[notokay]

>Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped

That scares the hell out of me. I started working in IT at 22 and now I'm 30.

I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around. It gets heavier every year.

I got bagdes CCNP/OSCP/RHCE/CKA/AWS DevOps Pro/etc only to confirm that I know at least something. (I don't tell anyone about them so I don't become known as a paper tiger.) On my way to CCIE.

I study things and write code for ~2-4 hours every day after work and ~8 hours on non-working days.

Maybe by the time I'm 35 and finally became a decent SRE, I hope that I can do a real work in big company like FAANG. And no one will hire me because I'm too old.

[eastbayjake]

> I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around

The difference is that SRE -- unlike much of AppDev -- gives you leveraged impact. The building blocks and guardrails that an SRE team gives to application development teams can create productivity impact for hundreds or thousands of engineers across dozens of teams. It may not feel like 10x from a banging-out-code perspective, but it sure is from an economic perspective - don't lose sight of that when you're talking about your value with your employer.

[joefourier]

FAANG hire college grads with barely any real-world experience, why would you be worse than them if you have been in the industry for 8 years? Further, what makes you think the work you'd be doing at those companies is more "real" than what you're doing now?