A few observations.

First off, companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle, and even Google, are running entirely off of the centralized education system in the US. These are companies that got their software into curriculum and taught everyone their way of doing things, then engaged in shoving their software and a lot of labor into large organizations making a gargantuan mess that was glossed over with lots of "free overtime". Compare Cisco CLI to Juniper, or Microsoft to Debian, or MS SQL to Oracle; who's going in who's direction.

Why?

If you made the investment in understanding exclusively those companies products you went along the technological imperialism trip and now that you're on the other side, and you never spend time understanding the theory or building critical thinking skills, you're washed up. 20 years working on a massive oracle mainframe or with purely Cisco R&S becomes a liability, the reason being, you never tried to find a better way to do things or try to eliminate your job and replace it with something better.

There's an honesty in Meritocracy; The market has always valued the independent thinking, hard-working, incredibly knowledgeable IT staff with a tremendous depth of understanding of infrastructure, programming, politics, and equipment over what 95% of the IT market has become. 95% of the people I've worked with expect the solution to be in some arcane google search result or in a book; they don't expect to go on the journey of finding the answer. What they never develop is real creativity, a real understanding of the systems they work with, or a real understanding of the architecture, why things are done, or the process of how to build on themselves; to set a path for themselves and others that that eventually brings about a finished product.

The entire IT industry is maturing and getting older and as they do, older staff that haven't done this is viewed as a liability. I'll agree, there's all kinds of ways to try to hire gullible people who don't know their own self-worth. Fact is though, those kinds of companies are on a long-term death spiral of their own making. Every time a large corp outsources, I go look at the 10-k and I see a major cash flow problem of managements making. "The old cranky sysadmin way" is beginning to take at more and more companies and that will trickle into academia as time goes on as management begins to understand what technological imperialism means and what the results are; generally, a total mess.

It's a very controversial thing to say these things because it makes a lot of people who aren't that good, or who invested their time in the wrong things feel like they are doomed. Fact is, there's no set career path in IT like there is in other fields like Attorneys and Lawyers, Stock Brokers, Research scientists and Academia.

The trick I've discovered is to put in no more than 40hrs a week at work, and if overtime is needed, come home and practice, do architecture work, learn algorithms, make good notes, read programming and architecture and project management books. 40hrs a week is for work, 10-20hrs a week is for self-betterment. Then you come into work, and find ways to eliminate your job. A new approach that saves butt loads of time. Get your assignments done early, then either come up with a new project to work on, move on, or study. Within a few years of doing this, you will be a top-tier programmer\architect\systems admin, whatever you want to do.

And while I do feel for people who feel they've fallen behind due to having a family, the fact is from my perspective, the real issues with society are things like 21% of GDP being spent on a scummy healthcare industry, or high incomes of the top 1%, or lack of wage parity tariffs on imports from China. The baby boomers have really messed things up for us. The fact you can't go from a high paying IT job to a factory job or retail management position and still have enough money to put your family in a decent home with 3 hots and a cot and to put your kids through school and college is a failure of society in general, not the IT industry. Those issues need fixed and frankly, contribute a heck of a lot to our messed up society.