It's not far from it. Software development is in small company with respect to the need for constant re-education and skill maintenance. The vast majority of developers with skills from just 10 years ago are wholly unemployable right now.
You mean somebody who knows how to develop in Java, PHP, Python, Perl, C, C++, Javascript, Ruby, LISP - all languages developed more than 10 years ago - is "wholly unemployable right now"? Doesn't seem to match my experience even a little bit. Programming practices also hasn't changed that much. In fact, there are still jobs for COBOL and Fortran programmers - not that many, but there aren't that many COBOL and Fortran programmers either nowdays.
There's a shortage of COBOL developers that are needed to maintain and update legacy financial mainframes that still don't make economic sense to replace since they operate at critical infrastructure points 24/7 and over the years have become pretty bulletproof.
Replacing these systems is extremely difficult since they're so relied on a replacement needs to be nearly flawless form the start. If you stumble upon on a bug in your international wire transfer code you could be messing up a $10 billion international aid wire that was meant for hundreds of factories.
