> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to add my two cents a

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to add my two cents anyway: I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but non-stressful systems administration job. The company is a dinosaur in Internet Years and has its idiosyncrasies but is ultimately a very decent place to work. My manager gives me my priorities and then gets out of my way to let me do my work. I work 40 hours a week, sometimes less. The company is mostly software devs and QA, so there's no such thing as on-call because nothing we manage needs 24x7 uptime. In 10 years, there have been about 3 times I've gotten a call on the weekend to help bring something back online. I could very easily double my salary in under a year if I really buckled down and tried to pivot to DevOps role in some rapidly growing biotech or fintech (read: crypto) company instead. The tradeoffs being: 1) sacrificing basically all my free time and time with my family in order to adequately grok the ever-changing world of DevOps 2) that feeling of being out of my depth for 6 months to a year that comes with moving to a new company 3) almost certainly being part of an on-call rotation 4) taking a risk on a new company that may go bankrupt or get bought out a few years down the road, and so on. I'm making an active choice to keep my stability and work/life balance while making what I consider to be a reasonable wage.