I just had lunch today with a guy who spent 20+ years as a project manager for a major desktop software firm, starting in the early 90s. He was adamant that IT and project management are on a downward pay spiral and are overstaffed. He transitioned into doing cybersecurity reviews for military contractors/vendors to help them meet US govt security requirements. (Open question what those might be, but he said the pipeline hack wouldn't have happened if they had been through this review process). Given your friend's security clearances, this might be a more interesting and profitable niche.
I'm seeing this in my company. The company has been continually combining roles and using the lower pay.
When I started 9 years ago we had systems managers. It's hard to say exactly how much they were making, but reasonably the average was around $170k. Then they sort of combined systems managers and PMs to create team managers that were paid at the PM level. Again, this is hard to pin down the exact average, but it would be about $140k. Now they want chapter leads who code 60% of the time and people lead the other 40% with scrum masters (usually split between 2 or more teams) instead of PMs. The chapter lead is making about the same as a senior dev around $125k. Scrum masters make less than PMs.
I really don't like the combining of roles. I think it doesn't allow people to focus and forces context switching. How can a chapter lead participate in their dev work and meeting while also knowing what devs are doing on several other teams to be able to meaningfully lead them? All while crushing the moral of the existing employees because we can see that our future progression and earning opportunities were cut down from what they once were.
