I was talking last week to my manager's manager about how I was staying
busy on the bench.  I told him I was working on a dice roller in Python,
which was the first program I'm writing for myself, and that I was having a
lot of fun and learning new stuff.  I said the other thing I was doing was
working on a Scala 3 class on Coursera, and that it was really
challenging,but I enjoyed it.  Since the boss in a businessman he was
interested in applications of Scala.  I told him it was used where safety
was an issue, like finance and energy trading.  (Lots of Scala 2
programmers are 1. upset Scala 3 isn't 100% backward compatible with Scala
2,  that it's not as mature as Scala 2, and *above all* they are angry that
it preferentially uses syntactic white space.   I like syntactic white
space.  It's harder to write, but easier to read, and when maintaining code
reading is fundamental.).  Scala also has some rapidly fading application
in data science, but even data science tools written in Scala are now
optimized mostly for use in Python.

A lot of functional languages seem to come into their own when quality and
safety are important enough to justify their low market share and
consequent high cost of development.

The manager's manager wanted to know what are some similar niche,
high-specialization--high-wage types IT jobs are out there.  He's in the
contracting and consulting business, I think it's mostly just professional
curiosity, but I don't know where to start a search.