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IMHO - if someone stagnates entirely regarding learning, something is wrong.
Large updates in toolchains like every 2 years a JDK LTS release, or a new C++ spec, or ... aside...
New things happen all the time.
Few pisses me off more than having to take a team by "their hand" and force them to deal with new changes....
For example pointing out every PR that the deprecated stuff is deprecated for a reason... -
Sure. Learning something completely new after acquiring 15+ years of experience is not that fruitful and that's where Engineers with < 5-10 years of experience are a much better fit
At the same time, learning never stops. You move from a framework to another, version to another, or adopt another JVM language or similar which the client think is a better suit for whatever reason. So, keeping on half up to date is important so as not to fall off the ladder fatally -
The most you learn is by doing mistakes, you can't do mistakes in learning/side projects or atleast they are not so impactfull as there's no real user base. Not to mention that whenever you're dealing with real users you start seeing outside the happy flow path. I believe the statement that you learn while working is true for software programming. I just think you're looking at it the wrong way, it's not the number of frameworks or languages that you master that is important but the power to adapt and overcome all sort of challanges. The IT recruiters / managers are dilusional in their search for the candidate that has 10 years experience with React, but if that is all he knows he s a much less valuable team member to me than someone that also knows a bit of Backend, a bit of database querying, a bit of working in a Kubernetes env with CI/CD pipelines. You don't need to master all but you need to understand a bit about everything.
I watch a lot of coding content these days just to get a feel for what's the message given to freshers or non tech people about the IT industry.
One of the things I immensely disagree with, is the idea that software engineers learn throughout their career. I disagree with the word 'throughout'.
They completely ignore stagnation on the job and also this fact that learning new technology at some point in ur career just wouldn't make sense, effort wise and financially.
Here's something I'll never do - Learn Ruby and then proceed to Ruby on Rails. Because the system wouldn't consider my past experience with NodeJS and Laravel, as a result I would be considered a fresher. So it wouldn't make sense for me to put this much effort and start all over again.
Also, your learning curve does plateau at some point in ur career for a certain amount of time. You may learn new things but sometimes you're only concerned with maintaining pre-built stuff so you don't learn new things.
I know some engineers are motivated enough to learn new things outside of a job. But I just wanted to say this.
rant