[croodies]

>There are certainly fields / problems that interest me (low level embedded type stuff, low latency programming, etc.), but they tend to not be accessible to someone with my educational background (let alone professional).

I prefer doing some projects of my own to satisfy the nerdy/geeky guy in me. It's not so difficult to pick up on some IoT hardware projects and implement your own home automation.

For starters, perhaps procure the 3-4$ IoT gadgets (ESP8266 is very versatile) or an Arduino Uno (costs about 10$ for a clone) and try to learn a bit of electronics. Instructables.com is a great resource for this.

If this sort of a thing doesn't interest you - Then may check out writing chat bots (Telegram.org has a great BOT API) and there are many open source libs that support this so that you don't have to write the underlying methods each time.

All the best and hope this helps.

[bayesian_horse]

It's not quite clear to me how dabbling in Arduinos or Chatbots is leading to a career though.

[mcv]

I come across tons of projects that do something with chatbots. Apparently everybody wants one these days. (Probably to save on people for customer support, though.)