That sucks. What part of the country do you live in?
My advice: keep learning cool stuff, go to networking events (e.g. meetups, especially related to NLP, machine learning, and Scala) get some job leads there. Cold-emailing your resume rarely gets you anything, especially when you're in a career sand trap. But you have a skillset that, if you're strong in what you've cited, is desirable.
You will eventually get a feel for how much investment you need to put into your day job to keep it, and you can use the remainder of your time (which may be 20-35 hours of your work week) to keep current with the skills you want. If you're writing code on company time, be careful and make sure not to use it for any closed-source purpose, because you don't want your employer asserting ownership.
You can get out of the sandtrap but you'll have to break the rules to do it. Stealing an education from a boss feels dirty when you're young and naive, but it's a necessary survival skill and, in a world where bait-and-switch hiring is common as dirt, not at all unethical.
I'm in Houston which is not a great city for that skillset.
I do extremely little for my job, so little I honestly started to wonder if I was missing something. Then I slowly realized my coworkers are morons. A few weeks ago, I was asked to create a directory structure for a bunch of incoming data files, a few hundred directories all told. Another person was tasked to do the same on a different server.
I spent about ten minutes on it because I wrote a shell script. He did it by hand and spent all day. Which, of course, is what I told my boss it took me as well. I just happened to use the rest of my time to read Akka in Action.
My advice: keep learning cool stuff, go to networking events (e.g. meetups, especially related to NLP, machine learning, and Scala) get some job leads there. Cold-emailing your resume rarely gets you anything, especially when you're in a career sand trap. But you have a skillset that, if you're strong in what you've cited, is desirable.
You will eventually get a feel for how much investment you need to put into your day job to keep it, and you can use the remainder of your time (which may be 20-35 hours of your work week) to keep current with the skills you want. If you're writing code on company time, be careful and make sure not to use it for any closed-source purpose, because you don't want your employer asserting ownership.
You can get out of the sandtrap but you'll have to break the rules to do it. Stealing an education from a boss feels dirty when you're young and naive, but it's a necessary survival skill and, in a world where bait-and-switch hiring is common as dirt, not at all unethical.