You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some f

You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc. I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary). But you can think it through step by step. No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve. So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".