While my career has mostly been as an AI practitioner, Java was also very good for my career. Sun had a link for a year on their Java home page to a blog article I wrote on the Java world tour so for about 10 years I was the first search hit for “Java consultant” which was nice enough.
Except for periodically updating my Java AI book [1] (5th edition was released July 2020), I don’t much use Java because most of my customers want to use a Lisp language.
Where should Java go now? I think both OpenJDK and also Oracle are doing a good job adding new features. I would vote for faster startup time; keep improving language conciseness; better data initialization literals.