The logically consistent explanation for both your experience and my experience is that you are on the other side of the K as people who are in demand and I am on the same side of the K as people in demand.

My guess is that one of the following applies: 1. You do not live silicon valley 2. You do not work at a FAANG 3. You have not built foundational infrastructure

I think if all three of the above are true, you are in demand to build AI hyperscalers. The trillions of dollars going into datacenters has to be built and managed by humans.

Unfortunately no. I made the jump in 2022 from doing on-prem at a small company to doing on-prem at a hyperscaler when software engineers were very in demand and got placed in an organization which does physical datacenter design and core software infrastructure (software defined networking, service discovery, host management, datacenter failovers).

Back in 2022 you could make the moves, but I think now it is very hard to make the jump.

Part of the issue with building and running very large on-prem infrastructure is that you can only get experience by doing it. It not like you can run thousands of racks in multiple datacenters as a personal side project.