[trod1234]

The job market labor supply for IT right now is supersaturated to the point that extremely competent people with the experience have been looking for several years and are now cutting bait and leaving the field for retraining.

Quite a lot of professional networks died in the great layoffs due to AI. Right now about 70% of my professional network is still out of work, and many of them start at a decade of experience in principal engineer/SRE/SA roles. There's a 1200:1 ratio for applications to cold call interviews, and ghost jobs have made finding legitimate roles to apply to impossible (above the shannon limit for noisy channels).

When there is no work in a specialized area, you go where the work is to put food on the table whatever work that may be. There isn't a lot of work elsewhere either, and many places discriminate against those who are overqualified to the point where they aren't really hiring those people despite them being more productive than some of the younger people they hire instead.

On the bright side, you have some fast food positions making more than some of the IT jobs available in this area (MSP) right now. CCNA cert with experience seem to be running about 42-50k now depending on the area you are working in.There's also been ~25% inflation in aggregate over the last 5 years so your effectively making 31.5-37k gross in purchasing power today at those rates. Computer Science degrees have one of the highest unemployment, and underemployment of most degrees except aerospace engineering.

This is just a preview of what is happening to all white-collar work. AI makes the environment outdated before you can do anything, and thinking its just the same environment as 10-20 years ago is a mistake.