As an example, I came out of school with a Mechanical Engineering degree in 1994, in Seattle. The other notable thing about Seattle in 1994 is the Boeing was one of its cyclical "Hey, let's lay off another 10,000-odd engineers and maybe hire them back in a few years" phases. That meant that for every job I'd interview for, the second round would be me and half a dozen Boeing engineers who'd been doing that exact job for ten years but were now willing to take an entry level salary so that the bank didn't take their house. I don't imagine it was a whole lot rosier than the job market you describe today.
After the better part of a year's worth of that same interview a couple times a week, I followed the advice we just read in the article. I found a niche at a place doing something sorta related to my degree (Environmental Engineering), using a tiny sliver of the stuff I'd learned by accident at university to convince them I was worth hiring (Fortran, which their models were written in). Then I learned how to do the stuff I was hired to do. Then I spent 4 years migrating from there to writing their first web apps, and only then did I take off for a software shop and start down the road to where I can now antagonistically respond in a self-satisfied manner.
So yeah, things were (and are, and will continue to be) tough all over. Try not to think you're in some special circumstance where time-tested advice doesn't apply to you.
Those kind of lucky breaks (hire you first and then pay you while you learn?!) just don't come around like they used to. Things were obviously not tough all over, like they are now. There's a mass of empirical evidence to show this. I don't why our elders continue to deny it (to their own future detriment!) other than so they can bask in their own self-satisfaction.
Not to say that time-tested advice doesn't apply. It does, but it just doesn't work like it used to!
Speaking from experience is fine until you start acting like your single experience can be taken as anything more than an interesting anecdote. This presumption is implied when one uses aggressive phrases like "quit whining".
The point isn't to whine and blame. The point is that we have to recognize the structural forces we are up against, or we'll collectively lose the battle (repeating a job search ad nauseum expecting different results).
I have one short response for my unsympathetic self-satisfied elders: you don't come whining to me a few decades from now when you're trying to retire with no pension, no social security, an IRA of confetti, and massive unexpected health costs.
We're in this together, so let's find a way out (self-righteous finger pointing doesn't help). I'll end with Thiel's concluding words, from a recent debate between him and George Gilder on The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth (its on youtube):
... "in a world where there's no growth and everything is zero-sum. There will be a loser for every winner, and the people will start to suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of a racket. That's not the kind of world that I want to live in. I'd like us to find a way out. But if there is going to be a way out of the wilderness we've been wandering in for the last 40 years, we have to start by acknowledging that we're lost in a desert and that we're not in some sort of an enchanted forest. Thank you very much."