[umjames]

So, if I understand you correctly, you'd like a 9-to-5 job where you won't be forced into management and be able to keep your valuable skills to yourself while you work on more interesting things after hours?

I think I am currently in that situation. It's not all it's cracked up to be. First off, your time on nights and weekends is not as long or of the same quality as 9 to 5. You don't have the same energy level or focus.

As for the job, no job is immune to change. If you have skills that are valuable to your employer, you'll find that either your employer will overwhelm you with work and/or they'll seek to have your co-workers gain those skills to distribute the workload. This kind of stuff will make you more and more unhappy with your job and this will surprisingly make it harder to work on your side projects outside of work. If you put all your eggs in one basket by anchoring yourself to the Oracle stack, when you go to look for another job (because you're tired of your current job), prospective employers (and especially recruiters) will see mostly Oracle stuff and you'll be pigeonholed into jobs that are similar to your current job.

Don't make perceived stability the central focus of your job search (unless you have others that depend on you financially). Choose jobs that will serve you better with respect to your career goals. That may mean changing jobs more often than you'd like (but not necessarily so), but you'll get to where you want to be sooner.

[fiveo]

I don't mind occasional OT (with compensation). Fact is, in where I live, companies can get away with lots of OT and not compensating them. I don't mind to go to management position late in my career. Not now, but maybe later.

Interesting things can have different means. To me, Google architecture (GFS, BigTable, MapReduce) are all interesting, but I have no desire to learn them for the sake of learning. Rails is interesting in the sense that I'd like to learn it, make a website using it, and take a poke at running a small business.

I'm also interested at the business of iPhone apps. I'd rather pay someone else to write the app than writing it myself. I prefer to focus on the operational side: making sure we have a website with good SEO and graphics design. Promote the iPhone apps and start making money (even with a low profitability margin).

But at the same time, I'm not a big gambler or a risk taker. Steady fixed income and experimental on the side is my sweet spot.

In short, I'd like to be able to run my own side business, be it iPhone apps or selling stuff online. That excites me more vs toying with various programming languages or solving hard algorithm problems. I prefer to talk with people than with machines. I don't mind to do occasional programming cause I like to build stuff. I just don't want them to dominate my whole life. I prefer not to be 40 or 50 and still hacking C, UNIX, Java, C# or Ruby for a living.