Absolutely. Web development with Go and supporting some PHP and Python apps. Tech management understands and values developers. I typically spend less than 30 minutes a day in calls/standup with the rest of my time spent in active development. Most of our developers are remote, including myself. No after-hours availability requirements. How did I get here? Found the job online and applied.
Extremely fast, dead-simple to troubleshoot issues, and no javascript required.
Most users are mobile, so speed and reliability are the priorities. This setup works well and it's simple to notice when there are any issues or any non-2xx responses to any server or database calls.
I feel you. I left $BIGCO a few years ago. Here's what we're doing.
For databases, we seriously considered cockroach, but went with postgres. For source control, we use self-hosted gitlab.
For CI/CD, we use Go and bash exclusively. Our entire back-end/api is Go and we use Go templates on the front-end. Front-end is almost entirely straight html and css. There are handful of front-end javascript http calls if the customer has js enabled, but js is never required.
Auth uses jwt. The Go standard library makes it pretty easy. At $BIGCO, I did use Auth0, but it got very expensive.
We dont really need GraphQL, so that one's a no for us. For service metrics, we capture KPI data server-side and have an admin section/views for the business managers.
Our team is distributed - mostly US, but a few overseas. Slack for comms. Business managers and CTO prioritize support-tickets/feature-requests and they get assigned to developers. No formal sprints; just bundle features together into a release and test it.
There are several projects, but the largest is basically a very large specialized content platform. Many sites that have to be fast with no downtime - so Go, K8s, CockroachDB. We also have some machine learning (that's why we kept the Python). Also a few fun, small Raspberry Pi / GoBot things around the office.
Recently laid off at age 48. Less than a month later, had multiple offers with better compensation. Still in tech sector. Two years ago we switched from PHP to Go, which definitely helped.
I converted from PHP/Laravel to Go about two years ago. Performance is amazing. Plays well with k8s. There are several good frameworks, but I'm, so far, just using straight Go.
NoSQL is good if you need flexibility in the data you store. So if you wanted to start collecting user's twitter handles, you could easily add that and then stop collecting them anytime. So some records would have twitter handles and some wouldn't. The table structure wouldn't have to change.
Also, MongoDB in particular has a geospatial data index. So if you were using location data and querying by location (e.g. what's nearby a user's location) that's a great feature. Not sure if other NoSQL solutions have that or if just Mongo.