TL;DR - You are not going to get rich at your startup. Well, you might, but the odds are about as good as winning the lottery. (So don’t make THAT the reason you go work at a startup)

Edit: If you want to skip this most and learn more about how startup equity works - check out this awesome Github repo: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation

This whole thing started when I saw a blog post titled “Advice to Grads: Join A Winning Startup”. It’s not a bad blog post, but I was immediately turned off by the title, “Join a Winning Startup”. So simple right? Just go pick a company that is going to be a huge success, and go work there, make millions on your stock options and retire by the time you’re 40.

This was originally posted on the Threat Stack blog - added here for continuity.

DevOps is a term that has absolutely blown up in the last 5 years. As someone who’s been involved with that community from the earlier days, it’s been interesting to watch the conversations around DevOps evolve over time. For many people, they had an immediate adverse reaction towards Yet Another Buzzword – especially when the core concepts that people described as being “DevOps” were things that many people had already been doing for years. (I’m not going to bother getting into the specifics of “what is DevOps” since there is already a plethora of blog posts that you can easily find on it.)

There is an immense value to taking time off. It’s not something that can be measured. But there is something genuinely amazing that happens when you stop working. The most vacation I’ve ever taken while employed was 3 weeks. And I was only able to get that because I negotiated it in as part of my employment package due to an upcoming wedding and honeymoon. But even then, taking time off was much, much different than my most recent experience with Funemployment.

Friday, May 16th was my last day working for Dyn.

Monday (today), May 19th is the first day I’ve been unemployed in nearly a decade.

No plans. No job. No idea what my next step is going to be.

I used to be Director DevOps…Twice. Both times I changed my title later. I even ran a DevOps team - although the team was already called that when I took over.

I have fallen victim to the the abuse of the DevOps title. And I see it all the time; in the devops twitter hashtag, people contacting about DevOps job opportunities. It’s got to be a real thing, right? I mean, we totally have people that are doing DevOps these days, right?

I recently lead an Open Space session on this very topic at DevOpsDays Austin. We talked for about 40 minutes, with about 35 people in attendance and I wasn’t able to find anyone with an dissenting option. Now that doesn’t mean that I’m right, or even that everyone in attendance is right. But there is one very important reason why you might want to think twice before using “DevOps” as part of your job title.