I spent 8 years doing Java development, layoffs are coming soon (my second time this year! 😊), I know how hard it is to get a job out there, and I’m tired of Java. So I was wondering if anyone had any advice for pointing my career in a new direction. I’d like there to be some technical aspect to it still, which is why I am posting here instead of elsewhere.
Right now I’m really into Lua, Vue.js, and am considering picking up CompTIA and AWS certifications just to make myself more marketable.
I have good people skills too, so if a career involves talking more than coding I’ll be okay with that. I spent part of this year teaching programming and loved it (but due to the state of the industry many academic businesses are closing down).
Or you know, should I sell my home and just go live in the woods until I die of malnutrition because at this rate we’ll all end up there anyways?
I dunno where you live, but maybe remote jobs are an opportunity? 8 years of java ain’t nothing to sneeze at and if your people skills are good, that’s probably always sought after.
Maybe a position as technical director or technical lead could be interesting?
Between Lua and VueJS, probably VueJS is the most likely to get you a job as a front-end developer. From VueJS to React isn’t a big step. If you don’t enjoy frontend (however you said you enjoy vuejs so…), you can look at stuff like Flutter and React Native to write smartphone apps. Every stinking business out there seems to want one of those, so if you’re interested, that’s where you can go.
As for lua, my first thought (as a web developer) is NGINX scripting. Probably LUA has way more uses (probably used for modding games too?), so just searching for LUA job openings might get you something?
Not sure what exactly you do, so a step from static typing to dynamic typing with LUA to another dynamically typed language isn’t big. Python is quite popular, but if you aren’t a data engineer or something similar, the most likely use will be backend web development with Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
In most cases though, I think you can expect a salary hit unless you pick up AWS certs (or are willing to after being hired) and move in to Site Reliability Engineering - basically devops with heavy cloud focus. Frontenders are paid less than python backenders who are paid less than java devs. Last I read C++ devs make a killing (no wonder, it’s an arcane language full of gotchas and you have to pretend segfaults are never your fault). I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you want money…
Thank you for taking the time to write all of this, I definitely needed such a perspective.