sign of the times ... technologies, experience, the economy

As a lot of my friends in the IT sector (students, employed personnel, benchwarmers, unfortunate out-of-work fuming hapless souls) know, the economy continues it's allegiance to gravity (despite what those omniscient analysts say to the contrary). This means a lot of people who would have been earning fat paychecks and driving [insert suitable sleek automobile label here] with a mere modicum of technical skills to help them along the way. Hey, in those good days, you didn't need more than a spirit of "I can master [insert suitable cool technology moniker] in a snap". No more days of working with low-level algorithms and squeezing efficiency and performance out of every [insert suitable atomic storage mechanism in appropriate programming language]. These are the days of APIs (aka the days of Java). Knowing the language is a small crumb in the pie. The APIs and the idiosyncracies of the language are what you need to get your skills honed in and these are what will get you a job (subject to the fatalistic probability distribution of the hiring and firing process. Joel Spolsky has a new post on this phenomenon. Vicious, direct and cogent.