Well I make more doing what I'm doing now (Mix of a lot of things, mainly C/C++). I am a jQuery / PHP person as that was what I learned first. Web is more of a side project for me whenever I get some inspiration to do something I haven't done before. Looked a bit into node recently, it seems to do some cool stuff but seems to be too unwieldy for anything I'd want to do.

When I'm on major websites there's more Backbone and old jQuery than angular, maybe some KnockoutJs and Ember here and there too.

I'd assume this is because these sites that are already developed and integrating Angular into them would be a pain in the ass at this point. I'm under the impression that Angular was designed to "succeed" jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and a lot of other JS Frameworks (Mind you, my understanding of Angular is also a few years out of date). It would make sense for newer sites to integrate Angular.

we're a deep Rails stack (Google favors Python & Java)

Which would follow trends from a few years ago when it was Rubypalooza and everyone and their mother said to use Ruby (I honestly don't remember this, I've only read about it).

Twitter's Bootstrap (which personally I dis-like)

Can I get an amen here?

Once you move past Stack as a crutch, it's about paying attention to the constantly changing web landscape. A lot of people don't have that energy but will remain gainfully employed.

Can you pleases tell me when this is going to stop? I used to love doing web development and then I realized that skill in web development is 99% based on looking at whatever Google is doing at the moment and copying it and won't pursue it as a career as I prefer to just do other things instead.

Well my job is 40% googling Stack Overflow, 40% reading documentation and 20% guesswork.

Oh yea and I do some programming.

Data Structures: An Advanced Approach using C is also a very good book for data structures.