Depending on your background, taking a gig in R&D or a rapid prototyping shop can be very clarifying, and you get to use and bring to play lots of old skills th

Depending on your background, taking a gig in R&D or a rapid prototyping shop can be very clarifying, and you get to use and bring to play lots of old skills the young folk don't even know about. You don't have to really worry about framework, just pick one. Or you might end up reworking fundamental data structure code, which can be really fun for an exercise of algorithmic design. On the other-hand, maybe it's time to go multi-disciplinarian, take a gig connected to, but completely outside of your comfort zone. Nothing put me into a state of panicked "I need to learn from the firehose" mode faster than this. I'm not even talking technical work, go be a manager, or an industry analyst, work on soft skills or liberal arts fields. Your old skills can provide interesting viewpoints nobody else has.