The problem is learning new skills is kind of a catch-22. After you've been doing something for a few years, assuming you're reasonably intelligent, you get to be an expert and command expert wages. Your employer is paying for an expert. He doesn't want to pay you expert wages to learn a a new, marketable skill. He can hire someone who already knows it. Or he can hire a new college grad for a fraction of what you make.

So you learn on your own time. But since you're doing tutorials and what not, and your time isn't infinite, when you actually apply for a job with this new skill your potential employer is going to wonder why he should pay you expert wages for a skill with which you still have effectively no professional experience.

So you take a pay cut and work your way back up. Maybe go from $120k+ to $70k. The sky is not falling...

You can, but only if someone's willing to hire you. Employers are leery of hiring you for substantially less money than you made in the last job. The fear is you're still looking, and a few months down the road (before you've really accomplished anything) you'll quit.

There is no need to tell an employer your previous salary.

You don't think it affects your job prospects when you refuse?

If they won't hire you because you won't disclose your salary, you don't want to work for that company anyway.

Problem: cannot find jobs.

Solution: don't want to work for them anyway.

I think a much more likely scenario is that you won't get an interview at all. An employer is unlikely to consider you for a junior role that requires < 5 years of experience when you've had > 10 years experience in another field.

Well in India recruiters ask for the current salary & expected salary by default. If you don't provide this info, your resume heads to the trash.

Software is highly unusual in that you can learn marketable skills as a hobby. It's not like a chemical engineer can learn marketable skills in civil engineering on the side. And not everyone can do software for a living.

There is that advantage, though some skills are harder to pick up (stuff relating to hardware, commercial software packages, etc.). This also means more competition as there are fewer barriers to entry.

But generally, I see it as an advantage.

That's a nice dream but most people are probably too busy staying relevant in their current profession to be concentrating on learning skills for another career that may never happen.

Exactly. Or there's no time. I get up at 6:30AM to work and get home around 8:30PM exhausted. Maybe get an hour or two to play with the kid, then it's off to bed for all of us. When I do actually have a weekend, it's spent taking care of all the shit that didn't get done during the week. Exactly when do I sit down to learn AngularJS?

Easier said than done if you have kids.

Except that the rate of change is picking up so the likelihood that the value of new skills is diminishing as quickly as you learn them. We need to refocus society on providing a minimal viable income.