system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How do you go about reinventing yourself as a developer?

Hoping this doesn't end up being too rambling - I've been in webdev for about 4 years now. Prior to that, I did a stint working on an ML platform for a couple years, which was basically my first professional gig. What I am learning is that while it's a reasonable sector to get comfortable in, I'm bored out of my mind and it just isn't the way I want to deploy my skillset. 

But, of course, you're pigeonholed basically the moment you step out of the classroom based on where you happen to have picked up an internship or where you managed to land that first job after a desperate few months where you'd basically take anything. So I'm many years deep into being a full-stack generalist and all lateral moves available to me must involve those skills. Let's say for the sake of argument that I don't really care about making a lateral move: I want to *start over*. Let's pretend that my passion is instead something in the realm of operating systems (it isn't), but I have very little experience and am minimally conversant in most of the tech involved. This is basically starting from scratch.

So, is that even a thing? Are we talking about a 33 year old going back and doing an unpaid internship at Microsoft or something? Or do I just yield to the pigeonhole?
gpt
There are other places where you can go.

Hypothetically...

Assume you move to a company that develops, say interconnect devices. Those devices will have some form of full stacking for configuration to status display to everything. But that's only one part of it. You could learn things about the device, then ask your superiors to give you small tasks on the actual device development itself, say fixing simple bugs on the network protocols, then maybe adjusting some drivers. Once you understand how it all works, maybe ask for something bigger, like setting up a data path or converting some tools, etc.

Now you know webdev and you know little something about the OS and the way circuit interacts with the overall system.

You can then find a job that is strongly only just into interconnect devices.

I know a dude who did sports medicine or something in college, then studies devops and is now our only hardware engineer and really good one at that. Dude knows more about schematics than most of us. It's not impossible. Just takes patience. Find something fitting you.