I think you need a big caveat on your assertion that “keeping pace is always best”. I would qualify it with “when the benefits outweigh the costs”.

To give examples: LINQ and jQuery are (to me) obviously vast improvements on previous ways of doing things. This was self-evident within hours of playing with them. It would be hard to find any hard-core VB6 guys who dispute this.

On the other hand, I have wasted days of my life on WPF I will never get back, and still feel like I’m fumbling around in the dark. Ditto Silverlight. Not only from a technical point of view, but also in terms of their future relevance – are they dead-end technologies? One can now say fairly safely with hindsight that yes they’re definitely dead ends (thankfully). The trick is trying to pick what technologies will survive, when they are new and shiny. MS in particular make this very hard by pushing all their myriad new technologies with extreme gusto and hyperbole.

I love learning new things that allow me to work better and faster, but some critical thinking (and gambling) is required when choosing where to invest your precious time.

The problems we need to solve could be solved with assembly. It might take us several years but everything we do could be done. So why keep up-to-date with the latest technology? Because it is really about “Writing code cleanly, efficiently so it’s easy to maintain”.

One of the legacy applications that we support at work is written in Perl. So should the developers sit back and just continue to write their Perl scripts in Emacs like it was originally developed? No, they keep up on the latest Perl libraries and work on creating a development environment (like with Perl Strawberry and Eclipse Perl plugins) that allows them to write better code easier as well as being easier to maintain. No refactoring, just keeping up with the latest in Perl.

I spend a lot of time with my son and wife. I take him to swimming lessons, we go on walks and we both have a new found love of Phineas and Ferb, the only time we watch a lot of TV together. Yet I consider myself fairly up-to-date with what is going on in the .Net world. These last few months I’ve been looking into what is coming in .Net 4.0.

So how do I do it? I come into work at ~7 am. I spend the first hour of the morning reading blogs, magazines, programming books, blogging about something I ran across while working. Then at 8 am I start the day and work till my work is done. Keeping up-to-date should really be about doing it incrementally. A little bit everyday and it’s not that hard.

As far as the implications you make when you say:
“So you study, study, study, learn all the current stuff, and guess what, before you actually get to use it in a real project, there’s some newer, cooler, better way to think about things. So hurry up, learn it fast, and hope that you master it AND get to apply it before it becomes obsolete.”

I don’t think technology is moving so fast that we can’t keep up as long as we do so on a regular basis and focus our sights on that which directly relates to our job. Don’t wait until .Net 4.0 hits to read up on dynamic or generic covariance and contravariance. Read about it now. The biggest problem I’ve seen people have is that they expect to wait until everything is out and then they get overwhelmed by the scope of it.

The problems I solve DO require all this “new crap” because it enables me to write code cleaner, and efficiently so it’s easier to maintain. The better programmers we are the more money the companies we work for make. Isn’t that our job?

So you study, study, study, learn all the current stuff, and guess what, before you actually get to use it in a real project, there’s some newer, cooler, better way to think about things. So hurry up, learn it fast, and hope that you master it AND get to apply it before it becomes obsolete.

Why are you guys buying into all this nonsense? The problems we need to solve do NOT require all this new crap. And don’t you want to spend time with your children, go for a walk, do anything other than stressing out about your career, which, because of people like you, is becoming like the froth on a bubble in a raging river.