🤠 The IT Job Market Just Split In Half — And We Built You a Board

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This is an IT Support Group

Saturday Editorial 🤠

IT hiring in 2026 just split in half — and your "anyone hiring?" post deserves better than the Facebook algorithm. So we built you a job board.

GM IT pros,

Happy Saturday! Pouring a second coffee and writing this one on a weekend because we just launched something that took months and the announcement deserves more than four bullet points squeezed between a CVE and a Chrome zero-day.

-Stetson

The IT Job Market Just Split In Half

Q1 2026 was a bloodbath. But not the one you think.

Depending on who's counting, the tech industry laid off somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people in the first quarter of this year. Challenger, Gray & Christmas put the March-to-February jump at 25%. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate roles. Block shed 4,000 and the CEO literally said it was because AI could do the work. Oracle is rumored to be lining up 30,000 cuts. Resume.org polled 1,000 hiring managers and 55% said they expect more layoffs this year. 44% said AI will be the main reason.

Here's the thing the headlines keep missing: the roles getting nuked are not, for the most part, your roles. The cuts are hitting customer support chatbots that replaced actual humans, QA teams that replaced actual testers, content moderation, and middle management. "Middle management" specifically got called out in three separate analyst reports — the AI productivity gains are real enough at the individual-contributor level that an entire layer of people whose job was to coordinate other people is getting compressed out.

What is happening to IT ops: nothing that dramatic. The BLS median for sysadmins is still $96,800 and projected growth is +5% through 2033. Not rocket ship growth. But not getting automated into oblivion either. The actual story for IT professionals in 2026 is bifurcation. The door on one side of the hallway is closing. The door on the other side is wide open. You need to know which door you're standing in front of.

Where the doors are wide open

Cybersecurity remains the only tech sector actually above pre-pandemic hiring. 514,000 open cyber jobs in the US right now. Median salary crossed $103,700. Only 74% of cyber roles are actually getting filled compared to ~90% across general IT — which means if you can demonstrate competence at a SOC-analyst level, there is a line of employers waiting to talk to you. The catch: cyber roles take 21% longer to fill than regular IT roles, and the reason is not "no candidates exist." It's alignment. Hiring managers want someone who already did the job at someone else's company. The people who break in are the ones who can credibly say "here's the ticket I took at 2am last Tuesday."

Cloud is the other open door. 275,000 active US job postings in January alone mentioned AI skills. Companies are paying 20-40% premiums for deep expertise in cloud architecture, DevOps, and ML infrastructure. Average remote cloud engineer salary is $139k. If you're a sysadmin who's been sandboxing Terraform on weekends, you already know more than half the "cloud engineers" being hired. File the application.

And sysadmin work itself is quietly fine. The hybrid sysadmin — the person who runs on-prem AD and also knows Entra ID, who patches Windows and also writes Ansible — is in higher demand than either a pure on-prem or a pure cloud specialist. The middle of the map is where the work is.

Where the doors are closing

Entry-level is getting squeezed and it's not subtle. IBM literally said AI can do many entry-level jobs and then tripled their entry-level hiring anyway, which tells you the CEO-class narrative and the on-the-ground reality are diverging. Still: if you're trying to break into IT in 2026 with zero experience and no certs, the path is narrower than it was in 2023.

The move is to not spend three months polishing a resume and expect recruiters to find you. The move is to get a CompTIA A+, get a help desk job that pays $18 an hour if that's what it takes, spend nine months there, pick up Tier 2 tickets, and be on a cloud or security track by month 14. Help desk is still the only entry-level IT role that routinely hires people with no prior experience — everyone in this newsletter who's been doing IT for 10+ years started somewhere that looked a lot like that.

So we built you a board.

"Anyone hiring?" is the most-posted question in this Facebook group, and it's been that way for years. The problem is that the Facebook algorithm buries long posts with external links, which is basically every job posting ever written. Good jobs scroll off before anyone sees them. Good candidates don't get seen either.

So — as of this week — we have a real, searchable, permanent job board:

jobs.thisisanitsupportgroup.com

It lives at a subdomain of the main site. No login to browse. Search by category (helpdesk, sysadmin, MSP, security, cloud, devops, management), by work mode (remote / hybrid / onsite), and by salary range. Every listing has a direct apply link. Nothing gets buried by an algorithm.

We seeded it this week with roles from companies we think treat IT pros well. A few of the ones worth flagging:

🔒 Arctic Wolf — Triage Security Analyst (Remote, $65-90k)

MDR shop that still hires people with 0-2 years of SOC experience and trains them up. Help desk → SOC is a real path here. View on the board

☁️ Rackspace — Cloud Engineer, AWS (Remote, $95-140k)

If you've been poking at AWS on the side, this is the level-up role. Rackspace pays for cert study time. View on the board

🛠️ NinjaOne — Technical Support Engineer, MSP-Facing (Austin, hybrid, $65-85k)

Getting paid to help other IT pros do their jobs better. If you've been in an MSP for 2+ years, this is a sideways move that opens up every other RMM vendor job market. View on the board

🏢 Presidio — Senior Infrastructure Engineer (Remote, $110-145k)

The senior sysadmin role for someone who's been running Windows/Linux/VMware for 5+ years and wants to stop being the most senior person in a 4-person IT department. View on the board

💻 Huntress — Security Operations Analyst (Remote, $75-105k)

If you've been doing MSP work and want to pivot to security without starting from zero, Huntress is one of the few SOCs that actively hires from the MSP world. View on the board

Full listings (plus five more across helpdesk, MSP, and DevOps) are live right now at the board.

Saturday homework

Four things. Pick one. Do it today, do it tomorrow, do it with a beer — we don't care.

1. Update your resume to match the open door. If you're trying to move toward cloud or security, the single most effective 30 minutes you can spend this weekend is scanning 10 job postings on the board, extracting the exact phrases hiring managers use, and making sure those phrases appear in your resume verbatim. ATS filters match strings, not meaning.

2. Post one thing on LinkedIn that isn't a job-search-cry-for-help. Pick a ticket you closed this week and write 3 paragraphs on what you learned. Hiring managers search LinkedIn for people who sound like they know what they're doing. That's how you sound like that.

3. Pick one cert to start this month. If you're a helpdesk tech: Network+. If you're a sysadmin: Azure Administrator (AZ-104) or AWS SAA. If you're already cloud-adjacent: Security+ or CySA+. Register today. Book the exam date. Your future self will thank you.

4. If you're hiring — post on the board. Right now, seed listings are free. Email [email protected] and we'll get you set up. Once we're out of the seed phase, there'll be a paid flow at a price that will still be cheaper than Indeed sponsored posts.

A Quick Word From The Shameless Plug Department

One of the most asked questions in the group is "how do I actually learn Linux when I've only ever used Windows?" The answer I'd give a year ago was "just run Ubuntu in a VM and break stuff." The answer now is Shell Samurai — a thing I built specifically to solve the I-don't-know-where-to-start problem. Hands-on Linux practice in your browser, no VM, no cloud credit card. If you're reading the "cloud engineer wanted" job postings and thinking I should probably get comfortable with Linux first, it's literally designed for that. Shameless plug, zero regrets. shellsamurai.com

That's the Saturday editorial. Back to the regular snark-filled roundup next Friday — where we'll probably cover the next three companies that laid off half their workforce while posting record profits. The cycle continues, the tickets keep coming, and your next job is on the board.

If you know someone who's job-hunting in IT, forward this email to them. That's the whole marketing plan.

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Stay paranoid. Stay patched. See you next Friday 🤠

-Stetson