Are you currently still in Fort Wayne?  I graduated from Purdue 10 years ago, and was interested in staying in the midwest, but my best job offer was a 1 year contract at less than half the wages I took in California as a full-time employee.  Fort Wayne is cheaper than Santa Barbara, but not <i>that much</i> cheaper.  Furthermore friends who stayed in Indiana describe work conditions very similar to what you mention here.<p>One friend of mine switched from being a developer to a DBA and said everything except being on-call more was a huge improvement: much higher pay, more respect and if he did well it made a difference: his previous two jobs were such that he would get in no way rewarded more (not even someone else noticing) for quality code versus code that implemented only 60% of the features with tons of bugs.  Everyone notices if the database goes down.