> 90% of jobs are some form web development in JS or Python which require experience with the framework de'jour. It's not clear to me if by the time I'll learn

> 90% of jobs are some form web development in JS or Python which require experience with the framework de'jour. It's not clear to me if by the time I'll learn them they won't be already obsolete. I don't work with JS, and haven't used Python professionally in a few years but still I think you are overthinking this. Yes, JS has a bunch of flavour-of-the-month issue with frameworks and libraries, I have seen it go full circle in a few regards for the past 15 years. Python much less, it's been Django and a few other frameworks (including some microframeworks, unsure how popular they are the past 8 years). That doesn't mean that if you learn one of them and people switch to their new hyped approach in 6-12 months you'll be dead in the water. Major concepts don't change much, they might evolve but the web is the web. If you have the disposition, just learn the bigger ones right now and be happy, this fear is quite unfounded as, if you are experienced, it shouldn't take a year or more to learn them, it will be a month or two of applied effort to create some toy project, expand the project with more complexity so you can understand/learn some gotchas and quirks. > Companies don't seem to hire "computer programmers" anymore: people with a broad horizontal skill set that can write code and quickly learn a new imperative language or framework as required by the current project, that can understand the principles of the underlying hardware, of the entire network stack, of the OS that ties everything together and delivers some high level abstraction like a web service etc. It's all a fragmented mess of very specialized islands. They absolutely do, I interview people all the time and I don't really care if they know all the nit-gritty aspects of our tech stack, I want smart people who can learn something if they need to, even better if they don't have to do that in their free time and can pick it up as we go during the usual office hours. The thing is that a lot of candidates have some experience with a similar stack or framework in use, of course they will have an advantage, but if you have a broad horizontal skill set that's still more valuable than a React expert... I say that because my skillset is quite broad but not extremely deep in any aspect, I'm pretty T-shaped in my knowledge and I haven't learned the framework de'jour at any point in almost 20 years of career. I've got jobs and when needed learned what the company used in their tech stack.