[nicoburns]

To me it seems like you've hit a point in your career where you need to learn some new skills. That doesn't mean your old skills are now worthless, it means you need to learn some new ones to go with them.

I'm younger than you (25), but I already flip-flop between higher paid jobs that use the skills I already have, and slightly less well paid ones that give me the opportunity to learn new skills. I figure that's just the price of staying competitive in the job market.

I come from more of a dev background, and I've looked into learning devops stuff. I think you'll find that your more traditional ops background transfers quite well to the new cloud environments. There's definitely a whole load of stuff around networking and stuff like that that I have no clue about.

I suspect if you put a bit of effort (a month or two even) into learning the new shiny AWS/kubernetes/whatever stuff, then you'll suddenly go from someone who sounds like they don't know anything (because you don't know the acronyms, etc), to a someone who can impress everyone because their knowledge of the new shiny stuff is backed by years of experience in a similar domain that most people don't have.

[bdcravens]

I'm almost 42: you never hit a point where you don't need to learn new skills. There will be periods of time when you can sit on your hands and just coast, but those periods ALWAYS come to an end. I've seen it happen multiple times.