I'd be interested in some career advice. I've been doing
JSP and
Java now for about 3 years. Just passed my Sun programmers exam on Feb 12th. My background before doing internet work was teaching (have a Masters in Education and my four year BS degree in biology ). My resume includes obviously just Java and JSP stuff as it related to the web ( no, I haven't coded EJBs..haven't had a need to at any of the two companies I've been with).
I'm not really happy where I work right now and would really like to leave. I'm making 50K which I suppose isn't too bad but I've worked on a lot of projects have over 2 1/2 years experience and am Sun Certified so I would like to be making a bit more (60 would be fine). The job boards look horrible though at least compared to when I first started looking about a year and half ago.
My question is one of econonmics and long term future. I love coding in Java but am not opposed to learning new languages. I'm wondering if maybe the market will be better for me if I start learning C#? Or am I better off just continuing to further my Java and web development skills. I'm sort of stuck because there are only so many hours in a day:) If I take time learing more advanced Java stuff than I hurt my java background but if I don't branch out maybe I'm stuck if the Java market gets way oversaturated with developers. I'm leaning towards just becoming the best Java developer I could become and than try to stand out from the crowd. I think I'm sort of way behind the crowd though in this regard and could never catch up to the many great java developers out there, so maybe jumping ship so to speak could land me a good career with C# and doing web development with .NET. I could maybe catch a bit of the wave that first happened when JSP took off.
Any advice much appreciated. Thanks.