Just remember that knowing the tools isn’t the part they really care about. They wanna know if you can build stuff that someone asks you to build, maintain legacy code, communicate well enough, etc.
That's encouraging to me as I feel that those are areas in which I've done well. I guess I get the most value out of staying up to date on the newest tools by knowing when NOT to use them.
Unless someone is hyper committed to a laser focused tech stack (e.g. we're a React/Node shop), I don't think you'll have much trouble. If you only know older stuff, say mid-2000s PHP & .NET, but you take a month or three to pick up Python & JavaScript, you don't need to advertise that your PHP & .NET are much stronger than Python & JavaScript. Just say you know all four. Talk about what you've built, and what you know, and let them dig into what you built w/ what you know. If you really want to modernize your skillset, by all means keep working on it, but don't let your ancient tech subtract deflate or inflate your confidence. Focus on being effective, not a myopic "you can do anything with my tech" weenie.
Think of it this way:
- If someone worked in a 100% Perl shop, but they were doing things that sounded modern-ish & had dabbled in React after hours, would you still want to interview them?
- Now if think of a Perl developer who is maintaining a server by hand, pushing tarballs of code with FTP, not using version control, and hadn't learned anything new since jQuery, would you want to interview that person?
