If you're worried about your job being endangered by entry level graduates(1) or outsourcing you should then equip yourself with skills that an entry level grad

If you're worried about your job being endangered by entry level graduates(1) or outsourcing you should then equip yourself with skills that an entry level graduate or an outsourcing shop won't have. That means you should strive to do something beyond just byte shuffling: as someone else pointed out in another story, acquire some background knowledge - be it in physics or electrical engineering, physics, mathematics or even psychology or philosophy. Or acquire deep domain specific expertise: in security, in distributed systems or in networks, in data mining/ extraction or even in systems administration (you'd be surprised how hard it is to find excellent coders who are also good sysadmins and/or excellent sysadmins who are also good coders and how many jobs demand both). My mother is in her sixties, isn't a native English speaker and programs in C (which some may look upon as "outdated" compared to C++ and Java), Scheme and OCaml (which aren't mainstream languages). However, she's got a very strong background in mathematics and domain specific knowledge in hardware design automation. If you're starting out, learning the latest APIs/buzzword right now may be worse for your career later even if it brings higher pay now -- it would be a case of premature optimization. (1) One exception is that I've heard (from a manager at IBM) is big companies (e.g. IBM) prefer to only hire for entry-level positions and then open up the more senior positions only to internal hires (the idea being is that entry-level employees grow while being trained on internal tools/methodologies/best practices and as they advance, have a track record that can easily be examined); but with the industry shifting more and more to innovation occurring in start-ups and SMEs that shouldn't be much of a burden.