Introduction
What is an Awesome Company?
If you've worked at least a decade in the IT industry, at a "fast-paced startup" or a "big corporation", you'll likely know exactly what is not an awesome company. Here's my personal list of non-awesome-company features:
- Meetings. Long, dreadful, useless, meetings.
- Mandatory in-office, on-site, fixed desk, cubicles.
- Interruptions. Constant interruptions throughout the day.
- Little to no time-off. Expected to work 400 days a year.
- Disrespect of your personal life, goals, interests, ambitions.
- Way below market salary. When digging ditches starts to look appealing.
- Focus on just getting things out there, adding to tech debt.
- Moving fast, coding fast, no tests, cowboy force pushes to production.
- 10x co-workers, rockstars.
- Outsourced vendors who suck, and being forced to "deal" with them because they're "cheap".
I could write a million things here, but you get the point.
An awesome company is pretty much the exact opposite of the above. An awesome company goes out of its way to hire the right people, to institute sane company policies, to hire people who are "normal", yet who lead interesting lives. That's what makes them awesome. In my nearly two decades working at various companies, I've seen both, and unfortunately "normal" is not the "norm".
I feel like I should have titled this book:
How to get a job at a Normal Company
Why a normal company?
Most people don't consider normal to be a good thing. Perhaps our definition of normal needs to change. Since normal still holds a negative connotation, I'll just replace it with the word awesome for the remainder of this book.
How to be awesome?
Don't be content with the status quo, with how things are, with how things will be in the future.
Strive to be better, to learn new things, to challenge yourself, and to improve in areas where it's needed. Help others become better.
Just know that even if you're not awesome right now, you can be awesome in the future. By the end of this book, you'll hopefully have the toolset necessary to become an awesome Sysadmin (or SRE, DevOps, etc), and hopefully get a job at an Awesome Company.