I've spent my last 2 decades doing what's right, using the technologies that make sense instead of the techs that are cool on my resume.

And then I got laid off. Now, I've got very few modern frameworks on my resume and I've been jobless for over a year.

I'm feeling a right fool now.

I have hung on to my job for many years now because of being in a similar situation in regards to trying to do the right thing and the fear of not being hire-able.

There is something wrong with the industry in chasing fads and group think. It has always been this way. Businesses chased Java in the late 90s, early 00s. They chased CORBA, WSDL, ESB, ERP and a host of other acronyms back in the day.

More recently, Data Lake, Big Data, Cloud Compute, AI.

Most of the executives I have met really have no clue. They just go with what is being promoted in the space because it offers a safety net. Look, we are "not behind the curve!". We are innovating along with the rest of the industry.

Interviews do not really test much for ability to think and reason. If you ran an entire ISP, if you figured out, on your own, without any help, how to shard databases, put in multiple layers of redundancy, caching... well, nobody cares now. You had to do it in AWS or Azure or whatever stack they have currently.

Sadly, I do not think it will ever be fixed. It is something intrinsic to human nature.

Try Rust? The system programming world isn't very bullshit-infested and Rust is trendy (which is good for a change), also employers can't realistically expect many years of Rust experience.

Need training and something to show? Contribute to some FOSS project.

This exactly, actual doers are most of the time not rewarded meanwhile the AWS senior sucking Jeffs wiener specialist gets a job doing nothing but generating costs and leave behind more shit after his 3 years moving the ladder up to some even bigger bs pretend consulting job at an even bigger company. It's the same bs mostly for developers. I rewrite their library from TS to Rust and it gains them 50x performance increases and saves them 5k+ a week over all their compute now but nobody gives a shit and I do not have a certification for that to show off on my LinkedIn. Meanwhile my PM did nothing got paid to do some shity certificate and then gets the credit and the certificate and pisses of to the next bigger fish collecting another 100k more meanwhile I get a 1k bonus and a pat on the shoulder. Corporate late stage capitalism is complete fucking bs and I think about becoming a PM as well now. I feel like a fool and betrayed. Meanwhile they constantly threaten our Team to lay it off or outsource it as they say we are to expensive in a first world country and they easily find as good people in India etc. What a time to be alive.