C/C++ is very relevant today, and will be just as relevant tomorrow.

When I was in high school, I made web sites for realtors. This was back in the 90s when any sorta webpage would pretty much do. Looking back, there were a lot of areas I was lacking in.

One was simple business skills. First is finding a decent niche to sell your services to. That was pretty much handed to me given one of my parents was in real estate. Apart from that though, is marketing yourself. As a skilled developer, you have the ability to bring value to other people. You have to be able to convince these people of this simple fact. This is a whole different skill/world than development. It's a skill that is equally valuable in life though.

Anyways, a few random tips. Don't undervalue yourself, your skills, and what value you are providing to others. It's probably worth more than you think. As far as payment, work out what is agreeable to both parties. This again comes down to "business skills". Also, a good knowledge of your local laws is handy where as a worst case scenario.

Finally, take what work you can get that doesn't sound horrible to you. Any work is good work. In the "real world", most jobs are not dream jobs. It's one of those sad facts of life.

The more physical things we can get rid of, the better

I for one I'm quite happy to not have a closet full of 286/386/486/PIIs/PIIIs/etc boxes and peripherals... so much less stuff to store/maintain/move. It also makes you look like a sane person when you bring a woman home =)

You mean after selling MySpace to Rupert Murdoch at the height of MySpace's popularity? Seriously?

+1 to moding parent up.

You won't get far convincing a product owner that you should spend months writing tests for the entire system.

Convincing someone that you should write unit tests for all new functionality to help guarantee the bug fix/new feature will continue to always work into the future is a much easier sell.

As someone who has suffered from chronic RSI for years, your best bet is an external input device. You can alternate between a mouse, and some of the other options out there. When I'm on the road, I've found the ozupad to be a decent alternative option. http://www.ozupad.com/ Between a tracpad, a mouse, and an ozupad, you can change things up enough to hopefully avoid the worst of the repetitive motions.

Technically RIM still holds the biggest smart phone market share with the iPhone in 2nd place.

As long as all the synthetic organisms are as hot as Jessica Alba, I'm pretty ok with this...

Or maybe they will define the lowest common denominator of standards support through their market share. Again.

For application deployment and management post-imaging, check out Filewave as an alternative to Radmind and Casper that others have mentioned. It works great with large scale deployments (even Adobe products), and can also works with Windows as well. Basically, it gives you the ability to add, modify, and remove any file on the HD over the network on all your machines.

This one time I had to work under heavy time constraints, in a night club, receiving fellatio, with a gun pointed to me head!

The whole operation the employer was running was a bit shady, but thankfully it worked out in the end.

Right after graduating I managed to get into the game industry as a programmer. The trick?

Internships!

If you look on craigslist (I'm in the SF bay area so your mileage my vary) there are tons and tons of postings looking for cheap/free programmers in the form of internships. You gota put in your time there instead of putting in your time in QA.

Since you have been in QA a few years, you should talk to your manager about moving on to a jr level programmer position in your company. If they are willing to work with ya, problem solved. If not, time to move on ASAP.