Ask HN: I am a huge fraud. Career and life advice
I go tell partners what to do, the "right" way to implement their use cases, and yet, in a brutally honest review of my own career, I have MAYBE 5-6 years of writing production software. The rest is as evangelist and/or PM. So, I feel like a huge fucking fraud.
I'm not particularly deep at anything. I'm a well-paid generalist that can maneuver around software, but I am not senior, not an expert. Sometimes I see the level of some discussions and I am ashamed of myself, for only being able to lurk and not contribute. I'm a well-paid fraud who searches for stuff on Stack Overflow all the time.
I told myself "go get more production experience, go down a level, apply for SDE jobs and get expertise". But I'm afraid I cannot pass the interviews - I don't have a CS degree and all I've learned was self-learned. When I see some of the interview questions in places like leetcode I am just stumped.
I am at a loss about what to do. Most of my identity is tied to my job - I was born poor in a shitty country and ended up in Silicon Valley. I can't give up on life (though it's very tempting) because I have a wife and a young son I love. I need to figure out what to do. Right now I have five Chrome windows, each with 10-12 tabs, covering Spring, Machine Learning, Angular, and IoT. I'm trying to keep up, to specialize, to go deep. Every night I stay up 3-4 hours after work trying to learn more. Just to see a junior SDE in a meeting just shit an ML-based system with a few lines of Python. I don't know what to do. It's overwhelming.
Advice?