I have a similar story. Graduated as an undergrad into the teeth of the dotcom crash. Took an opportunity to pick up a master's degree essentially "for free" because it's not like I was going to get a job in that environment. Graduated into still a very weak job market.
One of the saddest memories not related to the usual stuff like funerals and such is the job fair at the university after graduation. I bought a suit. I shouldn't have bothered. (Only worn it once more since then!) When I first walked up it looked OK; had like 15 booths. But EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. was just collecting resumes and telling you they didn't have any openings. Would have preferred to just attend an empty job fair or have been told it was cancelled. That was a truly crushing half an hour.
Took a relatively crap job after that. It actually wasn't bad on a personal level, it wasn't like I hated it, but, no future. Obviously a dead end. Crap job. Went to work for a similar crap job at a startup after that, which was pretty lucky itself. The out-of-work-hours noodling I did led to a real job, a few years later.
Do what you need to do. May not even be a programmer job. My personal opinion, which shouldn't be taken as anything more than that, is that A: the next few years are going to be rough, possibly rougher than the dotcom crash but B: in the end, programmer is still a good career choice. Companies simply can not compete without automation any more. Software will continue to eat the world for the forseeable future. I don't expect AI or low-code to do much more than peck at the opportunities available. (Maybe I'm wrong, but if we do get to the point that AI really does successfully replace programmers we have essentially hit the singularity and all bets are off.)
Programmers also have had and will continue to have the unusual ability that many other disciplines do not have where you can continue to learn skills even if you are underemployed. It's hard to practice industrial-scale chemical engineering at home while you're unemployed, but you can learn Rust, or Terraform, or AWS, or source control, or whatever, and even into the teeth of an underemployment period you can still be developing. That helped me and I recommend putting at least some effort into that.
Just don't forget that while learning Rust is more fun, it's not putting resumes out there, hitting trade shows, networking, etc. That is way less fun and much more emotionally expensive, but more likely to lead to even that job that puts food on the table.
One of the saddest memories not related to the usual stuff like funerals and such is the job fair at the university after graduation. I bought a suit. I shouldn't have bothered. (Only worn it once more since then!) When I first walked up it looked OK; had like 15 booths. But EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. was just collecting resumes and telling you they didn't have any openings. Would have preferred to just attend an empty job fair or have been told it was cancelled. That was a truly crushing half an hour.
Took a relatively crap job after that. It actually wasn't bad on a personal level, it wasn't like I hated it, but, no future. Obviously a dead end. Crap job. Went to work for a similar crap job at a startup after that, which was pretty lucky itself. The out-of-work-hours noodling I did led to a real job, a few years later.
Do what you need to do. May not even be a programmer job. My personal opinion, which shouldn't be taken as anything more than that, is that A: the next few years are going to be rough, possibly rougher than the dotcom crash but B: in the end, programmer is still a good career choice. Companies simply can not compete without automation any more. Software will continue to eat the world for the forseeable future. I don't expect AI or low-code to do much more than peck at the opportunities available. (Maybe I'm wrong, but if we do get to the point that AI really does successfully replace programmers we have essentially hit the singularity and all bets are off.)
Programmers also have had and will continue to have the unusual ability that many other disciplines do not have where you can continue to learn skills even if you are underemployed. It's hard to practice industrial-scale chemical engineering at home while you're unemployed, but you can learn Rust, or Terraform, or AWS, or source control, or whatever, and even into the teeth of an underemployment period you can still be developing. That helped me and I recommend putting at least some effort into that.
Just don't forget that while learning Rust is more fun, it's not putting resumes out there, hitting trade shows, networking, etc. That is way less fun and much more emotionally expensive, but more likely to lead to even that job that puts food on the table.