I past 30 now. Most of my friends are managers but I love building things and chose to be an IC. I think tech is very fast paced. You gotta constantly be learn

I past 30 now. Most of my friends are managers but I love building things and chose to be an IC. I think tech is very fast paced. You gotta constantly be learning. Terraform, k8s, docker, rust, js frameworks, other language paradigms, deeplearning etc It’s a lot to learn on your own. Places you interview may ask “have you used React / Some X tool”, the best response you can give is “yes, I’ve dabbled myself and built X prototype”. Or for core things “yes, I’ve had my fair share of experiences and contributed Y to their open source repos”