You make some good points.

I do the same thing when phrasing a response - if I don't remember all the details, I do a quick search. I get the benefit of refreshing myself on the details of something I conceptually know how to do.

Which leads me to the next point: One way to deal with the quickly changing technology is to always keep up with the conceptual level of things, but don't try to keep up with the implementation level of things except for when you actually need to code something. In other words, we really only have to know a great deal about the of the general things to be able to do our jobs, and be able to find out how to do the impementation only when we need it.

The implementation details are changing faster that the conceptual stuff and there are huge heaps of it - we just can't "know it all" - but we only need to know what we need today, so to speak. For example, the basic idea of Web Services (and SOAP) has been around a long time. The concept is changing much slower than how you code for it. The idea of a "stateless remote procedure call" is pretty much the same today as it was 5 years ago. How we go about doing it in code has changed a lot. So, knowing that Web Services exist, and what problems they solve allows us to decide to use them when it is appropriate. Once we have decided to use it, we track down the latest details for the environment we are working in. Keeps me sane... or at least less insane.

As far as the universities go - there just isn't enough time in 4 years to teach someone what they need to learn to be a good programmer. It is on the job after graduation that someone who has been introduced to programming will become a programmer.

Woody Z
http://www.learntoprogramnow.com
How to use a forum to help solve problems