I'm an European IT professional who lives on the East Coast for more than a decade.
You for sure can find 6-12 months gigs, but my experience is that it will take time to find the good ones, that pay well and don't treat their contractors as second class citizens. You need to build a network and that may take years. Also ageism in IT industry exists. For people over 50 the expectation is one to be in the management or maybe in very niche industry that has high demand for IT professionals.
I think your quality of life will go south in NJ. You should look into this from many angles and payment is only one of them.
A strong IT industry is probably a common thing among all Eastern Europe capitals due to the abundance of engineers from the communist past and the outsourcing to these countries that follow the fall of the Berlin wall. Minsk shouldn't be an exception.
I am not a software developer. As a sysadmin, I'm paid less than a software developer with similar experience. I started doing support after college, even though I have a CS degree. At the beginning I wasn't sure if I want to this and was a bit envy to software developers. It took me several years to realize that I actually prefer to what I'm doing than full-time coding. I've been at jobs that I can travel to different parts of the work to support our infrastructure or build a company's server infrastructure from scratch and having significant impact on the organization.
There is always a different path one can take, especially at such young age as the OP.
Another Eastern European here.
Unfortunately, the same trend of degrading education is happening in my country of origin, Bulgaria.
Another metric, particularly for math education is the representation of the country at International Mathematical Olympiad.
Bulgaria used to score almost always in top 10, even being number 1 in 2003, beating China, USA and Russia, until the beginning of the new Millennium. Now can barely make it in the top 20.
It's harder to get an IT job in the Boston area compared to 2-3 years ago. I've been in the job market for several months. With my skill set it was a breeze to find a job just few years ago.
Being sysadmin myself and experiencing a burnout, I can relate to that very much. I've been out of work for several months now after quitting my last job and still don't feel completely recovered.
Being in operations is very stressful. I'm seriously thinking of career change, but haven't developed any other skills outside system administration for the last 10 years. Not having the social support (I'm a transplant) just makes it even harder. New ideas are always appreciated. :)
There is a fix for #5; get a foreign degree. The college education at most European universities is free or almost free. Hey, at some of them they pay you to study. :)
They are not as highly regarded as the private US universities, but there are two dozen European universities in the world top 100. I hear more and more people saying they want to send their kids to study in Europe instead of paying hundreds of thousands for private school here. The curriculum for CS and many other STEM is more or less the same everywhere.
I think Jobcase is trying to fill the job-related market niche for non-IT professionals.
I personally find LinkedIn useful as companies and jobs reconnaissance tool.
Being in the IT job market off and on for the last 18 months and being interviewed at about 40 companies in one of the major tech hubs in the USA, gave me a similar experience as the OP. I came to several conclusions:
1) In my case trendiness is more valuable than the school you've graduated from (graduated from a school overseas that nobody in the USA heard of). I worked for one of the companies in the area, notorious for its difficult tech interviews and I got a bunch of calls from recruiters (including from Google) during my tenure there and immediately after I left. Two years and few short gigs at not-that-cool-companies later, I don't get that amount of calls.
2) Most of the "technical" recruiters have no clue how to evaluate technical candidates. For many of them the main (for some the only) way to judge about your skills is how much money you make/how much money you want. I'm talking about deep understanding what engineer do, I'm talking about basic stuff.
3) If you have 1-2 short gigs for the last couple of years you are under the suspicion that you can not be trusted enough to be hired as a FTE.
4) If you are unemployed at the moment of the interview - look 3)
I believe now that hiring in the IT industry is somehow a stochastic process. I was hired and got offers from reputable companies and organizations and rejected even at the first round of interviews by no-name/less-than-mediocre-companies. Go figure.
