This reminds me of a guy who was rejected from a programming position because he didn't have 5 years experience in this programming language... Which really fucked with him because he literally invented said language, less than five years ago.
I've heard a lot of this is companies setting their hiring standards to an impossible high so that they can say "Look we tried, there's no one qualified in America, we have to outsource the labor to this other country that literally doesn't have minimum wage or labor laws."
I remember when I was trying to break into the Linux sysadmin role. Every job required 3-5y professional experience. I'd had a homelab for a while and was reasonably experienced with a number of things, but there was absolutely no willingness to bring on a newbie and train them up. It was super frustrating. How will I ever get any experience if you won't hire anyone without years of experience?
I had an in-person interview lined up after a phone interview went really well. However, I got offered a different position before the Linux interview was scheduled and I had to take it because I was unemployed and couldn't gamble on it not working out.
I just got back into virtualizing Linux instances on Proxmox (had been on ESXi before the Broadcom fuckery). I'm considering going that route again as of just very recently.
