> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories

> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? Pretty clearly, there are tens of thousands of unqualified engineers. This is less about age, and more about whether you adapt with the times and changing technology. If you're a developer who grew up writing, say, COBOL, and you got REALLY GOOD at COBOL...I mean, just completely amazing at COBOL, so that you're in the top 1% of COBOL programmers in the world...where do you work in 2015? At one of the dozen or so banks that still uses COBOL. But what about the people in the top 10%? The people who still devoted their time to learning COBOL like no one's business? Where do they work in 2015? Wal-Mart. I hate to quote Seth Godin, but if you're going to devote yourself to being great at something, you need to absolutely be the best at it, or you're going to find yourself out of work whenever that thing isn't in vogue - and even then, it's a gamble.