The market is wrong, but devs should take responsibility for their own professional development. Resume-driven development may optimize for the market, but it probably isn't the fastest way to learn.

The purpose for learning tech is to put money in my bank account. Why would I take a job and work eight hours a day using non marketable technology and then spend my free time doing side projects that “don’t count” as much as what you do on a job when I could just choose a company where I get paid while learning new tech and I can spend my free time on basically anything else?

Once you’ve been around long enough. It just doesn’t matter. There are many ways to write a resume that don’t focus on job history, so you can market yourself in a way that makes you most appealing to the company you want to be hired by. You also get bonus points for having a “unique but standard” resume that’s tailored to the work you’d be doing instead of where you’ve worked (unless that’s something you want to highlight because it might get you in the door faster.)

In my case is 25 years “long enough” [1]?

The only way that I landed a job at $BigTech, without having to go through the “leetCode”/algorithm dog and pony show, work remotely, and without having to move from my relatively low cost of living area was by doing plenty of resume driven development and targeting my experience toward either Amazon (AWS) or Microsoft (Azure).

Before, my current job at Amazon, I didn’t care what company I was hired by. In my local market (large metro area on the East Coast) all companies were paying within the same range. By making sure that my resume was in sync with the market brings a lot of optionality (or at least did before Covid)

[1] to be honest, I stayed at one job too long until 2008 and was firmly in “expert beginner” territory.