Currently I work in financial services and have been in my current role for 2 1/2 years. Pay and everything has been great, but the number of opportunities have really shrunk with the current downturn. However, even prior to that it seems like many functions had been moving away from the area I am in. It used to be there was 130 job openings in my area, now there is 60. Every once in a while there is something that catches my eye, but no one has called back so far. To make matters worse, my team seems to bleed talent and as a result we get a lot of OT. I have been taking advantage of this. Now it seems like every next step up (outside of one that is directly in my department) is salary and would cut my earnings by 10k if I took it, but I would not need to work as many hours. This leads me to a predicament. Even if I could invest in real estate (I own two places), none of the places on the market make sense from an investment point of view. Second, I could switch industries with a cheap degree, but that would negate the fact my company has an office in Dallas. What I am thinking is finishing up my cheap degree here (I am working on a software development cert that can be converted to college credits), then transfer to the office in Dallas.

I do have a bit of fear of missing out if I decide to transfer into software development as my current city is a tech hub and is close to the West Coast, but it seems like both my current city and places like Silicon Valley are kind of more suburb oriented. There is nothing wrong with this, but I want to be doing and I worry if I move to Dallas I might miss out on opportunities to work on interesting things. However, from the little I have seen of Dallas (visiting for a few days), it seems like there is more to do than the city I am in or places like Silicon Valley. I just want to work on interesting things and I worry that either way I am screwed. Would Dallas be better overall do you think to build a career or work on interesting things?