The volume of small, incremental, changes in law is higher. Let me put it this way. The Dodd-Frank regulations that have come out so far in the last two years is probably the same number of pages, printed 50 lines per page, as the C++ source for Oracle's Hotspot JVM. And it's only 30% done. And there is no ChangeLog.

The pace of paradigm shifts is indeed much faster in technology, but I disagree there are major paradigm shifts in technology every 10 years. There are major developments within specific scientific domains like AI, image recognition, etc, but in software engineering itself there is little new under the sun. There is nothing in Javascript that wasn't done better in Smalltalk 30 years ago. CoffeeScript, C#, Lua, Ruby, etc? Derivative stuff that any Lisp-er plucked out of 1985 could pick up in a week or two.