The Journey Here
The knowledge and wisdom you find here will make you successful beyond your wildest dreams. I’m not just talking about success in your career or success with money. Although, by applying these skills, you can certainly make a fortune. I’m talking about success in life.
My name is Brett Petrusek and I have been iteratively improving for 42 years. More than half of that has been spent as a computer engineer. The success I have had in my career has taken me all over the world. It has made me financially independent and secure. Today, I make ten times more per year than I did when I started this journey at the age of 22.
In my life, I have applied the same methodology as I have in my career. I have been happily married for 20 years, have three beautiful children, and live in an amazing community that I love and loves me back.
I can boil this down to one thing: curiosity. I love to ask questions. I love to discover how things work. The more complicated it is, the more fascinating it is to me. So it is with no great surprise that I chose to study the two most complicated things on the planet: computers and humans.
The key to success is my ability to speak the languages of both. You must be able to translate business outcomes to technical implementations. This has propelled me from lowly grunt engineer to technical lead, to technical program manager, and now to a principal engineer at one of the largest cloud providers on the planet.
Land A DevOps Job started as an idea for a book. I wanted to help other engineers find and secure jobs, then thrive in them. It was written in the wee hours of the morning before my wife and kids were awake. I poured my experience and my ideas into the book and allowed it to flow out of me. Through that process, I learned the following:
How can you know what you are worth if you don’t know how much employers are willing to pay? DevOps job salaries vary wildly for a lot of different reasons. There was nowhere for us to go to see salary data that made sense. They were just numbers in a vacuum.
Some of us feel trapped and helpless to affect the change we all know to be vital to success at our jobs. The DevOps community created processes to help us embrace our humanity through collaboration, listening, and interacting. But lately, it seems like many of us are just going through the motions and have forgotten the essence of what DevOps is truly about.
There is nowhere for aspiring DevOps engineers to gain hands-on experience without a job. There is no “vocational” training. Tutorials and coding exercises can not teach you DevOps.
I am putting humans and culture first, as the technical side of the DevOps community already has amazing content and plenty of opinions. We should be paid what we are worth. We should have access to educational content for DevOps culture skills. And aspiring DevOps engineers should be able to gain experience they can put on their resume without taking tutorials and signing up for bootcamps.
The Mission
To compile what I have learned through my experience. Take the best of those things and reduce them down to their essence. Package them into easily consumable learning experiences for others. This is my mission, and the mission of Land A DevOps Job.
I have concluded that there are three things that are needed to fulfill this mission:
- Availability of salary and skills data with meaningful and actionable analysis
- Education paths for DevOps culture and critical thinking skills
- Experience based learning for aspiring DevOps engineers to bolster their resumes
We should all be paid what we are worth. We should know what skills are in the highest demand to remain marketable. So, I built a DevOps engineer job posting aggregation tool to collect salary and skills data. In the analysis , I break down salary data so that DevOps engineers can understand how much they are worth. The report also includes the most highly requested skills for DevOps engineers. Over time, this data will be used to track trends in the market, so our DevOps community can respond to them appropriately.
Given the gap I have observed in DevOps cultural training, my new goal in life is to fill that need by creating my own training and educational content for DevOps engineers. This is 100% culture and critical thinking training, focused entirely on HOW to think and not WHAT to think. I want our community to question everything about itself and become obsessed with business outcomes.
Lastly, I’m tired of seeing tutorials as the only option for aspiring engineers to learn DevOps skills. In response to that, I have built a tool that crawls Github for open source projects that need DevOps help. Open source project contributions are incredibly powerful on a resume, and this tool is designed to help DevOps engineers find those opportunities more effectively.
I started Land A DevOps Job to help the DevOps engineering community. It’s that simple. After 20 years, I gain more satisfaction from helping others than helping myself. This resource is an experiment for me to try to maximize that simple goal.