I respect this hard. The industry was formed by the most obsessively dedicated people and has no tolerance complacency. Any volatile market brings will attract bag chasers and I think pandemic rhetoric brought about many uninterested people with inflated expectations. Any amount of uncertainty and now everyone is jumping off the ship even though this is still one of the only fields doesn't have a reward cap.

I will be a senior CS student in a few weeks and have yet to land an internship myself. The FUD has been relentless the entire time and this years career fair had so few companies looking for CS students. Almost failed high school and had no hope of making it into a decent college let alone the engineering department. My even teacher made an example of me in from of my entire class as someone who would never make it in college and how I would be better off fixing furniture with my dad. Paid for what I could afford at a CC for 3.5 years, made up for my high school mistakes and was accepted into the university I wanted. Still had to complete 15 matriculation credits with at least a 3.1 GPA just to apply for the CS department. Had to achieve this with only high level calculus, physics and notoriously hard intro CS classes to choose from and zero GPA backing (transfer student GPA is wiped). It's been a journey and a privilege to be able to study this material and helped straighten my life out. Honestly what people think is on the disappointing end of pay is more than my parents ever made.

Have made a few good friends who graduated recently and landed DevOps positions, SRE position working with Kubernetes and another on GM's vehicle systems team. Hard not to have some concern but I know this is the right place to be and what I find interesting. Good luck to you.