>...where I've done several different positions instead of getting better at one and I'm wondering if I made a mistake. Allow me to try to help alleviate that

>...where I've done several different positions instead of getting better at one and I'm wondering if I made a mistake. Allow me to try to help alleviate that mistake feeling. :) I specialised the feck out of my role[s] over the last x > decade, becoming an "expert" in Exchange in a FAANG (one guess as to which one). It got to the point where I was debugging native code issues in Windows and making code changes to the Exchange product (as a whole), which was distributed across the world. Now, during this time, the "cloud" went from being a niche thing to being the predominant player in the market. So, whilst I was !pde.deep in a thread, people were learning CI/CD, Azure, AWS, etc. So, imagine my dismay at having one day been asked to seek opportunities elsewhere and, resultantly, coming to find the descriptions and requirements for "Software Developer" or "SRE" positions in the "real world". Niche skills are good because they take years to develop and you learn skills that can help you understand/rationalise other areas that you may not have gotten before that experience occurred - but those skills can also become antiquated, quite quickly. No one's looking for anyone who can debug native or managed software clients, anymore. No one's even looking for SDETs, anymore, it seems. In other words, on paper, code changes/fixes that have been delivered to millions of people might be somewhat impressive but the lack of any CI/CD in production use (because other teams owned that) means an even more glaring "hole" in my experience - that someone else has and could more easily fill that role. Companies want "right now", not "has the potential to learn this skill very easily and very quickly". So, I had to have a huge learning curve transitioning back to the common market (and that's not a complaint, by the way, just an observation), which hindered my ability to obtain gainful employment for quite some time. So, don't think of it as a mistake. Compared to you, I think that I've made the mistake: I'm envious of those who shifted around the start-ups and amassed quite a bit of skills, which made them far more relevant and marketable to the current market.