Sane advice. I'm 39, and I'm rather stunned to see 27yr olds calling themselves "old" and disillusioned with tech and what not ... let alone 17!
If you like to build things, hone your system level thinking .. which lasts longer than Angular/Backbone/whatever. (Heck I'm working with the intention of obsoleting them, based on old Smalltalk ideas!) If you like to build things the possibility of which average society has no idea of, hone your algorithmic thinking. I'm certainly more productive today than I was, say, a decade ago because I chose to focus on the ideas rather than specific tools during that time. I'm confident I can work with any tool at hand due to exactly what rayiner says. Good debugging skills, for example, don't die because you need to approach it scientifically.
rayiner - while you're right about the "if you know .." part, many companies today ask for specific skills and hirers don't know enough to say "we need guys to work on a Java code base, you know Smalltalk, you can handle it, hop onboard". So it is up to us tech folks who give these job specifications to hint at the broader kind of people we can accept.
