[lowercased]

At some point, you may have to look beyond traditional employment situations to best make use of your technical knowledge and experience. However, it might mean moving to consulting and possibly 'selling' yourself on a more regular/periodic basis.

I have soldered chips to boards .... close to 40 years ago, and plugged enough cards/cables together to last a lifetime. (I really don't like hardware stuff!). I've done basic Z80 and 6502 assembly up to ... web stuff today, and loads in between. I can passably describe the innards of some layer of various SQL engines, have compiled linux kernels and various packages from scratch, configured mail gateways, debugged DNS, setup/managed firewalls and intrusion detection systems, can often diagnose various application performance issues from description of symptoms alone, and can do many other things 'tech' related. (not trying to brag - loads of people here can likely do all of this, and more, and better, than me).

BUT... this set of skills often doesn't fit well within a traditional 'job' role. Finding situations where people can get/extract value from a wide variety of your skills is difficult (but can be rewarding when it's done).

I also can't do leetcode stuff, struggle with some 'point/click' things that others seem to find natural, and it can take me longer to 'produce' compared to others (although, I've often found myself cleaning up after others' projects when they leave).

I hope you have found (or can find) some situations that make the most of your skills, experience and perspectives!

[fragmede]

There are still places that need and are looking for that sort of help! Especially inside smaller cloud companies (Digital Ocean, Linode, etc) (or any company that's got their own datacenters, eg Facebook) where the solution to a problem can't be to use some AWS service. A heavy hitting sysadmin (embrace calling it devops instead) like yourself is necessary to getting stuff off the ground to a proof of concept stage, then to production.

Grinding leetcode is falling out of fashion anyway for many reasons, (but Leetcode will never tell you that), but it's still a skill to practice up on and be able to make it past an easy question without problem. It's not a skill you'll use normally at work, but the secret is no one's good at leetcode shit out of the door. It takes dedicated practice until you can pass it the interviews, just like any new skill.

[gitfan86]

I found that I make the most money investing, mainly via Tesla over the past 8 years. I only have about 1% of the engineering skills and work ethic of Elon, but that has been enough to understand what he is doing and ignore all the people on CNBC with MBAs who don't understand engineering.