Others have addressed your questions about Java & Ruby, so let me handle the job angle.

If you are ever unsatisfied with your job or your self-development, by all means move on. Life is short, and everyone deserves fulfilling and rewarding work. This is my advice regardless of profession; although it applies double for you, as this is literally the best job market we have ever seen for good people with technical skills.

That said, do not quit without having another job lined up if you only have a year or two of experience. Look around, read up on career searching, call some companies, figure out what you want, and then pursue it. Get a company interested in you and negotiate for the best possible offer. When you have an offer, give your two weeks notice.

Local job search on indeed.com Java Developer - 218 Ruby Developer - 28 Python Developer - 24

If your local job environment is analogous to mine, I would suggest that you pursue a dual track.

Route 1: Keep developing your Java skills - even if that means you need to push yourself beyond your current employer's "simple applications." The nearly 10X difference in job availability suggests that having solid Java skills is income security even if it isn't very sexy.

Route 2: Like a couple of others have said, you should continue to learn one or more newer languages on the side and really develop your side projects into something that is an impressive demo of your overall development skills.

If you are hoping to get into more of a start-up environment, Ruby should probably be your focus on route 2. If you are into science and/or data you like go with Python.

This advice assumes that you have the bandwidth in your life to pursue both routes simultaneously.

I think you're right. I particularly need to see some of my outside of work projects to some level of completion. Beef up the Github account. Haha and like you say, Java skills are highly sort after. I shouldn't disregard that.

Cheers

Interesting you want to go ruby. Scala and Java are semi-interoperable. As is Clojure. At least they all tolerate the JVM and JVM related infrastructure (to various levels). Some of the frameworks interoperate more than the others. Ruby is a bigger leap than some other possible leaps.

Perhaps senior mgmt is micromanaging WRT language selection. Could be your boss micromanaging and he's throwing senior mgmt under the bus. Or maybe you're correct. Anyway the point is you need to make sure its merely the specific language you don't like. If you move to a new ruby using employer where everyone has to dress the same way and hold their coffee cup the same way, you might be really unhappy if its actually the micromanaging you don't like rather than mere language choice.

Finally aside from any micromanagement issue there's work style. I prefer nearly consultative, professional environments where deliverables matter and you don't tell someone 5 levels lower on the hierarchy how to tie their shoes. However its a perfectly valid business choice to run a place the other way, and have an unprofessional, general laborer, non-craftsman type environment. You need to explore your thoughts on this too, again, see above, if you think your dream job is ruby and they don't micromanage one particular aspect of your job, you may none the less hate the new job if what you really dislike about the current job is the general laborer / code monkey / unprofessional unskilled labor workplace.

Other people have already mentioned that language doesn't matter as much as architecture / design. A extremely rigid view of language likely implies an extremely rigid view of arch / design, yet another axis to think about. If your current employer is extremely rigid about language you may have not considered what it would be like to work at a place with more freedom, or even just a different set of equally rigid arch/design outlooks.

Interviews are a two way street and with little experience you need to learn more about a potential new employer than they need to learn about you especially WRT the above.

Good Luck and all that.

I think you're hitting the nail on the head with this not really being related to an issue with the language choice. I think I just came to a decision I don't want to develop for the web in Java. I kind of lead with the language argument, but really my issue is with mgmt and processes. Mostly with promises from mgmt, regarding a positive change in the way we do things. However, this has been a long long time coming. I have started to get to a bit of a too little too late predicament. This has been fuelled by my mentors who have all left my company for the same reasons. Leaving me without a mentor figure, which is something I am really striving to obtain again. I would like a mentor at least until my development confidence has been made more concrete. As mentioned above, my development career is still early days.

What you have said about architecture and design also rings true! Many other employees in my company are crying out for the development a more maintainable and stable product, coupled with selling this product to clients expectations. Which we seem to struggle to get right time and time again.

I will definitely take you advice as well with the interview process. I need to ground my wants from a future employer.

Really appreciate the detailed response! Helps put in to perspective what my priorities should be!

Cheers!

So reading between the lines the most experienced longest term dev has only 18 months experience. There's nothing wrong with any individual dev personally only having 18 months experience, obviously every dev with 19 or more months experience passed thru the same state. The disaster is solely at the company/mgmt level where you're now the senior technical lead.

One aspect of a company circling the drain, is you're better off finding another place on your own terms before it goes under, apparently soon. Once it crashes, if you're still there, you've gotta settle for anything just to pay the bills. Its hard to say how long you've got before they close, but assuming your last paycheck didn't bounce its longer than you'd have if you wait till the bitter end.

Getting stuck at a better run company that none the less is technologically a clone, complete with pure java etc is still going to be much better.

As a guy who had his 18 months in 1982, I'm just saying I've seen a lot of companies swirl around the drain and its not sounding good for the company regardless of all this "I have lost the java faith" or whatever.

Good luck w/ the future etc

"However, efforts are thwarted by senior managements opinions. Opinions which aren't justified with any kind of evidence. It's just driven by their own personal taste / a lack of understanding of the current industry."

this seems like a very common issue these days. it seems like people in this industry reach a certain age and then cease to evolve and refuse to do anything new, which seems logically out of sorts in an ever-evolving field.

while its somewhat a mystery to me now, i can say its great inspiration for myself to not end up that way 10-15 years from now.

Overtime, its not the language you code that matters. Application architecture, design, database skills etc do. All this comes from experience, building large applications. I understand you may not have the opportunity in your current company to build those. You can start building small projects in your personal time.

You are just 1.5 years in the industry. Taking such risks early is not advisable. Don't be impatient, keep learning. For example, you can redesign and build the 10 year old sites in a new language or in Java itself.

It's interesting you say that! I have considered at least re building our demo product in Rails. Maybe this is a chance to at least show off to my own company that RoR would provide us with less headaches. I also completely agree about the patience side of things. I think my patience wore a bit thin today. I think I just thought I would use HN to vent my anger! haha. Thank you for the advice!

Cheers

You may also want to consider newer web dev technology on the JVM. My background ... did Java EE when it first came out. Went to grad school. Did lots of python and rapid web dev for projects. Was forced to use Java in current gig. First, I hated it. Then, I realized it is a bit complicated. Some parts of Java are crap. If you use Java 7, some of those headaches go away. Also, I learned about different web dev frameworks on top of Java (Spring MVC, Play! framework). These make a big difference in my opinion. Finally, there are JVM-based technologies that get you into the "modern" era: Scala and Groovy. My team used groovy like Java and it was a mess. We ended up giving up on a large code base that we developed in Groovy because it was declared as unmaintainable. I came in on this team towards the tail end of the end of groovy days and am glad. Anyways ... long story short, Java is not going away any day soon.

If you know RoR is what you want to do then go for it, but prepare yourself before. Here are a few points to consider: - how's the RoR job market in your area? are there openings for entry level? - to some extent you can compensate lack of production experience with personal projects (maybe build something in RoR on github) or by contributing (either with software like bug fixes / features or by getting involved in the RoR community)

good luck!

Hey there,

Thank you for the advice. I do need to prioritise my development of open source projects outside of work. I have some RoR projects to work on. So I think I just need to push their priority to top of my list! Thank you mate!