Ask HN: How do I solve my technical inadequacy and make the jump?
I love technical work and programming, however I have no tertiary education directly related to development. I do dev work outside of work hours for "passion" projects (games related, no illusions of becoming professional) so I believe I could be considered motivated and interested in learning.
I have ~15 years of dev work, however this has always been in a team (currently 5 years) where I am the most technical member. Whilst I have engaged in constant reading and self directed learning, ultimately I don't think I am up to scratch with expected dev experience/ability/knowledge of tools and workflows. I held scrum master certification, however my boss was not on board with enforcing principles (not complaining, it's his call) so I would consider myself a "beginner" here as well.
I am well paid in my current job (location: Sydney, Australia, ~125k + benefits), however I would like to change to a company where there is opportunity to work in a team of/with devs so I can learn.
I am experienced with c#, js, typescript, ms sql and primarily write tools to help internal teams/automate business processes/ease reporting. I don't particularly enjoy web work and my ideal (but not necessity) is to move to statically typed dev work (would love to work with rust or go but I have no professional experience).
I have experience with leading and implementing projects over the APAC region to comply with vendor reporting requirements and automation of business processes.
The truth is I don't know if my skills/experience translate as I have never been part of a truly technical, experienced team. What is an industry recognised way of increasing my technical competence? Should I be looking at some sort of PM role or something?
I am considering going back to university to do a degree in computer science, but if there are alternatives I would love to hear about them.