You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.
That's absolutely heartbreaking.
In the old days, we would have a team, that would compete, as a team, against other corporations. Our team would stick together, work together, and, quite often, function as a unit; leveraging each others' strengths, and compensating for each others' weaknesses.
Nowadays, we look at our team members as "the competition." In fact, we may actually be making plans to move to the other team.
But I have written programs in C, that were still in use, 25 years later. I have written programs in PHP, that were still (are still) in use, 15 years later.
There'll always be room for the classics.
That said, I'm quite looking forward to seeing what I can do with the new AI stuff.
And I am sorry. Things definitely used to be better than they are now, in some ways, and definitely used to be worse, in other ways (for example, it used to be a very white, very male demographic). It's not my fault that things went the way they did. Folks liked money, so folks built a culture that maximized profit, and eschewed humanity.
I am quite sorry about that, but it doesn't change the fact that it was not always so.
It's not in my personal interest to go about creating a slideshow on "how things used to be." I know what I know. I lived it. I ran teams, exactly like I described, and I was a proud member of very large, high-functioning teams that stuck together for decades without stabbing each other in the back.
Let's just agree to disagree, then, eh?
I don't disbelieve you, but I'm saying your experience can't be generalized in that way. Only aggregate data can tell us these things. Your experience may well have followed the exact trajectory you've described, but maybe 90% of people see the opposite.
Everyone is at best a temporary ally, friends and community groups are just atrophying daily as we continue to not invest in people and community and invest in more alienation.
Team is still very much a thing and if your team members are looking at each other as competition then that sounds like a culture thing, maybe the norm, still not acceptable.
This mindset will damage you over the long run, and the resulting career success may or may not be able to offset it. A zero sum mindset will lock you into this view along with the accompanying anxiety.
With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of entry are much higher and this will mean you have to outrun fewer people in the long run to survive.
I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial?
But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform.
But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps.
Edit:
I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries. I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case. I know how to achieve performant simple code. I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc.
Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.
It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.
Focus on what you can control and let go of that which you cannot.
A lot of them are senior or principal product engineers at companies you will have heard of.
Whereas with C, its extremely necessary to get into the weeds - otherwise your code just crashes or suffers some memory corruption issue, race condition, etc etc.
yeah that was the whole point of object oriented programming and Java to begin with. You don't need to know the details of the underlying implementation, focus on the problem you're trying to solve.
Problem with this approach is you run out of friends quick. People in bear country cary bear spray, have dogs to scare off bears and electric fences to keep them out.
We have tools and culture to not have to deal with/rely on survival of the fittest if we don't let fear control us - whether at work or in nature.