> Mainly because the industry really is a meritocracy and it's about what a person can do now, usually.

I think a bigger problem is a combination of the Hawthorne effect and the idea that most methods will work for small problems. You don't get to see the superiority of the "right" solution until you are under heavy load. Most startups don't come under heavy load for 18 months and by that point, they end up throwing more hardware, bandaids, people at the problem and don't realize that the fundamentals were wrong from the start.

The success of infrastructure, fundamentals, and strong devops are apparent if you do it right, but not when you do it wrong. This is a bad feedback loop as it doesn't covert the people that are doing it wrong.

> I have to constantly step my game up to stay relevant

This doesn't strike me as the case in other skilled professions. A successful middle aged CPA, MD, lawyer, or finance exec often has the option of more or less coasting on accumulated relationships and prestige.

This idea that a skilled software engineer must always be training up on his own dime and time is really kind of strange, in the bigger picture.

I never looked at it that way but one could draw analogies to things like new techniques in medicine. Such as a new robotic operating mechanism or new ways to treat people. On the other hand CPAs seem to have had their work set in stone since people used tables and numbers, I feel for those guys. Lawyers probably have so much research to do I doubt they ever really stop learning (albeit it's charged to the client) .

But learning is probably what keeps me from getting bored. I will say though, if I have to learn another JS framework I'm going to === my eyes out.