Experience in IT doesn't appreciate on its own

I recently caught myself on a thought that rarely gets said out loud in IT. Many people assume experience automatically appreciates over time. Ten years on the job means you are worth more than someone with three. In practice this is far from always true.

I have seen developers with twenty years of experience who were worth less on the market than people with five. And I have seen the opposite. They were all capable, sharp, strong engineers, but the market valued them very differently, and tenure had almost nothing to do with it.

The reason is simple. The market does not buy the number of years in a profession. The market buys the ability to solve the problems that matter right now.

What the market stops paying for

There was once huge demand for Novell NetWare administrators. Then for FoxPro specialists. Then for Flash developers. These were not weak people. They closed real business problems, and closed them well. At some point the market simply stopped paying for those skills, and years of accumulated experience turned into a line of history rather than an argument in an interview.

The same thing happens at the company level, when systems built up over years turn from an asset into a source of risk. For an individual specialist the logic is identical, it is just less common to discuss it openly.

The unpleasant part of this story is that the erosion of market value happens silently. You go to work, solve familiar problems, get paid. Everything feels fine. Then you step onto the market and discover that half of what you considered your expertise is of no interest to an employer.

How to check it in half an hour

Checking where you stand is easier than it sounds. Open 20 to 30 fresh job postings in your field and look at three things.

First, which technologies appear more often than a year ago. Second, what they are actually willing to pay for, rather than what sits in the "nice to have" section. Third, which tasks from your usual workload are already being closed by automation or AI. That shift moves faster than it looks from inside a single company. I have written before about how a developer's daily work changes once an AI assistant becomes part of the process.

After that, ask yourself one honest question. If I were let go today, how quickly would I find a job for the same money? The answer to that is usually the real assessment of your market value, not the number of years in your record.

But not all experience depreciates

And here is the second part many people miss. Not all of it depreciates.

Technologies become obsolete. Tools change. Frameworks come and go. But the ability to design systems, to understand a business, to work with data, to read people, to run projects and to own the outcome barely loses value.

A specific framework today may live three years. Engineering thinking lives for decades. The difference is that the first is knowledge you can download over a weekend, while the second is a way of thinking that is built only through practice and carries from one technology to the next without loss.

The practical conclusion is simple. You will always have to learn new tools, and that is fine. But if you have to choose where to invest the main share of your time, I would put it into what will outlive the next change of stack. Into understanding the problem, not just the tool. Into the ability to get a system to a working state, not to assemble a demo. Into ownership of the result, which no framework will replace.

Choose where you invest your time. That decision pays off longer than any single skill.