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Ask Slashdot: It's 2014 -- Which New Technologies Should I Learn?
An anonymous reader writes "I've been a software engineer for about 15 years, most of which I spent working on embedded systems (small custom systems running Linux), developing in C. However, web and mobile technologies seem to be taking over the world, and while I acknowledge that C isn't going away anytime soon, many job offers (at least those that seem interesting and in small companies) are asking for knowledge on these new technologies (web/mobile). Plus, I'm interested in them anyway. Unfortunately, there are so many of those new technologies that it's difficult to figure out what would be the best use of my time. Which ones would you recommend? What would be the smallest set of 'new technologies' one should know to be employable in web/mobile these days?"
Objective-C for iOS
This. Since you already have 15 years of C experience, you should pick this up quick. And it will set you apart from all the noob JS/php "developers" whose only knowledge of C is that it's the third letter of the alphabet.
On the plus side, Embedded programmers get about twice as much as web programmers. Switch to contracting if you want more money - around $50 per hour for web developers $30 to $75 and around $100 per hour for embedded programmers ($75 to $200). I'm not an expert on rates. This is just people I've met. It's a small sample but it makes sense. Embedded C programmers with more than 3 years of experience are damn hard to find. It's a niche market.
On the minus side, there are fewer Embedded programming jobs out there so you have to travel farther and often you can't work from home because you need to be with the hardware and often there aren't enough hardware to let you take one home. Or you need expensive debugging equipment like oscilloscopes, etc. Again I'm talking about contracting where you will have to travel to different places every time you get a new contract and they will be farther away than those web development contracts.
I recommend you stick with embedded C and if you want to learn something, learn how to use an oscilloscope, read a schematic and study some basic electronics so that when something doesn't work you can tell the Electrical Engineer exactly what is wrong instead of just saying "it's broken". This is how you get in the upper end of the salary range.
If you do switch to web programming then obviously you need to know: html, javascript, SQL. Those are the most basic and key things you need to understand.