Ask HN: What point in my career should I be getting at by now?

Hi,

I'm a regular reader of the hacker newsletter and I've been wanting to pose a question to all of you (in the form of a vent) but I haven't gathered myself to do it (until today) because, honestly, I feel embarassed for what I have to show and tell, curriculum speaking, in comparison to what I see here.

I'm a 28 yo working in the Information Visualization industry (or, as LinkedIn like to call it, Business Intelligence). I'm on it for about 3,5 years but I feel I'm not accomplishing anything meaningful, technically speaking.

In terms of stack, I've only come across working with Tableau and Qlik Sense and nothing more. I do throw around a little SQL, but very, very little, and at the end of the day I feel I'm only 'making charts'. Although Qlik (Sense) allows for some ETL, where I can put into action some cleansing and transformation strategies, I'm feeling I'm not learning what I should be learning. I want to get deeper, into more abstract terms.

I suck at optimizing - code, workflows,... I suck at understanding the architecture of things. I have a bachelor degree in computer science but it seems I haven't put that much into practice. I should be devising mental algorithms when working on things and I'm not capable of that. I should have a pipeline when working, like a method to do things, 'use this tool for this, that tool for that', that sort of operating. Instead, my to-do list is a collection of tabs in notepad++. If I need to do a copy & paste, I paste it into notepad++ and it says there forever. There is no structure.

Do you think I have stagnated/should be in an advanced stage of my carreer? Which stack of tools and skills should I have 'mastered' by now? I'm not exactly young... I know I am mixing practical limitations with technical ones, but for me those two aspects are intimely connected. I can't differentiate between having a practical, structured mind and being technically good.

Thanks for any word you might find relevant!