My advice: 1) Do some contract work, just to build some cash, networking, and confidence. It can expose you to more different parts of the industry in 3 month

My advice: 1) Do some contract work, just to build some cash, networking, and confidence. It can expose you to more different parts of the industry in 3 months than working in a big corporation ever will. -- Search for gigs via personal contacts, craigslist, and then guru / scriptlance / rentacoder, in that order. The gigs get progressively worse as you work down that. -- Although your former employer sounds like a shit place to work, and most people kind of glorify thier first real-world employer, feel free to hit them for contract work which YOU WILL DO FROM HOME. Emphasis on that last part. Charge them 3 times whatever your salary worked out to be previously; 2 times is standard, but if they fired you, stick it to them for 3. 2) There are plenty of places that hire coders with odd personal habits, sometimes far in excess of odd work hours. Apply to different places and mention your work hours in a cover letter. If you go through a couple of 1 month stands at places that don't work out, don't feel bad, you don't have to mention an employment period that short on your resume. 3) What do you actually expect to be that different about academia ? You can't be a student forever, so at some point you will be the equivalent of a freelancer in academia -- you will set your own hours, but your income will be largely determined by the grants you can pull in or what you produce for your professor. There are academic employers that can be as obnoxious about meeting times and etc as companies are, although they are less common. Finally, you are likely to embedded in a giant bureaucratic institution with many of the disadvantages of that, but lacking the security that traditionally comes from working in a really big corporation. In reality, the age of big institutions is over -- if you work for a giant corporation, you still have to constantly re-apply for your job and fight for health care and have a substantial possibility of getting laid off because some MBA invested in CDOs. We are all freelancers now, but only some people realize it. That's a different post. As a final observation, I would say that you seem to be pretty down emotionally right now, and even mild depression is often associated with weird sleep patterns. Consider the possibility that when your life doesn't suck as much, your sleep problems might be more manageable even if they are still there. I would make a fairly simple list of goals, such as "this month I will make $300 from contracting on craigslist" and "this week I will apply to 5 companies that sound exciting" and try to hit them in a fairly disciplined way every day, even if "every day" means "every night". If you start hitting a few goals, you can at least build some forward momentum.