Switching from Test to Dev after 4 years as a black-box tester at a Networking company. I have no clue about what things to look out for - technologies, work-flow. Need some help. [x-post /r/cscareerquestions]

I started working at a networking company 4 years back as a Test Engineer. I would say my work involves 50% black-box testing, and 50% automation of these tests.

In the last 4 years, I got a good idea about the domain, but got bored eventually and decided to switch to something involving more coding. So right now, I studied, interviewed and got an SDE role from a large networking company based in the Bay Area. After receiving this, I spoke with my manager about Development opportunities within my current company, and he offered me the chance to look at the different teams and take a call on what interests me.

Problem is - in the last 4 years, I have managed to completely pigeon-hole myself. So all the advances when it comes to Software Development - in the networking field, as that is relevant here - are just buzzwords to me.

I have these questions:

1) What do I look for when I go about choosing a team? What are some interesting technologies to look out for in the networking space? Currently, I am going off of language. I code in C++. But I feel basing my decision on that might not be wise. So what else do I look at? We have teams that work on the User Plane, then individual control plane modules related to domain, a platform team which write the drivers and stuff(?) and are developing our virtualized solutions.

2) If I choose to go to the new company, what all things do I take care of - so I get up to speed ASAP - with regards to technologies (in networking AND as a developer in the current market), coding, designing software. I do not want to be in such a helpless position ever again.

Any help would be great!