My professional experience has taught me two opposite things on this subject. 1) Toys. If you want to be employable you have to learn to play with all the tren

My professional experience has taught me two opposite things on this subject. 1) Toys. If you want to be employable you have to learn to play with all the trendy toys. You need to demonstrate the ability to build a tech stack with these toys and solve some problem. Beyond that old people skills are largely irrelevant. By old people skills I mean the ability to communicate with precision in writing and a mastery of skills (not toys). Nobody cares if you can solve business problems using code. Toys are the new inverted binary tree. 2) When things go bad and layoffs come around the only things that matter are old people skills and critical needs positions. Prior performance won’t save you and neither will titles or seniority. If you are solid with the cool kid toys but never really mastered your craft you aren’t worth retaining under a shrinking budget because they know they can easily replace you when the economy/business recovers.