>Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped

That scares the hell out of me. I started working in IT at 22 and now I'm 30.

I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around. It gets heavier every year.

I got bagdes CCNP/OSCP/RHCE/CKA/AWS DevOps Pro/etc only to confirm that I know at least something. (I don't tell anyone about them so I don't become known as a paper tiger.) On my way to CCIE.

I study things and write code for ~2-4 hours every day after work and ~8 hours on non-working days.

Maybe by the time I'm 35 and finally became a decent SRE, I hope that I can do a real work in big company like FAANG. And no one will hire me because I'm too old.