They Weren't Helping You. They Were Just Paying You Less Than You're Worth.

Why your first DevOps job pays less than it should, and how to fix it before you apply. I've been away for a little over a month. Life happened. I've been working on some things behind the scenes and I cannot wait to share them soon. But first, this. Because this one matters. I want to tell you about Andrew. Not because his story is unique. Because it isn't. Andrew got his first DevOps role in March 2023. Junior DevOps Engineer. A 47-person SaaS startup. AWS, Docker, a little Terraform. The kind of place where the whole engineering team shares one Slack channel and everyone knows when production goes down because someone will tag the entire channel within seconds. They offered him $62,000 a year. He said yes that same afternoon. No negotiation. No questions. He thanked the recruiter, hung up, and texted his brother. The number felt huge compared to anything he had seen before. Questioning it felt greedy. So he didn't. He was twenty-four. It felt like proof. It felt like he had finally