Speaker Notes - Condensed

Last updated Sep 19, 2022 Edit Source

• Map of content

Welcome everyone to Adventures in Technical Career Progression! I’m your host, John White, former VMware Staff Solution Engineer, current Google Cloud Customer Engineer, @vJourneyman on twitter.

We won’t be talking about product.

We’ve been releasing the Nerd Journey Podcast weekly for the past four years.

That’s just about 200 total episodes across 55 guests.

We’ve been looking for the career advice we wish we’d been given, earlier in our careers.

Ultimately, we’re just two nerds on a journey.

A journey to career enlightenment.

So let’s take a trip!

Let me just spend a second on the format. We’re going to do about 45 mins of talking and 15 min of questions.

And I’ve got a session in Moscone South I have to get to right after this one, so I can’t stay and talkin the hallway, but you can, right John?

Absolutely. Happy to stay and chat.

Glad one of us can. As for the content, we’re bringing you the collective wisdom of our guests.

Right, the patterns we noticed emerging.

Poll: People Management

Poll: Becoming a Top Level IC

Poll: Burnout

Poll: Need to find a way in, when you didn’t have the exact experience a roll asked for?

Sprinkling management communication and lateral moves throughout, but if it feels like we didn’t cover what you want from that, feel free to ask a question during Q&A.

Speaker Notes - People Management Career

• Graph diagram
• Ethan Banks is co-founder of Packet Pushers Interactive; Host or co-hosts podcasts about IT for architects and engineers on shows such as Heavy Networking and Day Two Cloud.
• Pointed out that manager of a tech team isn’t a super-tech lead.

• Administrative, resource coordination.

• I think he said he hated it, because it didn’t meet what his expectations were.

• Don Jones was a VP at Pluralsight when we talked to him, now VP of Content at Karat, and mentioned that managers are dependent on their team for their success, not themselves.
• No feel for day-to-day success.

• Different job with different skills
• When we originally talked to Charlie Nichol, he was a Senior Manager of Solution Engineering at VMware. He’s currently a Regional VP for Sales Engineering at Rubrik.
• You are no longer an expert at technology.
• He also talked about motivating people who are different from you.

• When we talked to Brad Christian, he was a Solution Engineering Manager at VMware. He’s currently a Product Marketing Manager at DataStax.
• His goal is to remove impediments from the team and help them do their job better.
• Do that and enjoy it and hold onto your technical skills a little, you can be successful.

• Jeff Eberhard was a Solution Engineering Leader at VMware when we spoke to him. He’s currently a Cloud Sales and Engineering Leader at Oracle.
• He had to learn how to manage people significantly older than him. “How do I lead someone who has been doing this since before I was born?”
• Let’s generalize that, how do you lead someone who’s more technically proficient than you? The answer is that leadership and management are different skills sets than technical proficiency.

Brad Pinkston is a Director of Partnerships at Decisionlink, though he was

• a Director of Global Solutions Consulting at VMware when we spoke to him
• “You don’t have to be a manager to be a leader.”
• Leadership is inspiring, teaching, mentoring, coaching, and supporting your colleagues.

• Management adds the tasks of hiring, firing, performance management and excercise of role power to support the team.
• Role power expectation. Role power vs relationship power.

Don Jones also says that mangement and leadership are two separate things. You can lead as a peer, without being the boss. Managers handle resource allocation, measurement, etc.

• Scott Lowe is a Principal Technical Content Engineer, and was a Principal Field Engineer when we talked to him.
• Re-states the point about leadership being different than management. Part of the leadership task is helping others be more effective in their roles without being their manager.

• Kelly Schroeder is currently Director of IT at Colorado Early Colleges.
• Observed a manager very clearly cared about the wellbeing of the team and it’s memebers, both personally and professionally. Carries that with him today.

• Paul Green is Chief Development Officer at Angel MedFlight, having also held the CIO role.
• Coaching vs Solving Problems. Helps reports think through how to solve a problem rather than solving it for them
• Connect employee responsibilities with the company achieving it’s goals.

• Back to Jeff Eberhard.
• Interested in personal connection with their reports
• An interest in helping people develop their strong points as well as their weaknesses
• An understanding of the individual’s abilities as a contributor

• We spoke with Evan Oldford, Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco and author of ‘Ghost Rules: Unspoken secrets to getting ahead’
• Great managers remember great talent and want to bring you with them.

• Talk to your manager about your career goals
• Ethan Banks implies that you should actually listen to warnings your manager has about becoming a manager.

• Charlie Nichol’s manager encouraged him to look into leadership/management
• Trust your manager’s instincts
• Got exposure and took on managerial tasks.

• Brad Pinkston and Jeff Eberhard both had conversations with ther managers about making the jump to Manager from IC.
• Good managers will give opportunities to take on leadership tasks to get experience.

Didn’t Jeff overcome an early “soft no” by having those conversations?

• Story about Jeff collecting endorsements from peers about the potential move, which helped overcome the soft “no”.

• Brad Pinkston process of preparing for a management interview that was just as systematic as preparing for a certification exam.
• Study, peer group prep, mock interviews, interviewing people who had the job already.

• Charlie Nichol knew the management position was opening up, so had unofficial discussions with each stakeholder ahead of time.
• Even got endorsements to apply from them ahead of time.

We saw these four patterns, and mapped them to four books on the topic. They’re just the ones we picked to call out the topic, but we’re sure there are others. In fact, if you know of them, we want to hear about them.

Deep Work is a book by Cal Newport. The thesis is that high value, difficult work requires intense and intentional focus. Individual contributors can leverage this idea to build personal brand and accomplish the important things.

Eric Brooker is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Bluewave Technologies and gave examples of successful people he knew that only checked e-mail a couple of times per day.

Don Jones suggests we should quantify time spent doing different things, removing the items that are less valuable, and scheduling everything.

Speaking of time tracking, Chris Wahl, Senior Delivery Principal at Slalom, found he was spending hours per day on social media and decided to focus on solving cool problems and removing distractions. He even wrote a great blog post after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Andy Syrewicze, Tech Evangelist at Hornet Security, mentions the skill required to do nothing, reminding us of Cal Newport’s charge to be OK with being bored. The dopamine hit of filling time with distraction leads to a dependence on distraction, the enemy of deep work. Evan Oldford often works on a problem right before bed, allowing his subconscious to work on it while sleeping (often resulting in a morning epiphany)

We’re showing our work here, right John?

That’s right. All our notes, including our speaker notes are going to be published at graph.nerd-journey.com. It’ll be live by the end of the conference. This is based on the ideas from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

Jon Hildebrand, Principal Technologist at Cohesity, mentioning how his manager saw his blogging as evidence of the potential to work on a bigger stage doing great things (our words, not his).

David Klee, founder of Heraflux Technologies, discussed how his blogging and community involvement helped build a reputation

Jonathan Frappier used blogging as a way to store knowledge and experience, then found that it brought some recognition and helped him make moves to bigger organizations. He was also a part of vBrownBag and the vExpert communities which boosted network connections and encouraged learning (started hosting some of the vBrownBag shows).

People want to learn from recent beginners as well as experts. Beginners can empathize with the frustrations and missing context that beginners face.

Don’t you have a saying about fear of being bad?

Oh right. Don’t fear being bad at something. You definitely will be. Embrace and accept it. Smart Kid Syndrome

Steven Murawski mentioned the willingness to be a beginner and asking dumb questions as a career enabler. Beginner doesn’t mean inexperienced. Bringing the depth of your experience and related experiences.

Scott Lowe mentioned the balance between discomfort while you’re learning a skill and waiting too long to discuss it, when it’s become passe.

Stephanie Wong is the Head of Developer Engagement at Google Cloud. She talked about the first pancake principle: It’s always going to be bad, but you’ve got to get it out of the way.

Chris Wahl ditched social media, focuses on solving cool problems, and removed distractions. We told him about the book and he wrote a blog post after he read it.

This idea is based on the book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.

That’s right. He says that great output comes from great thinking. Great thinking comes from great writing. And great writing comes from taking smart notes while you’re consuming information. Smart notes are

• Atomic Thoughts
• In your own words
• Connected to other thoughts The graphs you see on these slides are examples of Smart Notes. We used a program called Obsidian, but there’s a bunch of tools out there that you could do this with.

Chris Wahl mentioned a note-taking system incorporating labels and color-coding to remember and find things.

• you won’t know what’s important until later
• writing in your own words forces deeper thought and understanding of the subject

Josh Duffney is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, and was the one who originally introduced us to the Deep Work concept we talked about earlier. He was so galvanized by the idea of Smart Notes that he wrote a short book on how to implement the system with Obsidian.

Stephanie Wong discussed how real learning comes from not just reading something, but retrieving the information, processing it, and teaching it back to others.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Improvement comes from small, incremental steps. Improving 1% every day has a compounding effect. So making tiny, easy changes that last and build upon each other can have a profound effect.

Joseph Griffiths mentions that there aren’t short cuts to iterate on one’s career. Learning and getting better takes time, and is an iterative process.

Steven Murawski and incremental changes over time.
It's not that I need to be perfect tomorrow.  I need to be a little bit better than I was today.

We had two people mention this idea for fitness as well. Blake Johnson discussed small, incremental change as the key to make lasting changes. Michael Levan talked about a series of iterative, modular changes, individually measured. But he’s also a DevOps consultant as well as a fitness guy, so that makes sense.

We can get anxiety and feel fear from those things we cannot control. Things like doing our jobs well, enhancing our larger organization (our team of peers and beyond), and helping your network (catching up, lifting others up). The Inner Game of Stress by Tim Gallwey, a tennis coach who paired with medical professionals to write this book, encourages us to think about what you don’t control, what you don’t control but keep trying to control, and what you control that you are not presently controlling (all about awareness).

Tom Hollingsworth, Network Analyst and Tech Field Day Event Lead, says we cannot always be chasing a stretch goal - set manageable, reachable goals and be ok with not making everything a stretch. If everything is a stretch goal eventually the rubber band will break. Work on stretch goals often enough that it feels like a special occasion and pushes you past boundaries but not so often that it adds stress.

Jonathan Frappier, Senior Product Education Engineer at HashiCorp, stresses the important of finding something to help maintain balance. He slowly peeled back extracurricular activities after almost losing his passion for technology but took up snowboarding as a hobby with the family.Look out for how you are feeling at any given moment. If beaten down, remember to look for the wave that will come to give you energy to do something new or something you once enjoyed. Don’t try to ride every wave. Awareness of going through the waves allows you to pick yourself up and come out of it.

Cody de Arkland encourages us to Give yourself room to build up new confidence when starting a new career path / role, and let it be ok to not be confident for a time. Build on what excites you and the places your confidence comes from.

Josh Fidel says loving your job isn’t enough to prevent burnout when other priorities slip. In his case, it was too much time away from family because of travel 5 days a week combined with the immense pressure of working with large customers on things under close inspection by leadership.

Things like exercise, being in nature, and a practice called Morning Pages helped me get away from the overwhelming feeling of such a large to-do list. It was all this and not having social media logged in on my phone.

Bill Kindle, a Senior Systems Engineer at Chemstation, needed creative outlets like writing and participating in community groups to fight back burnout and boredom with his job. The rev up and rev down of extra curriculars is different based on your situation (in contrast with Jonathan Frappier needing to trim down activities outside work).

We’ve seen a trend in guests who had some kind of background in education and then went into technology. I’m part of that list as are Ethan Banks, Jonathan Frappier, and a couple of others. Don Jones told us that teaching is just repackaging information. Think about roles where that is needed.

Dominique Top, a Solution Engineer at HashiCorp, started off perfoming in a band and studied music at the Dutch Pop Academy. She worked at an Apple store in retail sales and learned more about the devices and the tech. She got a job as a recruiter for DevOps roles but would try to learn from the candidates about the technology, eventually attending and later leading community meetup groups in the space. She got into DevOps community advocacy and then met a leader from HashiCorp who suggested she fill some skills gaps (which she did and later got a job as a Solution Engineer).

Stephanie Wong went to school for communications and digital humanities (impact of tech on society and culture). She practiced her audio/video production skills in a guerilla podcast; When it came time to apply for a job for developer advocacy, she could apply all her tech skills from being a sales engineer with her communications background to get the job. There is also a shout out to dreaming in bands concept here and saying no to Google Cloud (dream company).

Jimmy Tassin, a former IT admin and Solution Engineer at Lumen, said despite lacking industry-specific experience, he had experience in government-regulated industries, which was a positive when interviewing for a financial services industry job. During other times, he was able to draw the paralells between operating a successful Minecraft server and IT administration.

Sales experience doesn’t always come from sales roles. For example, selling projects to your boss (not just that we should upgrade to the next version because it’s better). Tony Reeves, a Solution Engineer at VMware is a great example of this.

Nick Korte said selling his ideas on solutions at a helpdesk was still selling.

David Klee went from doing IT for a performing arts center to working for a consulting firm to eventually starting his own consulting business. The focus on helping solve interesting problems and his no nonsense / low pressure approach helps put customers at ease.

Reach out to us with your ideas, your disagreements, the stories you’d like to share with us. Our DMs are open, we’d love for you to listen to any of the episodes that you find helpful and subscribe if you like our content in general.

graph.nerd-journey.com will be live by tomorrow. If we’re missing conceptual links or some of our thought should connect to things that don’t exist on our graph, let us know and we’ll investigate and add it. Maybe you’d like to come on to talk about it, even? There’s an idea.

That’s all the content we have that we didn’t cut. We’d love to open up for questions.

Or if you don’t have any questions, we’ll just keep talking.

Nick has another session at 3:30, so he can’t stay after, but I’m happy to hang out in the hallway, or head over to the VMware Communities and Code.