I've been thinking about the phrase "time in the market beats timing the market." Not just with investing, but also in career management. After all, that also involves trying to get a greater return on investing your time into some job or skill.But the more I look at the job market in software, the more I see advice for managing a software engineer's career like trying to "beat" the market. I don't know if I still like this approach. I'd rather not want to keep trying to predict when the high point of some skill or technology is approaching. I prefer to do what I personally like and only change/learn something new because I get bored, and not because the job market doesn't favor it.Tech trends feel like moving targets, and I have a dilemma. I like working in tech but I also don't like being forced to hit moving targets.To give you an example, I started my web development career in the late 2000's. I didn't "buy" into cloud computing when it went on the rise, and I didn't "sell" my PHP skills. That's making it tougher to get interviewed at jobs probably because my experience doesn't have enough of the right keywords. Trying to just keep up with new concepts just for the sake of the job market is stress-inducing and it's like constantly monitoring stocks to buy and sell. It's an emotional roller coaster.Is it just possible to hold on to your initial "investment" of skills long-term, and regardless of what you started with continue to build returns from that? I know that the advice to just spend more time in the market is advice for the regular joe, but I actually do just want to be a regular joe programmer.