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?
If you’re tired of Java you can always do Kotlin, it’s a lot less wearing on your soul. And there’s tons of job opportunities.
Oddly enough I had more recruiters talk to me about Kotlin recently than Java, are there any certs you would recommend, if they even exist?
Certs are a waste of time tbh. If you have 8 years of experience, you should have more than enough to fill out a resume already.
An AWS cert is almost certainly even more useless for you specifically unless you wanted to get into devops/sre and do systems design. I have been in sre for a very long time and have never even heard of anyone writing tooling in Java. That section of the industry is entirely dominated by go, python, and (more often than anything else) bash for really quick automation.
To be honest, I’ve been an engineer for roughly 15 years, and I don’t have any language or framework certs beyond my EECS degree. My languages and frameworks come and go depending what I am working on at the moment, but it’s generally not that hard to refresh my knowledge if I need to pull some stuff back up for use again.
honestly… if I see certs on a resume I immediately get suspicious. In general certs are worth absolutely nothing and if there are too many of them they will actually make me less likely to recommend someone for a position. Experience is way more valuable than certifications and open source work is even more valuable than that.