Your field is not what it used to be, great salary conditions have disappeared, it has become soulless drudgery, and for less and less money with more and more "harassment", where you make a mistake?

I saw it firsthand.

My mother used to repair telephone booths in my youth, those devices where you threw in a coins and you could make a call, one telephone booth was for half of the large area, and there was a queue in front of it. As a job, it was interesting, you were constantly in the field, you could arrange a lot of things during the day, and at the beginning, the booths were visited by a Volga car (old soviet union era car), which was owned by a few bigwigs here.

As time went on, this great and prestigious job, which you got into only "by acquaintance", began to turn into hell. First, the management came up with the idea of monitoring all employees for efficiency (each technician logged in at each booth and reported to the headquarters), later the technicians were assigned not very good cars, and efficiency was maximized, until the technicians became "slaves". With the advent of mobile phones, slavery ended, I haven't seen or remembered a telephone booth since.

My field met the same fate.

When I started working as a Linux administrator, it was a dream job, relatively easy, above-standard money, and you could almost dictate the conditions, we were in short supply. Perhaps over time, and over twenty years, education has progressed, and universities have begun to be able to produce solid Linux administrators, in addition to various retraining courses and a general loss of interest from companies in this field, as they say in marketing jargon, the field has filled up.

Over time, I came to the conclusion that in terms of labor-law relations, I started to pull the "shorter end of the rope", plus I wanted to move towards contracts, where I registered almost no interest and no demand. There were simply enough people on the market for companies who were able to manage Linux for them, and in addition, they began to move away from Linux management (the direction was towards containerization and the life cycle of software and the cloud). I understood that I had to reorient myself, the market is elsewhere, so I jumped on the AWS and Serverless train, which turned out to be a dead end, the market just wasn't there.

Especially AWS was not very interested in sales in our parts, and was not able to appeal to companies here. Another problem was Serverless itself, a great technology, just too expensive for larger companies, and for smaller companies, where it would pay off, there was a lack of money and poor working conditions, so not a very ideal state.

How I found a new market.

The truth is that companies came to me wanting Kubernetes, not one company, but rather all of them. I found out that there was demand, so I started to educate myself rapidly and invest time and energy in this direction, which I would say after some time that I succeeded, and the sky cleared again, especially in my DevOps field, where the demand is currently beautiful.

What I want to say above all is that as I studied at university (I have an unfinished economics degree), everything from a marketing perspective goes through a certain development, each technology has some adoption, deployment, cash cow regime, and then decline.

If you are in a field that is going through a decline, try to conquer new territories. I know it's hard, none of us want to do it, let alone in our forties or fifties, but we really no longer live in a time when what you learn in your youth will last you until retirement."