No, the author is actually saying that that attitude is fine. His point is that you need to keep learning and doing things that are relevant today, not learn today's technology and then stick with it for the rest of your career.
> I could tell you about all my accomplishments over three decades, such as replacing the use of a System/3 punch card system with the AS/400, writing a Cobol debugger, or…. Ah, I’m boring you. What you do care about are things I did in the last two years.
RPG is only relevant today in the same way Cobol is.
The feeling your comment conveys is not "keep learning". The feeling is that by talking about "archaic" stuff, the author isn't "doing himself any favours", i.e. he makes himself sound old.
That's actually his point.
Someone who has seen a technology mature and develop over decades, seen the hype trains come and go, projects succeed and fail, might be a bit wiser than someone fresh out of Stanford. He might have some ideas about how to build maintainable systems after working on some that are older than most developers.
If you don't see it, that's on you, not on the author for mentioning his particular "archaic" specialization.
> I could tell you about all my accomplishments over three decades, such as replacing the use of a System/3 punch card system with the AS/400, writing a Cobol debugger, or…. Ah, I’m boring you. What you do care about are things I did in the last two years.
RPG is only relevant today in the same way Cobol is.