[austin-cheney]

I recommend test automation. There is a ginormous gap between the kind of innovation you are looking for and what most people are capable of delivering.

Ironically being really good at test automation will allow you to become really creative and increase your value. I call that ironic because QA work is otherwise boring and repetitive because most QAs are not capable of developing and most developers are not expected to be creative or innovative at the typical large corporate job.

Seriously, most people super struggle with test automation. They expected it to be done in a certain predefined way using tools they are already comfortable with or they completely panic in a way looks that autistic. The goal is to solve very real business problems and most employers don’t care so much how it’s done as long as you can dramatically lower operating expenses and lower maintenance risk, which is weird because they always expect actual development to be done in a very specific way to conform to established internal norms.

If really want to go crazy do test automation of both Java apps and test automation that executes in the browser. Most people struggle to automate any of that even outside of test automation and frameworks to more than turn on their monitors.