Post Startup Founder Feeling Lost, Career Advice Appreciated
I am hoping to get some career advice, because to be completely honest I am stumped and don't know what to do next.
My own background is I am self taught in it, have worked as a Linux sysadmin for a few years at an ISP, worked at a comp security company for a while doing protect evals, support on products, pen testing, then I did my own start up, I bootstrapped a SaaS antispam service as a single founder/sole employee company based around open source with a custom frontend written in PHP/MySQL. It had ~2000 companies using the system when I sold it. But I didn't have many direct clients, it was almost all through a network of resellers I built up to insulate me from having support issues from users kill all of my time. On top of that I did freelance web dev work in PHP/MySQL. I sold that business a few years back and went back to college to do study law. I became a father while completing my studies and so I decided to take more time out to hang out with my son while I could afford it.
Now I have wound down the funds from my old business, I want to get back working and be a part of something.
The problem is that I'm not really good with the things that are current. Everything now is virtualization, ruby, node. I haven't been exposed much to these things, even things like Nagios, I didn't use that in my business, I just wrote scripts which sent me an SMS based on certain criteria. One recruiter told me that's no good, their client wants Nagios experience. Even my PHP ability isn't the best, I write everything as functions, and job descriptions want OOP. Any job I see is looking for people who are specialists, I'm not a specialist, in the guy who is too stubborn to give up and eventually figures the thing out.
I have also found out that HR have blocked applications I have made because of the gap in my work/employment history, I sold my business in late 2008, so I can see how late 2008 to early 2012 would be an issue from a HR perspective.
I am thinking of doing the RHCE as a way to verify to perspective employers that I do currently have an ability to manage Linux systems, I figure some sort of third party validation would help hiring managers get over the career break.
Should I take a junior position and work my way back up the career path? Do I just keep applying for jobs with experience and work on explaining the employment gap? I think me being rusty is also an issue after such a break, which negates slightly against me getting jobs with experience, at least so far that seems to be the case. Do I start learning Ruby and write something to release as open source to show I can write Ruby code? Maybe just giving up on getting hired and trying to bootstrap a business again from scratch is the way to go?
Has anybody else found themselves in a similar position after selling a start up? If so, what did you do at this point?
Apologies if this post comes across as complaining, that really isn't my intention. I'm just a little frustrated and not sure what direction I should take.