A have worked most of my career all over the travel industry and there is a huge shift I have noticed in the past couple of years. First of all the companies i

A have worked most of my career all over the travel industry and there is a huge shift I have noticed in the past couple of years. First of all the companies in this space are massive having thousands of developers and secondly these companies typically have an old industrial mindset of never firing or retiring people and absolutely never making hard transitional decisions that impact the work force. All of these companies are shifting as much as they can, if they aren't there already, to conduct as many transactions as possible over a website. Most of these companies have been around forever and have been engaged with selling online, in some capacity, since the 90s. The problem with that is that until about 9 years ago web technologies were slow and nobody took them seriously. Even now formal training in web technologies is rare. This is problematic because more is continually demanded from web technologies and the majority of the work force is completely lost. The universal technology in every one of these companies is Java and it dominates nearly all aspects of development at every stage. Java isn't a web technology. The result of that problem differs by company due to internal perceptions of technology and company culture. One company I worked with was growing its revenue and market incredibly fast outpacing their peers and historical norms. This group had the freedom to make candid decisions about their future and reality in general. They had the most bench-warmers of any group I worked with, but they also realized the future is in JavaScript instead of Java. The challenge is that legacy developers wanted to learn this "new" way, but transitioning is hard, especially if you aren't doing that work in your job. There was a lingering fear of obsolescence here. One company I worked for refused to figure it out. They were confronted by all manners of technology decisions they could not agree upon resulting in different layers of management doing their own things without agreement. The only strong part of that business was marketing. The company folded and somebody bought the brand for super cheap with a skeleton crew. One company I worked for waited very late to accept this reality and struggled to figure it out. There is a JavaScript layer, which is largely a vanity architectural layer over and reliant upon the legacy Java layer. This group has done well by cornering large areas of the marketing and acquiring competition. The technology is slow compared to their competitors, expensive to maintain, and very painful to work on. Many of the developers refused to abandon doing as much as possible in Java and will often block new code submissions that could be better served in Java. There was no fear of obsolescence because nobody in a decision making capacity was willing to do things in a new ways. I cannot imagine what this industry will look like 10 years from now as the technologies and developers continue to age and new blood continues to either burn out or grudgingly conform to the old technologies.