All I would say is, aim much lower, pick up plain old ugly Java, learn Spring, Hibernate. From being a "bad" advanced algorithms Lisp / C++ developer it's an ea

All I would say is, aim much lower, pick up plain old ugly Java, learn Spring, Hibernate. From being a "bad" advanced algorithms Lisp / C++ developer it's an easy jump to be an "ok" CRUD apps developer / Enterprise drone. You will nail the technical interviews, just try not to be overqualified. Pick up either Spring/Java/Hibernate for the corporate "boring" market (but still well paid / plenty of offering) Or Rails / Django for the still cool startup market You can make a good living as a CRUD app developer, many of us do just that. reading through SICP is a huge bonus, but not a requirement to get a job in this "improving, but not yet fully ready for functional programming" world. Did you ask yourself sometimes if you are perhaps overqualified? or causing the impression that you are going to over complicate things? Did it occur to you that you are maybe making interviewers look stupid as you give them a functional solution you learned in SICP to a problem they had in mind a imperative, for loop, lot's of shared state solution to? Perhaps you are too good of a developer for your own good? I interviewed and hired lot's of developers, and having someone "too smart" is sometimes as bad as having someone who is, well, the opposite... Try to go to a professional mock interviews service, and check if it's indeed you being a bad developer or something else, check anything, gee, check even your breath, (not kidding, had candidates who were brilliant but simply had bad breath, I was the only one decent enough to tell them that I guess as they didn't understand why they can't seem to get a job) not that I'm saying that this is your problem, but don't go and say that you being a bad programmer is the reason without very serious investigation. Take it as a debugging task, rule out anything, I'm pretty sure you are a developer much better than many others happily employed that the moment...