Is this really true? There are plenty of job openings for people who are good at maintaining Java Spring apps!

They also pay a fraction of what the jobs "hip" companies pay, and often come along with developers Being treated as second-class citizens.

Is that true, or are you inadvertently comparing the cost of living between SF and other major cities?

Hip technologies are being used in SV, and they have to pay tons of money just to keep the talent pool large and circulating.

Older technologies are used in other cities, and there the market forces aren't so crazy.

But a good Java dev can make plenty of money in SV, and a Go developer will make a competitive salary by Dallas standards but not by SV standards (and probably have a harder time finding a new job).

I am currently working in NYC (living in NJ), with a total comp that is more than 3X what I was making when I left Dallas. Based on the market there, I would still probably be making 40% of what I do now had I stayed, and the company would not have been as good.

For the record, I have been using a JVM language as my primary work language since early 2012.

Lots of hip companies use the JVM, and sometimes, Java.

Not according to itjobswatch.co.uk where Java/Spring roles fetch top rates. Same with Indeed.co.uk so which job market are you referring to?

It’s not so simple. For eg if your skill set is in demand you can easily trade up to a better company than if it wasn’t. This is true in my own career. Also the bar to entry would be lower. So for this reason if you’re breaking in right now learning React is better than learning Spring.

Yes exactly my point. Go lookup salaries.

Java will be around forever, and becoming an excellent Java developer will absolutely remain highly lucrative for a very long time. That's its reputation at the companies I"ve worked for over the last 10 years (all startups). Go is more of an anti-language imho. Among myself and similarly minded colleagues, I would say its main attraction is its lack of features and it seems a haven for people that are grumpy like me. I always get a chuckle when I see it framed as "hip" because its just never felt like that to me. Elixir is Hip. Rust is somehow Hip. Go, just not in my experience.

Stagnate by what standard though? There is a certain joy in just maintaining the status quo.

> Stagnate by what standard though?

Range of employment options. Possibly salary, though that's more variable. There are some jobs keeping the lights on with legacy tech long after it is done being the hot thing, but typically with any particular stack it's a shrinking numbwrt of jobs often with shrinking average real pay unless it hits a phase where the decline in people able to do it exceeds the decline in work.

If you are riding out the last few years of your tech-focussed career (whether that's before retirement or before moving out of hands-on tech into, e.g., management) that's maybe not so bad, but if you planning being in tech for a longer period it's potentially extremely career-limiting not to adapt to current market focus.

> Range of employment options. Possibly salary, though that's more variable.

I'm not sure this is true. Most of the shops I've been in don't care about whether you know this or that language or library. You're expected to learn that as you need to. Most of what I've seen cut people from interview loops is missing fundamentals.

From a programming perspective, possibly. As an Ops Engineer, I'm having a hard time shifting jobs. Where I work now, it's heavily siloed so I can't shift into a CI/CD team because it's a different team or the Product Engineering team because they don't do Unix administration, automation, or Kubernetes (other than the deployment aspect). I focus on automation with shell scripts and Ansible plus Tower to get Infrastructure as Code going. I took on the Kubernetes role, and am the single point of failure for the 24 clusters I manage. And now management is asking what support contracts we have for Kubernetes (me, it's just me and asking questions in various places on the 'net). Add in that I'm taking courses for the CI/CD toolset and implementing them on my homelab. But I still can't get a bite on shifting jobs.

> Range of employment options.

Then you'd be wise to stick stuff like Java or .NET, because there are probably millions of jobs requiring them.

By financial standards :-)