I'm 50. Been in IT across three decades. There is very little in my wheelhouse that I cannot do or learn within a very short amount of time. Yet... I fight to f

I'm 50. Been in IT across three decades. There is very little in my wheelhouse that I cannot do or learn within a very short amount of time. Yet... I fight to find decent work that I am more than capable of doing. IT salaries in Texas suck horribly. I've fought this since leaving the East Coast. Being that my wife is from here and my own parents are long gone, I agreed to let my wife be near her own family. At 50, I can: - Admin anything *nix or Windows under the sun. I used to run Sun E10Ks for Network Solutions and more than 100 FreeBSD/Linux servers at one time. - Can write Python, Perl, Ruby, PowerShell, C#, Bash, awk, and am learning Go as I write this. - I can build any web server or database server under the sun, can write programs to do basically whatever a server or sysadmin might need, usually in a matter of hours, not days. - I can perform security assessments, as I used to be a pen tester. I have the experience and the certs (required from a previous employer). Yet... I struggle to find work in my own damn country! IT for older workers does indeed suck. I now work for a non-profit coding and some other IT work. Not a bad fit, but the money could be a lot better. On the East Coast, I was a six-figure guy. Here? Good luck, even if you're 30 and have a masters in whatever and 10 years of experience. Am I bitter? A little. American IT workers, unless they are current darlings in a hot area or arena, struggle. I'm actually working on starting my own MSP IT firm with a suitable partner almost my own age whose experience rivals my own. Good MSPs in this area can do very well.