I second Big Daddy's recommendation to consider a career as a business analysts. It could be a very good fit with your programming background and your desire to stay in the software development world *and* with the fact that you enjoy working with users. I don't know how the economy has affected demand for business analysts, but before the economy tanked, they were a hot commodity. I'm an editor with CIO.com, and we wrote a lot of stories about business analysts. So if you want more information on the role, a simple search on CIO.com for "business analyst" will yield a lot of info. Good luck!