There's been a decent amount of change on the backend, too. I hesitate to call it churn because not all of it deserves to be characterized this way. I started

There's been a decent amount of change on the backend, too. I hesitate to call it churn because not all of it deserves to be characterized this way. I started working with backend technologies in the late 90s, and there was a lot of talk about building data warehouses, mainly with distributed SQL databases, often in Oracle or another high cost private solution. Because my work involved industrial engineering, we also did a lot of analytics and prediction - collaborative filtering was one interesting approach to recommendation systems back then. Since then, the "noSQL" movement occurred, and while I'm delighted to see a resurgence of interest in SQL, mongo, Cassandra, various graph databases, and other non-sql data stores do have valuable uses (I think some people just went too far against SQL and the relational model, which also remains exceptionally valuable). I didn't name all of them, but while there was value in there, some of it was churn and adopting technologies for the hell of it. But even when it wasn't churn and was legit, that's still a lot to learn. Also, spark, hive, Hadoop, and a lot of storage and infrastructure has moved to a cloud environment (AWS is the biggie, plenty of others). Again, not necessarily bad tech, but a lot to learn. Also, in my own particular field (this may not apply to all backend developers), machine learning did become a big factor in work, especially prediction systems. I did a lot of math in undergrad and grad school, but there was still plenty to learn there, including dusting off the old math books and re-learning how gradient descent works for neural nets, logistic regression, and then other approaches like bayesian methods, random forests, and so forth. Also, in this time, the middle tier technology you needed to know also changed - to a large extent for the better, but C++ gave way to Java, which grew in to a mountain of a mess with EJB and other crap, then ruby and python, rails and Django (for the record, I loved ruby and rails but don't work in it much anymore). If you want to do distributed computing, you can use python, but you really might want to consider learning Scala. Now, obviously you don't have to learn all this, you can specialize, and I wouldn't call it all churn (then again, I wouldn't call all the javascript framework stuff churn, either). But to work on the backend, you probably did have to keep up with a lot of that. And like I said, I couldn't tell you what it's like to keep up with other fields... but yeah, I'm pretty comfortable saying that keeping up is pretty hard on the backend as well, and that learning these tools is no easy thing.