructure as code, “cattle vs pets” and immutable architecture.
non-relational databases, the Hadoop ecosystem, distributed storage systems, containers,
Especially in the cloud, distributed storage systems is just an API call. NoSQL databases do require a change in mindset, but the world is still dominated by RDMS’s. In fact they are still dominated by the same three or 4 as they were in 2010 - SQL Server, Oracle, Mysql and Postgres. I’ve been going back and forth between Mysql and Sql Server for almost two decades and six jobs.
the increased use of languages outside of C/C++/Java for systems programming (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Clojure, Scala)
Besides Python, you can still safely ignore all of those languages and just stick with C/C++, C# and Java and be good. Those were the same languages that were in demand when I (belated) jumped back in the job market in 2008. The other are all niche languages in the grand scheme of things. Go is starting to pop up more admittedly.
machine learning, and CUDA, among many other technologies that were either nonexistent or were in their infancy in 2010.
You can also safely ignore those and still be marketable.
As far as low level developers, the submitter seems to be a standard everyday “enterprise developer” (no insult intended , I am too). So low level code, CUDA and machine learning wouldn’t be relevant.