Wow, you really have been out of the loop for 8 years. These days all you have to do is read a Rails/Ruby tutorial and go find one of the infinitely many jobs available out there. Once you get the feel for writing code again and get you skills back look for another more satisfying job.

Most productive programmers know that it is impossible to judge how productive another coder is by any method short of actually working with them. So interviews these days, I find, are significantly easier than they were 8 to 10 years ago when people asked irrelevant math questions to judge how productive of a coder you are.

Some points:

The world of programming has changed significantly in the last 8 years -- all the stuff you may have thought was good programming practice is now questioned by a dozen and a half blog posts/articles. Even the mighty if statement is under fire.

I think in general programmers are more friendly than they were 8 - 10 years ago. Perhaps because there are more of us which is forcing more of us off our opal pedestals and back into the reality that we are just blue-collars.

So brush up your CV get in there and join the mighty throng.