What direction of development to choose? Mobile Development or Web?

Question

Career in IT

About myself, I am 37 years old. I have been working as a 1C programmer since 2003. Before that, I wrote a little in Pascal and BASIC for myself. The first education is legal, this year he graduated from the master's program in applied informatics (in absentia). I would like to switch from 1C to more "adult" technologies, since the 1C market is highly dependent on the state of the economy in Russia. Currently, I have a family and two children to become a “padawan” on the minimum wage, there is no way, so I plan to study the material on my own and try to freelance in the evenings and weekends, in the future, if I have the opportunity to completely move away from 1c. Advise what is better to choose to study the Web or Mobile development? What is the most valuable thing in freelancing? It will also be necessary to join the team (remotely) since it is quite difficult to become a specialist on your own

Answer 1

Web technologies are more universal. Having studied JavaScript well, you can write both front-end and back-end for both websites and mobile applications. With such baggage, you will definitely not be lost, and you will always find a job, even here, even abroad. But there, fashion is constantly changing, more and more new frameworks appear and disappear regularly, and it will be extremely difficult to keep up with all the trends.
If you focus only on mobile development, say on Swift, for iOS, then the minimum salary bar is higher there, and it will be easier to enter this market (really, you need a Mac).
In general, now these 2 spheres are increasingly intertwined. The backend for both websites and mobile applications is written in approximately the same way.
So knowing only JS and a bunch of modern frameworks, you definitely won’t get lost, and you can decide what will be closer as you learn.

Answer 2

Mobile. The web is much more blurred, the fan of potential learning paths is many times wider. It's easier to get lost along the way, and you don't have much time for it.

Answer 3

I know a lot of people who started migrating from 1C. It seems the only adequate way to change the profile, without loss in the salary column - you need to look for vacancies where people are needed for integration with 1C (knowledge of the internal structure and api), of course, such specialists are especially popular in the corporate enterprise sector. As a rule, you need to learn something serious to the intermediate level (python, java, c # etc.), which will allow you to implement any integration + layout and front stack (as a thing with a fairly low entry threshold). Tailor your sql knowledge. And do not climb into mobile phones, there is no crowding.

Answer 4

Stay in 1C. If you have not spent years in vain, you are both a pro and you have connections.
If something else is interesting, it can be combined with 1C. For example, I have not yet seen an ordinary web developer be able to perfectly integrate an online store website with a 1C accounting system - this requires knowledge "at the intersection of technologies".

Answer 5

In your case, mobile development is more promising - a narrower range, salary limits are generally higher, demand is good. Especially for iOS and remotely abroad, there are not so many good specialists. Yes, and we now have this quite a profitable business, both under iOS and under Android.
Web development is easier to learn, but the spectrum is much wider. In my opinion, the market is oversaturated with "specialists" who are ready to do everything faster and cheaper, and it is much more difficult to lure an order from them. Therefore, freelancing in the evenings will give professional growth, but not earnings, at first for sure.
The only advantage of the web is if you learn JavaScript very well and become more skilled in node.js, Electron, React, Vue, etc. frameworks. - you can close the whole area from websites to mobile and desktop applications at once. But it's complicated.