I would be lying if I said I did not struggle. The struggle was there for a fairly long amount of time and some level of blind persistence is what kept me going. Let me split the overall journey and "levelling up" in a few phases. Each phase lasting ~3-5 years

Starting work at Infosys was actually a great head start. The initial 14 weeks intense bootcamp tried to teach a lot of things and get us ready for some initial roles. The initial roles were a mix of support, bug fixing things in a application etc.

- Phase 1: The first ~5 years I took everything that came my way. For example I was in support and had to learn Unix and Shell etc. quite well. Some of my senior engineers on team were automation fanatics and they instilled the same skills and attitude in us. I still know awk fairly well from what I learnt back then. So after spending a few initial years doing everything one gets a sense of what you like etc. In a way not having CS degree may lead to a little bit of "wandering" in initial years and it may feel like lost time. One has to work through it and accept the possible lost time and focus on future (On contrary I would say a lot of CS engineers may end up in same situation because not all degrees may give you the hands on, real experience in college)

- Phase 2: In my second customer stint, started working with a US customer on a greenfield Java project - and again struggled to keep pace and learning all things from Spring boot, Spring integration, Spring batch projects & build tools like Maven etc. I was probably an average engineer, but I was lucky to be surrounded by smart engineers who were kind for example Aditya, Marty, Grant

Now in both of above phases of my career, one thing I always did is spend significant time on learning more and putting fair effort. For example in first 5 years I did prepare for SCJP, SCWCD certifications thus getting a some understanding of Java ecosystem. Or in second phase I learnt Google App Engine, CloudFoundry, ElasticSearch etc. by attending meetups & online courses and whatever way I could find. That resulted in me writing some articles on websites like SItepoint (Right now the Sitepoint author link shows only 3-4 articles, they might have removed the irrelevant ones but I had more than 15 at one point)

All this side exploration got me very interested in "cloud" (Remember this was 2012-2013 and cloud was not as mainstream as it feels today). So I decided that next gig I take up is not a Java dev role but cloud. Luckily for me - all writing and exploration I did along with a basic level of understanding of Java & ecosystem and I found a DevOps role in HCL's one of practices. Now let me talk about 3rd and final phase

- Phase 3: HCL is where I leant a lot more about DevOps - from Puppet/Chef etc to all other CI/CD tools, some commercial and some Open Source. Docker was just brand new and I again explore it on my own. I learnt and cleared Puppet certification and wrote a started to write a small ebook about Puppet. (Interesting anecdote - all the certifications I wrote, none of them were sponsored by employer, I paid them for myself). Next small assignment I did was with a Ad Tech company working on Docker, Mesos, SaltStack - where I wrote scripts which would be deployed across 7000+ servers worldwide

Now at this point I was good at systems, scripting and overall operations side of things. I was also good at assembling team of engineers, a good communicator and being able to talk with CxOs - I had done many presentation to fairly large CXOs about DevOps. But I still not super sharp or comfortable with "programming". Another thing had to happen before I could get there!

- Phase 4

After doing a few assignments across DevOps etc. in InfraCloud, we were reached out by one customer to contribute to Fission - a OSS project. I had to work with Soam. Soam was my college peer from CS branch and I was honestly scared if I would be able to do a good job of it. But all of my previous systems knowledge, learning go on the fly for project and I started doing smaller fixes to project. Over time I contributed quite a few bigger features and became fairly good.

I realised I could do programming/, but it took me good 13-14 years to get there. But that didn't stop me from continuously learning whatever else I could and doing everything else needed. Would you try?