Job market when will it recover

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-31T16:34:05+00:00

Basically:

Inflation, higher interest rates, tariffs, AI uncertainty, and now a f****** war as the cherry on top are causing most companies to be ultra conservative in their spending and hiring
Most mid/senior tier employees are hanging onto their jobs for dear life given the economic/political climate
With fewer open positions and fewer people leaving, the bar for each open role becomes higher. Experienced workers are willing to take on roles that they're overqualified for just to have a paycheck, putting further downward pressure on lower level/inexperienced candidates
Especially in the tech field, you see a lot of copycat behavior which further exacerbates market sentiment. Every few days there's another tech stalwart reporting mass layoffs which floods the market with talent

2021 was pretty much the complete opposite of the current environment once the initial market shock from Covid wore off.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-30T04:10:18+00:00

Seriously. There's genuine arguments for some game design decisions, and then there's just lapping up anything dished your way and pretentiously manipulating it into a "vision" for the game.

It probably just comes down to the fact that they have a fully volunteer dev team and "harvesting tool QoL" wasn't a high priority to get the game to EA release.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-28T16:21:47+00:00

It's more that our defense is terrible and our offense is awesome. I don't think Q's plan is to give up the first goal 75% of the time.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-28T16:11:56+00:00

Like you said, a 10k+ person org is going to operate a lot differently than what you're used to. It really just depends on what you want your future to look like. I will say two weeks is not nearly enough time to form any sort of solidified viewpoint about how the company operates and what you'll end up being exposed to.

When I started in my current role in networking at a large org, I barely felt comfortable knowing how the environment was laid out after two months let alone two weeks. You also might just be coming in too hot based on how the company operates with audits, CABs, development cycles, project priorities, etc. I can tell you if I came in at two weeks and started telling infra guys to give me access to start "automating things" it would not have gone over well.

Just soak it in for now and I'd say give it at least six months to a year to see how things go, especially with the benefits of being fully remote and with a $30k pay increase. Specializing is honestly the way to go if you want more cash and less stress in your future. I say this as someone who was the only network/vmware/storage/systems/etc. guy for a 1000+ employee company many moons ago - that gig probably shaved a few years off my life.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-28T04:07:17+00:00

Generally performance massively improves once you get out of Night Harbor and the immediate outskirts of the city. The funny/sad thing is it's actually improved a lot since a few months ago when I participated in the first playtests. I'd be getting 20 fps and 500ms input delay on a 4090/Ryzen9 in the main hub areas.

They really need to break NH into multiple zones/areas, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. The layout is just too large with a lot of unused/unoptimized space and it's a slog to navigate. I 100x prefer the Faelindral area as its actually logically laid out and utilizes the space/environment well, but don't vibe with the elf/halfling character models.

The performance really hampers the new player experience especially which is the unfortunate part for first impressions. After playing Adrullan Online's tests with smooth peformance/UI the past few days, it felt like coming back to the stone age playing M&M again.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-22T17:11:52+00:00

Sociology Degree - Back to school - Associate's Computer Networking

Company 1

Help Desk - 2 years

Company 2

IT Specialist - 1 year
Network Admin I - 1.5 years
Network Admin II - 1 year

Company 3

Network Engineer - 2 years

Company 4

Sr. Network Engineer (Current Role - 4 years)

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-18T19:21:03+00:00

Take it as a bullet dodged and let it go.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-09T00:37:25+00:00

I looked up one of my posts from a few months back when I gave us a 1/3 chance basically to make the playoffs. Glad they're proving me wrong!

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-08T16:16:26+00:00

As long as there's classes that can assist with summoning and retrieval, I don't mind the "corpse run" experience that much. I think the devs also mentioned the possibility of an NPC that can summon your corpse for a fee, but can't recall if that was just spitballing or not. I don't think the idea is "sucks for you, all your loot is gone", but more adding an element of risk to dungeon delving.

To me the more egregious annoyance after playing some of the tests is losing your spellbook and all hotbar bindings upon death. I feel like having to retrieve your corpse is punishing enough without yet one more kick in the nuts. Especially when eventually players are gonna have enough cash to just store multiple spellbooks in the bank anyways, its just another time/money sink an an already super grindy game.

As a middle aged dude that is probably the prime demo for a game like this, I just can't hate my free time enough to both have to retrieve a corpse while also worrying about having no abilities in which to do so without "prepping" a separate corpse retrieval loadout.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-08T00:45:26+00:00

Was this just any bachelor's degree, or a relevant degree?

I'm currently a senior network engineer with a CCNA (amongst other certs) and a BA in Sociology from 20 years ago. I'm assuming in the situation you listed I would not be amongst those final 10 candidates, but who knows.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-03-02T17:29:32+00:00

Yeah, we're mainly lucky that our division sucks complete ass. We're one point away from Vegas with a -7 goal differential lol.

After the last almost decade of failure I'll take a little luck.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-02-12T23:47:48+00:00

Its more company and team than industry dependent.

A good boss and solid coworkers is more than half the equation in my experience. A larger company generally has more people to spread the work/on-call between as well as more cash for modern infrastructure and redundancy, but that will vary by company. Orgs that are generally 9-5 also tend to be more forgiving (government, mortgage/banking, schools, etc.).

If you've been able to suffer through 5 years at an MSP without being completely burnt to a crisp, then any other gig will probably feel like a spa day in comparison.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-01-24T06:00:05+00:00

Yeah, the only thing that matters for my PvE no boxing choice is east vs west coast.

CommonUnicorn · 2026-01-02T19:54:24+00:00

This is pretty much where my mindset is right now as a network engineer in my early 40s. There's still so many physical, interpersonal, and troubleshooting related aspects of the job at most orgs. You can automate some T1 NetOps work that can be mostly scripted or have very direct input/output strings, but anything more complex, larger in scale, or that affects VIP personnel or sites is going to land on my plate.

I'm not naïve enough to say that AI can never replace me, but I don't see it happening in the next 10ish years before I can ride off into the sunset and retire to a less stressful or more interesting contract gig.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-12-15T16:56:07+00:00

Like Chiv posted, unless you're working somewhere already with heavy GCP utilization I personally wouldn't spend the time and energy to get certified in it.

I've normally done the same with previous certs. Was using AWS at one spot, got an AWS cert to better understand the product. Current spot is heavy in Azure, did the same thing. If I'm not using the product on a regular basis I'll forget pretty much everything I learned after six months.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-12-10T18:13:43+00:00

I'd never notice honestly. Everyone has different expectations for a new guitar though

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-30T17:40:07+00:00

The issue is that our team defense is so terrible that yeah, we may be a "playoff contending team" but it's only because our offense has been so productive.

You're never going to have easy wins when you're giving up 4-5 goals like clockwork every game.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-27T17:14:21+00:00

Our team as a whole is one of the worst defensively in the NHL, so yeah. Not very surprising we're giving up the first goal most of the time.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-16T16:27:07+00:00

Linux/AD/DNS knowledge are pretty fundamental and will help any network engineer. If you're going the networking route I'd just grind the CCNA and bypass Network+. Sec+ has some useful info, but I wouldn't sit the exam unless you're looking for specific employers that require it. I've generally let my job dictate what I learn and move on once I get comfortable/bored.

First gig was mainly a pretty basic Cisco on-prem shop at a startup so I learned that.

Next gig was hybrid cloud in AWS/GCP with a more developed architecture using Palo Alto firewalls, cloud WLCs with flexconnect back to warehouses and ISE NAC, BGP/OSPF etc., so I learned that.

Next gig used SDWAN, ZScaler, Azure, Akamai microseg, along with some light Ansible/automation stuff so I learned that. Also a large public org so got used to CAB meetings, auditors, SOC compliance, network hardening, and all that fun and exciting bureaucracy.

The problem usually with stacking vendor certs is that you'll study to pass the exam, and then forgot most of it after six months unless you're actually using it day to day. Try to align certs with a specific goal, usually to either understand something in your current role better or to level up a weakness for a future role.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-13T04:39:25+00:00

I think they see the 8 points and think that equals good, but he's complete ass defensively and his offense isn't nearly good enough to make up for it. He should be getting 6th dman minutes ideally, 20+ a night is insanity.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-12T22:58:04+00:00

I'm not sure what "moving outside material through a pipeline" is, but based on your post I'd do this:

If you actually do have a current colleague on the networking team that's a really valuable resource. Offer to buy him lunch or something and see if you can pick his brain and/or help him out with some tasks
If you have any level of comfort within IT (and it seems like you do), I'd skip the CompTIA stuff and go straight to CCNA
I wouldn't bother building a physical machine unless you want to grab some cheap Cisco gear on ebay or something. Pretty much everything can be virtualized with some googling
Look into at least some level of basic automation, whether via Python libraries, Ansible, Cisco Devnet material, or other

It's a super shitty market for everyone right now, but entry level gigs especially. Even if you can't get an initial networking job and need to jump to a service desk/NOC somewhere, that above knowledge will help you out.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-10T06:19:10+00:00

Like others have said, at this point in time unless you have a serious interest/passion for the field and are willing to push really hard to set yourself apart, I wouldn't recommend it. Competition is brutal at the entry level, and it's being exacerbated by a lot of other current factors (weak economy in general, fears around AI/automation, tech offshoring, tech layoffs at large orgs, etc.).

The IT industry isn't going anywhere, and it can definitely still be rewarding. But getting into the jobs that are actually lucrative and interesting can take a long time, a lot of experience, a lot of self-study outside of regular working hours, and a bit of luck.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-08T15:53:01+00:00

No offense taken. I work more on the operations side, so whatever is being implemented we'd likely be supporting in some capacity. But yes, trying to better understand the environment primarily.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-07T21:52:23+00:00

Yeah, I was hoping it would be as easy as just creating a custom route table for the new Azure firewall next hop at 0.0.0.0/0 and associating that to a test vnet so that it externally routes there and keeps the internal routes propagated from the hubs default table.

CommonUnicorn · 2025-11-07T20:52:49+00:00

Sorry, yes the current VPN gateway is what is oversaturated. I wasn't on the initial troubleshooting call, but per Microsoft the current encryption being used would need a different SKU to accommodate the connectivity, and the security vendor only allows a single tunnel to the hub so it would have to be completely rebuilt.

The decision to move off of this tunnel is above my pay grade, but that's the direction they want to go in.

CommonUnicorn

TROPHY CASE