Well, I used to have an area of expertise... Then we adopted a kid.

Kids are hard. Kids who had years of neglect and trauma... can be a lot harder. I love him very much, but he takes up so much of my time and energy, I just don't have any time for my own stuff any more.

Also, my field (IT) has gotten weird as computers have gotten weird. Nobody uses computers any more, they use "devices". And these devices all suck. They're hard (or impossible) to actually back up, you can't deploy software to them in an organized way, they're a security nightmare, and the interface just isn't as easy to use as a freaking mouse and keyboard.

And if you want to talk about actual computers, those suck more every year too. Oh the hardware is improving by the day, but the software hasn't been cooperative in years. Always online operating systems, fake settings menus to keep the user away from the real settings menus... Actually, nevermind, I don't even want to talk about OSs, they make me too angry.

And then there's all the software packages that would rather be services than what they actually are, a product. Poor Adobe, just not filthy rich enough yet...

Anyway, it gets harder to do IT as computers get shittier, and I am falling behind, because I hate it.

I have news. This "rapid technological change" thing? It's window dressing. At the end of the day it's how humans relate to and interact with technology that matters, and humans haven't changed. The core principles, that you develop a deeper understanding of with experience, really haven't changed appreciably.

Capitalism and the corporate environment have really sapped my enthusiasm for software development.

Corporate development makes me feel like SpongeBob in that one beach episode.

I often feel like I'm doing the devil's bidding, only to be paid so I don't starve, and then they'll throw me to the wayside when I'm no longer "useful". Makes me not want to learn, why should I? It doesn't give me job security, or better hire ability.

Don't work in a company where they only use cutting-edge shit, it's usually a sign of a scam to pump up a company to impress dumb money investors and get a golden exit for the owners.

We have GOT to find a new word for us besides "Lemmings"....

That would require feeling like I was ever ahead.

Not really, but that’s largely because what I consider to be my area of expertise is extremely niche. I am a Lead Product Manager for an internal software. I started out as an IT business analyst for the software literally as soon as it started development out of the proof-of-concept phase. Two years in, I got promoted to Product Manager. Five more years and I’ve had 2 more promotions, growing to the Lead role I have now.

There is only one person at my company whose knowledge of the application rivals my own, and he started out in QA at the same time, then backfilled my BA role when I moved to Product. I know that application inside and out; its upstream dependencies, its users, its place in our business and our technical architecture, etc. And that’s because I’ve had a hand in building it since the beginning.

People I’ve never even met think of my name as synonymous with the software. I am literally the expert on it. My tool touches almost every part of our business and ultimately makes the day-to-day jobs of over 60k people easier. I constantly learn from working on it, and in seven years it has never been boring.

However, I am no longer the only PM for it. I manage a team of 3, and I empower them to run as autonomously as possible. Every year I am less of an expert because it has outgrown what one person can maintain in their head. I use my knowledge to build up my team, and they are becoming powerhouses in their own right. I am proud when I don’t know something in my app, because it means one of my staff owned that feature so wholly that I didn’t need to be closely involved.

Now, what of this knowledge is applicable to a broader industry? I honestly don’t know, and that sometimes freaks me out a bit. I think of Product Management as my vocation, and yet I’ve only ever done it on one team, one product. I take a course every couple years, but otherwise am not super up on generic Product Management skills/trends. However, multiple people who have broader backgrounds working with Product Managers than I do have called me the best PM they’ve ever worked with, so presumably I’ve gotten something right.

Not really an answer to the question as you intended it, I’m sure. But I do think about my role and my expertise in it a lot. And I really love it.

No, that would require a pre-requisite of having an area of expertise:)

I went from being "to forward thinking" in my last job, to catching up with what cutting edge IT setups can be even some state of the art stuff too.

I take heart knowing that despite the pace of innovation the reality is it takes a lot of time and effort for things to really go into practice.

K8s for example is just now getting "boring" for the early adopters IMHO. Its crazy how long its been going and how many systems are built on it, but there are plenty of diverse opinions on implementions still.

The people who have fallen behind the most are the ones who don't realize they've fallen behind. "What you know you don't know, versus what you don't know you don't know" and all that. They are also the people least open to catching up when the opportunity presents itself; if you think best practices haven't changed since you were initially trained, why would you even entertain any information that contradicts what you initially learned? Part of this is ego, as it would require admitting that you've been doing it wrong this whole time (so instead these people keep doing it wrong as some kind of sunk cost fallacy).

Yes. Things change eternally and I can't keep up. The things I have experience with go away and I became a noob with the new stuff. Some things carry over, many things do not. Lots of things only come with experience.

Luckily, there are many professional prosthesis that I use to lessen that. For programming, that's things like linters, automation checks, peer reviews, etc. I'd suck 80 times worse than I do now if I didn't have all those tools.

It depends on my clients. For some, I'm presenting the state of the art. For others, I'm dragging them decades into the future. For the other others, they are making me learn and it is a good feeling.

When professions are protected from competition by government, those participating in those professions get lazy.

When I was a software developer it blew my fucking mind to meet doctors who didn’t learn anything new about their profession. I was making forgot-your-password workflows and if I didn’t learn constantly, my career ended. They’re saving lives and can’t be arsed to read a paper now and then.

As a fullstack angular dotnet developer I don't feel like I'm falling behind.

I read the updates on the state of JS and watch YouTube videos on the new C# and dotnet features and I'm pretty happy with how I'm keeping up with the latest in my field.

That being said "falling behind" is subjective and most people aren't early adopters. People often wait until they hear recommendations from 3 colleagues before taking up something that is by then old news.