Learning new trends and new technologies is always one of the key requirements to be a developer. We might be highly skilled developers but staying up to date with the technology is very important. The biggest reason is that there are always innovations that make things easier and makes our development easier. Today people expect fast websites and modern websites. If we are stuck with older technologies, we may not be able to come up to speed.
I have had a personal conversation with some of my developer friends. Some people are old-school developers who are stuck with old technology and their day jobs don't demand anything more than that. I hear from them that they would even retire by just knowing the old stuff and they don't really want to upgrade. Sometimes the conversation can even get difficult with them. This ideology can work out for people like them but for new engineers who are freshers will need the mentality to learn and keep learning continuously.
A simple example would be to say that asynchronous programming is taking over synchronous programming and making the web much faster these days. People who are still using programming languages that are synchronous are starting to have limitations. They have to either start learning some modern programming languages or keep looking for jobs that will continue to use the older synchronous programming languages.
Learning helps in comparing
I would say that we don't have to learn and be a master in something. Just getting an idea about something new is always good. But we should also not be defensive and try to find flaws in the new technology. There can be flaws but we have to be open to learning to understand how modern technologies can be used to make our lives better. If we are able to spend time and understand the new methodologies and technologies, we would be able to compare them with the existing ones to find out the good and bad.
Maybe if someone is joining our team with knowledge of modern programming languages, we would be able to understand them if we are up to date with the latest programming language and techniques. I have seen some of the managers going really defensive with the freshers saying that their modern knowledge is not very fruitful and start discussing all the cons and try to prove that their old methods are only great. This will not help in moving forward and sometimes it will even take us backward.
An open mind toward learning is a great skill for every developer. Having knowledge of multiple programming languages and multiple methodologies will help in comparing with each other to arrive at the best logic and best solution. We are in a microservices world where we can technically write a service in any language we want. One can be in Java Spring Boot and another can be in C# and another can be in Nodejs. Being open to learning can help in balancing the pros and cons.
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