Speaker 1: Lauren, what's going on?
Speaker 2: You know, that's always a challenging question, right to answer,
So maybe offlip it around. What's going on with you?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we're just it's early October in the
northwest US, So I'm getting ready for my first winter
in fifteen years, because I've been living down in Arizona
for fifteen years, and so now I'm like, oh wow,
there's this winter stuff I gotta do, and I'm trying.
Speaker 2: To figure it out.
Speaker 1: Hopefully before you know, it becomes a limiting factor in
my personal life choices.
Speaker 2: It's a whole set of lifestyle that you need to
be able to adapt to it. Like, it's not just
you have like one set of clothes that you can wear.
Speaker 1: All the time.
Speaker 2: You then need like fall clothes and spring clothes and
winter clothes. Actually four sets of like your life that
men adapt prepared. But actually, yesterday it was so warm
here that I regretted not wearing shorts. Yes, you know,
that's October seventh in Switzerland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems a bit unusual.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean it was got really
cold here already, but it was sort of this anomaly day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the different clothes for each season.
Just the other day, my wife commented, She's like, I
never ever thought I would see you own so much flannel.
I was like, wait, is that a good thing or
a bad thing?
Speaker 2: I mean, is it like red plaid like with blue lines,
lumberjack flannel.
Speaker 1: Or oh, you know it with the bib overalls underneath.
I'm all in, man, I'm all in.
Speaker 2: I mean, you got to pick your lifestyle here, and
you know, maybe that's I sort of want to have
us try something a little bit different for today's podcast.
So I was I took longer than I probably should
have looking at your LinkedIn profile recently, and I did
notice that you've actually had quite a long career.
Speaker 1: It has been this year. It has been thirty years
that I've been in the tech industry.
Speaker 2: I feel like if we had some sound effects, those
would be going off right.
Speaker 1: Now, right, because that's I don't know if many people
who have been at it this long. I think it's
a small group of people.
Speaker 2: And that's to say that everyone should retire before they
get to thirty years of experience.
Speaker 1: No, absolutely not. I think I think there's a proven
path to doing this, but a lot of people don't
know what it is, and so that's kind of what
we're going to talk about today. You know. I think
first thing, because this conversation actually came up with someone
I was talking with the other day. They're getting started
in their tech career, and they said, I just want
somebody to be honest with me, like what is it
really like? And I said, not going to bullshit you.
It's fucking hard. Like put aside, there's like great moments
that keep you going. But it is hard work. But
we have to like qualify hard work. Yes, it's hard work,
but so is you know, laying asphalt on the highway
in the desert in the middle of summer. Those are
both hard work. They're just different types of hard work.
So you kind of have to keep that in perspective.
I think during the hard years over a thirty year career.
Speaker 2: You know, I didn't think I would bring this up, actually,
but I thought it was sort of a joke initially
when I had started that people burn out at working
knowledge work, which is fundamentally what we're doing. As you mentioned,
it's somehow similar but still very different than the physical
work you would put in to perform some sort of
manual labor. It's yeah, for sure, is not a joke.
And I used to think, oh, yeah, you know, I'm
used to doing hard work at the high school, university level,
whatever I invested my time in. It's not easy. I
spent a lot of time studying, preparing for tests, et cetera.
And I always like, I don't want to do that anymore.
So I decided not to go to graduate school and
try to actually start working. And yeah, I'm with you
that I think just calling it hard work doesn't necessarily
really clarify what you have to really put in to
make even a short career.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. And I think that highlights So I've
picked out like four common paths for tech careers, and
so highlight those real quick. The first one is you
start your tech career, you do it for few years,
and then you kind of acknowledge it that point the
level of effort that it's required to keep going at this,
and so you move to something like a pre sales
engineering or a solutions engineer type role where it's still technical,
but you just kind of you know, you're familiar with
the concepts and you have the fundamentals, but you're not
required to you know, learn the you know, all the
different subcommands of operating a Kubernetes cluster and use those
on a daily basis. Right, So it's technical, but it's
less technical.
Speaker 2: Inspect I mean, it's sort of like the one where
you take the skills that you've learned over the beginning
part of your career from a theoretical standpoint or you know,
trying to figure out your way, and you're actually putting
them into practice by focusing on that part of the
delivery and less on learning new things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, Like you those fundamentals, like you know,
you know, you know basic things, well maybe basics not
the right word, but do you know things like you know,
don't expose your database server with a public IP address.
And so you use those lessons to help other people
engineer good solutions, but you're not actually responsible for getting
your hands on the keyboard and implementing them.
Speaker 2: You have some tricks in your tool bag and mantras
that you can repeat at maybe the right moment, and
you're now someone that can actually share that advice after
you know, I think like maybe even a.
Speaker 1: Five year mark for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's one. Yeah, the next one that I
commonly see is people moving from a technical role into
a management role. And I think this one we just
see it in other industries, you know, like if you
start out as a bank teller, then you become like
the manager of the local bank branch, and then you know,
you work your way up through a career in management,
and that's like the defined career path for every other industry,
and so people just naturally apply to ours. The one
of the things that I learned from that, though, is
that being a manager is a completely different career path.
It has very little to do with your technical skills,
because to be a good manager, you need people's skills.
You need to understand what motivates your people and when
they're struggling, and how to get them to turn it around,
and how to communicate with them. You know, not some
people respond to written communication, some respond to verbal communication,
and you have to dissect and figure that out for
each one of your employees, remember it for that employee,
and then frame your conversations with them using that.
Speaker 2: I feel like that bears repeating realistically, because it's sort
of the area where I feel like in my career
people kept on saying, oh, you need to have soft
skills to make this happen and not really explain it
in a way that resonated with an engineer or engineers
I feel like aren't really explained to what that difference
in role is. And I think you know you've done
a good job hashing over that. It is quite the
challenge and it for sure is nowhere close to the same.
I think for me, the language that I have jumped
on in the past that has been helpful is you
have more resources at your control to help deliver something
of much greater scale, Like you're not going to build
a skyscraper by yourself. You know you can hire as
many people as you want to help you do that.
What exactly do you do to make that happen? And
in knowledge work, I feel like it's very difficult to
wrap your head around what extra people will help with
It was a I'm sure it's happened to It's happened
to me, I'm sure it's happened to you. In your career,
you can ever get asked like, hey, will like, we're
not going at this as fast, says we want to like,
could you use some extra people?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah? Like And for me, most of the time,
the answer is no, because then I've got to stop
progress on it to get them into a productive state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and also like splitting the work and
just breaking out like you know I have in my
head it's organized in some way, and so moving into
the management position is all about doing that, you know,
like no hands on really, like how do I organize
people to automatically achieve what I want? Okay, yeah, I
got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the things that helped me make that
concrete in my head because I think the word soft
skills is the wrong word. I think that's misleading in it.
But for about five years I was a CrossFit coach
out outside of outside of work, and to me, that
taught me more about communication than anything I've ever done
in my life, because, yeah, you're in this scenario where
you have people of varying skills trying to complete strenuous
work for their own personal benefits. But at the same time,
if they do it wrong, they could injure themselves and
that's the worst case scenario. But then you add in
peer pressure on top of that because they may be
standing next to someone doing the exact same movement with
twice as much weight. So now they're feeling less confident
because of that. And then let's up the pressure one
more time and let's put a running clock on there.
So now we're going to judge you based on the
time it takes you to complete this work. And so
as a coach, you're looking out across this group of
people and you see someone making a mistake. So you've
got to make it across the gym to this person.
You've got to break their mental thought process because they're
just focused on that clock. You've got to interrupt that cycle,
get their attention, and then figure out how to communicate
to them enough so that they don't injure themselves. So
you're like, does this person respond to verbal cues? Do
they respond to show and tell? Do they respond to
feel where I can like touch the middle of their
back and say don't don't bend this. If they do
respond to feel and it's a person of the opposite sex,
are they going to assume that I'm trying to hit
on them and take it the wrong way? And You've
got to process all of this stuff in a matter
of seconds to prevent them from getting injured. And to me,
that taught me a lot about soft skills and how
to communicate, and I think those directly translate into a
management career path.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I totally get that. I keep hearing that
someone has an example that's somehow sport related. I know,
a cross fit. I feel like is in a weird
area here, right, it's not definitely, I mean it is
sort of for you. I mean you're thinking of as
a coach, like this is my group, this is my team.
I need to get them to the finish line and
helping them however that happens. And I was just starting
to like develop these nightmare scenario where there's like a
clock ticking down as a software developer and someone's wanting
me to come and pat me on the back and say, hey,
you know, you know, do this a little bit differently.
But the team thing keeps coming up for me a
lot like I feel like I didn't. I wasn't exposed
to sports teams enough as a in a leadership capacity
or understanding how to work with leaders in that. You know,
it's still very especially where I came from my you know,
my culture American initially, and so it definitely task oriented,
you know, head down, focus on whatever the thing is
that you need to do it relevant to the sport,
even if there are other players that are on your
team that are happening at the same moment. But over
my career, having focused on that a lot, I definitely
got a better understanding of what it means to make
a team and to lead that team in knowledge based work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, sure I can relate to that. I
grew up in Texas in the seventies and eighties, so
you either played football, basketball, or baseball, preferably all three,
and I was one of those and still am one
of those uncoordinated people where if you want pure hilarity,
just throw me a ball and expect me to catch it.
But anyway, right now, I'm over it now. I just
like own it now, Like, yeah, that's never gonna happen.
I'm fine with that.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we got the management position future, you know, yeah,
change your role long term, right right, And.
Speaker 1: I think it's important to acknowledgement, acknowledge that you are
specifically changing your expertise.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because there actually has been this mancho like
don't put engineers in like, don't force engineers into management position,
And that's like one side of the spectrum and there's
side of the spectrum is oh, yes, management positions come
after uh, you know, being an individual contributor. So right,
I hope there's like some sort of magic middle ground
here where like there is some portion of the population
who this is this is probably the path that you
belong on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think the other common path that
I've seen, and I think the motivating factor behind all
of these is like you mentioned earlier, you know, the
continuous education thing. You know, tech is continuously changing, You're
always behind. And so the third one that I've seen
people pursue is just finding a nice comfy hole to
hide in. So you get your job and then you
figure out how this legacy component works and you just
become the expert in that, and now you're kind of
like indispensable because no one else wants to touch this thing,
but it's critical to the business operations, and so you
can just kind of carve out your defined work and
you're just going to ride that out to retirement. And
I'm not saying and I'm not like saying that is
a bad thing at all. This is a valid option.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, do you think there's like some secret
that actually making that career happen like something that you
should go and do to if that, if that feels
more comfortable to you, because I mean, I know there's
people out there that are like, I don't want to
be a manager and I don't want to go into
sales or even working with other teams and having to
communicate across them as a.
Speaker 1: Challenge for me. Yeah, for sure, learn coboll.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, hands on, hard technical work is not
the norm, even like in my career, I have very
rarely seen those people. I mean, I think it's less
and less the case over time, with new strategies having
been discovered and then replicated across companies and then turned
into tools that can be utilized the complicated subsystem person
who's that foremost expert in that thing. Number of roles
I feel like has been decreasing over time.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure, for sure. And I think that highlights
the common denominator to all three of those strategies that
causes people frustration in their career because all three of
them force you out of that continuous education mode and
more than likely at some point that job is going
to end. So now you're re entering the workforce, but
you've let your technical skills lapse, and so now you're
not interviewing at the level that you previously had because
you don't have up to date tech skills.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean those three are either I changed my role,
I did something with my skills. I'm not focusing on
learning over and over again. So there must be other
career paths out there that don't focus on switching out
but maybe focus on learning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is kind of the path that I've taken
over the last thirty years, just kind of having the mantra.
And it hasn't been this mind from the beginning. It's
evolved over time, but it's just waking up and when
I get out of bed in the morning acknowledging I'm
the dumbest fucker in tech right now because since I
quit work yesterday afternoon and got up this morning, technology
has progressed, but here I was sleeping in bed. So
now my job for today is to deliver value from
my employer, do the thing that they're paying me to do,
and level up my skills so that I'm going to
be valuable to them tomorrow. And the focus is not
so much on the employer of oh I've got to
be a good employee so that they put a gold
star on my forehead or whatever. The goal to all
of this is, I've got to provide for my family.
You know. My job is to make sure that everyone
in my family has a roof over the head, food
on the table, and money to meet their needs. And
this is the path that I've chosen to do that.
And so continuous education is just one of two primary
tools I use to do that. The first tool is
active employment employment, and then the second tool is a
continuous education so that I can have active employment tomorrow.
Speaker 2: So there was a previous episode where I grilled you
on mastermind groups and people who can sort of challenge
you on as I quote your bullshit. I feel like,
you know, that's a source of learning at least feedback
from the outside. But like, how have you managed to
actually hold in new information and kept growing over the
last thirty years. Was it like a conscious effort of like,
I need to learn something this week, this is the
thing I'm learning. Was it you were involved in some
companies that maybe made it easier like any Was there
a concerted effort? Was it just who you are as
a person?
Speaker 1: Probably a combination of all those I think one of
the driving factors has has been most of my career
has been building early stage tech startups, you know, and
so all the early stage tech startups, you're not limited
by previous technical decisions, and so software engineers tend to
be aware of like, oh, hey, there's this new thing
called Heroku or this new thing called Versell, and so
then they use that and I'm like, ah, damn, all right,
I got to learn that. And then you start to
if the company is successful, you start to hit the
limits of that. So now it's like, Okay, we're going
to have to get off of this. What are they doing?
Why is that the limiting factor? And what can I
build that will work better than that which leads you
into you know, cloud computing or Kubernetes or something like that.
So it was kind of like just taking a step
back to read the lands gate and figure out where
we're going and what was going to be the limiting
factor in that path. You know.
Speaker 2: That's a really interesting perspective because I feel like I
started my career on the opposite side, and when I
was working at one of these companies, the thought I
kept having to myself is I feel like I'm learning
dead frameworks, like things that are not going to afford
my career in any way. And it wasn't like, let
me force this company to introduce something that they definitely
don't need, like Kubernetes, in order to put it on
my resume. It was let me find other companies that
are doing something in a field that I care about
that I could push forward. And so like switching your
career every couple of years, I mean, I feel like
has been this recent mantra of how people get promoted.
But if you look at the reason why, I feel
like the continuous learning is a good justification of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree with that, And I would have
to say I probably have followed that almost subconsciously. You know,
in thirty years, I've never been with the same employer
for more than three years.
Speaker 2: You know, this is going to be like recorded, and
then people may hear that and how many years are
you coming up on your current.
Speaker 1: Joone will I've got eleven months to go there.
Speaker 2: I think there's a wisdom there that. And I ask
people like, how long like you plan on working at
this company until you retire? And the answer is almost
always no, And I'm like, okay, great, and right now
you're like the way you're acting or the path that
you're taking or what you're focusing on is aligned with
I'm going to work there forever. So like how many
years out you know, you start playing this game of
like where is your career going? When is that point
in which you know which you think you will no
longer work at that company? And I'm not asking you to,
you know, answer this for that point, but I think
the interesting thing is you mentioned you focus in the
startup world where there is a rapid turnover or introduction
of new tools, and things change when you get to
the scale phase and be like, Okay, our product now works,
we need to make some significant changes there or the
tools we're using run out. Have you ever heard of
the cont the pioneer, settler and town planner. No, So
it's sort of this mentality that someone takes on and
not that you are only one of these. There is
this idea of you're doing some green field work, you
are a pioneer in the wild West in a previously
mapped out region of technology or whatever you're doing, and
then there's this stage in the middle, which is the settler.
You can imagine there are some things that are built,
you're coming in and making some changes there to improve it,
and then there's a town planner, which is like over
optimization of everything we have to in order to scale
to millions of users or millions of requests per second, etc.
I can imagine that the pioneer is sort of stuck
on the learn new tools, but not necessarily learn new
things for your own benefit. And obviously the optimizer is
working in very fixed framework. So it does sound like
maybe you fall into the middle of this where you're
coming in, you have some experiences and you're really helping
out the organizations, but you're pulling out all that information
and knowledge that you can and being as effective as
you as you are would be in that role.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And I think that's part of the
reason why the three year mark has worked out so
well for me, because in the life cycle of a startup,
it's kind of a that's kind of like a three
year max thing, you know. And that's funny because I
actually gave a talk several years ago at DevOps Europe
that talked about this life cycle that sounds very similar
to what you're describing, but I used it as like building.
I actually use the analogy of the Right Brothers in
aviation industry on it. But like a startup, you know,
you have your first phase of the startup where you
have this idea, and so your job there is to
launch that idea as fast as possible, because there's always
a difference between the product that you built and the
product that your customers wanted, and so your job in
phase one is to launch something so you can figure
out what that gap is and then close that gap.
And then now that you're building the product that your
customers want, phase two is actually building a factory that
their job is to create that product. So you're building
assembly lines, you know, and putting in teams and figuring
out how to make this thing scalable and redundant and profitable.
And then once you figure that out, you move into
phase three, where you have you just operate the factory,
you know, you just operate the money making machine until
the end of the company. And each of those phases
requires a completely different type of person, and someone who's
really good at phase one is probably going to struggle
in phases two and three and vice versa and all
those things. So I think at that point, you kind
of put yourself in a position where you're there to
achieve a certain thing, and then once that's achieved, you
have to go for two reasons, one because you're not
good at what comes next, and two, if you are
good at that, you probably enjoy doing it and wouldn't
enjoy doing the subsequent phase.
Speaker 2: What I heard was I have some great wisdom and
a talk that I prepared, and now I want to
go and watch that. You've got like a website where
you've got your talks listed or something.
Speaker 1: No, I probably should, but I can find I can
find a link to that talk because I thought it
was pretty cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I mean it sounds pretty spot on because I
feel like a self identification here, Like I see a pattern, right,
you know, I care about learning, I care about learning
new things, and also who am I? You know, what
kind of person am I? What kind of career do
I want to have? And so now I got to
ask you, did you ever think that you'd have such
a long career? Was it something that you had planned
for in some way?
Speaker 1: No, definitely was not planned. Definitely wasn't planned. And I
think that's really really important to highlight for people who
are just starting their careers. You don't have to have
the next thirty years mapped. You probably shouldn't have the
next thirty years map because you're going to learn things
in the first five years of your career that will
influence how you want those remaining years to go. So
you don't have to know everything. You just have to
keep moving forward.
Speaker 2: When you started, what was the picture like for you?
Did you have some sort of foggy vision of what
sort of work you would be doing even in five
years or longer term.
Speaker 1: No, not a clue. Like my first my first job
in technology computing technology. Prior to that, I installed in
program telephone systems, but I had a hobbyist interest in computers,
so I set up the novel network for the company
I worked for. And for those of you who don't know,
Novelle was a computer server networking platform in the early
nineties that was ultimately beat out by Microsoft. But yeah,
I started installing that, and then there was sort of
a natural progression there. You know, we were installing the
telephone cables and the desktop computing became popular, so we
started installing networking cables, and then the customers were like, well, hey,
you put in the networking cables, can you install the
routers and switches and like, oh sure, well actually our
sales guy said sure, and we're like damn, okay, I
guess we'll go figure that out. And then, you know,
then they would bring in the computer guys and the
conservers wouldn't work, and they would instantly blame the network.
And so I had to learn enough about how servers
worked so that I could prove that it wasn't the
network issue at all. Funny how some stories never changed, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: What you're doing today?
Speaker 1: Yeah, official description pretty much. Yeah, just the just the
actual commands I run is different. Yeah. And then we
had a company that they had a Microsoft SEQL database
server and they couldn't figure out how to work at
The people that were supposed to be working on it
for more unresponsive, And so I just happened to be
there working on the computer network one day and they're like, hey,
can you take a look at it? Like, yeah, I
can take a look at it. And this was back
whenever they shipped physical manuals with the software. So I
took the Microsoft Sequel Server six point five book home
with me that weekend and read it to cover to
cover and then finallyigured out their problem and then they
offered me a full time job as a database administrator
and things have just gone on from there. So no,
this was not planned by any mean, this was like
the Forest Gump path to career growth.
Speaker 2: I mean I saw some fear there. Like if I
had ever been in a similar certain circumstance like having
opened the DBA book, I feel like I would have
closed it very quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think I was probably preconditioned to that because
my original job out of high school was as a
nuclear engineer in the Navy, and so it's very much
lots of books to read and very high stakes for penalties,
you know, because it's a nuclear power plan, you know,
so they're kind of kind of finicky and so but
after doing that, like my risk tolerance was pretty high,
you know, like, oh, hey, I'm not going to kill
every living creature into twenty five mile radius. Cool, we're golden, yeah, crazy, right,
yeah exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: It just just release the software, I mean whatever.
Speaker 1: Right, just release it. No one's gonna die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, one actually may find out, and you're not
planning on saying there very long anyway. So I mean
there is, for sure this problem in tech where people
are often more rewarded but for switching companies, Oh for sure.
And so you work on a project, it's challenging, you
don't it doesn't go well, it gets completed, you learn something,
then you leave and you're celebrated for that work. You
can talk about it, what you did, et cetera, et cetera,
and new place loves it. And then ten years later,
whatever you built like causes the first company to crash
and burn, right, and like, there's no one to be
held accountable for that. And I mean, for sure the
engineer should not be the one held accountable for that.
If one person could be responsible for taking down the company,
there's a problem with the process. I hope it turned
into some sort of insurance policy that engineers have to
take out in order for them to start working.
Speaker 1: I know the attorneys have the SoundBite, that's all they needed.
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like Shavalla up, I am not
an expert, right, I have no idea what I'm saying.
Please do not take my words at eddy official capacity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to pin one of the drug commercial
disclaimers at the end of this episode, where the guy's
reading it like auctioneer speed. About all the legal disclaimers
about this episode.
Speaker 2: I mean, I will say, if someone wants to pull
me into a court case as a subject matter expert,
I'm happy to repeat those things. But you can find
my fees on my web page for for sure.
Speaker 1: No, but that is a that is a good point,
an important point. An important point to acknowledge is that
switching jobs is your best path forward to increasing your
south with the caveat if you don't want to burn
any bridges along the way, which is pretty easy to do.
I mean, just be just be like a stand up person,
you know. I think that's fairly low bar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say that you may be it may
be challenging to get invested in whatever architecture or platform
you're building enough to understand or deal with challenging problems.
If you keep switching too soon, like, you may be
eliminating some of the most challenging pieces of technology that
you would be able to invest in or learn about
because it requires understanding so many different moving pieces at
a company. So I think it's something to keep be
aware of, and honestly, I tend to think of it
as it's a negotiation tool that you can use if
you're struggling in your current job to say, hey, you know,
I think I should change something while I'm still working there,
rather than believing I have to leave to have everything
be different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And I think when we had Kelsey
high Tower on the show a couple months ago, he
did a really great job of highlighting that you know
that your first few years of your career should be
broad and touch many things, but then at some point
you find something that you're really going to focus in on,
and so at that point you go deep into that vertical.
Speaker 2: Here's a maybe a spicy take. If you never get
fired in the first five years of your.
Speaker 1: Career, if you never get fired for the right reasons,
I think that's important to call it laid off.
Speaker 2: And fired for the wrong reasons. And there's not a
lot that you can do about that, unfortunately. Yeah, but yeah,
for sure.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking, if you get fired for bearing
your ass to the HR person, that's that's probably not
what we're referencing here.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm talking about like accountability in your job
and your official job responsibility and role. Yeah, for sure,
because you know, we don't know everything, and I feel
like pushing that and disagreeing with other people as natural.
And I think that some people, some companies see disagreement
as not a positive and that everyone should be happy
and work together all the time. And I feel like
disagreement actually does breed some interesting conclusions, interesting technology, good
decisions to come out of that. So just being agreeable
isn't necessarily the path forward for learning new things in
your career. Don't be scared to be the odd black
sheep out.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, absolutely, because either either you're right or
you learn something, So there's really no downside to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You started as with the cable
lines and got to DBA and now you've to I
don't actually know what your official role is now. I
saw it to a like T DevOps lead. I imagine
you're responsible for more things than you're comfortable with, but
maybe you could just give me a good summary of what.
Speaker 1: That looks like. Yeah. From my perspective, I'm responsible for
building the infrastructure that allows the software engineers at our
company to ship their code reliably and safely, with fault
tolerance and scalability, even when they don't know what those
things mean. And that's kind of how I view it, which,
you know, it's still vague in itself, but technically it means,
you know, building out infrastructure in AWS or GCP or
something like that and using CICD so that they can
focus on the things that they do well and produce
a product that I know will run well.
Speaker 2: Are you like on some sort of autonomous team that
focuses on this area. Is there like a team lead
of that team?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the team lead of the team.
Speaker 2: So there's like people that sudo report to you that
you're responsible for their future careers there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is a bit of a transition for me,
you know, because it's less hands on the keyboard, more
focused on, you know, some of those softer skills that
we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2: And like as having had the thirty year career, like
helpful for giving wisdom to your fellow team members, I hope.
So I don't know, because you know, sometimes in this
position and I worry, like, are my experience is even relevant?
One of the ones I really struggle with is I've
experienced this problem and it was a failure in some
regard and I learned from it. Yeah, And like should
I help someone else through that same experience, or give
them advice so that they can avoid it and never
feel the repercussions of their action.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think a key component to that
is being aware of the back in my day syndrome,
you know, because as you get older, you it's got
to be genetic or something, because you'll find yourself standing
on the front porch yelling at the kids about back
in my day, you know, and it's just not relevant.
So I think one of the key aspects to that
is to make sure that your own skills are relevant
with today's current technology, and then guide your use of
that based on things that you've learned in the past.
So you have to have like a foot in both camps.
You've got to have a foot in the past and
a foot in the future to have a somewhat relevant perspective.
Speaker 2: I like that you you jumped into the puddle here
we'll say quicksand mud pig about the future, because I'm
going to ask you there's been a lot of flux
I feel like in the technology industry today, especially in
the last year. I don't want to say that the
layoffs have anything to do with it, or that AI
specifically related to it in general, or whether or not
that will change, Like, are you ignoring this It's like
you've seen this happen so many times in your career,
it's just another time. Or is it like a fundamental
change here that people need to be aware of that
could affect how their careers are evolving And maybe the
second fall up here is like or you're just hoping
that you'll retire before you have to worry about it.
Speaker 1: No, I'm currently treating it as just one of many
cycles I've seen in the past, and for me, the
key to navigating these cycles is to not pan your
identity to a specific thing, like you know, like I'm
not identified as the expert in Kubernetes because no business
cares about Kubernetes. What the care about is solve their problems.
And to give you a specific example from my startup history,
you know, I'll start working with a startup and they've
got ten thousand monthly active users on their app. I'm
not there to talk to them about how you can
use kurinetes or you know, Docker container based images or
monitoring your slas and your response times. I'm there to
talk to them about how do I get you from
ten thousand monthly active users to one hundred thousand monthly
active users, because then they can do the math and say, oh, well,
at ten dollars a user, if they can increase that,
that generates this much additional revenue. And so now you're
solving a specific problem that they do care about, and
they don't really care about the technology you used to
do that.
Speaker 2: There's something very special about that advice. So you're not
just the DevOps lead pulling on. You also advise startups,
and as you mentioned, they care about getting to market
and increasing their revenue, validating their idea, but then also
scaling up. And so you're basically saying it like, I
know technology, And the right answer in any of those
conversations is not like use use this technology, like use
this thing. It's understanding where they're at and saying this
is the thing that you need to change to make
that happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Like if you hire a carpenter, the
carpenter doesn't show up saying hey you got to hire me,
I have a sixteen ounce clawhammer. You're like, I don't
give a shit. I'm trying to build a house. And
so they're going to talk to you about building a house.
They may in fact have a sixteen ounce claw hammer,
but that's just a tool that they use, and I
try to apply the same thing. You know, I may
have Kubernety skills or DBA skills, but that's just a
tool that I use to solve the problem that your
business has.
Speaker 2: No that really resonates with me. Actually, I remember seeing
pretty good conference talk video about selling toilets at departments,
you know, home DEEPO or Lows whatever, And you go
in there, like I need a toilet from my house
and there's like twenty toilets that are sitting there. It's
like which one do I buy?
Speaker 1: And you got to test them?
Speaker 2: Sorry, I feel like I'm unfamiliar with this concept. You
you test them in the store?
Speaker 1: Well, why else would they have them sitting out? I
mean a little privacy curtain would be nice, but hey, whatever.
Speaker 2: They seem worse. Apparently that's that's not for everyone. It
takes a special kind of skill to be able to
pull that off. So the point the point is is
like you don't you're not the foremost expert in whatever
those things are. You have some problem and how the
toilet works isn't necessarily your what you care about or
you know, as the carpenter that you're hiring, like what
the code is for how thick you're two bike? Well
your walls need to be or the support beams, how
the electrical wiring needs to be done? You don't really
care about, right, Yeah, And so I think that's a
good analogy there that the person the expert in that
is there to ask.
Speaker 1: You the things that you do know about and guide
you to the right solution. You know, like how much
room do you have? Oh, you've only got sixteen inches
with so the twenty four inch model gets ruled out immediately,
you know. So focus on the parts of the problem
that they do understand and then use your expertise of
the product to help them make the right selection.
Speaker 2: So I feel like what we're talking about is becoming
that expert over time by focusing on learning and so
irrelevant of how the market shifts or what new tools
are available, it could be just figuring out how do
I apply that to what I already know. It's not
like a different field. It's not something you have to
switch like I'm going to change my role now, but
how do I use these things to help me deliver
more more effectively or is there something I can learn
about that? But you do a lot of things at
the same time. It's like, you know, you do the advising,
your podcast post. How do you find time for all
of that?
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of time, and I think that's
something that has to be accounted for, you know, like
a tech a career, a long thirty year career in
tech is not a forty hour a week commitment, you know.
It's it's forty usually forty plus hours at the job
that pays your salary. But then you have to dedicate
time above and beyond that to update your skill set
so that you're relevant for tomorrow. And I think that's
one of the big the big misunderstood lessons from college
is it's not about the education as much as it
is about building good learning habits that you can use
for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Okay, I only have bad learning habits, so lay one
on me here.
Speaker 1: I probably do too. I just put in the time
to compensate for that. You know, like whenever I was
in nuclear engineering school, you spent forty hours a week
in class, and then you spent another thirty to forty
hours a week after class studying, and so I just
built those you know, bulldog skills where you just keep
chewing and chewing and chewing without regard for anything else,
and it's cost stuff along the way. You know, like
I used to love playing I still probably love playing
computer games, but I don't know because I don't do
that a lot anymore. Same thing with you know, like
playing guitar. It's just not something I have time for
very frequently, and so there are trade offs. But according
to my life goals, which is to build a life
where I've provided for my family the best that I
could and help set them up for success, it was
a fair trade off. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a good thing to keep coming back
to because it's your personal identity is not like where
you're working or the tool that you're working with. You
have some other life goal that you're trying to achieve,
and not getting too attached to your current situation is
the only way that you can move forward. I mean,
there was no even in the four examples of the
different progression paths you can have as an engineer, being
the foremost expert requires a very specific niche and there's
just not that many of them, all of them require
fundamentally changing something as time goes on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think one good way to keep this in
perspective is you're going to card in a career in tech,
but it comes with rewards, and those rewards I think
are the the way that you finance your true goals
in life, because when you die, you're gonna meet your
creator and they're going to say, hey, we gave you
the most state of the art vehicle in the known universe,
we gave you a human body, what did you do
with it? And saying I was a team lead for Microsoft,
I think is probably not going to cut it as
the answer.
Speaker 2: I think it's self reflection, so you know, you have
to decide for yourself that if that cuts it or not.
I think you know at the point that we're our
own judges there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least I like to.
Speaker 2: Believe that, because otherwise I think I'm going to be
in trouble because your your version of how you studied
for nuclear engineering is not how I approach my university time.
I had a very different approach there, So that we're.
Speaker 1: Not I can take a guess.
Speaker 2: I mean it was still you know, with as much struggle.
You know, I used to think that getting burned out
in the job was some sort of joke. And I'll
be the first one to admit this, that it was
not something that I thought actually would happen. And then
it happens to you, and you struggle with it a
lot because of whatever you were doing, the strategy you had,
and it really has this psychological and physiological impact on
how you deal with things. And so really being mindful
of that that there is it is hard work, for sure.
There is no like this is an easy job. You
mentioned rewards. And I feel like I was asking very
many times in my in my pre career and career,
are you going to make a lot of money? And
I always thought, yeah, probab to make some money, right, Like,
it's probably not as much as like a lawyer or
a doctor or whatever else I came to mind with.
But after working in tech for not as long as
you will, I have actually the belief that you can
make quite a lot of money in this industry. I
feel like I've seen some people say they have total
compensation is over a million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've heard that as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's not the norm, no, Yeah, there's a lot
out there, for sure, and so I like your framing
that it's not just easily achievable. If you want to
get to the next level and change really your compensation,
it requires putting in a lot more effort, and maybe
the company you're working for can support you. Hopefully you
don't have to put in a lot of more hours
to make that happen. But your hobby, if you're a
person that likes to learn, seems like you know you
really well fit for that, right you know, I can
learn what I care about outside of the job and
focus on that and then bring that back and use
that in my career.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. And I think that's important is to
have a reason to learn, you know, because like saying,
oh I have to learn this for this particular paycheck
is going to lead to burnout, guaranteed. You know, you've
got to tie it back to some other reason in
your life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I think one of the things I
often struggle with giving good advice over is when early
career engineers come to me and say, Hey, what should
I learn? And I'm just like, there are too many things,
too possibly that you could be learning, Like which one
do you care the most about. Which one is well
aligned with who you want to be or who you
are or how you think about problems. That's the thing
that you should go after. Don't ask me should I
learn AWS or GCP or I mean, I'm going to
tell you to learn AWS, but that's sort of a
different a different bucket. Realistically, it may not help you
get a job, right, You know, what I think is
important isn't necessarily what is important for you. So really
focusing on what you actually cared about, you cared about learning,
You took what you were currently doing and said, you know,
it was always a yes. It sounds like, you know,
oh we're doing this thing, can we do this other
thing as well? Yeah? Sure, why not? Let's jump into that.
Speaker 1: Uh that's scary, not really, what's the worst it could happen?
Speaker 2: No one, no one, No one's dying, right for sure?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the ways I like to guide people when
that question comes up is just tell them go get
a junk PC, build a web server, put it online,
build a website and make it public, you know, and
then you're just going to take them. You're going to
take them all the way through the entire software delivery
life cycle end to end and tell them at some
point in there, you're going to enjoy part of that
process and you're going to hate other parts of that process.
Focus on the parts that you enjoyed.
Speaker 2: There is actually, if people are looking for something specific,
there's some documentation out there around what's called the Cloud
Resume Challenge. It's basically a will described It helps guide
you through the different technologies that you can potentially be
using and say, here, solve this problem. Then solve this problem.
Then solve this problem very specifically, and through that you
can take like take lots of time understanding what you're
actually doing and why. Like, it's not about getting through
it as soon as possible, No one's no one's going
to be reviewing your work. But it is a great
thing because the outcome is a hey, look, I built
all these things to automatically update my resume, and it's
on a public website. And you can even show that
as a project that had some value. Whereas someone who
tells me, oh, yeah, I build like a recommendation engine
that shows like movies or whatever on a web page,
I'm going to be like, why why did you build?
My first question in an interview, like, tell me about
something you really enjoyed doing and then why you did it.
And the answer can't be oh, I just needed to
do something right. I want to understand your thought process
on understanding business value or driving forward. I had a
problem I need to solve, and here's the solution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think that's it right there. You had
a problem to solve. You know, why was that a problem?
Why was this the solution that you chose? Because that's
what all businesses are doing, is they're trying to solve problems.
Speaker 2: I think there's another thing here, and it's the nuances involved.
Like if it's a concrete thing that actually happened to
you and there was a lot of discussions behind it,
those are interesting conversations. Those are interesting stories how you
were engaged in that, what you learned about doing that.
And if it's sort of a made up hypothetical problem,
then you don't really understand the trade offs. There aren't
any trade offs to make. It's whatever you want at
every bend. You can't really say, well, we had one
hundred thousand users, so we had to do things this way,
or we only had ten users and so we could
do things differently, if you just have a made up
number of users in your head, I have no idea
how resilient and reliable the project that you did had.
Speaker 1: To be, yeah, for sure. And another thing you can
do is if you don't have a problem that seems
particularly interesting to you, is talk to people that you know.
A specific example is a buddy of mine just recently
has been taking Mui Thai lessons. But the software that
the company uses for like building membership and tracking classes
and all that kind of stuff was just really frustrating
for him to use. So he went to the owner
and said, hey, can I just build you a platform
that's specific to the classes you teach, because like he
was using some generic gym membership websites SaaS that was,
you know, for anything from like Planet Fitness to you know,
your local CrossFit thing, and so it wasn't really working
for their specific needs. So he's currently working on building
one specific to w we Tai gyms.
Speaker 2: He really took that opportunity that he found and did
something with it. I think being open outside of your
nine to five or whatever you want to call it.
In the remote world or hybrid world, the hours during
the day aren't fixed. You know, whatever you're doing in
those in the downtime, I think are great opportunities to
invest more in. They're the things that maybe you already.
Speaker 1: Care about, yeah for sure. Yeah, And so it's multifaceted
win for him. You know, he gets a better experience
as a customer of this gym, but he's also getting
more skills at solving problems for a business and at
the same time working on advancing or keeping his own
technical skills up to date as well, all from the
same project.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot there go on, Like you can
keep investing in that more and more, and you can
turn it into a business and sell it to the
next next gym and the next.
Speaker 1: Jim in the next gym, right for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So since you've got up there in years now, are
you starting to think about like, I'm going to retire
at some point or is this like I'm going to
be doing this till like I'm going to be on
the podcast host until the day I die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's been coming up more and more frequently
in my thought process recently. I might I might be
close to the end of my career.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, anything that's weighing to help make that decision, Like,
was it a direction, like you you like what you've achieved,
You're getting out early. Is it a you know, you
said you had a main goal in your in your
why you're working, and if you don't need the money,
then you won't necessarily do that. Is it about I
want to play games more?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: You know you said get back to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's definitely not I want to play games more
because I am about gosh what it's been seven, eight,
maybe years ago. I hit this point where I just
I don't need to work for the money anymore, and
so I kind of retired at that point. And after
about thirty days, my wife was like, look, we got
to talk. You can get a job, you can go
away forever, you can get a mistress. I don't care
what you do, but you cannot sit around the house anymore.
And she had a valid point, because I just I'm
not the type of person who can have nothing to do. Like,
worst case scenario for me would be retire and the
only thing I have to look forward to would be
like a daily round of golf. So I think it'll
probably change for me in the near future, but I
just don't know what that is going to look like.
Speaker 2: So, I know that you've said a lot of things here,
there's a lot of secret nuggets of wisdom that have
been added, and.
Speaker 1: Well, I hope so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, anyone that's been doing something as
long as you have collects those and picking your brain
is always always a good time.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, there's some Yeah, hopefully. I think that's one
of my goals, you know, because I mentioned my original
goal starting this three decades ago was to provide from
my family. And I've done well at that. I mean,
given where I started, I've done really really well at that.
And now I'm like, well, what's what's the next goal?
And I think part of that is, hey, I did
okay at this for three decades. What can I share
and how can I share it with people who or
earlier in their journey, Like what can I do or
say to help them build on top of the mistakes
that I made so that they don't have to repeat
those mistakes.
Speaker 2: I hear a book coming, maybe.
Speaker 1: I don't know, get a make it a New York
Times bestseller, because seemingly every book.
Speaker 2: Is it's just a statistically significant like you write a
book and then the only way you know about the
book is that if it's a New York Times bestseller,
all the other books like you never even hear about.
So there are no books that are not New York
Times bestseller. They secretly get deleted from the internet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, how demoralizing is that for an author like God,
I can't even write a best selling book according to
New York Times.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think you know that's something really interested in.
You can ask the actors and directors that make video
content that shows up on streaming platforms, because the stream
platforms remove everything from there that don't do well. And
so I can imagine as a content creator getting your
stuff just terminated like that is that's a special kind
of new foul with the current world order, right, no doubt. Well,
then maybe we should move over to pics.
Speaker 1: Let's do some pics. You're starting at me to start,
I feel like you interviewed me this time, so I
feel like I should go first.
Speaker 2: You should definitely go first, all right.
Speaker 1: I have been reading The Way of the Superior Man
by David Dta Data. I think it's data DEI d A.
It's a cool book. It's probably going to be controversial
for most or for some people. But even if it is,
I think it's worth a read because it does a
really good job of like highlighting some of the things
we talked about here today, like what's your goal in
life and what's your role in achieving that goal? And
I think one of the common themes through it is
whenever you have challenges in the relationships of your life,
it's your fault. It's not anyone else's fault. It's either
your fault because you screwed up, or your fault because
you didn't set expectations correctly, or your fault because you
didn't guide the scenario at the right time. But it's
really good at reflecting on that and removing blaming from
your vocabulary, Like instead of blaming someone else, you're like, huh, yeah,
it's my fault. I should have done this instead, and
we would have never been in that situation.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, I see this both being more healthy
and also potentially less healthy, depending on how you you know,
approach the situation. I mean, there's a lot to be
said up not like playing the victim right that, right, Yeah,
you could have impacted that, Like if you don't get promoted,
you know, you could have done more to make that happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you know, Like one thing to keep
in mind as you read it is, if you've ever
read Victor Frankel's Search for Meaning? Is that the right title?
He was He was a Jewish doctor who was sent
to a Nazi concentration camp in World War Two, and
then later he wrote this book about the positive aspects
of that, not that there were positive aspects of that,
but the fact that he's like, you know, we're in
this brutal nightmares situation seemingly out of our control, but
you know what I can control. I can control my thoughts.
And yeah, yeah, So if you haven't read Victor frankel
Search for Meaning, I think is the title. That's a great, great,
great book, like must read for every person on the
planet type book.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he's got maybe there's two.
Speaker 1: Picks there, maybe, yeah, two picks.
Speaker 2: So mine's also a book. Because I'm laying but I am,
I will. I will share this that I've almost run
out of books that I feel like I'm okay recommending
for people to read, so very soon I'm going to
have to u over to a completely different genre content.
I'm not sure what that's going to be. Yeah. My
book pick is one it's called One Up on Wall
Street by Peter Lynch, and it's an old book. I
think it's like nineteen sixty two or something like that,
and it has nothing to do with software engineering or
knowledge work. It has to do about how to invest
in the market to get better returns. And you should
not take the advice in the book as far as
investing in the market, because it's so old that everyone's
already done this, everyone's already found and knows how to
apply it effectively. But the advice is value based investments.
That's understanding what the core value is with something that
you would invest in, how much value you would get
out of it, and what the return could be. So
not speculating on what would happen. And I find that
I get a lot of inspiration on how I can
change my mindset when I'm learning things from nonfiction or
even sometimes fiction outside of the tech industry, outside of leadership.
And so I found a lot in this because it
made me realize, Okay, you know what am I doing?
What do I want to invest in in myself that
can give me returns? You know, what do I care
about fundamentally as a person or what am I good
at and then leading into that more and so I
think it's a great book. It's also was super.
Speaker 1: Helpful for me right on, and I'm going to highlight
something you said, like talking about books like there is
the I mean, we're both old enough, you know, where
there was the stigma of people who read. You know,
the high school football team was going to come running
around nerd and beat your ass. But there's nothing wrong
with reading, Like it's probably the most important thing you
can do with your life. Because every problem you will
ever face in your life, We've got books going back
thousands of years someone somewhere has written about a very
similar problem and how they solved it.
Speaker 2: If we're going to go there that I'll share my
wisdom here. I always hated reading books. I thought it
was the worst. And that was because the books that
you've access to or are forced to read, at least
from my perspective, were not good books. So you know
what you pick up in through your academic career. I
didn't like it all, and so it gave me the
view that all books were bad. But as Weill said,
there's definitely inspiration that can come from things that you
didn't know were out there. So if you do have
that mindset, you know, try doing something you don't like
at least ten percent of the time and maybe you'll
maybe it'll change your mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And if you're struggling with where to start,
I think starting with older books is better because the
barrier to publishing was much higher ten years ago. Nowadays,
anyone with a PDF can release a book, and so
the barrier to entry leads to potentially lower quality books.
But if you go back, you know, like two thousand's
and before, the barrier to getting a book published was
pretty tough, and so the quality I think tends to
reflect that. No.
Speaker 2: I think it's a really good point. There's just because
there's a book published doesn't mean it's good. Like, you
can disagree with the book. It can be bad. You
can you know, not something that you want to read,
and it's okay to get rid of that and put
it down. But not all books are the same, I
guess as the wisdom.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure for sure. All right, therapy session over.
Speaker 2: For just one hour there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll just uh, we'll just get a transcript of
this submitted to my insurance company and bill it as
a therapy session. You're getting paid for this episode, Warren, Well,
I only do.
Speaker 2: Things for free or for my my actual rate, so
this probably wouldn't cover it.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna have it fair enough.
Speaker 2: But if you want, you want the actual invoice claim,
I'm happy to send that over to you.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure, tax deduction, all right. Thank you for
this episode. I really enjoyed it. Appreciate your time and
your questions. Thank you to everyone listening for listening, and
if you have thoughts, comments, ideas, further questions, you know
how to find me