As @Fast-nop points out. It may make you feel smug at the time, but it's an incredibly rookie error

@eo2875 I'm never expectant of a bonus (the clue with a bonus is in the name), but when a contract states a pay review each year, and that doesn't happen...or maybe it does but behind closed doors they review concludes no movement, then that's a bit much after many years. I've worked at larger corporations before where no bonus or rise has occured for my many years there, but it was never a dangled carrot there.

@dmonkey Meh.. fair point. There are some more generalised ones, such as Semantic Software Design, but I agree not many. Certainly Java biased.

@AlmondSauce I fear this is true

@heyheni I agree reading software blogs, articles and general release data is a good idea. And I would hope that surgeons read medical journals, but I would also hope any new guidelines, practices etc would have training time allocated by their employer as it's for the employers benefit as well.
I more refer to the first question being 'so lets see the vast personal projects you've been working on at a GitHub link'. A surgeon doesn't provide the bodies of random people he's operated on in his spare time.

As for the 50+ unemployment, I've worked with many a 50+ who haven't trained in new things for 20+ years, but have made sure they've built a network of other people using the same archaine tech so that they can jump to some company still running 'legacy' and requiring their now niche skills (not saying its the best approach, just how some people approach job security).

@heyheni I agree to use my knowledge for my employers benefit on company hours. They employ me for my knowledge of the area at the time of employment, I agree if the focus of the task changes they expect me to have knowledge of that too, but they expect that knowledge to be limited or non-existent unless they employed me on my excellent knowledge of it. The IT domain moves so quickly you can learn something now I prep for an upcoming task in a few months and find you knowledge completely out of date when you finally hit the task. A sensible employer hires people with a good understanding of coding fundamentals and the ability to grasp new knowledge quickly, and a decent project manager/employer factors in ramp up (learning) time. I've worked on projects where the knowledge of the proceeding learning project was outdated at the start and the gap between the projects was all of a weekend.

You should know how something works before just randomly picking the latest buzzword blackbox off the shelf to hide it all. - How the hell are you going to debug something you don't understand

@ltlian I've always been told by the 'recruiters' there are more roles than devs to fill them. If that's truely the case, whilst I understand a company doesn't want a complete fuckwit, they also don't want to fuck with the few devs who do know what they are doing, just because they can pay the fuckwit less on paper - reality is the redoing of the work will cost triple just getting someone in the know to do it in the first place.

Reads a lot like my rant last week. They're all theiving bastards