Title: So, my most recent stint at Microsoft just didn&#x27;t work out. The tech was cool, but the day-to-day workflow was tedious and torturous. I only held out for 4 months - my shortest gig ever, but it really was the most I could muster. I really wanted it to work, but ultimately couldn&#x27;t strike that bargain with myself.<p>So... now I&#x27;m back to living on couches and wondering &#x2F; researching where I might still be able to be useful and productive in the world. It&#x27;s not an easy question. There are more technology stacks than ever, and I&#x27;m suffering very severe paradox of choice. I sure miss the &quot;good old days&quot; when you just focused on writing a single app in C that ran on a well-understood machine, or even a single well-understood OS API. But those days are mostly gone. Now it&#x27;s all distributed, multi-level conglomerates of varied frameworks and languages sort-of working together. I can&#x27;t decide whether I have any interest in that. I sort of envy the people who can simply state, &quot;I am a Rails dev&quot; or similar.<p>I feel a lot of pressure to pick a niche. Something. Anything. Because living on couches gets old, fast, and even more dire financial straits await after that. So I&#x27;m being driven by the stick, and not the carrot - which is an unpleasant position.<p>I found a great game (on Steam) called TIS-100, where you progress by writing small, well-defined programs in assembly language, for a strange, highly constrained imaginary processor. It&#x27;s great for its pure distillation of machine-level programming. There was a time when people used to get payed for doing what you do in this game. In other words, I fear I&#x27;m getting old, and my career options have just begun to seem uncomfortable.
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