I'm in a strange position in my career and I guess this post will be part thinking out loud, part looking for people who have done something similar successfully.

This November I will have been in the field for 20 years, doing mostly Unix and Linux administration and automation. My work has gotten laughably simple over the past few years as Kubernetes came on the scene and basically I am just editing YAMLs. Stuff that an intern could do. I am becoming stupid as all hell because of this. I have led a team and mentored and all that. My soft skills are senior, but my hard skills have degraded, and I was never a gifted programmer to begin with. But I have experience with many different technologies and programming languages etc.

Back when I was in College, I dropped out of CS because I couldn't really see myself as a programmer full time. I was in the accelerated CS program at my school and when we got to binary trees, I just said this just isn't what I am trying to do with my life so I dropped out to continue the work I was already getting paid for doing Unix stuff. So, I never got the experience with more advanced DS/A stuff, which I am working on now by hacking on leetcode, and I purchased a premium subscription.

What's my move here? I feel like my experience is both an asset and what some would consider a red flag. Like, why would a guy with 20 years experience apply to a junior programming job? Do I apply to internships with a tailored, edited resume? I would really like to work at Google and see how large scale is done, because I have only ever worked on medium and small scale stuff. I do not want to be an SRE however. I would like to do backend stuff, preferably with Go, as I find that really fun and enjoyable. I would rather gouge my eyes out than do front-end work.

Any advice, thoughts, etc?

PS I am also enrolled to finish my BS but I put it on pause during covid. I could potentially leverage that as me being a "student" but I don't want to completely lose the asset of my lengthy experience in the field.