When the greybeards go, I'll probably moved to OpenBSD. I don't want to sell their development skills short, but I have less faith in the generation of devs replacing them. They have learned seemingly a small amount of fundamentals from their predecessors, as indicated by continuous bloat and inefficiency in the name of 'thats just how we do things now', in a derisive tone of 'get with the times', often ignoring the sacrifices being made in the process for often marginal gain.
The bellwether for me was when logs became binary blobs rather than plaintext.
They aren't right just because they're old. I could easily write the opposite comment:
I don't want to sell the greybeards' skills short, but I have less faith in them than the new generation (the most skilled part of the new generation; don't ignore sampling bias). The new generation has learnt the lessons of the old and improved on them, whereas many oldies stick to outdated technology like Autotools, Perl and Bash in the name of "if it kind of works half the time I can't be bothered to learn something better".
The bellwether for me is when devs doggedly stick to plaintext logs because "that's just how we've always done things".
Long reply from a young programmer that recognizes this trend and what it implies:
Alan Perlis says you can measure the perspective of a programmer based on their thoughts on the continued vitality of Fortran. Many universities are now going full Java and lowering standards on fundamentals for financial reasons, this is a bit alarming.
If you really want to stand out, spend serious time on fundamentals. Learn to develop and deploy clean, efficient software from scratch without relying heavily on external resources that add said bloat.
A huge trend in software right now is low-code/no-code tools. These tools can replace programmers that don't have a deep enough grasp of fundamentals to compete. A very small percentage of the world population knows how to code, so these tools are becoming massively popular.
This is what separates the programmer that can quickly throw together a basic CRUD app and a programmer that can develop a successful programming language from scratch. If you can make sense of the Linux kernel and you have the drive to constantly learn new tech, it doesn't matter too much what trends come and go.
If you just want to ride the wave and think just having a CS degree or knowing how to code will guarantee you an easy life, it will be a rude awakening when the industry keeps moving forward and economic crises trim the fat from the cyclicly overvalued and monopolistic world that is software development.
This is the duality of being a programmer. Yes, you can teach yourself many useful things and acquire powerful skills relatively quickly, but if you stop learning and challenging yourself, then you are liable to be left behind.
The bellwether for me was when logs became binary blobs rather than plaintext.