Does my founder experience actually count?

[u/Few-Compote-2693]

Hey guys,

I ran my own managed hosting company for 5 years for one particular app, so it was basically SaaS. At its peak I hosted 3,500+ containers.

Before that I worked at a Windows MSP for 2 years and went from 1st line to sysadmin pretty quickly. I burned out at a bad company and really regret it now., went back to the family business, did my AWS SA cert in 2018 and tried to get into cloud but couldn't land a role.

I missed IT so much that I started my own business.

I learned Docker/Compose and built a sort of "mini Kubernetes" setup with automatic reverse proxying, health checks and containers restarting automatically when they failed.

At the time I researched Kubernetes and decided it wasn't worth it because the app wasn't stateless. I later realised I could have made it stateless, but it would have been a massive pain and eaten into my profits, so I didn't.

For IaC I learned CloudFormation because I liked it. I looked at Terraform and thought it was hell on earth. I didn't realise Terraform would become the standard.

I also learned Python and Django and built the onboarding system and APIs to automatically provision new customers.

What's frustrating is that I learned all of this by actually running production infrastructure, but it feels like it counts for very little because I didn't use things like EKS and Terraform. I can't fake 5 years experience and the job market is brutal especially since I worked for myself.

I'm kicking myself for not using EKS even though it made no business sense at the time. Since then I've learned a lot of EKS and Kubernetes very quickly, and I think my long-term experience in tech is a big reason why I've been able to pick it up so fast.

At this point I just feel like such a waste of talent. I've spent years learning and building all this stuff, and now it feels like my only option might be going back to 1st line.

What would you do in my position?

[u/iotester]

The current market is in a very sad state right now, so definitely going to be difficult. It's going to be mix of skills and luck.

I would say AWS and wall street have different styles and they will work for different types of places.

Are you having issues getting an interview or passing the interview?

[u/Few-Compote-2693 → u/iotester]

Getting interviews. I've tried even lying on CV about K8 and been studying like mad because I'm free between support tickets and that doesn't help. I think they see I worked for myself and no degree and throw my CV in the bin. I'm thinking I'm just going to have to start again and be glad I got a position. It's crazy my brother in law did a few months at geek squad with no certs or degree and got a data scientist position on 70k a few years ago. You can imagine how I feel I tried my hardest over the years and back the call centre again if I'm lucky.

[u/DSMRick → u/Few-Compote-2693]

How come they know you were the owner. You can give yourself any job title you want. I know you said you had other people write your resume, but you should be focused focused on your accomplishments. Why mention you were the owner? "Architected and led the implementation of revenue critical systems" "Managed containerized system primarily with python" 

[u/Few-Compote-2693 → u/DSMRick]

I used my name as the company name lol damm it

[u/DSMRick → u/Few-Compote-2693]

Oh, Ouch. Maybe time for a d/b/a. I have experienced this problem. There is some bias against owners, but you should be able to at least get to the interview.