> it hasn’t been hard to keep up with the changes in that time.
That depends entirely on your context. Debt, disability, dependents, other personal goals,...
Not everyone can easily spend nights and weekends following what goes on in the JavaScript, Go and IoT space at the same time.
> a) they’re not happy about that, they just don’t know how to change it
It's called "opportunity cost" and "risk management". They rather stick with what works - the best of all the worse alternatives - instead of stepping into the unknown. Personal happiness on the part of the staff is subservient to that strategy.
Don't confuse the opinions of the tech staff with the mindset upstairs.
> b) a vast majority of their technical workforce will have no contact with that at all.
Goes without saying.
> Cobol devs
I choose COBOL and Perl as random examples of niches. There is tons of legacy infrastructure to be maintained beyond COBOL and Perl as well.
> They love shiny new tech. A large portion of my consulting work comes from such organisations that are highly motivated to implement it.
Of course they do. But shiny tech only gets to be implemented in place where failure is factored against the potential gains.
Put differently, a mobile app being unresponsive for 15 minutes is an annoyance. Banking or medical records getting corrupted or lost, is a disaster that simply can't ever happen.
> A significant portion of my work comes from large organisations seeking to modernize their technical capabilities. They tend to be filled with people like him when I start, and a non-trivial portion of them tend to be gone a year later (all of the ones who couldn’t adapt to the new technology).
That's bad management based on short-term thinking, and it has absolutely nothing to do with technical skills.
Modernization isn't about the tech, it's about reducing costs. Employees are seen as a liability. Always. And so lay-offs and modernization go hand in hand. The hidden cost is the loss of institutional knowledge and culture.
Instead, they try to cheap out by bringing in consultants, like you, to do work on a per-project basis. But that doesn't create any institutional knowledge. Instead, it makes them utterly dependent on the volatility of the consultancy market.
Down the line, what you get are stories like the trainwreck which is Boeing.
Even if those employees did spend time learning Node in their free time, they would still have lost their jobs. Simply because their salaries, and the protections & benefits that salaried employers enjoy, made them unattractive.
And those who did learn, well, they left long before the writing was on the wall anyway, because the only reason reason to invest time and effort in your own skills is for your own sake, not the sake of your employer.
Finally, working for yourself, or working as an outplaced resource comes with many drawbacks. It may work out fine if you are healthy and you're in a situation that allows you to do that type of work. But those conditions can change at any time.
Private corporations and enterprises aren't charity. It's sensible to reduce costs as you go in order to stay competitive. But when corporations do that in such a way that the labour markets get stiffled, income levels stagnate or decrease and the fabric of society gets pressured, well, that's just predatory capitalism.
If you can live in such an environment, then that's great for you. But judging others because they struggle? That's a hard nope right there.