Kelsey Hightower

You come in, you do this thing, and I got really good at it because to me, I kind of saw it as like a bit of a competition.

Who is the best data center tech here?

What do their metrics look like?

How do I exceed their metrics?

I want to learn how to do every particular thing in this data center because previously as a business owner, the more skills you have,

the money you can make.

And then I just started switching jobs every three to six months because I just wanted to explore everything to just amass my abilities.

And doing the math, I think every jump was like a 25% pay raise.

I mean, coming from a small base, it didn't feel big at the time.

But after a few jumps, my salary doubled.

You know what?

And I would say the biggest inflection point in my career was there were two of them before I get into Puppet Labs.

So you come from Google, you see this huge operation.

There's hundreds of thousands of servers.

The cables are perfect.

Yeah, so in 2004, maybe 2005,

That data center is like a warehouse.

I mean, it's huge.

So think about a place where, and I'm pretty sure they always exaggerated the numbers.

So an exaggerated number to think about is like, think about 200,000 servers in one place.