em7

Then I'm guilty of breaking the license. I have always been stealing code from Stack Overflow. Well, since I'm a senior dev right now I steal only from answers.

Sounds legit.

Can you make it an Enterprise Bean?

Well, I'd advise anyone to constantly look for opportunities. I used to job-hop roughly every 2-3 years because I got a better opportunity. But I stayed more than 6 years at my previous workplace. Not the best financial decision but I liked my job in applied research.

Not sure what financing applications you develop. But what you suggest wouldn't pass a code review in any financial-related project I saw.

Using integers for currency-related calculations and formatting the output is no dirty hack, it's industry standard because floating-point arithmetic is, on contemporary hardware, never precise (can't be, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 ) whereas integer arithmetic (or integers used to represent fixed-point arithmetic) always has the same level of precision across all the range it can represent. You typically don't want to round the numbers you work with, you need to round the result ;-) .

I used PHP voluntarily. 22 years ago there wasn't much choice. Java hosting options were expensive, Perl options were more expensive than PHP, C# didn't exist (this was the same year it came out!), Python 2 wasn't commonly installed by default on Linux distributions etc. No cloud, no Node.JS. If you had access to Windows server you could use VBScript - if you targeted Internet Explorer (versions 4 and 5 were dominant, 6 was new, it was the most popular internet browser at the time) you could use VBScript for both server-side and client-side scripting. Java applets were a thing. But if you didn't need that, PHP was the most accessible option. And since many hosting providers gave you similar versions of PHP and its libraries, you knew what could work and what not and that you could move your website from one hosting provider to another.

I would say yes, Java can be useful. Look into basics of Spring Boot. My previous job was greenfield development of cloud microservices in Spring Boot and Kafka. We used Azul JVM (the paid version with some cloud goodies) but GraalVM can compile your code AOT so it starts fast (not as fast as C++ but no sloth either). Java might not be only for old legacy systems. Java craze is over but Java didn't go away.

However Java as a language might not be everyone's coup of tea. I like it but you might not.

To me, it doesn't sound like a "no go". To me, it sounds like "consider to go [elsewhere]".

I've been coding for money for some 18 years. It's not unheard of to switch from one team to another or one product to another. Are you a contractor (i.e. self-employed independent contractor / consultant)? If so, you can definitely speak about autonomy and you can walk away from it if you don't like it. If you are an employee, there is no real autonomy whatsoever. HR departments of some companies might want you to believe that you are somewhat valuable for them, in reality, you are an expense - a resource. In any larger company, you are a cog in the wheel. They want you in another team? There might not be much you can do about it.

I don't really understand what your role really is. Social skills, research? Are you a manager? Are you a researcher? What does "all of that" mean?

If the language has really good type inference (Haskell comes to my mind though F# was quite nice as well) it's better. It really makes life much easier.

However when dealing with real-world problems (just moving data around which are changing constantly) the types don't really add that much, you need to test anyway. Test suites is what I need. Clojure and Common Lisp are OK.

Not sure whether that helps. If there is no critical mass they can just say "F... you".