In general, being a good engineer means being able to cut through the hype and just deliver real solutions that solve real problems.
So you don't need to keep up on everything to be a good engineer. On the contrary, the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply, while keeping a light eye on what is new in order to understand when it is worth learning a new skill. It is OK not to do everything. And best practices are not as clear as that term makes it seem - "best" is subjective. Different projects have different needs, so it is good to know what worked for others, but you still need the deep knowledge to make your own decisions.
I don't think the work is any harder now than it was a couple decades ago. But there are a lot more distractions now, so being comfortable with prioritizing where you want to spend your energy is a bigger task that it used to be.
> the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply
The age-old generalist vs specialist discussion is pretty interesting.
As a small anecdote, I'd say that the best engineer I know is very much a specialist. He can correctly set up loads of servers and infrastructure on all kinds of cloud services without much difficulty. But he's almost useless when it comes to building a good product on his own. Ask him to put together a simple contact form? Oh, he can probably eventually figure it out, but he'll cobble together some of the worst HTML/CSS with a crap UI you've ever seen.
Personally, I think that specialists can be incredibly talented and useful, but there's a reason that generalists rule the web. There's a thousand different ways to solve any problem online. Having a really broad base of knowledge of different aspects of technology gives you a lot more insight into the different ways to solve a problem that a specialist might not be able to see.
That said, it's usually a team that builds a product. A good team can have some expert specialists in key domains, and put good generalists in a position to build great products.
The standard response to this is that T-shaped skillsets are the correct answer. Keep your specialty, but have enough broad skills in addition to that specialty to be useful.
So you don't need to keep up on everything to be a good engineer. On the contrary, the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply, while keeping a light eye on what is new in order to understand when it is worth learning a new skill. It is OK not to do everything. And best practices are not as clear as that term makes it seem - "best" is subjective. Different projects have different needs, so it is good to know what worked for others, but you still need the deep knowledge to make your own decisions.
I don't think the work is any harder now than it was a couple decades ago. But there are a lot more distractions now, so being comfortable with prioritizing where you want to spend your energy is a bigger task that it used to be.