I did the "hyper-focus-on-one-tech" thing for ~15 years. Talk about burn out.
Reason I started worrying is because market for Golang CRUD/API engineers seems to be down a lot, not many opportunities, if I lose this job need quite some time to pivot to another stack or start as a middle engineer again (currently, staff engineer)
A staff engineer is meant to be more removed from the code than an intermediate engineer, they're supposed to bring massive multiplier effect instead of cranking code all day. I don't think you should focus so much on the stack.
First barrier is an interview, from my experience people expect you to know nitty-gritty details of their stack if you want to lead other engineers and be a force multiplier. How do you even do a code review without properly understanding the trade-offs in that stack or widely accepted best practices in the community, which you accumulate over a long period of time.
You can of course fallback to another archetype of staff eng, and become a voice of leadership to translate high level business objectives to technical solutions, but companies I know still expect you to write a lot of code
If you're already a staff engineer, your leadership skills could be more important to your future than becoming fluent in Java or .NET. Aim for getting promoted, not for avoiding getting demoted?
“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
- Mark Twain
I don't want to touch it again. In fact, I'd rather go into environmental science so I can contribute something to the greater world. But that would require schooling and that doesn't seem to be desirable in your 40s. Not that it can't be done, but it would be an enormous pay cut plus student loans.
Anyway, find something that makes you happy. Don't chase the tech. Like other's have said, blockchain was "hot", crypto was "hot", data science may be reaching the tail end of it's "hotness". I expect AI in today's form to fizzle out, as well (can't speak for it's future states).
CEOs/CIOs/CTOs rah-rah this shit and time and time again we're back to doing generalists work - Azure/AWS/GCP web services, some API middle layer, some database layer. And that's okay!
Miata Is Always The Answer
Though, if I could afford an old air cooled 911, that’s what I’d do.
61 here.
Had a Miata myself, have shifted to SLK's same fun, slightly bigger, some with very large horsepower.