I currently work as an in-house developer for a University of about 30k students. While there is less deadline stress, it's not exactly like actually being a st

I currently work as an in-house developer for a University of about 30k students. While there is less deadline stress, it's not exactly like actually being a student again. We have cubes and an organizational bias towards Java-Is-The-Best-Solution-For-Everything. That said, the people here are all happy. Employees get 22 paid vacation days a year, and the dress is casual, excepting meetings with the very high ups. There is no prototypical office asshole, and we usually have more money than people, so you have a lot of freedom to buy equipment you need or software that will solve a problem if it makes more sense than writing it yourself. It's kinda nice to be in-house and yet not have to reinvent the wheel. It leaves you free to tackle fun/interesting/non-cookie-cutter problems, rather than writing some ERP module that should be a commodity.