As far as I can tell, it's programmers and adjacent. I am currently hiring for an infrastructure role (sr. network engineer/architect) and it has been miserable, even for remote positions. Certainly don't see an influx of available talent happening in the infrastructure world.
I work on the infrastructure side (as a programmer, there are programmers on that side as well believe it or not) and this has been my experience as well.
The last 10 years or so have seen outsize investment in the product focused roles and comparatively little in infrastructure.
Generally speaking the trend has been "who cares just move it to the cloud" and then proceeding to not hire sufficiently to work on that infrastructure, which then leads to a move to a more expensive more managed version of the cloud, on and on until you are in a really bad spot and find yourself paying out the ass for an MSP.
There are way way fewer people with experience on the infrastructure side now as a result of basically being ignored for a decade, and so pay has been increasing rapidly.
Just go look at the department handling your company network or whatever you've got for infrastructure. Half those people are on deaths door. What's the plan for retirements when everybody new is just being funneled into front end development?
I'm a Sysadmin with some networking certs, and the linkedin messages have started coming in more frequently, and stating (quite good) salaries up front.
So it certainly does not seem like are 100,000 unemployed sysadmins in the job market currently.
I get the feeling it's seen as an unattractive janitorial job which is perhaps why there are so many attempts to re-title the job as Devops or SRE or Platform Engineer or whatever the de jure is.
I suppose if I had to pick my title, I'd just say "Infrastructure Engineer" because that seems to strike the right balance of vague yet fancy enough to put in an email signature. Really it would be "IT Dude (open source focused)".
As much as companies want to seem to believe they can get rid of them, they need someone generalist around who understands how things fit together and can take on the occaisional maintenance task.
