It’s not just about skill progression. To stay relevant and not be seen as an old out of touch developer, you have to know how and when to jump on the next hype cycle.
It's possible for a developer to be skilled beyond a level which their bosses, recruiters and colleagues are able to grasp. You're not going to get paid extra for that surplus skill. Your pay is limited by your boss' imagination. Even though those skills are extremely useful and deliver real returns.
Proving yourself as a developer to a non-technical person takes years because that's how long it takes to see the results. In a big company it may even be impossible to prove yourself because your work is mixed in with that of many other people and the results average out.
However there is also the path of understanding business domains, brushing up soft skills and embrace being polyglot across multiple stacks, delivering working solutions for companies that couldn't care one second what their IT cost center runs on, as long as they stay in business selling socks or whatever they actually care about.
No, you can’t be 45 years old (I’m 46) and say I understand the business domain and I can give you a really cool VB6 Active X control to solve your problem that only works in IE6 on a Windows XP VM.
Yes, if the CTO doesn’t care that he is using somewhat modern technology he should be fired for incompetence. He’s going to find that he has a hard time recruiting developers who know how to write FORTRAN for a Stratus VOS mainframe. Yes I’m that old. Been there done that.
Saying you know the business domain but not keeping up with technology is just an excuse that people make and then scream ageism the minute no one will hire them because their idea of cutting edge technology is ASP.Net WebForms or Enterprise Java Beans.
Yes, my current position is a technical consultant working remotely for Big Tech who has to understand business problems and not just know how to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. But, if push came to shove and a meteor struck all of their data centers world wide, I could put my resume out their and get a job with a tech stack that is at the right point on the hype curve.
>if the CTO doesn’t care that he is using somewhat modern technology he should be fired for incompetence
A ridiculous statement. The last concern of the CTO should be "are we using the latest tech for the sake of having the latest tech". Their concerns should be about cost, what the business actually needs, and what the future will entail. Finding new developers isn't that difficult, even for something like mainframes which most college grads today are totally unfamiliar with.
Your point about being more easily hireable by staying up to date with the current hype is true and valid. However the CTO doesn't have the same concerns as you. This is the important difference.
Also not working alone helps to sort out the issues when cutting costs arrives.
Finally I am not saying not to learn, rather people should focus on their business value as a whole package, and not being "Expert on Technology X, Y, Z".
I am about the same age, apparently it was worked so far.
Especially seeing that when working as a Corp Dev, salary compression and inversion are real and the best way to keep your salary at market value is by job hopping.
Is an appropriate response to not getting out of touch.
For example you can invest a lot of time in learning some kind of framework and get really proficient. Maybe that opens up new opportunities to you. Maybe in a few years the framework falls behind and you should have better invested your time in something else?
I think you can do a lot of great things without knowing every detail of a black box. And it allows you to spend your time on other things which are maybe worthwhile in the long run.
What's important is that you do not avoid digging deeper into a topic just because of pure habit. Maybe that kind of self-reflection is a trait which is less prevalent in "Expert Beginners" called out in the article.
This sounds pretty similar to the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in reinforcement learning (game playing AIs). Exploration comes at a cost, and exploiting current knowledge is safer, but if the agent doesn't explore enough it will have lower total score. A good exploration strategy is a must because knowledge comes from exploration.
In most competitive games with scouting you have to move up the ladder quite a bit to find solid scouting.
Every framework gets out of date after a few years. It’s par for the course in technology. You have to ride the hype cycle.