Every time I've gotten a response to a resume sent to Craig's List, it's been a legit job. Perhaps this differs by category (I'm a programmer), but I don't see many scam jobs- just the occasional person who thinks programming is an order of magnitude cheaper than it is.

Advertising is the next bubble. Advertising budgets are relatively fixed, but the number of companies chasing those dollars are growing at an expanding rate. The dot com crash will be followed by the mobile app crash and web 2.0 crash in the next few years.

Ooh, I know. We could have a central authority that serves the domain->key mappings via an internet protocol. We could call it DKS- domain key service.

Or you know, that could be why it was hierarchial to begin with. Peer to peer isn't always the right answer.

Good point. And my current schedule reflects this- my 6 month bonus is going to send me to Europe for a few months. What I wanted here was more to get opinions, see what others in this situation have done.

I agree, that definitely helps. My current job has been cool in that respect- I've heard people talking about my software on the bus, in lines at stores, etc. It's made it a lot more fun to work on.

Maybe I'm trying to figure out what I should find in the next job? I'm not staying with the new company because I dislike the new owners. They actually bought the previous (and totally unrelated) startup I worked for as well.

Not in the games industry. The last job was mobile software. Eh I was going to be mysterious so I couldn't be traced back to my name, but screw it. I worked at a company called Swype making mobile phone keyboards. I was the lead developer for the Android platform, which included responsibility for most of the core (since Android was more than 95% of volume shipped).

That sounds like my job. I'm 50% dev, 50% PM, and 20% people manager. There are weeks when I don't code at all, just respond to bugs with various forms of "by design", "won't fix", or comments on how to fix it and ship it off to some junior engineer. I try to fix one or two real bugs myself, but my days are so full of talking to PMs, managers, etc that I just don't have time.

I don't hate the role. There are times when the lack of coding annoys me, but there's other times when I actually enjoy my additional responsibilities (seeing a junior dev I mentored coming into his own) and the force multiplier it can bring (just being able to write down how to fix a problem I know off the bat and not having to go through all the trivial work of implementing the solution). But I don't have much of the management overhead other than dealing with my team- I don't do budgets, planning meetings, etc. And I'm not sure I would want them, so I've been hesitant to move up in the management side.

To form a startup (I have no interest in being a consultant type, I despise business networking and self-salesmanship) I'd need a brilliant idea. I'm out of those at the moment. I'd also need someone else to do the business end. I understand business, but I'm not enough of a people person to do the sales/marketing stuff with non-technical people.

Also, I have a mortgage. That makes me leery of not having income for more than a year. I'd need to get angel funding very quickly, which once again requires a hell of an idea. I'm really not the type of guy who comes up with revolutionary ideas, I'm the type who figures out how to implement one or does small evolutionary type ideas.

I've had a pretty varied career so far. My first job was firmware, I did that for 4 and a half years. I did back end web services for 2 and a half . I did porting to proprietary OSes for two. I've now done Android development for 2 more. I did some short contract stints in between doing odds and ends, the longest one programming for a really bad ERP system.

Another change in domain (or going back to one I haven't done in a while) would definitely be a possibility. It would make it seem less of a move sideways. I'm definitely keeping my options open on that front.