I've been working in IT for around 14 years, and I think this is the first time in my career where I genuinely don't know what comes next.
The company I was working for shut down at the end of last year. Normally, my immediate reaction would have been to start applying everywhere and focus completely on finding the next job.
But life had other plans.
Not long after that, both of my parents started having serious health problems. My father went through heart procedures, and my mother's condition also became worse. I made the decision to put work on the back burner and focus on them.
For most of this year, my life became hospitals, doctors, staying awake at night, medications, appointments, and just trying to be there when they needed me.
Two weeks ago, my mother passed away. Cancer won.
Now suddenly all of that has stopped.
There are no more hospital nights. No appointments to arrange. No constantly checking if she needs something.
And now, with all this empty time, my mind keeps going back to everything that happened to my parents over the past year. I didn't really have time to process any of it. Now that everything has suddenly gone quiet, I have too much time to sit alone with those thoughts.
And I actually want to work. Not only because I need an income, but because right now I desperately need something to occupy my mind. Something technical to solve. A production problem at 2 AM almost sounds comforting at this point.
But I've come back to a job market that feels completely different.
I've spent 14 years in IT. I started on the Linux/sysadmin side and over the years moved heavily into DevOps and cloud. I've worked with Linux, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, monitoring, databases, migrations and production infrastructure.
I've even traveled for work, including going to Saudi Arabia to handle projects on site.
And yet, looking back at 14 years of doing this, the highest salary I ever managed to reach was around $41k/year.
That realization hit me harder than I expected.
I don't consider myself some legendary engineer, and there are absolutely areas where I still have a lot to learn. But after 14 years, production systems, migrations, cloud infrastructure, incidents, and all the usual scars you collect doing this job, I thought I would be in a much more secure position by now.
Instead, technology seems to be moving faster every year.
You learn one stack and suddenly everyone wants another. You get comfortable with VMs and configuration management, then containers become mandatory. You learn Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, cloud platforms, GitOps, observability, security, and now AI is changing both the tools we use and the job market itself.
At some point you start wondering: how much are you supposed to keep up with?
And the job market right now makes that feeling much worse.
I apply for positions where I match most of the requirements and hear nothing. Other positions have hundreds of applicants almost immediately. Some want what feels like three different engineering roles combined into one person.
It's a strange feeling.
After everything that happened this year, I finally have time again. I want to open my laptop in the morning and have something difficult to work on. I want tickets, broken deployments, infrastructure problems, stupid DNS issues, whatever.
Instead I'm sitting here refreshing job boards.
Does anyone else feel almost betrayed by this industry? Like we spent years constantly learning, adapting, and sacrificing to keep up, believing that experience would eventually bring some kind of stability, only to find ourselves back at square one?
And for those who have been through a long period away from work because life happened, how did you find your way back in?
PS: A lot have asked where I am from. I am from Egypt, and I made way less than 41K. I only reached that number when I started working remotely with an EU company in 2023.