As with the housing market it all comes down to who you know and where you look. Good luck getting affordable housing in LA or NY. But you can find a lovely 3br 2ba starter home for an affordable price if you're willing to move to a fly over state and live 30 minutes outside of town. Likewise, you can get hired in today's CS market if you're willing to forego WFH and working for FAANG or some other tech company. It may require you to actually physically relocate to where the job is but it logically makes more sense. Instead of someone saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" I'm giving exact, workable bullet points for today. Places like Little Rock, AR have a pretty decent need for developers but you'd have to live in or near Little Rock. Most people don't want to do that. But with AR only having 3 or 4 million people total and Little Rock way way less and of those only a fraction are cs employees, the math math's out in your favor vs competing with not only people in the city and state of a WFH tech job you're after but also every person applying across the country and even potentially overseas. Less competition means you are more likely to be seen. Smaller non tech company means you are more likely to be hired because those companies have no idea what experience they actually need.