Reddit reviews Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

Oof, literally no one except one other user gave you territory-specific advice to Los Angeles. Guys, just because your career strategy worked in your territory does not mean it'll work in hyperscale cloud-computing dominant Silicon Beach Los Angeles. Classic example of survivor bias, people... We're talking about a territory that has Dollar Shave Club, Tencent, Alibaba, Tinder, Grinder, OkCupid, Verizon DMS, CloudFlare, Akamai, Fastly, Limelight, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and so so so so much more.

Alright, Los Angeles is not a territory where you can take the traditional approach of "just get A+ certified, write some simple but communicative resume and hope for the best on a helpdesk role". The last employer I had right before this, I was a DevOps Engineer. Through automation, we reduced our helpdesk footprint from 15 to 3. By the time I left, only 2 people were left.

And since moving on from that job/employer, I now work for a premier-certified multi-cloud consultancy partner with multiple partner competencies including DevOps Competency and Managed Service competency. Los Angeles is a territory I cover, and let me tell you, the Silicon Valley mantra "move fast and break things" couldn't be more true here compared to other territories I cover.

Los Angeles is a territory where you need to hustle. Plain and simple.

Go to MeetUp events. One MAJOR advantage you have living in Los Angeles is the abundance of cloud-centric MeetUp events. At one, I met Mitchell Hashimoto, the inventor of Terraform . At another MeetUp event, I met Randall Hunt, a chief evangelist of Amazon Web Services. At another MeetUp, I met the senior product director of Fender Digital (Fender Guitars). At a tech conference MeetUp, I met Corey Quinn, a prominent figure/critic of AWS. And there, I also met Dave Bullock, who articulated on blue/green deployment best practices at AWS Anaheim Summit, a free conference for anyone to attend. All of these could be job prospects, but you need to go out there and make yourself visible.

Not to mention the agency recruiters I met along the way, folks from cream-of-the-crop Jefferson Frank (which in territories like Toronto, basically only place AWS Engineers that make upwards of $120,000+ CAD) to middle-of-the-road Workbridge Associates and Jobspring Partners (sibling companies), to bottom of the barrel Robert Half.

Point is, like I said before, YOU NEED TO HUSTLE IN LOS ANGELES. There are almost 4 million people that live in Los Angeles alone. Include Los Angeles County, and you're looking at over 10 million. If you want to stand out, you need to put more effort in than in other territories.

If you don't want to put in that level of effort, the traditional "get A+ certified and get a helpdesk job" approach will work in other territories like Arizona just fine. But in California, especially in Los Angeles, you need to network network network, hustle hustle hustle.

Hell, everything I just wrote? Merely scratches the surface. Everything I wrote above is just to establish visibility. I didn't even talk about developing your skills beyond the basic bar, which would easily take another few paragraphs. I'll leave this short by saying, start exploring websites like LinuxAcademy which covers everything from A+ to AWS, Docker to Kubernetes, GCP to Nagios, Puppet to VMWare, YAML and so so so so much more.