I’ve seen folks who have been programming since they were kids that blow everyone away and I’ve seen folks that have been programming a few years do the same thing. In that same regard, I’ve seen a fair number of programmers (who have been in the business a long time and a short time ) that totally suck. I had the same jump going from ASP with vbscript in the 90’s to .net with C# about five years ago. The cool part is when you get into the new mindset you start thinking, “Wow, look at all the cool stuff I can do now that wasn’t possible before”. It just takes time.

To tell you the truth….I have found if what your making looks and works well, it doesnt matter how you acheived it. Content is King bro. But personally the satifaction taken from good code and knowing how to do stuff is what makes ya feel all fuzzy, so just follow what makes you feel fuzzy. You do that…chances are you will be pushing out some cool stuff that gets peoples attention.

Hold onto your google, yourself (err yeah not like that tho) and just be ready to switch out your bible if needs be. Still the same methodology/design patterns, just your speaking french instead of latin. but youll never not need the stuff you have learnt so far.

To be honest… most comp sci students do not get taught what you need to know in the real world to be a software developer. Sure… they can write a compiler that compiles the compiler that was used to develop the flash compiler but in reality they come out of school with only a rudimentary knowledge of SQL or .NET or J2EE. They can develop some nifty code that can demonstrate that it can “learn” in a rudimentary sense but they don’t know how to write a multi tiered web app that can handle 100’s of concurrent users let alone thousands. Your analogy was based on someone with 15 years dev experience coming in and taking over and I guess in a way that makes sense because usually that person will have a broader scope of knowledge and is therefore better suited to architect an app. He’ll be throwing around terms that you’re not familiar with… which isn’t really anything to get excited about… you know exactly what he’s talking about… he’s just using different language to talk about it. He’s read books about UML… or J2EE application architecture… or he knows the Struts framework which helps him to understand the cairngorm and ARP frameworks for flex because they’re based on essentially the same core MVC pattern. The bottom line is… his scope of knowledge is broader. You’re real fear of being obsolete is only a fear of not being able to commit the time it will take to “catch up” to a person with 15 years experience… which isn’t exactly the case at all. If you consider how quickly technology has changed over the past few years anything that person knows is technically obsolete as of 3 years ago. What was thought to be “proper” web application architecture 3 years ago has changed dramatically. If you look at how absurd the J2EE framework is compared to the spring framework or some others you’ll see that there is always a “better” way. A person with 15 years experience and has most recently been developing with ASP is behind the person doing ASP.NET for the last 2 years who is behind the person doing Flex, AJAX, Lazlo for the last 2 years.

If you want to catch up on the “basics” read Steve McConnell’s books. That’s the first thing I recommend to every developer, flash or not, that asks me about “catching up”. After that it’s just a simple fill in the gaps scenario on the topics that you’re weak in (database design, UML, application architecture, aspect oriented software, XML manipulation, Service Oriented Architecture) which can probably be accomplished by picking up a book here or there or even browsing Wikipedia for the answers.

The “old dogs” are usually the one’s that are more set in their ways and posses a general unwillingness to change/learn. You have a leg up on them if you’re willing to learn.

I feel ya.