[IaacForHire]

"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped. "

You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.

You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.

[lrvick]

I read it. It just read to me like you do not like having to constantly learn new things.

I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.

Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.

I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.

I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.

Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.

[IaacForHire]

Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.

[lrvick]

I still learn and use all of the above tools regularly too as good security requires a good infra-as-code story.

We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang

A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.

Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.

Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)

[andsoitis]

> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems

Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.

[jfabre]

You seldom want to become an expert in a single technology. It's doable, but you're putting all your eggs in the same basket. What if the technology becomes irrelevant in 5-10 years?

Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.