"So I'm sorry, but if you're not adopting new programming languages, tools and frameworks, then I don't think you are a good software engineer. Because good sof

"So I'm sorry, but if you're not adopting new programming languages, tools and frameworks, then I don't think you are a good software engineer. Because good software engineers only solve the problems that they have to, and don't continue to solve the same problems over and over." Yes, and? You're arguing a straw man. I'm not claiming that things haven't changed for the better in 30+ years of coding, or that people should be writing web apps in FORTRAN, or that you shouldn't re-use code. But you're being...imaginative...if you believe that the latest shiny webapp tool (e.g. Node.js) is actually as new and innovative as you're claiming it to be. Anyone who has been around long enough to have written early Windows or Mac apps will have a lot of experience with single-threaded, evented programming. (Certainly enough to know that Node.js is a wonky regurgitation of a very old idea.) Same thing goes for your MongoDB apologetics: actually, no, the industry didn't settle on relational databases because "that was how you did it". They became widely adopted because they hit a sweet spot in terms of speed, reliability and flexibility (a spot that basically none of the current NoSQL products have yet to match). In other words, even if you like new things, experience helps you know when the new thing you're evaluating is a pile of crap. And judicious decision-making is far more important than the latest shiny when it comes to being a good engineer.