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We don’t talk about salaries in the US like people do in other countries. Apparently, we citizens of the United States are extremely conservative when it comes to this topic. I’d like to see that change in my lifetime. I sat down and looked at my W-2 like I do every year. A number hit me out of the blue. It proved to me job hopping works (to a point). From my first job out of the military to now, I’ve increased my salary by 3X. I’m not trying to brag at all. It’s a living testament that veterans are likely undervalued. Also, that they should take full advantage of their newfound job flexibility. When you look at my resume, since 2011, I’ve held 12 different positions. Each one was a pay raise, status boost, morality alignment, or open source work alignment. Then there was a transition from carrying a pager to not carrying one anymore. I’ve been at Red Hat for two and a half years. Today, my job is the best job I’ve ever had (and that is saying a lot). But, the two positions before joining Red Hat were only six-month stints with very legitimate reasons for leaving both. But, before that, a year at a great company. It shows that people are willing to work for great companies that align with their morals and ethos. Red Hat is a fantastic tech company with a wonderful culture. Every move to get here was worth it. Because it finally put my value and compensation in sync. It has made up for the previous nine years of not being able to put as much in a college or retirement fund. But, now that’s all possible. ...

Unpopular opinion alert (and Disclaimer)… Call me old fashioned, but I thought two of the top tenets of open source were candor and goodwill. I thought it was good practice to contribute to a project before baking it into a product. This was often the case for open source friendly vendors. But, it feels like AWS came along and never got that memo. I feel like AWS has done a lot more taking and productizing (aka making AWS a trillion-dollar, with a T, business) than contributing back to open source. They keep shooting themselves in the foot as they take more and more projects into their bevy of services. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet of a dev finding their code in the codebase of an AWS project without any credit being given, among other license violations. Someone at AWS said they’d look into it. But, consumption without credit incidents keeps happening (this wasn’t the first such incident I’d observed). There’s a culture problem, it seems. Then AWS hires a journalist to cover its open source work. I feel like that doesn’t help its case at all either. It acknowledges awareness of a problem. Pay for play is a negative thing in the radio business. It’s duplicitous at best in the tech industry. ...

I lost a co-worker from the Ansible team this week. I’ve been struggling to get past the insanity of people younger than dying. 2021 is off to a real shit start. But, I think the biggest tech story of the week comes from Elastic. Keep reading for the details on Elastic’s idiocy. Here’s your weekly reminder that open source isn’t a business model, though. But, there’s been a moment of justice for those here in Michigan who were impacted by the Flint Water Crisis. Ex-Michigan governor indicted for ‘willful neglect’ in Flint water crisis. Here’s the grand jury indictment of Former Michigan Governor, Rick Snyder. The Judicial System better not mess this up. I also learned about the term Sealioning this week. I’ve seen it done before but did not know it had a definition that I could shut folks down with. Nice! Note: I’m looking for an intern this summer to help with OpenShift.tv (live streaming). If you know anyone that may be interested, please ask them to apply. If they have questions, feel free to send them my way (Twitter DMs, Telegram). Please apply ASAP as I’m already reviewing resumes this weekend. ...

The first full work week of the year has already been filled with news. But, Monday saw a Slack outage, Wednesday saw an insurrection in the US, and there is a new twist in the Solarwinds supply chain compromise. We’ll discuss two of these topics and more. Note: I’m looking for an intern this summer to help with OpenShift.tv (live streaming). If you know anyone that may be interested, please ask them to apply. If they have questions, feel free to send them my way: have them apply. People Linus Torvalds tears into Intel, favors AMD After Spectre/Meltdown, I can’t blame anyone for being mad at Intel. What Buddhism can do for AI ethics “Buddhism teaches us to focus our energy on eliminating suffering in the world.” Jobs report shows 140,000 jobs were lost in December. All of them were held by women “Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000.” ...

Note: If you’re reading this, you’re winning. You beat 2020. Also, the DevOps’ish Solarwinds supply chain compromise Index has been updated. I was talking to DevOps’ish readers a bit this week. One reader, in particular, has mentioned in the past that they’d be willing to help put the newsletter together when I’m recovering from surgeries or need a day off. This morning I sat down to get a headstart on the newsletter and realized I should instead work on a checklist or HOWTO or whatever it would end up getting called. Let me introduce you to DevOps’ish’s WRITING.md file. It details how the newsletter is made and some of the guidelines around writing a newsletter, in general. It’s made me realize that I need to look into automating more of what I do. That’s one of the beautiful parts of checklists or good documentation; it tells you where to start looking into automation points. Another thing we discussed is profit sharing and how that would have to get figured out. Or rather, we need to talk about how to figure that out. Which then triggered an early afternoon of getting GitHub Sponsor up and running. Getting good, long term newsletter sponsors is difficult. Larger newsletters generally outsource it. That seems a little much for me right now. If this system proves to work well, I will flip regular sponsors over to it potentially. ...