I feel like your perspective is very narrow. You’ve had a bad experience at one company that you admit has done well for almost all their employees, therefore all companies are evil and your chance of happiness is zero? That doesn’t seem reasonable or even likely. May I recommend “Feeling Good” by David Burns? It has helped many people in situations like yours.

"therefore all companies are evil"

Not evil, but that they lie and screw over employees. Are there any companies on Glassdoor with 100% positive ratings (with n>100)?

Would you ever expect that for anything? There are always going to be disgruntled employees/customers. if I see 100% positive, I'm usually looking for the scam.

Glassdoor is a terrible metric for measuring companies.

Like any rating system it is biased towards people with grievances, as they are motivated to look for an outlet to express that grievance.

And it's likely thar at least some of those grievances where born out of misconduct by the company. Bringing us back to my position that all companies lie and screw over workers, that the ones that look good just mean you aren't witnessing it.

Find me any situation anywhere in the world where there are no bad actors.

Companies are made up of people, this happens everywhere. You're just describing life. This is not a problem specific to "companies".

Or, on the other hand, I've seen companies offering to enter you into gift card drawings to relate your positive experience with them on glassdoor, etc. :eyeroll: To me, glassdoor and the like are similar to Amazon reviews, you can't trust them, but it sometimes feels like the only way to _possibly_ get the information you're seeking.

Obscure tech is also an opportunity to be one of those rare specialists in a field. A Linux expert still gets rewarded more than a Windows one in a desktop management role, though it's certainly harder to find a job in the first place.

But this is also a personality thing. I prefer being a specialist on something unique over one of many on a big team.

I agree with you that when the obscure tech is simply the wrong one for the scenario, it's bad. If you don't believe in it yourself it's really hard to commit to it. In that case it's probably better to find another position or even another company..

I recall thinking that my friend who had decided to gamble on Objective-C as his specialization in '95 was being foolish, because NeXT wasn't doing that well, and the hazard pay for being one of the last N experts was probably fraught.

Less than 2 years later NeXT merges with Apple, and Steve Jobs has begun the biggest comeback in tech history, including switching Apple to Objective-C. Well then...

This sort of thing is a lottery ticket. You likely will not win, but if you do it could just make a couple extra car payments, or you could be set for life.

True, but I don't see Filenet and Neoxam ever getting big.

No, and any framework that your architectural astronaut coworkers created is most definitely not going to ever be used anywhere else you ever work. And in fact the decisions it made may well be counter to industry accepted practices outside of that company.

I have specialized on Pascal, XPath, and causal (Bayesian) networks

I do not know how to make a career out of that :/