Went back to school in 2004 after being unable to find a decent job for 2.5 years, started in Jan 2001 as a database developer, and held onto that for a year and a half. The company is hospitality based, and after 17 months they finally cut me loose as tourism was very flat.
I finished my Masters of Mechanical Engineering in December 2010.
I am once again a database developer. I sent engineering resumes to all regions of the US, and got about two phone calls back for jobs paying ~50k a year. I posted my IT resume on Dice and within 2 hours I had 3 calls about jobs.
WTF.
So here I am, masters of engineering, and Im programming databases. Getting paid pretty good though, so I cant complain. Interesting how things go though.