It sounds like your idea of staying current is different from what others are talking about in this thread. Do you keep up with the latest JS frameworks and nodejs? Rails? There's a distinction to be made between learning new things that are actually useful (deep learning, NLP, new programming paradigms) instead of learning the latest framework just to do something we could already do with another technology 5-10 years ago.
Re:Old Geek
by mark_l_watson on Thursday September 15, 2016 @01:19PM
(#12507958)
When I used Rails (a long time ago) and Node.js (last year) for work, then yes I did get up to speed on both of them and enjoyed it.
I agree that core technologies like linear algebra, machine learning, etc. aren't the current topic. The main thing is to learn new things, and as someone else here said, maybe it does not matter so much what you learn as long as you learn new things.
My formula is to spend at least 15 hours a week on non-billable learning projects, writing technical books, etc. A lot of this time is simply reading papers in my areas of interest (deep learning, functional languages like Haskell, application of deep learning to NLP, etc.) and writing enough code to make sure I understand new technologies.
I get hired because I stay current.