The "tech stack != career" is on my mind lately since the "stack" terminology seems to be really in vogue these days. Like, I hadn't even heard of a "full stack engineer" until a few years ago and now it's everywhere - which I think is because it ultimately amounts to "general-purpose programmer" and that's actually what most businesses need most of the time.
Everyone(who's been around long enough) knows that the technology churns and real progress is slow, but I think this kind of fashion is based on employee marketability - nobody wants to be just a code monkey, after all.
Something a friend of mine said that really resonates with me, and helps to put the whole thing into perspective: s/stack/pile/
This works splendidly because even the hippest startups working out of mansions by the beach (or whatever) are still fairly kludged together from an engineering standpoint, especially if there is ageism serving as a kind of experience cap (for example ageism by proxy of being too expensive for those startups to pay for). People are extremely territorial about their piles, but if you are good enough friends with those engineers (or get them drunk enough), you find out that everybody lacks confidence in their work to some degree. Someone I work with currently said that if you don't look at code you wrote three months ago and feel like it's shit code, you aren't improving. That is a very insightful comment, to me.
Everyone(who's been around long enough) knows that the technology churns and real progress is slow, but I think this kind of fashion is based on employee marketability - nobody wants to be just a code monkey, after all.