Pro: In the last ten years backend development has turned into AWS SDK-orientied programming mostly. Databricks-oriented in case of data engineering recently too. Between this and python/js popularity it is more of unskilled labor now.
Contra: I'm reading digital circuits and introductory FPGA programming books this summer - fullstack development for the robotics dominated future here I come ;) Granted some EE classes in your old major will help. But modern digital circuits and embedded hardware space also have a lot of similarity to your muscle memory as a software developer.
A typical Bay Area commute (e.g. to SJ or San Mateo/Redwood City) is 40+ miles one way. A typical weekend drive (e.g. to Half Moon Bay or Sonoma) is a 100-mile roundtrip.
Very few people want to re-create their production AWS MSK cluster from scratch. And that's the only way currently. MSK can usually upgrade Kafka brokers with minor performance degradation but not for this particular change.
If you have a use-case where you currently allocate ~1K threads mostly waiting on I/O switching to virtual threads is a one-liner ("Thread.ofVirtual()" instead of
"Thread.ofPlatform()"). No more golang envy for sure.
Depending on how much memory is used by the Thread stack (presumably 1M-512K by default, allegedly 128K with Alpine base images) that's your 1G-500M heap space usage improvement right off the bat.
The migration from JDK17 to JDK21 was uneventful in production. The only issue is limited monitoring as a thread dump will not show most virtual threads and the micrometer metrics will not even collect the total number of active virtual threads. It's supposed to work better in JDK24.
The Spring Framework directly supports virtual threads with "spring.threads.virtual.enabled=true" but I haven't tried it to comment.
By the time you acquire enough experience to do it in 25+ years of lunches the job market starts showing less interest in you. But that's the only promising strategy in the LLM-dominated world I guess.
I learned about OOP from a Turbo Pascal v5.5 book circa 1993. Drawing triangles, squares, circles, all the good stuff. Turbo Vision library was a powerful demonstration of the power of OOP which made MSFT MFC look like a mess in comparison.
Not every SWE working in the Bay Area can afford a $1.5M house just to charge his car. Not to mention that the car would be twice as expensive (e.g. top Elantra 2025 trim at $30K vs Model 3 at $50K+).
In a galaxy far far away so called "J2EE application servers" used to be the reason JDK upgrades were not allowed. And that would probably be a real major update Java project.
When I joined my current team (in a big honkin' corporation with a history of layoffs and outsourcing) I inherited a dozen microservices, all on JDK8 and a couple written in Scala. So among the first things I did was an upgrade to JDK17 of every single repository. And it was mostly uneventful. More or less use a different Docker base image and bump up the Spring Boot version from 1.x to 3.4. Not running the latest LTS release is professional negligence in my book.
Keep in mind that Scala had been released before golang was. And became popular around the time golang was released. Without GOOG-scale resources behind it.
Contra: I'm reading digital circuits and introductory FPGA programming books this summer - fullstack development for the robotics dominated future here I come ;) Granted some EE classes in your old major will help. But modern digital circuits and embedded hardware space also have a lot of similarity to your muscle memory as a software developer.