The niche you're in matters a lot. Just as a thought experiment, if you pulled a C programmer from 2004 through a time machine into 2014... they probably would

The niche you're in matters a lot. Just as a thought experiment, if you pulled a C programmer from 2004 through a time machine into 2014... they probably wouldn't take that long to acclimate. There are new things, sure, but there are still a lot of the same APIs, same tools, and so on. The basics are the same. Make, GDB, Visual Studio, the language -- it's evolved but it's not unfamiliar. If you pulled a webdev from 2004 into 2014 through your time machine? Outside of HTTP and HTML, pretty much all the things are different. And in two years and already everyone's onto the next language and the next "framework".