> experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time

I'm 28, which means I'm young enough that even people like you believe I can learn new tricks. As far as I can tell, my brain is still fully functional. That said, most of what I use every day, I learned over ten years ago. Computer science never gets old. The notion of indirection is never obsolete. The mental machinery required to navigate up and down in an abstraction hierarchy is universal. Sure, I learn new APIs every day, read about new programming paradigms (hey, functional reactive programming is cool), and so on, but I learned all the basics way back when.

Would you say that all my older experience is worthless? If your hypothesis were correct, I should be able to say that what I'm learning now is more important than what I learned in 1998, and that's just not true.