Sure, technology fads are like a carousel, but that matters most if you insist on staying ON the carousel and make part of your living writing about the fads. I started in this millennium, but I've done it long enough to know that learning and using a new piece of tech is only superficially satisfying. What's exciting is building something that solves a problem. If I lose track of that and get bored, nothing is more motivating than coming across a coder who bangs out code using the tech he knows to solve problems. It's amazing to see what Rich Hickey can do with a pile of Java or Zed Shaw with a pile of C, to name two examples I've encountered. No need to complain or pontificate (or at least keep it to a minimum), just build things and solve problems.
Agreed, and I think a lot of the angst amongst CRUD/web-app developers stems from a rapidly shrinking number of truly new problems to solve in the domain - hence the focus on yak-shaving, "platforms" to eke out the last few marginal efficiencies in creating a web-app, and re-inventions of the 1980s.
That's why I love embedded - because the domain contains a lot of problems which are constrained by hardware (which so far is still holding to Moore's law), there are always a number of new problems for software to solve.
Sure, technology fads are like a carousel, but that matters most if you insist on staying ON the carousel and make part of your living writing about the fads. I started in this millennium, but I've done it long enough to know that learning and using a new piece of tech is only superficially satisfying. What's exciting is building something that solves a problem. If I lose track of that and get bored, nothing is more motivating than coming across a coder who bangs out code using the tech he knows to solve problems. It's amazing to see what Rich Hickey can do with a pile of Java or Zed Shaw with a pile of C, to name two examples I've encountered. No need to complain or pontificate (or at least keep it to a minimum), just build things and solve problems.