40-ish developer here and I think the author is being at risk of being left behind.
I just think that when we choose this industry as our career, we have to go in with the knowledge that this isn't something where we can learn a set of skills once and then focus on that for twenty years. Our career is learning. Our value isn't what we've done before, it's what we're able to do.
That isn't to say you always have to learn the newest thing - definitely not. But it's important to stay current with the largest general trends. In the past it meant being facile with a handful of MVC frameworks (however you define MVC). In the more recent past it meant being familiar with some sort of RPC architecture (whether SOA, REST, "API-first", whatever). At present you probably want to be roughly familiar with at least one javascript framework that has MVC on the client side. And looking towards the future, you have to bone up on math concepts and functional programming, so you can move into parallel programming and concurrency concepts.
That's my sense of the rough direction. If in five years you haven't paid attention to that stuff, you'll still be able to find work, but it'll be grunt work that is at greater risk of being outsourced.
I don't think that the future is that scary. The current themes at a shallow level are changing very rapidly but the underlying principles and techniques are changing at a much slower rate. The latest, coolest, brightest startup is using a framework that's only been in existence for 6 months (and replaces another framework that's only been around for 18!) but most of Google's codebase is still in C++. Most of Amazon's codebase is Java.
You don't have to keep up with the latest fads. You have to pay attention to the big themes, and be willing to change frameworks as you change jobs, but a company that updates it's entire framework model every 12 months is going to waste a lot of effort on maintenance that could have been put to better use. Most companies will keep their existing frameworks because it's good enough.
It looks scary but programming as a whole moves much slower than the surrounding hype makes it appear.
I just think that when we choose this industry as our career, we have to go in with the knowledge that this isn't something where we can learn a set of skills once and then focus on that for twenty years. Our career is learning. Our value isn't what we've done before, it's what we're able to do.
That isn't to say you always have to learn the newest thing - definitely not. But it's important to stay current with the largest general trends. In the past it meant being facile with a handful of MVC frameworks (however you define MVC). In the more recent past it meant being familiar with some sort of RPC architecture (whether SOA, REST, "API-first", whatever). At present you probably want to be roughly familiar with at least one javascript framework that has MVC on the client side. And looking towards the future, you have to bone up on math concepts and functional programming, so you can move into parallel programming and concurrency concepts.
That's my sense of the rough direction. If in five years you haven't paid attention to that stuff, you'll still be able to find work, but it'll be grunt work that is at greater risk of being outsourced.