Frankly I am tired of all the complexity and over engineering of enterprise Java. For all the effort, I find most apps are large (1+ MLOC), monolithic, hard to

Frankly I am tired of all the complexity and over engineering of enterprise Java. For all the effort, I find most apps are large (1+ MLOC), monolithic, hard to understand and maintained by large groups of onshore/offshore resources who just keep the stuff running by sheer numbers and have no pride in their craft. If this is the type of thing you want to move away from, then I don't think that the problem is teams that use Java - the problem seems to be working for large enterprises. I suggest that as a first step, ignore any questions of language/platforms/tools and instead think about what type of company you would like to be working for: a small start-up, a more-established medium size business, etc. Do you want to work in a place where the primary business product is software (i.e. a software development company), a place where software is something that is done in support of the primary product being sold, or are you interested in consulting for others? Once you decide what type of environment you'd like to work in, then the rest of the decisions follow naturally from that. As a single anecdote, I work for a medium-to-large software-as-a-service company business where most of our work is in Java, but we are very far from the notion of monolithic apps with 1M LOC and offshore teams. The language/tools are not the problem, it's the people/organization.