Most companies don't need anywhere near my level of dist experience and I'm totally aware of that. I'm at an AWS-using company now so it's all basic terraform and CI work but previously I built a literal AWS/Google Cloud kubernetes competitor for a CDN so I dealt with the actual backend of k8s a lot which nobody but CDNs really need. CRIO/Containerd/virtio secure container sort of stuff. Cgroup manipulation at the lowest syscall levels.
I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to.
So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work.
Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.
It may be useful in times like these to contemplate the impermanence and randomless of the world we live in.
The original job I had was "welder", for which the lower end of the pay range was about $20-$30k, and after some additional decades of experience you could dream of rising to $40-$50k.
I have had some pretty dumb programming jobs, but on the whole it seems pretty fortunate for there to be a job where you can be a college dropout and outearn dentists (or, for that matter, fleet admirals in the US Navy).
I'm not pedigreed though. I can't get hired at Google/FAANG because I'm not good enough at compsci/programming to pass any of their coding/committee interviews. I really thought I'd find my way into G, interviewed there with many referrals, etc, but they have no interest. And now I don't even want to go there. My dream companies have dropped to a handful, like Pixar, Nvidia, Arm types. But I don't have the CS. "Get better at programming" .. yeah.. I need to.
So I'm in this weird spot where my salary is basically stuck. I'm at around 17 years of experience (I turned 40 today but have worked on bsd/linux since a kid) so who knows what the next 20+ years will look like. Maybe I'm pricing myself out of work.
Senior SRE work at this level seems to be 180-250 and you're lucky to get anywhere near that 250 unless you work at FAANG/Datadog/blahblah. Datadogs one of the highest paying SRE groups I'm aware of, but non-remote.