Came here to say the same thing, I graduated in '99 with an ECE degree when movies like Fight Club and The Matrix came out and the future was so bright we had to wear shades, right into the Dot Bomb of 2000/2001. People might have forgotten or be to young today to remember that most tech innovation stopped from then until around 2007 when the iPhone came out. Facebook was around 2004-5 ish but the PHP ecosystem it was built on was anemic until Lumen/Laravel took off after 2011. It's hard to get a job as an engineer when all companies were thinking about was outsourcing.

Those years created such trauma for me and set me back so far financially that I didn't recover or pay off my student loans (meaning I had no disposable income whatsoever) until I was 40. I can say with confidence that those experiences all but ruined my career, and many others in Gen X. We didn't get promoted, or trusted to manage others, or even have children. It's like we never existed, especially the tail end, the "Elder" Millennials like me. All we hear about now is the success of billionaires - the Tony Starks of the world, but I'm with the losers - I'm Ivan Vanko.

Thankfully the situation today is nothing like the Dot Bomb or the Housing Bubble collapsing in 2008. Nobody can find employees right now. And with the arrival of AI, even the most prescient geeks have absolutely no idea what's going to happen in the next decade. The years effectively go 1999,2000...2023 with 2 lost decades in between. The only innovation has been in GPUs, Moore's law effectively halted in 2007 when R&D started going to reducing cost and power consumption. That may change with RISC-V and the open sourcing/democratization of hardware. So for the first time in a _very_ long time, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about the future.

To get to the point: I'd recommend rejecting most job hunting advice. Stop thinking about what you need to do, or what others expect you to do. Remember that being alive and kicking is what matters. You can survive on next to nothing. The world doesn't come to an end just because you lose your job or run out of money.

Instead, picture a business owner's goals. They just want you to solve their problem, and hopefully be able to pay you. So start with the fundamentals: shows like Mad Men. Learn how to listen and communicate. Don't assume that the person you're talking with has any more of a clue than you do. They may be interviewing 100 people because none of them emphasize how much they are there for their employer. If you're solid, and dedicated, and show up, that can do more for your career than credentials. Just be on the level, is what I'm saying.

One pitfall to watch for is settling. I made the mistake of moving furniture for the first 3 years out of school to support my struggling shareware business. I came out of that job a different person than when I went in. It built my intestinal fortitude but destroyed my psyche. But I've fallen back on it when I needed money. Donating plasma works too. And stuff like Bacon is the Uber of handyman work. It's important to know you can do that stuff to subsist, so that you aren't desperate when you go to an interview. It's all dating, basically.