I don't want to be dismissive but I think we all go through this. My dream of building robots was kind of crushed when I realized as a mature student coming int

I don't want to be dismissive but I think we all go through this. My dream of building robots was kind of crushed when I realized as a mature student coming into a cs program after eight years of working blue collar jobs, that I might not have the chops to get into the electrical engineering program. A few years later I'm graduating in the middle of the dotcom crash. Hey, building contact us forms and customizing or building CMS software landed me a job so let's do that. Ten years after that I was thinking "great, I've spent 10 years validating email addresses on contact us forms" (the reality was quite different, of course, but I was feeling like I'd lost the thread). But then I started doing a little more with ecommerce and got good at mentoring people and so on. Now, it's ten years after that. I am managing a bunch of programmers and still write a little code. And I'm wondering how I will stay relevant for the next twenty or so years but so far, so good. And I keep learning more and more. Not about compilers and Docker (this does come up, I guess) but about projects and people, business, domain knowledge about the area we build software for, and so on. On paper, yes, I'm nothing. Just some average dude. But I really like my job, my team, and my skills. I'm not saying this will happen to you but what I am saying is you shouldn't feel inadequate because you can't build a C compiler in assembly or something. That's the kind of thing only someone truly, truly interested would do. It's not something you do because you should or because it will make you a "real programmer". Find an industry or business that fascinates you and figure out what they need to see to hire you and go for that.