I am already apathetic about the whole Javascript scene and I am considering transitioning to another career.

I'm starting to learn Android and Java this week.

While I've kept up with JS quite well (I know Angular and React, and have used jQuery, Backbone and Knockout), I believe the churn and fragmentation are a bad sign of deeper issues in the industry. There is no way that serious companies are subsidizing this kind of nonsense. Facebook maybe, but Facebook have an army of developers. I suspect the issue is lots of over-valued startups who have hired like crazy in the boom, have too many frontend devs on the books, and those devs are justifying their existence rewriting the codebase in whatever is trending on HN this week. That's going to come to an end very soon and the market will be flooded with out-of-work JS devs working 15 bucks an hour on Upwork.

The result of all this churn has been user interfaces that are slow, brittle, and riddled with technical debt. A lot of these companies are going out of business soon so that's OK. Those that are left are going to be soured on web development for a long time, and they're going to realize that they would have saved a ton doing the whole thing in mobile native apps from the start and keeping their web development to four or five pages on SquareSpace.

My chosen backend stack for the past few years is Python and Django. I have no problem technically with these tools, the job market for these technologies has all but dried up (and before people say, "there are a ton of Django jobs in my area", I live in the middle of nowhere, I have no option to move, and so I am strictly talking about the remote job market. A local-only Django job in SF is about as useful to me as an opening for a brain surgeon in Inner Mongolia). I'm sad to see them go, Python has been good to me, but the demand just isn't there.

There is demand, however, for Java, .NET and mobile development (and WordPress. But I'd leave the profession entirely rather than work on WordPress the rest of my career). I used to do Java some years ago, it's not the best language out there, but there is a lot of solid remote work for enterprise companies or contractors. Mobile development is still in demand, there's a lot of interesting things being done in that space, and since I'm doing Java anyway, why not?

Of course I'll do whatever other work in the meantime - if by some miracle I get a Django project next week - but long term I'm seeing a paradigm shift and I want to be ahead of it. In a few years the next boom will be along and we'll be all using WebAssembly, but for now, time to get out of web development.