This is the conceit of knowledge work in general. You're only as relevant as much as you keep up.
It's why it continues to tend young.
The older you get, the more opinionated you get and with opinions come inflexibility so the less you are open to new ways of thinking, even those which may be superior.
Essentially people have criticisms of newer tools that have become industry standards as unnecessary and inferior.
Regardless of the merits of that argument, the new tooling is where the industry is at. The best hackers I know are extreme versions of this. Increasing dissagreability appears to be the crucial flaw of competency unless you work hard to avoid it.
The most extreme version of this I remember was about 20 years ago when I met a man of about 55 who was clearly a very brilliant computer engineer with impressive credentials that I have forgotten (a prestigious PhD and work history) but said he had always dismissed microcomputers, yes, as in not minicomputers and mainframes as toys and a waste of time. This was like 2002. I was still in college then and I vowed to never become that guy.
I was reminded that Karate borrows the term Shoshin (beginner's mind) from Buddhism to express overcoming this dialectical.
In the world of martial arts this is expressed essentially by the fact that you work with the same people so this tends to a false sense of generality in ones understanding. Within any particular discipline there's confinements because there's a core focus and rubric of things you do with is necessarily exclusionary and reductive because of the constraints of time.
Serious martial arts practitioners (think career professionals) claim people will plateau indefinitely, as in for the remainder of their lives, unless they effectively practice shoshin. This can go in odd directions. Take George Dillman for example, who has developed a mechanism that he, and maybe nobody, really understands and as a result he's considered a fraud although he and his students experience it as genuine.
True shoshin demands an open investigation as to why, where, and how people feel a mechanism and a good faith assumption that there's something poorly understood there.
People will widely agree with the concept of shoshin but when it's demonstrated with an example, that previous consensus disappears. It's not easy or popular.
It's why it continues to tend young.
The older you get, the more opinionated you get and with opinions come inflexibility so the less you are open to new ways of thinking, even those which may be superior.
Essentially people have criticisms of newer tools that have become industry standards as unnecessary and inferior.
Regardless of the merits of that argument, the new tooling is where the industry is at. The best hackers I know are extreme versions of this. Increasing dissagreability appears to be the crucial flaw of competency unless you work hard to avoid it.
The most extreme version of this I remember was about 20 years ago when I met a man of about 55 who was clearly a very brilliant computer engineer with impressive credentials that I have forgotten (a prestigious PhD and work history) but said he had always dismissed microcomputers, yes, as in not minicomputers and mainframes as toys and a waste of time. This was like 2002. I was still in college then and I vowed to never become that guy.
Still trying...