[AnotherUnixGeek]

There are two main reasons for this: 1. older employees may no longer be up-to-date with the latest technologies 2. they're too expensive.

Whose fault is that? Keep your skills up to date, keep yourself relevant, combine that with your experience and (2) will often more than take care of itself. There's a critical lack of experienced talent in mobile enterprise application development, for example (I've been interviewing candidates for most of the year). The laws of supply and demand are still alive and well, and salaries are good even for Silicon Valley. But not many developers with enterprise back-end and middle-ware experience have even bothered to become familiar with mobile application platforms or development.

Putting in the effort to stay current when our jobs are secure can spare a lot of anguish when our jobs stop being secure, and will always keep open the possibility of working for ourselves with skills that are in demand.

[NVDave]

One of the problems I see in “keeping up to date” in software is that much of what is recently deemed as “progress” is nothing more than some PhD candidate’s re-hash of stuff we had before.

How many languages used today could we eliminate... if we just told the people who whined about the non-C/C++ syntax of Lisp and Smalltalk to STFU and get to work? It appears to my curmudgeonly eyes that most modern interpreted languages are just as re-hash of Lisp or ST-80.

Further, none of the “innovations” in software recently are addressing the most expensive and embarrassing elephant in the room: Security, and by extension, reliability. Everyone wants to address issues like rapid deployment, reusability, etc, but no one wants to address security from the metal upwards - at least, no one has since MULTICS.

I agree that keeping one’s skills up to date is a necessary part of being a professional. However, in software, I assert that much of this effort is being sunk into bottomless pits of irrelevance.