Interestingly, locally to me most software development jobs want Oracle, Java, and Microsoft to be on your resume. There's an odd posting here and there for em

Interestingly, locally to me most software development jobs want Oracle, Java, and Microsoft to be on your resume. There's an odd posting here and there for embedded developers (bare metal, Linux, RTOS, etc), but by and large, if you can't do Oracle, Java, and Microsoft (.NET, etc), you're going to have way less jobs to apply for. Ruby, Python, Haskell, and other things discussed on HN don't seem to be in demand based on my limited searching around. I'd postulate that working in startups will net you skills that are valuable to other startups. Working in established companies using "enterprise" software systems will net you value to other "enterprise" software companies. On a slightly sad but related note, there's not much on indeed.com for mechanical engineers. They all seem to be leaving upstate NY even faster than the software people. Personally, I'd like to see more local jobs posted for up-and-coming tech. I think OpenCL / CUDA has quite a future solving some rather hard problems quite a bit faster.