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.