[chojeen]

As I get older (I am currently thirty), this is something that terrifies me, mainly because it is something that I have experienced from both sides. I got a B.S. from a major CS university, then started on a Ph.D. in Astronomy. Due to my dissatisfaction with that program, the fact that programming is my passion, and various life events, I decided to leave after obtaining a M.S. and began to look for work.

I attended my university's CS job fair, only to find that I had become almost completely unemployable to tech companies (granted, I only had a 3.3 GPA in CS; damn you, WoW!). I ended up taking a tech support job with a scientific computing software company after I was promised a quick transition into development. However, that too evaporated, ironically due to the stigma of working in tech support.

After about 8 months, I interviewed for a developer position at a Midwest branch of a major tech company, but was again turned down. Luckily, I was instead hired to be a QA contractor on a different team, whereupon I quickly transitioned into a non-contracted developer on the original team that didn't hire me about a month before the company's new CEO announced that we would not take anyone with lower than a 3.5 GPA. I took the opportunity to mention this fact at every opportunity to one of my co-workers who had originally voted not to hire me.

After about a year, I started interviewing new candidates at this company. You would think that, given my prior experiences, I would be more forgiving than my peers in looking at past experience. While I didn't make any judgments based on school or GPA (in fact, those were filtered out before the resumes ever made it into my hands), I did turn down several candidates who were "too enterprisey", i.e. did not have experience or interest in whatever tech was trendy at the time. Granted, these candidates also had trouble understanding and debugging simple perl scripts I showed them, so I was already not on board, but when those candidates were borderline hires/no-hires, that was something that swayed me in the "no-hire" direction.

Now, as a married thirty-year-old with two kids and several non-coding hobbies, I have neither the time nor inclination to use my free time to learn today's trendy languages and frameworks. My work keeps me relevant for now, but if that ever changes and I need to look for work, I'm terrified that my experience and ability to learn quickly will be irrelevant to prospective employers, who will just want to see the right technologies appear on my resume.

[noname123]

Hello, just want to chime in and say that you shouldn't have to feel anxious about falling behind potentially if something new comes along.

Life is too short to worry about things that can't ultimately care about you (weird thing to say I know, but the interests that you care about, even if they are non-human, you fall in love with because they give you something back; and excluding the emotions of: the fear of missing out, the pressure to fit in, or the greed to get ahead).

I'll go out on a limb and say that most of the new Javascript web development frameworks are created by really zealous young people fresh out of school, eager to explore the brave new world of open-source and using Github as a medium to mark their mark (hence the reason for why there are so many new solo frameworks or fork, not enough collaboration); or by old-timers in that community who for whatever personal reasons really enjoy doing it and been doing it. Go to your local open-mic for poetry or music jam for a "In Real Life" representation of this phenomenon.

Speaking for myself, I am just not interested in learning arbitrary new frameworks that isn't intellectually interesting, that is simple syntactical sugar (remapping the textual receipe of rendering of a button from desktop development, to Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to React.js) or doesn't open up a new outlet to other subjects that I want to learn about (e.g., machine learning, Bioinformatics).

Practically speaking, if it turns out in 5 years, all software companies mandates the banning of lamer frameworks such as PHP or .net and only Node.js/React.js/Flux allowed. I'll wait for the idiot crash guide for these frameworks and these frameworks to be watered for "plebes" like the rest of us and try to learn the keyboard remapping in a couple of weeks; I'll let the hipster kids on Github who "did it first" take the street cred; and hopefully then, I can still manage.

[abc_lisper]

Don't worry about that. Prepare for interview questions at sites like http://www.geeksforgeeks.org .

Get into a company with people who know what they are doing. They will be far lenient of GPAs, and the frameworks you don't know now.

[zyxley]

As somebody who got a first software job before even having a degree, companies that focus on GPA over demonstrable skills weird me out.