Another way to put it is that the 25 year old thinks all the shiny new technologies are important. The 50 year old knows better. I'm 51. Many, maybe most of th

Another way to put it is that the 25 year old thinks all the shiny new technologies are important. The 50 year old knows better. I'm 51. Many, maybe most of the tech that's fundamental to my career didn't even exist when my career started. Only Unix and SQL have been constants. http was a lab experiment. The Mosaic browser didn't exist yet. Java? Ruby? NoSQL? Whatever. If you need to learn a tech to solve a problem, you learn a tech. It's not hard. What I find interesting isn't new technologies. It's new problems, problems that didn't exist before (often because they're the result of new tech), or problems that could not be addressed before (due to limits of computational power or data access).