The answer to this question depends heavily on your location. For example, I live in Cleveland and it's dominated by .NET companies, so for someone here, my ans

The answer to this question depends heavily on your location. For example, I live in Cleveland and it's dominated by .NET companies, so for someone here, my answer to "how do I get to paying my bills" (ignoring any other factor) would be to learn .NET. Other cities are dominated by Java, or ruby or node.js in some cases. In any case, you'd also be well-advised to learn some basic frontend (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) since every tech stack I mentioned needs a frontend to go with it. How to figure out what's popular in your city? Searching job postings can definitely help, see what the common trends are. It also helps just to talk with folks in your local tech scene. Google "<your city> tech slack" -- most major cities have a general-purpose slack team for the local tech community, and you should have no problem finding some general information.