:) You are becoming more valuable (in the sense of being able to deliver more absolute value). But you are becoming less of a commodity, which means employers

:) You are becoming more valuable (in the sense of being able to deliver more absolute value). But you are becoming less of a commodity, which means employers are also becoming less of a commodity for you. To prepare for the future, you need to look into marketing yourself "wholesale" (that is, sell completed projects rather then into a team), and/or establish a network of people who care about fundamentals and not the latest hotness. I turned down a hadoop job awhile ago, because it was hurting me to do things so stupidly. (I managed to do the same thing on C at 1/10 of the time on one machine as the project did on 10 machines using Hadoop, but they insisted that "hadoop is the thing"). If I was hungry for food, I might just deal with these pains. I'm obviously less employable right now than I was in my 20s when I was happy to use any stupid technology - but I'm happier for it.