I have scanned the comments and don’t believe that what I’m about to say has been addressed – if I”m wrong, feel free to ignore.
You are a software guy. If you are good, there must be something that you could produce, independently, that someone would be interested in. Not sure about the terms of your employment agreement, but if you have legal room to generate and sell your own software I would think you should be putting your free time toward that. I don’t know anything about you, but my feeling is that if one were to put good engineers and good real estate agents/brokers on a Venn diagram, there would be little to no intersection of those two circles. Why try to retrain yourself when the skills you already have are valuable? I have six (at least) ideas of web based services that I think would be marketable – maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but if I have that many I’m sure you have more (and if you don’t, that’s something to think about).
Most people want others to give them a job. When they do that, they sell their time and there is only a finite amount of time. On the other hand, if you start your own business and you come up with Flappy Bird, or similar, you can sell millions of downloads in a day. And I’m being a little facetious, you don’t have to have a blockbuster – a little extra income goes a long way depending on how you invest it.
