I don’t think it’s a normal expectation for services with variable labor and materials to have a flat price associated. Certainly not for businesses buying said services. But there isn’t a single “charge per seat” software company that has a valid excuse for obfuscating pricing. Every software company I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with hundreds over my career buying software for corps) has a “list price” for their product even if they hide it.

Holy shit I would take this over an open floor plan any day. I dream of having my own quasi-isolated space.

LinkedIn and Indeed mostly, though I do check my resume against the listing using stuff like jobscan.co to play the stupid match-the-keywords game to rank myself as high as possible. The response rate sucks but I do get responses, and I think shitty response rates for applications via job boards is kinda common in general. In my area (both geographically and career-wise I suppose) there are also plenty of recruiters looking for people to get in the door, which gets you past the AI gatekeeper. Though recruiter activity has slowed down in the past year and it’s not a time of plenty anymore they’re still around.

As with anything YMMV. So many variables, and surely some luck has played a part in my experience.

That’s entirely dependent on experience. Low to no experience? Get certs. In today’s age of AI powered resume screens, even with experience if what you’re pursuing is a position lower on the totem poll then you will still need them to get through the AI. Probably want a higher-value cert than CompTIA if you wanna work in IT but don’t want to stay trapped in the help desk (I’m talking a networking cert, a cloud cert, ITIL, etc). The most common career path is through the help desk but one doesn’t need to stay there.

Once one gets a decent amount of experience certs don’t really matter. In fact, I climbed up the early rungs of the IT ladder by selling my experience with stuff in my home lab and selling my ability to learn. I don’t have a single cert and never have. I misrepresented nothing about myself, but I did need to eat some below-market-pay jobs at first to rack up real experience to sell. Nobody really cares about the cert, it’s a knowledge industry and what matters is what you know and what you’ve done.