I scratched and clawed my way through. It sure was interesting and varied.

I took heart from a book "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher (2006). Not sure if it's dated by now, but it might encourage generalists who are "serial masters", that is, who master one thing after another; in my case to succeed in various different jobs with a common foundation of computer skills, scripting, *nix and electronics (all self-taught).

I played out that old maxim: A physics degree qualifies you well for every job but physics.

But look at what scripting did for me. I don't recall writing any low level code after learning assembler and C. That layer had sedimented for me while others were still hard at it writing large, complex programs. I just needed to solve a wide variety of problems very quickly,(laundry list withheld) My tools were perl (new at the time), tcl, even hypercard, which let me build interactive apps for non-computer-geek managers rapidly and with nice graphics (XCMDS to the rescue).

So, is this just moving solutions a layer above the previous? How often does this happen?