I mean… will any employer possibly care if I told them that I've worked through half of SICP, internalized maybe thirty Emacs commands, can do some moderately interesting stuff with sed and pipes on Unix, and can write crappy Perl code? Will all of this stuff remain merely a secret weapon of mine while I continue on in work environments where such tools are unknown, actively feared, or completely off the radar?
Now what?
Start your own company (duh, right?), or become a manager at one. If you know these things, you can probably spot talent a lot better than the average manager... and companies want managers who can spot talent well.
An average programmer learns a variety of tools that lead him to a series of epiphanies.
With his eyes open, he no longer can cope with the lame blubiness of his career, but he finds him self pigeonholed by his old job description. He doesn't have the credentials to strike off into a job that would allow for more professional growth. But he had no idea that the many small development choices he'd been making over time would lead to this crisis. Now what?
I'm not normally found arguing in favor of the grad school option, but every tool has its use. If you're in a place where you can't imagine getting a job outside of the narrow boundaries of your resume, you need a different environment with different friends and colleagues. It's time to escape the resume-ruled world for a while and get a master's degree.
When you emerge from school it will be like being born again: Society will understand it when you declare that you no longer want to be known as a Blub guy -- you'll have moved to a higher plane, or at least a different one. Plus you'll have a lot of smart friends who might want to help start a company.
Other options include: start a company [1], downshift your career (find the job that you think you want, find the entry-level job that leads toward that, and get that job -- swallow your pride), build some independent projects (websites or open-source projects) and launch them... or all of the above.
[1] Here on news.yc I'm contractually obligated to include this advice somewhere in every post.
> Grad school.
This is not the first time I've seen you write something like this; so as a general question, how would one who hasn't had much involvement in academia (perhaps ever) get back into (perhaps into) academia?
Let's define our terms carefully. When I use the word "academia", I usually mean "getting a job that's on the career path to becoming a tenured professor, at least in theory".
If that's what you're asking about, I can talk about that, although my first advice will be to forget all about it. ;) But that's not what I'm recommending in the post above. I'm not even recommending going to grad school for the credential, exactly. I'm recommending going to grad school because it's a great, society-approved excuse to quit your job, get the hell out of your cubicle, take some interesting classes, do some small and interesting projects (either for school or on the side) with a bunch of other smart people who have similar interests, and change the direction of your resume.
(There are obviously other ways to accomplish the goal of changing your career's direction, and one of those might be better. But this particular scenario -- a person who feels trapped by their own job history -- just smelled to me like someone who might prefer the grad school route. It's a fairly safe, classic, and well-respected way to mix your life up a bit for a year or two.)
At the "halfway through SICP" level, it's probably a bit early to start projects that are interesting. Do you have any pointers for finding open source Lisp projects that could use beginners?
Actually, halfway through SICP sounds like a great place to start projects that are interesting. For example, my first real exposure to Lisp was through Arc. The tutorial was enough for me to write a basic ray tracer (I submitted it to the unofficial arc repository a few months back).
I've never looked for open source lisp projects myself, but I'd give a site like github a try (just search for Lisp).
Now what?
Start your own company (duh, right?), or become a manager at one. If you know these things, you can probably spot talent a lot better than the average manager... and companies want managers who can spot talent well.