Flash is hardly the only tech to have become obsolete. Anyone who has been around this industry more than a decade can list off multiple technologies we don't work with anymore.
The article was right that ongoing learning is the key. And while formal higher education is not for everyone, it does well at teaching people new techniques for learning and research. It isn't the only path, especially in today's reality. Its current failings are one reason that bootcamps exist...
But the idea that people are going to let their skills stagnate for 8 years, then return to a bootcamp to get the latest tech... Sorry, but that is simply absurd.
I'll be the first in this thread to start listing off technologies other than Flash. We're at the point now where if you include JQuery on your resume, recruiters are less likely to hire you. Ruby used to be trendy for startups, Python 2.7 used to be popular. Angular 1.x beat off BackboneJS, MeteorJS, and EmberJS but even Angular was completely rewritten in Angular 2.x and superseded with React.
Completely agree... I don't even remember enough Perl or Ruby to be effective with it at all. It all changes over time. I do miss parts of Flash/Flex though.
Its nice for small scripts that people might use bash for. I do Python most of the time, but Perl's syntactic sugar makes it so much nicer for something like looking up a set of files matching a regex, moving and renaming them.
The article was right that ongoing learning is the key. And while formal higher education is not for everyone, it does well at teaching people new techniques for learning and research. It isn't the only path, especially in today's reality. Its current failings are one reason that bootcamps exist...
But the idea that people are going to let their skills stagnate for 8 years, then return to a bootcamp to get the latest tech... Sorry, but that is simply absurd.