Developer tip No. 4: Eye on the new stuff, hands on the practical

Exceptionally young developers have a tendency to work on the shiny. Ruby is probably my favorite programming language, but it doesn't pay (on average) as much as Java, and the market is smaller. This may not always be true. Scala looks like it's coming on strong, but don't kid yourself about the market size -- it isn't here yet. On the other hand, don't stay still so long that you are the future equivalent of a COBOL or PowerBuilder developer either.