Are we Platform Engineers / DevOps Engineers done for?
I've been in "Platform Engineering" since it was "Unix Admin", popping Dells and Sun boxes into racks and managing full automation to bring them up to some flavor of server, to 'Systems Engineer' where you write Perl or Java code for a Fortune 50 for some product you integrated to 'DevOps Engineer' where you write terraform and manage EKS to 'Platform Engineering' where you do all those things (minus datacenter), but also are an SRE, a pipeline expert, and a 'software engineer'.
Now, companies are looking for a unicorn and there doesn't appear to be job mobility, you are either getting huge 4-500k offers for Head of roles or nothing at all. Managers are expected to be 100% hands-on, have majored in math or comp-sci, and still have the same preparation as an IC.
I believe that I've aged out of the job market (40's here) because I'm in one of the hottest areas of the U.S. and I get ZERO responses to job applications.
I think that software engineers moving into the space, AI prompting thinking that we can reduce headcount, and a sluggish job market are contributing.
Is anyone pivoting away from these? If so, to what? If not, are you now an 'AI Platform Engineer'? Retired?
(Writing from a burner account, of course.)