The instructor said that when you make your living with your knowledge, in IT you can expect that your value will decline by about 25% a year. I jokingly mentioned that in that case, at my current job I have a technical competancy level of -200%!
But he's right. Things change so rapidly in the IT world that you have to learn new things every day, otherwise your knowledge becomes obsolete, and so do you.
There are a significant number of programmers who are at a certain stage in life where they will not be able to make the next "transition." Imagine hearing, "We're sorry, but we will no longer be supporting algebra and English." Not everyone can be a Bill Gates and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Sorry, but I disagree with you 100% here. That's just part of the job. Have you done much support for MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 lately? How about QEMM? Or SCO Xenix? OS/2 v2.0? NT Server 3.51? Configured many ARCnet or Token Ring networks lately? All of these were terrific technologies that were really leading edge at one time. But they've all fallen by the wayside.
As people in the technology field, we've all implicitly agreed to keep up with the technology, otherwise we'll be obsolete as surely as the technology that we're experts in...
Heck, I'm in a situation where I'm trying to come up to speed ASAP on Microsoft products. As a Novell specialist, they've got the technology, but they don't have the "mind share," as my instructor put it... Novell could sell a server that prints money, and still, nobody would be buying it. Because they lost the "mind share," and now they're losing the market share as well. (Thanks to Mark G for those statements... They're right on target.)
Mark
The average life of a software product is significantly greater then three years. I've deployed code that will be running in VB 6 in ten years, maybe longer though that kinda scares me. No support required from MS however so I don't see what the big issue is. I bet some has still got Dataflex code deployed and running (phtttttt).
Should we reinvent systems that are doing the job and debugged because .NET works well? VB still works fine with or without MS.