I recently moved to a city close to several national forest preserves. My dream is to buy a few dozen acres butting up against preserved land with a supply of water. I want to start a family and build a homestead that might withstand the changing climate.
I’ve spent over a decade of my adult life split between roles both teaching children and working at a tech company that didn’t appreciate me nearly enough. Up until the end of last year, I made between $14 - $35 / hr. I finally left the abusive tech company and spent 6 - 9 months searching until a few months ago, I started a new job. It’s a DevOps role at a company with a great product, doing something I believe in, for really intelligent passionate people, for almost $200k a year.
Currently, not only is paying off my student loans finally a possibility, with remote work, that homestead life is now possible too. My work is rewarding, and instead of just staying home and smoking weed, I have high enough income and low enough stress to feel comfortable going out.
I sing Karaoke one day a week, go to a writer’s group another day, take a cooking class about once a month, and currently, I’ve decided to learn DnD. All of these activities once seemed fiscally irresponsible to me, because I felt like I had to devote my time into passion projects to try to escape the rat race. Now that I have real income, I’m fully invested in it. I’m ready to sacrifice my day hours for good enough cheese.
It’s all relative. I want to overthrow our oppressors as much as anyone. I haven’t been bought out necessarily. But given the situation, I’m starting to buy in, just a bit. If a bit of wealth and a role I don’t hate can enable me to get physically fit, find a partner, and secure a plot of land where we can weather the oncoming storm, I have a hard time not rejoicing in the idea that ten years from now, we might be living a relatively mundane rural lifestyle. If we need some technical manpower to bring the oligarchy down, I’ll be there. But maybe also it’s okay to want to be happy.
In short, transitioned from a company with mostly state-level contracts to one with mostly federal-level contracts, which requires a higher level of clearance and more knowledge about security.
More specifically, the company I used to work for is a foreign conglomerate with many thousands of employees and a high turnover rate due to low pay. We would hire inexperienced people, train them up on complicated systems, and they’d leave for higher pay elsewhere, forcing us to start over. I begged HR, not to raise my pay, but to raise the pay of everyone under me because we were losing so many people. They refused. The VPs refused. I think they were under orders from overseas not to give a dime more than they had to. In the long run, it cost us millions in training. Our technical debt was through the roof. And I finally got sick of it.
My new job isn’t much more complicated than my old one, but all of the people are better, the culture is way better. Less than 100 employees. Less work to do on weekends, no on call. No outages because we follow proper DevOps practices, whereas I had to forcibly drag my previous employer into modern times.
If I have one suggestion, it’s to read The DevOps Handbook (2nd edition). Or listen to it, the audiobook is very good. It goes into great detail about how companies become like the one I left and how to implement practices that will prevent that kind of decay. Let me know if you have any questions. 😊
I recently moved to a city close to several national forest preserves. My dream is to buy a few dozen acres butting up against preserved land with a supply of water. I want to start a family and build a homestead that might withstand the changing climate.
I’ve spent over a decade of my adult life split between roles both teaching children and working at a tech company that didn’t appreciate me nearly enough. Up until the end of last year, I made between $14 - $35 / hr. I finally left the abusive tech company and spent 6 - 9 months searching until a few months ago, I started a new job. It’s a DevOps role at a company with a great product, doing something I believe in, for really intelligent passionate people, for almost $200k a year.
Currently, not only is paying off my student loans finally a possibility, with remote work, that homestead life is now possible too. My work is rewarding, and instead of just staying home and smoking weed, I have high enough income and low enough stress to feel comfortable going out.
I sing Karaoke one day a week, go to a writer’s group another day, take a cooking class about once a month, and currently, I’ve decided to learn DnD. All of these activities once seemed fiscally irresponsible to me, because I felt like I had to devote my time into passion projects to try to escape the rat race. Now that I have real income, I’m fully invested in it. I’m ready to sacrifice my day hours for good enough cheese.
It’s all relative. I want to overthrow our oppressors as much as anyone. I haven’t been bought out necessarily. But given the situation, I’m starting to buy in, just a bit. If a bit of wealth and a role I don’t hate can enable me to get physically fit, find a partner, and secure a plot of land where we can weather the oncoming storm, I have a hard time not rejoicing in the idea that ten years from now, we might be living a relatively mundane rural lifestyle. If we need some technical manpower to bring the oligarchy down, I’ll be there. But maybe also it’s okay to want to be happy.
May I ask how you landed such a pay bump?
In short, transitioned from a company with mostly state-level contracts to one with mostly federal-level contracts, which requires a higher level of clearance and more knowledge about security.
More specifically, the company I used to work for is a foreign conglomerate with many thousands of employees and a high turnover rate due to low pay. We would hire inexperienced people, train them up on complicated systems, and they’d leave for higher pay elsewhere, forcing us to start over. I begged HR, not to raise my pay, but to raise the pay of everyone under me because we were losing so many people. They refused. The VPs refused. I think they were under orders from overseas not to give a dime more than they had to. In the long run, it cost us millions in training. Our technical debt was through the roof. And I finally got sick of it.
My new job isn’t much more complicated than my old one, but all of the people are better, the culture is way better. Less than 100 employees. Less work to do on weekends, no on call. No outages because we follow proper DevOps practices, whereas I had to forcibly drag my previous employer into modern times.
If I have one suggestion, it’s to read The DevOps Handbook (2nd edition). Or listen to it, the audiobook is very good. It goes into great detail about how companies become like the one I left and how to implement practices that will prevent that kind of decay. Let me know if you have any questions. 😊