Many programmer start of employed by companies within IT departments or software houses, often these organisations don't value high quality programmers, preferring to promote them out of programming into design and management roles. This doesn't leave a career route for people who want to be programmers all their life.

So most programmers give up what they enjoy and are good at for a pay increase, some leave and become freelancers and some like me accept a comfortable living, in a low stress environment; no commuting, no boss, no politics.

Although most people don't like hearing it, almost every business is the same from an operational perspective, so whatever you want, I have probably done it before.

As I am free to choose what I do, I am also up-to-date on the latest technologies as well as happy working with "what came out 30 years ago". If you want to keep your COBOL app going for another 20 years, fine by me, as it starting again with a .Net browser based solution.

For an experienced developer the web or the desktop is just the matter of a different presentation layer, but the user experience and the cost of development are quite different because of the fundamentally different models of computing.

These differences are explained here.

C# and VB.Net - These are the most popular languages used by businesses wanting Microsoft Windows based systems.

C++ and C - Outside of technical projects these languages are falling out of use, they deliver high performance solutions at the expense of longer development times. However programmers who can use these languages often write better code in other langauges as they have learnt a lot.

VBA/VB - The mainstream PC business systems development language prior to .Net.

COBOL - Out of favour outside of legacy mainframe systems, but a good balance between productivity and performance.

BCPL - Totally obsolete.

Assemblers - The best possible performance at the cost of very low programmer productivity.

MS SQL Server - Probably the most popular choice for SMEs.

Oracle - Still a major player.

PostgreSQL - A major Open Source database.

MySQL - Probably the most popular Open Source database.

MS Access - The dominant personal database, but it is also a lot more attached to an SQL Server database it is a great Rapid Application Environment.

dBase - Once the dominant personal database.