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If you want a career with stability for the next 20 years in which your current knowledge will remain forever useful, I doubt web tech is the place to be. Even Javascript itself isn't enough, in spite of its stability for decades as a top of the Tiobe rankings juggernaut, thanks to framework churn. Mastering the core language barely helps you when there's a paradigm shift every few years in DSLs built on top of it that everyone expects you to use. If you want backend stability, master Java. It may be boring, and I don't like it either, but it's been the dominant server-side application programming language for 25 years and has tremendous inertia and is not likely to go anywhere. If you want to work in container runtime and orchestration technologies, then Go is probably a safe bet as it's taken such a lead as an implementation language in every container engine out there that it probably isn't going anywhere, either. I love Rust, but it isn't currently dominant at anything unless you count "rewrite a critical service that can't afford garbage collection but still requires memory safety" as a meaningful category of software. It sounds like you're trying to exist at the bleeding edge but still have some level of assurance that what you choose to master now will remain relevant decades from now. I don't think you can have both. If you'd have asked this question 20 years ago, you'd have been asking if you should master Perl or PHP. 10 years ago, maybe Scala or Python. Why should we think this decade will be any different from every other decade and that Go and Rust will achieve staying power when nothing else except Java did in the past? To be clear, I think Go absolutely will keep its staying power for container engines, just as Python kept its staying power for scientific computing and systems scripting. But if you're asking specifically about cloud-based microservices, I wouldn't place a bet on anything specific at all. Master the domain itself and get good at learning new languages because they will very likely keep coming. Or master Java, because like it or not, it isn't going anywhere. |
I sure do want more stability in my career.
I have been considering Java.
I see a lot of great resources for software architecture and design patterns with Java examples.
Java for sure has the most advanced resources available for my domain and the most job opportunities especially when you know Spring Boot and the like.