Having less time to "learning new stuff to stay relevant" makes us de-facto less hirable. The "github" thingy is just a proxy (as is the "whiteboard CS exercise").
I actually do learn new stuff. While on the current job, I've been doing:
- Code-hinting (semantic analysis) in an IDE
- Product management
- Low-level JIT codegen & optimisation (for ARM Neon & Intel SSE)
- Some datascience (technology/ product evaluation for a 8-digit aquisition)
- One of the early contributors to a web standard
- Distributed systems, bigdata (mostly graph-processing at quite big scale - Facebook-big)
and probably other stuff I can't remember right now. I worked in half dozen different programming languages. I'm pretty sure I've "stayed relevant" more than the average Joe, but you wouldn't know it from github.
