I can only speak to US-based IT jobs, but there's a really distinct problem with the industry here.
There is a decent supply of bright young things coming out of school who don't know things, but know that they don't know things, and study and bust ass on stimulants to make up for it -- coding all night on Dew.
By the time those bright young things are 30, they have probably given up the Dew because they have high blood pressure, and their evenings and nights are taken up with family duties.
It's an all-or-nothing approach; spend all your waking hours on your job, or have a life. One's healthy, one isn't. One will keep you employed in the IT industry past 40, the other won't.
And yet, we hear IT companies complaining that they don't have enough talent and trotting out the old "old programmers can't learn new tricks" schtick. Instead of developing the employees they have, they want more input into the front of the system while they shuffle the 90% of programmers who don't become "greybeards" and aren't "management material" off into suboptimal jobs doing 4-hour response hardware service.
To me the most valuable programmer is a full-stack developer
That's because of the type of problems you work with. I have seen a embedded programmer literally create over 10 million in value in less than 8 months by rewriting someone else assembly code. His code did error correction, and cooperative multitasking on a 32khz embedded system which allowed the company to avoid ripping out a lot of deployed hardware by added new capability's and fixing a range of issues relating to cosmic radiation flipping bits. (You deploy enough sensors and it's an issue.)
There is a decent supply of bright young things coming out of school who don't know things, but know that they don't know things, and study and bust ass on stimulants to make up for it -- coding all night on Dew.
By the time those bright young things are 30, they have probably given up the Dew because they have high blood pressure, and their evenings and nights are taken up with family duties.
It's an all-or-nothing approach; spend all your waking hours on your job, or have a life. One's healthy, one isn't. One will keep you employed in the IT industry past 40, the other won't.
And yet, we hear IT companies complaining that they don't have enough talent and trotting out the old "old programmers can't learn new tricks" schtick. Instead of developing the employees they have, they want more input into the front of the system while they shuffle the 90% of programmers who don't become "greybeards" and aren't "management material" off into suboptimal jobs doing 4-hour response hardware service.