gdfer

I received a computer science degree ~12 yrs ago and have worked successfully in the field as programmer, team lead and dev manager. Most of my experience comes from developing enterprise apps in Java.

While I've had a successful career thus far, consistently get great reviews & make a good wage, I am also getting ... bored I guess.

I'm considering various options -one idea that's piqued my interest lately is furthering my education a bit (would have to do online learning) and making a transition to working in a more specialized area of comp sci such as cyber security or machine learning. I don't have much experience in cyber security (have done some pen testing/fixing of java web apps -OWASP type stuff) and have virtually no experience with AI/machine learning concepts. I just find these things fascinating.

I guess I'm curious: Has anyone made a similar career change from a more general developer type of role to something like cyber security or machine learning? How did that go for you? What should my expectations be and what are some suggestions for investigating and going about this?

Lastly -I don't work in or near a big city and would probably have to work remotely (I've been doing remote Java consulting successfully for a while) or move. Not sure if these specializations are conducive to remote workers so I wonder if anyone can shed any light on that.