For me, that feeling of needing to learn new things I think comes not from new tech or tooling,
but from needing to solve different problems all the time.
I would say there is definitely a fast-moving, hype-driven churn in web development
(particularly frontend development!).
This really does wear me down.
But outside of this, in IT you’re almost always interacting with stuff that has been the same for decades.
Off the top of my head…
Networking.
From ethernet and wifi, up to TCP/IP, packet switching, and protocols like HTTP.
Operating systems.
Vastly dominated by Windows and Linux. UNIX dates back to the 70s, and Windows on the NT kernel is no spring chicken either.
Hardware.
There have been amazing developments over the years.
But incredibly this has been mostly transparent to IT workers.
User interfaces.
Desktop GUI principles are unchanged.
iOS and Android are almost 15 years old now.
Dealing with public cloud infrastructure, for example,
you’re still dealing with datacentres and servers.
Instead of connecting to stuff over serial console,
you’re getting the same data to you over VNC over HTTP.
When you ask for 50 database servers,
you make some HTTP request to some service.
You wait, and you get a cluster of MySQL or Postgresql (written in C!) running on UNIX-like OS (written in C!) and we interact with it with SQL (almost 50 years old now?) over TCP/IP.
As I spend more time in the industry I am constantly learning.
But this comes more from me wanting to, or needing to, dig deeper.
For me, that feeling of needing to learn new things I think comes not from new tech or tooling, but from needing to solve different problems all the time. I would say there is definitely a fast-moving, hype-driven churn in web development (particularly frontend development!). This really does wear me down. But outside of this, in IT you’re almost always interacting with stuff that has been the same for decades.
Off the top of my head…
Networking. From ethernet and wifi, up to TCP/IP, packet switching, and protocols like HTTP.
Operating systems. Vastly dominated by Windows and Linux. UNIX dates back to the 70s, and Windows on the NT kernel is no spring chicken either.
Hardware. There have been amazing developments over the years. But incredibly this has been mostly transparent to IT workers.
Programming. Check The Top Programming Languages 2023. Python, Java, C: decades old.
User interfaces. Desktop GUI principles are unchanged. iOS and Android are almost 15 years old now.
Dealing with public cloud infrastructure, for example, you’re still dealing with datacentres and servers. Instead of connecting to stuff over serial console, you’re getting the same data to you over VNC over HTTP. When you ask for 50 database servers, you make some HTTP request to some service. You wait, and you get a cluster of MySQL or Postgresql (written in C!) running on UNIX-like OS (written in C!) and we interact with it with SQL (almost 50 years old now?) over TCP/IP.
As I spend more time in the industry I am constantly learning. But this comes more from me wanting to, or needing to, dig deeper.
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