That's a more interesting question to me right now because I was actually wondering exactly what the answer was myself. I've been thinking of looking for a new job since my current employer grows ever more ... shall we say, unstable, over time. Really it's the market, and at least they are trying to adapt... But, anyway, I've been here a long time though, and it's mainly because I've had the pleasure of moving across many projects with enough variety and newness to keep me interested. Oh and they are extremely flexible with my work schedule and situation (WFH, set my timeframes 99% of the time.)

So I made a list. In 15 years as a working pro, across 3 corps, I've worked on 18 substantial projects.

There has been something of a theme with almost every project I've spent my time on. It's pretty generic sounding, but, data integration is probably the best term for it. The one project I spent the most time on and dug my hands into the deepest was a home grown message queue/pubsub middleware system, with some business specific semantics built in at the protocol level. I've worked on large scale vertical integrations for state compliance (basically, getting a bunch of data out of an extremely semantically burdened personnel db transformed and delivered to a state entity for compliance with reporting laws. Constantly, streaming style.) And also some cool small scale apps purely for doing research, which is where I fell in love with Spring Boot. I was so shocked at how fast we could have a serious Java app platform up and running with everything required for the whole stack using that tool, and that was like 4 years ago.

Anyway, all my projects kinda look like this. It's easy to call most of them ETL implementations, I guess, but they always have some particular complexity that keeps them from being solved with off-the-shelf tools, or at least, not completely solved.

The only time I have had to do web development in the last, say, 8 years, has been propping up dead simple UIs to some of the unfinished systems just to drive some user flows, UIs that are inevitably replaced by something "good" by someone else later, or a CLI even. And to be clear, I've got no qualms implementing services to be consumed by the front end. It's the forced dependency on tools I view as ill suited to reliable software production and collaboration (mainly JavaScript, in all its forms) that bug me. And while it's admirable that so many people keep trying to "solve" this, the real solution is for browsers to stop demanding we target JavaScript, and instead, target a language agnostic platform how we developers best see fit. Frankly, I think we'd be far better off if browsers exposed the friggin .NET CLR as their lingua franca. Could always use Mono or hell, Roslyn now, I guess. That's why I'm hopeful for WebAssembly.

You know, 48 hours ago I had never used Scala or Spark (directly) before, and now I've got a brand new 1.0 code-baby (Scala spark app running on AWS JavaScript, and instead, actually represent a real platform to be targeted EMR via Data Pipeline) transforming a few 100 gigs of internal analytics data dumped into S3 on a daily basis so it can be accessed efficiently with Athena for my tiny internal data analysis prototyping team. So it's certainly not about fear or inability of learning new tools.

It's just that at this point in my life and career, I have a much clearer understanding of the sort of languages, tools and libraries that make my job smoother, easier, and more successful. Things that reduce risk in the shipped products, improve the experience of working with others both new and experienced with the code base, and of course, things I personally like. To me, it's worth being adamant about not wasting my time with garbage, and sadly the entire web environment is built on a trash foundation. One that's bled into the server space, wasting a ton of time and power.

Luckily out of everything you can find jobs for, there are PLENTY of options that fit my criteria. It's not like strongly typed languages with good static analysis potential are rare. On the current TIOBE top 20, I'd take 7 or 8 without too much concern.

And some of the hot areas right now, the parts I'd be involved with, are implemented with good tools. Like Spark that I mentioned, heavily favored in "Data Engineering" tasks, is built with Scala, which is fine. More importantly, the true platform for it and nearly every single one of all the alternative tools in the space, is Hadoop, which is Java, which the place I have the most experience. So I think I'll probably be looking to expand my time in this part of the industry for my next job. Besides, it feels kinda cool to talk casually about how a terabyte of ram might not be enough for your next analysis task.