Aren't you the dark horse, and I thought I knew most of your background eh lol. I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day who is one of their upper echelon techies at Dell, and I remarked saying I should have tried to get into a much bigger firm like Microsoft many years ago, instead of bouncing through shitty employers with bad attitudes whom ran medium to large sized firms. (Nothing to the scale of Microsoft.) Had I done that, or at least tried; I would't have minded one of those owl sleeping bags and a personal office space of my own. I also wouldn't have spent my time trying to grow a game dev team as a programming company back then had I known how saturated the industry already was. And compared to now, it hasn't improved. Anyway, I was telling my Dell friend, who suggested that I look elsewhere, as Microsoft wouldn't touch me because of my age regardless of my experience. Have you ever heard of Microsoft being prejudice towards employing staff members who are heading for their forties?
Isn't it ironic how some of us turn-out from childhood? I was terrible in school when it came to maths. I could't stand it, nor could I understand most maths classes regardless of the maths topic or the simplicity involved. Yet, I ended up in this field anyway. My mother back then (when i was in primary school) hired the smartest tutor in our country to teach me, and I remember him saying to my mother one day. He just doesn't absorb information, and I can't see a future for him. lol I find it funny now. I've been writing scripts in variety of languages for the last 20+ years or so, and I do that on the side from my actual programming job at .... probably best not putting that public.
It's something to think about,
all the great minds incredibly had some learning difficulties. I didn't have a learning disability, I just had no interest in learning what didn't interest me until I got into electronics and coding and soon found what sparked the wires in my brain to learn related subjects that I showed no interest in previously.