Idea Management: Supporting Business Growth by Investing in People with Erik Gross (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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The Final Flight of Captain Forrester

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The Final Flight of Captain Forrester 4:38

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A woman’s search for her father—a pilot who disappeared during a mission in Vietnam—collides with the fight over what we owe those who never returned from war. From the producers of "America's Girls" and "Tom Brown's Body," and hosted by Texas Monthly writer Josh Alvarez, the show debuts April 2025. Texas Monthly Audio subscribers get early access to the show, plus bonus episodes and more subscriber-only audio. Visit texasmonthly.com/audio to learn more.…

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Entrepreneurs have no shortage of ideas. But how do they know if a new business idea is actually a good idea? Our guest this week would advise seeking fast feedback during the ideation process to save time, preserve energy, and remain focused on delivering value to your intended audience.
This week in episode 294 we’re rejoined by Erik Gross to discuss some of the lessons learned from his recent entrepreneurial pursuits. We’ll talk through how the entrepreneur can go from ideation to taking action. This includes generating ideas, capturing ideas, scrutinizing or testing ideas, and deciding to abandon certain ideas. We also discuss how the entrepreneur, business owner, or manager can invest in employees even before they start work by making roles occupiable. And it starts with putting all the pre-requisites in place to write good job descriptions.
Original Recording Date: 09-07-2024
Topics – Entrepreneurs and Ideas, Focus and Subjecting Ideas to Scrutiny, Sources of Feedback, Scaling Business Opportunities with Automation, Entrepreneurial Succession Planning and Attitudes, Investing in People and Making Roles Occupiable, Thoughts on Employee Onboarding, Transferring Duties to Others
2:29 – Entrepreneurs and Ideas
* Erik Gross is a developer, an architect, and an entrepreneur who has been very active in the tech space over the last 10-15 years.
* This is a return visit for Erik to our show. You can find our previous discussions with him in the following episodes:
* Episode 267 – A Theme of Learning with Erik Gross (1/3)
* Episode 268 – Ownership through Failures: An Entrepreneur’s Take on Difficult Decisions with Erik Gross (2/3)
* Episode 269 – Monetize Yourself: Leveraging Your Most Valuable Knowledge with Erik Gross (3/3)
* Though we did talk about entrepreneurship a little in episode 268, does the entrepreneur naturally get a bunch of ideas to chase, or is there more science behind it?
* Erik knows many entrepreneurs and says in general the entrepreneur has a plethora of new ideas, and this can be both good and bad.
* Erik learned the idea itself is less valuable than executing on an idea, but he still gets excited when he gets what seems like a great idea.
* “If you’re paying attention, if you’re interested in helping people, if you’re interested in starting and growing things…you’ll have lots of ideas. Is it going to withstand a scrutiny from the marketplace? Will people pay for it? Is it something that has legs? There are a lot of other questions. But yeah, the ideas…most entrepreneurs…they are full of something, but generally ideas are what they are full of.” – Erik Gross
* Do most entrepreneurs keep a list of ideas they will go back and reference?
* Erik, like many technologists, is a nerd for tools. He uses Obsidian to capture ideas.
* When an idea hits, Erik has been known to pull over if driving to capture the idea and get it out of his head. Otherwise the idea might be lost, which is a terrible feeling.
* Even if people make lists of ideas, it does not mean they are going to execute on any of them. Periodic review of your ideas is a good practice because something you jotted down a while back may be related to what you are currently doing.
* Nick says keeping a list of ideas makes sense whether we are an entrepreneur or just a technologist, a people leader, etc.

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Idea Management: Supporting Business Growth by Investing in People with Erik Gross (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Find the Missing Context: Perspectives and Observations from Enterprise Experience with Daniel Lemire (2/4) 56:03

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When you’re missing a specific experience in your career, how do you get it? Daniel Lemire was missing experience in a large enterprise to pair with the things he learned from pursuing a graduate degree. Join us this week in episode 324 to hear the story of what happened when Daniel got that experience that provided the missing context to apply what he learned. Throughout this discussion, you’ll notice Daniel’s continued openness to new opportunities lead him from a contractor position in a large enterprise all the way to technical lead. There’s also a parallel process of Daniel’s development of expertise and credibility alongside his observations of the enterprise organization as a whole that encourage us not to limit our focus only to the technical work we’re doing. Near the end of our discussion, Daniel shares his perspective on an organizational decision to begin outsourcing and the way it impacted his work. What would you do in that situation? Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025 Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 323 . Topics – Missing the Context of Experience, Unexpected Opportunities, Confidence and Feedback, Enterprise Experience Meets Educational Background, Gaining Organizational Perspective, The Cascade of Objectives, Technical Leadership and a Change in Strategy 3:03 – Missing the Context of Experience Daniel said after completing his master’s degree at UNT he did not have the context of experience to pair with his education. As part of the master’s program, Daniel got an education in marketing, management, and technology. In class, they might have a discussion about how CIOs make decisions or have a guest speaker to provide additional context from the business world. “I knew what the right questions were, but I didn’t understand why those were the right questions. And it was a real challenge for me because I couldn’t place what I was learning…. I was learning the right things. They really were the right things, but I didn’t know what to do with it. The curriculum I took in getting the master’s degree was exactly what I needed to be successful in a large enterprise. But because I had only ever done the independent consulting, I had only ever worked with very small companies, companies that had less than 100 employees…. So much of what I was learning about management discipline and program development and project management was for these really big organizations, and I didn’t have the context to understand why all of those things were necessary….” – Daniel Lemire, thinking back on his master’s degree program Daniel makes a reference to the 150-person relationship limit known as Dunbar’s Number and says this requires very different business management techniques. Upon finishing the graduate degree, Daniel had learned 3 very critical things: Daniel discovered through conversations with classmates and through completing specific projects that he had an aptitude for the subject matter. He also realized the program had been the right place for him. Daniel knew he had a lot to learn but that he was missing enterprise experience. It was something he really needed to get the full value from what he had learned pursuing the graduate degree. “The third piece of it that I didn’t understand until much later was that journey of taking turns between being overprepared for something and getting into something that you’re overwhelmed by. That’s yet another dichotomy because in some ways by getting the graduate degree I was overprepared for an enterprise environment, but from an interpersonal and from a political and…just being one of many in a corporation, I was totally unprepared for that experience because everything I had ever done up to that point was at a much smaller place.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel was the only IT person when he worked at the Conroe Medical Education Foundation, and there were only about 20 employees. Through his consulting work building websites, Daniel interacted with several companies across various industries. He mentions one of the largest had about 80 employees. 6:54 – Unexpected Opportunities Daniel shares a story of crossing paths with an acquaintance who had been the systems administrator at the Texas Women’s University (TWU) Police Department but was moving to a different job. “Sometimes you find somebody else that’s technically good and you know who they are, and you remember them. This was kind of one of those deals…. I’m doing this grad school thing while I’m kind of just paying the bills doing the consulting thing. So, I was ready to take on another opportunity.” – Daniel Lemire, on a chance meeting with an acquaintance who got him a job Daniel was asked if he’d be open to doing something different and possibly taking over at the university police department. After saying yes, Daniel spent a year working at TWU while he finished his graduate studies, which provided the opportunity to learn about a completely different type of business (a police business). Daniel spent time understanding what the police officers did and spent time building systems. One specific example of a system Daniel built (or contributed heavily to building with others) allowed students to buy a campus parking pass on the university’s website. This was his first experience working on an integrated system. In everything he did, Daniel’s intent was to solve problems. There wasn’t a guidebook or manual to build things like integrated systems. Another example of a project from his time at TWU was building a customized alert system for the university based on programmatic scripts (which acted as a stop gap until a vendor solution for this could later be put in place). “There’s no guide for this. I just know what the technology can do, and I know what my skillset is. We put the things together and built something that solved an immediate issue…. Even TWU as big as it was…I was just in the police department. That was a big place, but my place inside that big place didn’t take advantage of everything I’d learned in getting the grad degree.” – Daniel Lemire While Daniel was working at TWU and wrapping up his graduate degree, he received a call from a gaming buddy from his time as an undergraduate who suggested he consider a role at PepsiCo. The role Daniel’s friend mentioned was a contract role for loading operating systems on servers before they get shipped to specific sites. His friend’s description of the role was a little nebulous. As a result of their discussion, Daniel got connected with the recruiter for this role. He was intially worried about asking for too much money but found what he asked for was in range per the recruiter. Daniel was really excited about the possibility of a full-time role. After Daniel was passed along to the hiring manager to interview for this role, the manager asked him how he felt about working weekends during the interview. Daniel was honest and communicated working on Sundays was not something he could do. After the discussion with the hiring manager, the recruiter called Daniel to let him know it wasn’t going to work out and that this was a weekend job (not something that was previously communicated to Daniel as part of the process). “This isn’t going to work out because this actually is a weekend job. And I didn’t know that. That wasn’t disclosed in the conversations she and I had or in the job description details that were in front of me. I was just answering the questions honestly because that’s what the right thing to do was. That job didn’t work out for me….” – Daniel Lemire Daniel could not commit to the schedule for this role because it conflicted with his church activities. A few months later, the same recruiter called Daniel saying there was another open position for which he might be a fit. This role was better pay than the first one he had interviewed for and was more focused on the systems engineering work Daniel had been doing. This job ended up being a role on the same team as the friend who recommended Daniel apply at PepsiCo. Daniel’s friend removed himself from being part of the interview process to prevent conflicts of interest. Daniel built a good rapport with one of the decision makers and was hired quickly as a systems engineer. He started with PepsiCo working on Windows Server automation. Daniel was considered analyst level and not a lead engineer. Daniel says he had been doing more programming and coding than working with hardware coming into this role, and he was able to learn a great deal in this role. “That then was a huge opportunity for me because I got to get into something that was completely new. The hardware focus was something that I wasn’t used to…. I got to go deep into something I thought was going to advance my career because I didn’t know enough about hardware. I got to work on a team inside of an enterprise, and I really wanted that enterprise experience after I got the grad degree because I had all of this stuff in my head that I couldn’t really quite use yet.” – Daniel Lemire At TWU, there was no need to decide which server vendor to use. A specific vendor was the established server provider. The paycheck for this job was a great opportunity for Daniel to provide steady income for his family. They were able to buy a house and discuss starting a family. There were opportunities all over the place after starting at PepsiCo. Getting in and doing well could set someone up for a career there rather than just a job. 15:14 – Confidence and Feedback When Daniel was only doing consulting work, he was not around other people doing the same type of work outside of some mentors who provided guidance. Being in the graduate program put Daniel around other people doing similar work and helped him understand he had the ability to do well in this field. It produced a confidence that seems to have catapulted him through the interviews for roles at PepsiCo. In the last couple of years Daniel has learned how essential confidence is in getting us to what’s next. Daniel has seen a number of people be overconfident and run into numerous problems as a result. A sensitivity to these kinds of people may have affected the way he thought about confidence in the past. “Finding the way to get yourself the self-confidence so that you can convey what you know to other people enables you to explain the value that you can create for them, and that’s how we do business together.” – Daniel Lemire Nick mentions an element of feedback as well throughout Daniel’s story from teachers and friends. His friend recommending the role at PepsiCo is the next iteration of that feedback. Daniel tells us he was not seeking feedback early in his career, but he was getting it. “If you asked me about it now, I would expressly tell you that feedback is probably the most important element of being successful. It’s going to give you an early warning sign when you’re on the wrong path, and it’s going to push you in the right direction when you’re on the right path.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel remembers a book he was reading back when he and his wife were dating that encouraged only dating people you are serious about. Otherwise, it is a waste of time. Daniel says feedback is how you prevent wasting your time. In Daniel’s case, feedback he received was unsolicited early on. Nick has heard podcasters say that getting no feedback (good or bad) about your podcast is a bad sign. Daniel works from home and puts post-it notes on his monitor that only he can see. One of the notes says, “what experiments are you doing?” “In the absence of feedback, you can do experiments and see and evaluate yourself. Is this moving me in the right direction? …The reality is it creates the delta between what you’re doing and what you could be doing…. If you are changing things, generally you are going to get a response. Either somebody’s really going to like it, or they’re really going to hate it. But either way, you’re going to get some feedback.” – Daniel Lemire John says a corollary to not getting feedback is perhaps no one cares enough. Even if someone cares negatively and thinks you’re wrong, at least someone cares enough to criticize and maybe set you on the right path. “Whatever you’re doing, make a ripple.” – Daniel Lemire 20:39 – Enterprise Experience Meets Educational Background Once Daniel started working in an enterprise environment at PepsiCo, did everything he had learned in his graduate program start to click with his experience immediately, or did it take a while for that to happen? “I can tell you that basically from the moment I landed, everything started to make sense about that grad degree…immediately. I felt like I was Superman and had X-Ray vision because everywhere I looked the pieces were fitting together…. The part that I didn’t appreciate about knowing all of that was the engineer in me was also immediately frustrated because I could see where things were broken, and I wanted desperately to fix them.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel was able to understand how upper-level leaders were making deicisions thanks to what he had studied. As someone new to the organization, it was important to execute his job well and build credibility. Credibility was necessary for speaking up later in attempts to impact organizational decision making. “I’m delighted to say that was the easy part. Being good at the thing that I was responsible for was what allowed me to consistently exceed the objectives that were handed to me. And to a large degree they were handed to me…especially in the early days of making any kind of decision about how things were going to work. It was just ‘this is what we need to accomplish. Go get it done.’” – Daniel Lemire Daniel enjoyed writing code and working in the server lab to make things work. He was a contractor in the beginning and was left out of organizational politics. Daniel reminds us that contractors should stay out of organizational politics because it can lead to trouble. Daniel did well in his role as a contractor and was helpful to the people around him, earning a reputation that would get him to full-time employee status about 1.5 years later. Daniel even did well enough to negotiate a little bit on his full-time employment offer. “I could that time as a contractor as my time at PepsiCo because, really, the things that I was working on were my responsibility. I owned the thing that I was given.” – Daniel Lemire Though it no longer removed him from politics of the organization, being a full-time employee meant Daniel got to be part of the progression and accomplishments of a large enterprise. He enjoyed seeing the datacenter and how computing was handled at the scale of the organization’s needs. Daniel knew the combination of growing himself, doing the technical things that needed to be done, and leveraging his graduate degree would help him progress within the organization. The company made investments in Daniel as an employee in the form of training, for example. Was this Daniel’s way of answering the question from the person at church from long ago about what he was doing to grow himself? Yes – it’s about having a vision and intention for where you want to go in the future to avoid standing still. Daniel brings up the physics concept of entropy. Standing still means you are degrading. “You’re always in some phase of change, so if you have any control at all, make sure that your phase is going up and not down. Because if you’re not paying attention to it, entropy is playing on the system, and things are going to naturally degrade.” – Daniel Lemire 25:10 – Gaining Organizational Perspective John mentions Daniel’s first experience in an enterprise was in a very large one. For very large enterprises, it takes a lot of time and effort to move in a direction the organization is not already moving (i.e. the container ship analogy). How did Daniel see this in his experience? Daniel started in an individual contributor role. He was not responsible for a program or for people. The graduate degree gave him the context to interpret different situations within the company. “In any sufficiently large environment there are the official things, the things that everybody says because it’s what they have to say or it’s the dialogue they have to carry through. Then there are the things behind the scenes, the real actual games that you’re playing, and there’s a whole different set of rules that are associated to that. And the sooner you can understand the difference between the rules they say they’re using and the rules they’re actually using, the more likely you are to be successful. And to me, that graduate degree gave me to tools I needed to understand not just what was said but what was not said and what that meant for me. So even though I didn’t have that responsibility, I could see the things that were being done from an organizational perspective and translate that into being able to decipher what the bigger next move was.” – Daniel Lemire In Daniel’s role as an individual contributor, he knew they needed to iterate on a server build or support new equipment with hardware refreshes over time, for example. The technology strategy of the organization and business leader perception of the technology organization were things Daniel could still observe in his role. “I was able to see both the good and the bad from a position that I could learn a lot without having to carry any of the responsibility about making those decisions. And I think that was really the thing that shot me ahead from my enterprise career perspective…. I was able to gather a lot of information in a very short period of time because I was able to contextualize it with the graduate degree.” – Daniel Lemire Many of Daniel’s peers who didn’t have the same education had trouble making sense of things the company was doing (i.e. why decisions were being made certain ways), even to the point of frustration at times. Even if Daniel didn’t agree with a decision, he could contextualize it and understand it. Did Daniel try to explain some of what he knew / understood about the organization from his education to his colleagues, or did that feel too assumptive? Daniel says he’d be willing to have a 1-1 conversation with people about his observations. In the audience of an entire team or a senior leader, Daniel held his tongue. Looking back on it now, Daniel thinks he could have provided more value by sharing some of his analysis of the situations with others. “…I did have some of the right ideas, but what I didn’t have that I now fully comprehend is I didn’t know how to say things in a way that would be received well. In other words…my early days…while I was good at providing critical feedback, it was critical feedback. I didn’t know how to say things in a way that was polite or nondestructive…. I had some critical moments in my career where I had some very critical feedback, and I let it out in a way that was not constructive or useful. And that limited what I could do from a career perspective…. So, it’s kind of one of those double-edged swords. Don’t bite your tongue unnecessarily, but at the same time, be sure that you can say it in a way that is constructive and helpful.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel says the internalization of frustration has come out in his tone at times. Even now, Daniel has to be mindful of not putting himself in a situation that is overly stressful or frustrating because those conversations don’t usually go well. Daniel might have known the right thing to do but didn’t know how to convince others or use what he knew to persuade them. Daniel highlights how valuable it was to bounce ideas off his peers within the company. We can easily recognize who knows their stuff / area really well and might seek these people out for a discussion. It’s important to be really good at what we do. Daniel says it can lead us to new opportunities because people seek us out as experts. “That’s why you have to balance the doing the things that you’re not good at and exercising the things that you are good at. If you get too far into the doing things that you’re not good at, it lessens the number of opportunities that you have. So, you have to be really strategic about diving into the deep end too far. You have to continue to do the things that you’re not good at but do it in a way that leverages the things that you are so you don’t get into the red zone. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned, and we’ll touch on that a little bit later…. The very first thing I took away from that experience was find the right people and talk to them on a 1-1 basis…. Finding great people is a huge career builder.” – Daniel Lemire Talking to the right people 1-1 allows you to test out what you’re seeing and get some feedback. Also, these discussions allow you to identify who you can work well with to take advantage of it later on in your career. 33:42 – The Cascade of Objectives Does finding the right people mean building champions for your personal brand? Daniel says yes – this idea of brand building is true everywhere. “You have to be able to tell someone in a very short period of time what your value is, and that is your brand, no matter what you’re doing, no matter how large or small the organization is. You do have to think about that to some degree and have a plan for that. That’s something I lucked myself into.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel can look back and see that he was doing the right things to build a strong personal brand early in his career, but he didn’t quite understand what he was doing at the time. Nick thinks most people do not know how to succinctly articulate the value they bring to situation / job / role without some reflection, writing, etc. We can get some of this from the feedback received from others. Daniel was having conversations with other people 1-1 but was not consciously thinking of what things he was doing should be put on his resume. Daniel worked for a company which required employees to write down and track their yearly objectives (including evidence of progress made to reach those objectives). This helped him think through resume-type items. It is a benefit of working for large organizations (mandates to use specific systems to complete these types of exercises). “I can honestly say with reflection that that’s one of the best things an organization does for their employees because it forces you to do something that will make you better whether you want it to or not…. If you’re in a position today where you’re not given that system, the best thing you can do for yourself is to literally write it down. What are you going to do? And then look at it again multiple times to ask yourself ‘what am I doing about that’ and ‘how did you do so far?’ The most successful people write it down. They think about it. They talk about it, and then they write it down and then evaluate it later. And that is so essential, and I didn’t really appreciate that until just recently.” – Daniel Lemire John mentions in his most recent role he was asked to go through the OKR (objectives and key results) process. He had done this before at Google. In a leadership position it can be harder to take OKRs from an upstream leader and then re-contextualize for downstream team members. But it does provide a common understanding of how everyone will be measured. John agrees writing and tracking objectives can be a great resume builder. It helps someone articulate how they were measured and the steps they took to accomplish the objective(s). Daniel calls this process a cascade or translation of the objectives down to a manager’s direct reports. This process was one of the most difficult things for Daniel when he was a people manager (the translation process). “Whether or not you’re great at it, you have to do it because if you are not doing it, the people that you’re responsible for supporting and helping don’t get the context that they need for why it is they’re doing what they are doing…. Just improving yourself in a vacuum is actually one of the biggest roadblocks to organizational success…. That’s what a critical manager does…they make sure that the individual is able to grow and carry through the responsibilities but to do it in a way that it doesn’t jeopardize the rest of the system. So, in some ways you might say that those middle managers are the transmission that connects the engine to the wheels. You can have a great engine, but if it never gets connected to the wheels, you’re not going anywhere.” – Daniel Lemire When people get really good at building their own thing, it might not interface well with the rest of the organization. Daniel mentions he sees many people get excited about what they can do with AI. It may be empowering to an individual, but we might want to jump in to make ourselves more effective without considering the larger organizational impacts doing this will have. A senior developer might be able to build great applications with AI (perhaps even using AI for the things they might ask a junior developer to do), but not working with a junior developer means the person is not being fostered to develop into a senior developer. There’s a downstream impact here that comes up later on. “The other thing that as individual contributors and managers that we should all be thinking about is, ‘how do I optimize for today without putting myself in a difficult situation for tomorrow?’ We have to think about both the short and the long term, and we have to help the rest of the organization do that as well. That’s probably the challenge for the next decade as we get the most advanced technology that man has ever seen and try to put that together with humans.” – Daniel Lemire 41:05 – Technical Leadership and a Change in Strategy What made Daniel move toward people management in the first place? He shared some insight into this earlier, but we want the full story. The first step in the process was moving from build engineer to technical lead. Daniel tells us he was not responsible for managing direct reports in this role but focused on making a greater impact on the overall team and the work they were doing. Daniel says progressing to technical lead was a natural progression. When he looked around, Daniel once again realized he had an aptitude in this area. After observing the systems and the way work was done, it naturally led Daniel to persuade members of the team to take slightly different approaches that were more optimal. It was about influencing the direction of the work people on the team were doing and how they were thinking. Daniel shares an anecdote from his COBOL class in college. When students were getting caught up in small details, the professor commented that the class “couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” The professor reiterated to the class that they were focusing too much on the small details and not thinking about what they were trying to accomplish. The above is exactly what kept happening in Daniel’s technical conversations with others. Daniel had to encourage people to look at the larger picture, and it kept happening. “And that just sort of kept happening. It was just sort of a natural progression to where I was helping them with those individual things that they needed to accomplish but also helping to make things mesh more easily as we had to put things together because I was consistently finding myself in the situation where I had to negotiate the interface between the work that we were doing and the value that it was creating. I didn’t understand that at the time, but that’s actually what I was doing now reflecting back on it.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel might have to tell someone that reprogramming a specific function again and again was not going to deliver the results the team needed (build a server faster). Sometimes an optimization we are making will not improve the system, and value only gets generated when the system is improved. Daniel says he spent the middle decade of his career in that contextualization area we spoke about earlier. He was at PepsiCo for nearly 16 years. The first couple of years were getting technically oriented and finding ways to contribute to the team. The career progression of others gave Daniel the opportunity to move up / progress within thr company. Daniel would ask for specific work / projects, and his manager could see his talent and would in the future look for opportunities to leverage those talents. “They understood that I was capable and that if they gave it to me, it would get done well. That made things better for them, and that made things better for me.” – Daniel Lemire In being the technical lead, Daniel appreciated that he did not need to deal with HR things. In this role he was able to accomplish a number of things he is very proud of but also limited his growth from a manager perspective. “I don’t have any regrets about not moving into that manager space sooner…. I was able to observe all of that without having to be responsible for it. For me, that responsibility is a mantle that I want to put on, but when I do put it on, it is something that weighs me down. There is a cost for me in taking on that. I take it very seriously.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel stayed in the technically focused contributor role for a long time. He did not have to take on being someone’s manager and existed to support others technically and to help them grow. It was the organizational strategy inside the company that started to affect Daniel’s career trajectory. There was a lot of outsourcing happening for various reasons (optimization, globalization, etc.), and it impacted Daniel’s colleagues over time and the relationships he had built with them. The changes meant Daniel had to seek out new people to work with on various projects, and instead of working in the same office as Daniel, these people were in a different part of the world and from a different culture. “You’re building your network. Every person you have a good rapport with that goes somewhere else…that creates totally new avenues of opportunity for you.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel was frustrated that colleagues had to leave the company, but he also had work to do and decided to focus on what needed to be done (the things he could control). This was building Daniel’s frustration in ways he did not understand at the time. Daniel says he often tries to compartmentalize things and uses the analogy of a waffle to illustrate. “Don’t think about just work or just family. Sit down and think about all of the elements of your life and how they are going to fit together. Because if they don’t fit together, it will come around to bite you later.” – Daniel Lemire, on compartmentalization The organization’s decision finally impacted Daniel. The company decided to outsource all infrastructure services. This was a very challenging time for Daniel. He had to hand over systems and processes he had built to someone he had never met. It was a difficult reality but a reality he had to face. “It was to the point where my management team actually said to me at one point – ‘Daniel, you don’t do that work anymore. That’s not yours. That’s not your job. Your job is to make sure that things get done, not how they get done.’ And I had a really hard time with that…. A big part of my pride was the work that I had produced. Essentially, what that meant to me was that the work that I had done, that I had spent the better part of a decade to be effective at, really was not valued…. There was a time of struggle there for me, and that began the sort of searching mode…going back to the very early experience where I found out…that’s not where I’m going to be now. Now what? And it was because I recognized that what I was doing was no longer the path forward, I kind of had to have a reset.” – Daniel Lemire Mentioned in the Outro It sounded like gaining the enterprise was the right place for Daniel. Doing his work well was the groundwork for developing a great reputation, but Daniel was also observing the organization and looking at the way decisions were made. At first, he did not have the influence to change any decisions, but he got at least some influence at the technical lead level. This began with remaining open to new opportunities just like in his early career (i.e. recommendations based on the feedback from others). As he started to observe the enterprise of PepsiCo, he began looking for new opportunities inside the company. These types of opportunities didn’t exist at the companies where Daniel had worked previously due to their size. Does your company have you set and track objectives? If so, are you doing it well? If you don’t have this requirement, you can still document objectives and progress toward them on your own. Maybe we should document and track our experiments too. Nick thinks we should still track things even if they initially seem unrelated. They might be more relatable to your next role than you think! Other episodes that pair nicely with this episode: Episode 284 – Draft Your Narrative: Writing and Building a Technical Portfolio with Jason Belk (2/2) Jason Belk reminds us of the importance of a career narrative. We need documentation of the work we are doing to generate and practice that narrative! Episode 267 – A Theme of Learning with Erik Gross (1/3) Erik talks about a moment when his classroom learning in the Nuclear Engineering program met experience. Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YoutTube If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Build a Career MVP: The Importance of Feedback and Iteration with Daniel Lemire (1/4) 46:42

för 8 dagar sedan46:42

46:42

If your career was a product, what would the current release notes say? Just as product managers launch a minimum viable product (MVP) and enhance it based on customer feedback, Daniel Lemire unknowingly began building his career this way starting in high school. This week in episode 323 you’ll hear about Daniel’s early aspirations to be a pilot in the Air Force and the phone call that forced him to change directions. It was a reliance on his faith, his aptitude for computers, and an openness to feedback from friends and teachers that prompted Daniel to study management information systems in college. Follow along as we explore the timeline over which Daniel decided to become an independent consultant, gained technical expertise and experience through building systems to deliver value, and ultimately decided to pursue an advanced degree. With each decision along the way, Daniel chose to take a step forward very much like a product release adds features and enhancements. If you thought of where you are now as a MVP, where could you go from here? Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025 Topics – Meet Daniel Lemire, An Early Deviation from the Plan, Self-Awareness and the Gift of Explanations, A Tinkering Instinct and the Cycle of Confidence, Consulting and a Return to the Familiar, The System Builder, Thoughts on Product Management, Getting an Advanced Degree 2:31 – Meet Daniel Lemire Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. He gets to speak with senior leaders about the use of artificial intelligence in their organization specific to the ServiceNow platform. It’s a pretty popular topic of conversation these days. Daniel enjoys driving influence and helping organizations create value, and throughout the course of his career, Daniel has learned to calibrate the use of technology against the creation of value. 3:39 – An Early Deviation from the Plan How did Daniel get into technology in the first place? Daniel’s middle school had a computer lab, and he and several others were part of a computer club. In addition to this, Daniel was fortunate to have a computer at home in the early 1990s and play games on it and discuss computers with friends. Going into high school, Daniel wanted to be a pilot. He wanted to attend the Air Force Academy and eventually become an officer. Daniel was working to do everything he could to hit that goal. Daniel tells the story of a phone call from an Air Force recruiter during his sophomore year of high school. During the course of that phone call, Daniel learned he was disqualified from serving in the Air Force because of his asthma. “So immediately I found myself in this position of…if it’s not the Air Force, what are my plans? …Am I just going to go find a school to become a pilot and continue down that path with a different means, or am I going to do something completely different? …Honestly, I kind of threw up my hands, and I said a prayer. I said, ‘God, this is what I wanted to do, and this is not how I thought this was going to go. What should I do?’ And, over the next few weeks, the computer thing became increasingly an area of focus.” – Daniel Lemire Conversations with friends and some teachers helped Daniel realize he had some talent when it came to computers. They encouraged him to spend time in that area. From then on, Daniel would find ways to do different things with a computer because it was something he enjoyed. “Any time you can take something you enjoy and turn that into value is really great.” – Daniel Lemire As a senior in high school, Daniel took a computer maintenance course and learned all about computer hardware. Taking this class provided things to Daniel that he did not know he needed. Daniel was good at using Microsoft Office software and really enjoyed programming after taking a course on it. Daniel also took a typing course from a typewriting teacher. Students took it as if they were using a typewriter. Making 3 errors meant you failed the typing exercise. Daniel says he was not great at not making mistakes back then but understands he would not type at the speed he does now without the experience of taking this course. High school courses set Daniel up nicely to choose a computer-related course of study in college – Management Information Systems (MIS) or Computer Science. When taking tours of potential colleges, Daniel would visit the computer lab on campus and make sure he visited both computer science and business information systems personnel. Since math was not Daniel’s primary interest, the business side of computing was better suited for Daniel. Daniel ended up at the University of North Texas (or UNT). Daniel says one of the biggest benefits of their program was learning both new and older technologies. When he entered UNT in 1999 it was one of only a few colleges that allowed students to work on a mainframe. 8:59 – Self-Awareness and the Gift of Explanations Nick likes the way Daniel handled the setback related to being a pilot and putting his effort into an alternate path. Most people would have had a lot more trouble. Daniel says he didn’t have enough life experience to dissuade himself from taking the next right action. Nick points out Daniel had enough information to select a course of study that fit with his strengths and his interests in the best way. Daniel says self-awareness is not something we talk about enough. “I’m very much a striver. I will do things that are very hard for myself just because I want to accomplish something really big, and there is absolutely a time for taking on those big things. But you also have to do it from the context of…what am I good at, and what can I get started with right here where I am?” – Daniel Lemire Daniel says it wasn’t just his interest in computing that drove him to it. It also had to do with other people’s observations of his interest in it. As a result of both, he was open to pursuing computing in his course of study instead of continuing to search. In high school, students were given some recommendations for future courses of study – something in thr arts, something in science / math / engineering, or some sort of specialization in a different area. Daniel says he was ok at math but really enjoyed physics because it was very conceptual. He would work on math problems and make simple mistakes. “…so being able to capitalize on the part that I was good at in getting into that computing career I think was the other piece of it – knowing that I was good at it and being convinced in the shortest time possible that that was the path for me by being open.” – Daniel Lemire Did someone encourage Daniel to look at both the computer science and management information systems options when he was visiting colleges, or did he naturally investigate both on his own? Daniel listened to the feedback he was getting from high school teachers, and he specifically mentions his typing teacher. Daniel took the typing course as a sophomore in high school, and that teacher recognized his aptitude with computers. Daniel would help her from time to time and would later become her teacher’s aide. In a number of their conversations, the typing teacher would ask about Daniel’s future career plans. Daniel says it was not a coincidence that he had this teacher in his life at the same time the Air Force said no to him. John says around this same time many people might have said they were good with computers, but they likely meant they were good at playing computer games. This is very different than using computers to solve problems and seeing them as systems because you’ve taken the time to understand the internal mechanics of the system. Daniel says having access to computer technology at home what critical in all of this. Daniel tells the story of trying to tweak configuration files on his computer to get a game to run and breaking everything. Daniel’s mother had a friend from church who was able to come over and fix the computer problem. “He could have showed up and been like, ‘Daniel, what an idiot. I can’t believe you would do something like this.’ He could have fixed it and just walked away, but he took the time to sit me down and say, ‘ok, I see what you did here. Now let me explain it to you so that you can understand it.’ It was that taking of the time that really made a difference, and I haven’t forgotten that because we get so tied up in ourselves that we forget what it is to give that kind of a gift to somebody else. That’s an invaluable opportunity, and I learned so much through that and was able to convert that into a win time and again because somebody invested those few minutes in me by explaining something I just didn’t understand.” – Daniel Lemire 16:28 – A Tinkering Instinct and the Cycle of Confidence John says listeners recognize the tinkering instinct, and the experimentation we participate in through it ends up benefitting us. Losing some of the fear of doing irreparable harm to a system allows us to learn even more. Daniel feels this played a big role in his story and has told people he is addicted to the “undo” button. “The further up in the career you get the more likely it is you’ll get yourself in trouble by making a bad decision, but if you’re able to identify those areas where you make mistakes less often or you can set things up in a way that you can make those mistakes without them being harmful…I really think that is a key to success.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel stresses the importance of opportunities for iteration. How often do we put ourselves in situations where we don’t have to get something right the first time so we can take advantage of an opportunity for growth and learning (i.e. a new skill, a new system, etc.)? “Any time you can setup a scenario where you don’t have to get it right the first time, but you can benefit from it if you do is so essential to the journey…. You can really get ahead when things are going well but avoid yourself getting into an unrecoverable situation from there on out.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel mentions the Agile methodology and cites a quote by Jeff Bezos about making decisions that are easily changeable if they start you in the wrong direction. “I don’t need to know that this is the right answer right now. I just need to know enough to make the next step. That’s where I was in the early part of that career…. That showed up again and again as I continued my education…. It really became critical when I got out of college.” – Daniel Lemire Going into college, Daniel didn’t know the world was about to have an internet bubble burst. He was very excited about working for EDS (a premier IT company many people wanted to work for) and felt he was well-prepared to do that. Daniel talks about taking an internet computing course in which students had to build a business plan for an internet-based company and then execute on it. There was a competition as part of the final exam involving a mock proposal. Daniel was on one of the 3 teams which had to deliver a presentation at the offices of Sabre. He learned 3 things from that experience: One doesn’t need to know everything to do something impactful or interesting. It’s about knowing enough to build a business plan and a prototype you can showcase for feedback. Near the beginning of Daniel’s presentation at Sabre, the computer crashed. He had printed out the speaker slides and notes and knew what points to hit to finish the rest of the presentation. The very first time Daniel needed to present in front of a group, his hands were shaking. It took many presentations in front of people to get over it. Doing the presentation at that time was a huge deal for Daniel because he was not comfortable as a presenter. Having those notes eased his anxiety. We should not underestimate the value of preparation when going into an intimidating situation because it can boost our confidence. “It’s funny how your current experiences can crystalize that looking back on those moments. And I can absolutely tell you from a career perspective, what I didn’t appreciate at the time was how much a difference that confidence made in my success…. I totally understand that now because I had to go through the entire cycle of you’re confident, you’re not confident. How do I get that back to do and tackle the next big challenge?” – Daniel Lemire 23:12 – Consulting and a Return to the Familiar John points out Daniel’s willingness to attack something he was not comfortable with. We’ve previously seen a pattern John refers to as Smart Kid Syndrome which hinders growth when people do not invest in weak areas so they can be perceived as being good / highly skilled at things (i.e. the opposite of a growth mentality). In Daniel’s case, he found the things that made him feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations and went back to them. Not long after the presentation at Sabre, Daniel obtained his degree but could not enter the workforce. There were no job openings, and it was a time of many layoffs. Daniel had no choice but to fall back on some of the things he knew to make himself successful. Daniel had proposed to his wife before that last year of college, and they were married the summer after graduation. His wife got a job as a graphic designer to provide planned family income. “I fell back on what I knew, which quite candidly, was what I learned in that ecommerce course.” – Daniel Lemire Before most people really knew what building a web presence for businesses would mean long-term, Daniel knew it was something he could do. He began a journey as an independent consultant. It was something he knew how to do and a place he could create value without a full-time job working for a specific company. “I kept looking for that opportunity to work for somebody else, but it never materialized. And I made the best of the situation I was in…. I have a marketable skill. I just have to find somebody that wants to pay me to build a website.” – Daniel Lemire, on going into consulting after college Small jobs here and there helped Daniel improve as a consultant. Daniel tells the story of moving back home for the summer before his last semester of college. At his father’s medical clinic, the systems manager suddenly quit. This was 2002, and the clinic adopted an electronic medical record system. It was critical that the systems stayed running to handle the patient load. Daniel’s father asked him to fill in until they could find someone to take the role of systems manager full-time. Daniel understood what his father’s business did at a high level, and he chose to take the opportunity, knowing he would learn something from the situation, even if he was only needed for a short time. “I wound up spending nearly the entire summer there, and while I was there, we kept finding things that I could help out with. I could build a database for tracking the number of patients they were caring for. I built a payroll management database where they could keep track of time off and holidays…. I built a whole bunch of systems, actually. It was well more than just doing the networking and the PCs. And of course, there were things that I was out of my depth at. But you make those mistakes, and you learn. And in an operational environment having the wherewithal to just fight through and not give up on the problem and stay late until you get it working was really the key to the success in doing that…. I carried that into the consulting business…. That had convinced me…that I do know enough about this and that I can do the things that need to be done. Now, I just need to find the right people to do it for.” – Daniel Lemire 28:41 – The System Builder Was Daniel finding the problems in that environment that he could solve and providing the solutions because he decided to go have conversations with people about what they were doing, or was it based on ideas he got by being put into the environment? Daniel says it was a combination of both. For example, he could see a process and the amount of labor it took to complete the process like working with patient records. Daniel cites some early daily conversations with one of the head nurses about the work she was doing. Daniel could see the head nurse was reinventing a solution for the work she needed to do each day. He knew it was a repeatable process that could be turned into a database system that would make the nurse’s job easier. “I wasn’t afraid of that because I had done enough in the college courses to know that I could do it and that it was going to be a functional system that would add value.” – Daniel Lemire, on building a database system for one of the head nurses at a medical clinic The head nurse began to tell other people in the office about what Daniel had built for her. The accountant / payroll specialist asked Daniel if he could build her a system to track nurses and their time off. Daniel says this was much more technically involved than what he did with the head nurse. The accountant knew what she wanted and knew enough about how the system should function so that Daniel could ask deeper questions to capture the requirements and how data should be tabulated and calculated. “Reflecting back on that journey, one of the things that I have a much better appreciation for in my late career is that idea of getting quick success on something that’s going to get you momentum in the right direction.” – Daniel Lemire We can often get into something that is too much of a challenge or something so valuable that we won’t do it unless someone pays a high price for it. To Nick, this sounds like perfectionism. Doing great work without thinking about how to make it perfect seems like a dichotomy on the surface. “But the truth is, no one ever does anything perfect the first time, so the art of perfection isn’t about how you get it right the first time. It’s about how you keep at it until it’s good, and I understand that now in ways that I couldn’t comprehend back then.” – Daniel Lemire 33:12 – Thoughts on Product Management John says Daniel’s colleague in payroll sounds a lot like what we might call a product manager today. Product managers guide the product vision, help establish a minimum viable product to release and then foster feature enhancements and their priority over time. The idea of a minimum viable product and adding features over time is to get feedback along the way instead of building something huge and fully featured without any feedback until its release. Daniel tells us about being a Windows guy from the beginning. When his wife had to use a Mac for graphics, he didn’t understand why someone would want a more expensive computer with less flexibility (i.e. computer games). The growth of computing has a ton of lore behind it. We can’t really think about the PC without thinking about Bill Gates and the work he did. Daniel mentions what Bill Gates did with the acquisition of DOS . Gates developed a reputation early on for developing applications (Windows, Office) that worked well enough to do a job despite not being particularly well engineered. Daniel says Microsoft was likely as successful as it has been from the willingness to put products out there to create value, even if the products were not perfect. “I want to call out to all of my friends in technology not to underestimate how important that value proposition is for everything that you do. We get so caught up in the technical that we don’t think about that. That’s why that role I think has become so essential…. We know what we want sometimes, and we’re just frustrated if we can’t get it…. You need somebody that can sit between those two positions and sort of negotiate between multiple different parties…. And that’s what they master – that balance between being the best and getting something done.” – Daniel Lemire, on the role of the product manager A product manager consistently calibrates between being technically great and getting something completed. This takes into consideration the needs of developers and the demands of a business end user. Daniel feels the product manager’s role is becoming more important and not less when it comes to nascent technologies. Nick thinks a product manager is a personification of the inner struggle with perfectionism. Daniel says sometimes the product manager acts as a tiebreaker when there is gridlock between 2 sides so action can be taken. “I think that’s the key. Whatever it is, be taking action.” – Daniel Lemire 37:47 – Getting an Advanced Degree Daniel had some success with consulting and making money. He built a content management system before WordPress was a thing and expanded it into tracking customers and contacts. Daniel is still very proud of this work. In a lot of ways Daniel is a contemporary of the ServiceNow founders, but the ServiceNow founders were way better at product market fit. “Sometimes it’s not how technically talented you are. It is finding the right people to work with that makes the big difference…. When I found a customer that would let me really geek out and build them a big system, we both won…. That’s what I wanted to do. I just wanted to build great systems. I didn’t want to be a sales guy. I didn’t want to be a marketing guy. That was not something that I was prepared for or had a desire to do, and I also recognized that I just wasn’t any good at it. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and go with the things that excite you.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel learned about moving toward interesting things during his high school experience (i.e. how he got into computers). Once Daniel got a job doing work for a client, he would get so into it that he would stop doing marketing and sales. After finishing a job is when Daniel would start thinking about his next consulting engagement. He might spend a month or more trying to figure out how to land the next customer. At this point, Daniel started talking with other people about his path forward from the current state of consulting. “I wasn’t finding great success at doing the consulting thing, and I knew I had the aptitude to really create value. I just wasn’t…in the right place.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel recalls someone older (probably from church) asking what he was doing to allow himself to grow while he was in this “middle space.” Daniel thought about the question and said he would like to get an advanced degree at some point, but he knew that would be expensive and really needed to make money to support him and his wife (who had just enough to make ends meet at the time). “If you’re thinking about an advanced degree, your life is never going to be less busy because you’re going to add all of these things that you want to do. You’re going to have kids. You’re going to have a career. You’re going to be doing things with your family and your church and your community. If you feel like you have time to take something else on…just go get that advanced degree now while you have the time.” – Daniel Lemire, on advice he was given Daniel started to look into the advanced degree and learned a program at UNT would let him double dip from undergraduate coursework and reduce the number of hours for a master’s degree significantly. Daniel was able to complete the degree slowly over about 3 years, feeling it was a much better use of his time. “It gave me a much better appreciation of how businesses worked. The challenge was I didn’t have the context of experience to put with it.” – Daniel Lemire Mentioned in the Outro There is an element of humility involved when we realize we cannot solve a problem by ourselves. Daniel said a prayer to ask for wisdom after his plan to go into the Air Force wasn’t going to happen. He was also open to receiving feedback from other people who had ideas about what he should do. Part of the humble attitude we need to have is this openness to accepting suggestions. In Daniel’s case, it made sense to act on the suggestions. It may not mean that in your case, but be open to the feedback so you can process it before making a decision. The idea of taking a step forward even if you need to reverse it later sounds like a way to fight against perfectionism. We talked about product maangers doing this. It’s persistence without perfection. Listen to complimentary advice on perfectionism from the following episodes: Kellyn Gorman spoke to us about – accepting work that is good enough and calibrating the quality of our work based on time constraints in Episode 320 – Becoming DBA Kevlar: Roadblocks, Perfectionism, and Technical Orienteering with Kellyn Gorman (1/3) . We did a 4-part series to review Finish by Jon Acuff full of strategies for fighting against perfectionism: Episode 272 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 1 – The Day after Perfect and Cut Your Goal in Half Episode 273 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 2 – Deliberate Time Investments and Avoiding Distractions Episode 274 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 3 – Get Rid of Your Secret Rules and Use Data to Celebrate Your Imperfect Progress Episode 275 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 4 – The Day before Done and Perfectionism’s Final Roadblocks Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YoutTube If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Ally and Warrior: The Loneliness of Women in Tech with Kellyn Gorman (3/3) 41:14

för 15 dagar sedan41:14

41:14

Why do you think women leave careers in technology? Sometimes they are bullied, but sometimes it’s the loneliness. This week in episode 322, Kellyn Gorman shares the story of what moved her to start Women in Tech programs in the technical community, the lessons she learned from the Microsoft community, and what it was like returning to the Oracle community after an absence. You’ll hear about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and some of the benefits and drawbacks they can create based on the experience of Kellyn and her husband. Even advocates and community warriors need support from others and time to recharge. Kellyn shares how she is able to achieve both to continue supporting the community she loves. Listen closely to learn how can you foster a more inclusive community for women in tech. Original Recording Date: 02-21-2025 Kellyn Gorman is a database professional who has worked in the technology space for 25 years better known as DBAKevlar. If you missed parts 1 and 2 of our discussion with Kellyn, check out Episode 320 and Episode 321 . Topics – A Lonely Place in Tech, Returning to the Oracle Community, Encouraging the Contributions of Women in Tech, The Backlash of DEI, Being the Messenger and Getting Support 3:31 – A Lonely Place in Tech Did Kellyn’s initial struggles with public speaking and the challenges recalling her presentation topics have something to do with a lack of women attendees at the events, or was it just due to the large social setting in general? “Being a woman in tech, especially a data infra specialist like I am…I’m not on the analytics side. I’m very large database. It’s a very lonely place.” – Kellyn Gorman In 2011, someone Kellyn hired a woman she had previously worked with to come work with her again. “I didn’t realize. We communicated differently between each other, and we had a great interaction. It was so nice to have someone else there that I could go to lunch with, that I didn’t have to worry about…. It sounds sad. I don’t want that. I want to feel the same way about guys that I work with. I love the guys. But it was different…. She was pretty much bullied out of the job, and I was angry…. This is the last woman that leaves. I had looked into the history and of the 8 women I worked with in my career, at that point 5 of them had left tech. I scheduled lunches with them, sat down and talked with them, and found out they had all left for all the same reasons when you got down to it. They had all left because of the sheer loneliness, the isolation, the lack of collaboration…and sometimes bullying. And it was just really sad. And I didn’t realize that I was often bullied, that I was often isolated and everything else. And I said, ‘we’ve got to fix this.’ So, I started doing Women in Tech programs within the Oracle community.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn started the Women in Tech organizations for Kscope (an Oracle Developer and Technology conference) in Europe many years ago. By the time Kellyn left, the women attending RMOUG went up to 22% from the former 7% because of these programs, and there were more women getting into the Oracle ACE program. Kellyn would bring in different sponsors to promote women in tech. She would also get allies and other Oracle ACEs to personally promote specific women in the community and people of color. “I took this stuff on head on. They’d come back and go, ‘she’s not technical.’ The women I’m talking about is now the lead speaker for AI in Oracle…. Absolutely took no prisoners. Did I get shot as the messenger? A lot! Worth it…I am Kevlar. I will be bulletproof as long as I can.” – Kellyn Gorman, on moving a community forward Kellyn says the Oracle community has grown a lot. Listen to the way she describes how it once was when it came to treatment of women in tech. “Now they’re more likely to be allies…. That means they’re growing too, and that’s what we want. It always has to be based on education, not on persecution…and we focus on that. And I learned that very much from the Microsoft community. The Microsoft community is much farther ahead than the Oracle community on those situations. They police their own. When somebody gets out of hand, the guys are right there behind the women going, ‘no, you will not do this. This is not good.’ They expect that equality, that inclusivity, and I think that’s really essential that you see that growth. As long as there’s growth, as long as you’re moving forward, that is extremely important. That’s kind of where I take this.” – Kellyn Gorman 7:53 – Returning to the Oracle Community Kellyn has returned to the Oracle community after having to walk away from it for a little while. She is working to breathe some of the energy into it gained from being part of the Microsoft community but doesn’t feel she is quite there yet. “Well, I don’t know if I’m there yet…. For women in tech, we call it the death by 1000 pin pricks. It may be death by 1000 cuts, death by 1000 small bullet dings. I am the messenger that got shot a lot…. At a certain point I stepped away from the Oracle community and was like, ‘this is not healthy. You’re taking too many hits for too many people. You need to go where you’re safe and loved. I am very safe and very loved in the Microsoft community. So, I did that…and it really was helpful.” – Kellyn Gorman On the Microsoft side, Kellyn knew who paved the way for women in tech and understood the challenges involved. Kellyn shares the story of returning to Oracle Cloud World after a long absence. She had not been there since 2019. “…People coming up to me and giving me hugs and saying, ‘I couldn’t be where I am without you….’ I thought that no one remembered. I thought that no one cared.” – Kellyn Gorman, on returning to Oracle Cloud World John mentions that he loves being judged by the people he helps. Kellyn says it was lovely to know people cared about the efforts she had made during her earlier time in the Oracle community. It was an emotional moment. Shortly after the conference, Kellyn was approached about speaking at the Oracle Data and Analytics Conference and Kscope . She has been confirmed as the keynote speaker for BOTH events! Kellyn had submitted talks to both conferences, and they were moved up to keynotes. “‘We feel that you kind of got a raw deal with Oracle, and we want to fix that.’ Those kind of approaches…you didn’t even realize people noticed the hits you were taking, you know? So that definitely has been really nice. Not only am I coming back into the Oracle community, but I’m coming back in a way that I’ve got keynotes. I have articles that are being published in a number of top magazines. I am able to contribute in a way that is very powerful…. I had this conversation the other day that they were having problems with the haters, and I said, ‘don’t ever even pull yourself down into that level. Always work up. Always stay up. Don’t ever let them pull you down.’ This allows me to go back into the Oracle community and not be pulled down by anybody, to be able to do the best that I can do and focus on that…because I was anxious about coming into the Oracle community again, anxious about the challenges and those feelings….” – Kellyn Gorman Previous experiences in the Oracle community made Kellyn worry about getting into uncomfortable situations at events. A lot of events for the Oracle community may not have codes conduct or may be serving unlimited alcohol. This type of atmosphere lends itself to uncomfortable situations for women. “In the Microsoft community, there are very strict code of conducts. There are very high expectations, and there are people looking out for each other. That makes a huge difference. That takes a huge weight off of people when you’re there as a woman in tech, and I would love to see that at all communities. I don’t think people understand how important that is. We’re there to learn.” – Kellyn Gorman John mentions it is disappointing to hear about events with no code of conduct. Kellyn mentions how proud she is of the Kscope event organizers. When she expressed the importance of a code of conduct, organizers immediately implemented it as part of the conference. “We joke about it, but nobody wants the red card…that says you violated the code of conduct. DO not get a red card!” – Kellyn Gorman Nick says we’re highlighting important considerations when joining a technical community. This can be approached similar to the way Kellyn looked for new jobs – approaching people on the inside to gain perspective. Get perspectives on women in tech from people in that community, ask about codes of conduct for events, etc. Kellyn is also part of DevOps communities, which we didn’t get a chance to discuss. Kellyn tells us she is just now getting involved with the Postgres Conference . Many people she knows from the Oracle and Microsoft communities are attending. Kellyn shares the message she had printed on some stickers as a reminder to others in the community. “Assume that she is technical and capable of breathing fire. This is a saying that’s gone around the Microsoft community for a very long time. But I think we almost need little pins that say that just to keep us safe. It’s really important…. If I walk into a conference and I’m here to interact with my technical community and talk to people about tech and the only questions I receive are ‘how is your husband? Are you still living on the floating home? How are your kids?’ If I just get that over and over and over again, I wonder why I attended an event. This is with me speaking this has happened. So, I know it’s happening to other women, especially women that may be younger than me.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn has given the keynote at an event being only 1 of 3 women at the entire event. She later attended a Girl Develop It event that had all women and only 1 man in attendance. “It’s really interesting how the events are changed and how the interactions are and everything when you change up how inclusive or how different the attendance is for the people that are there.” – Kellyn Gorman, speaking of her experience at different community events 15:25 – Encouraging the Contributions of Women in Tech This change up in inclusivity comes from leaders and board members of the community in question. Should someone consider speaking with those people before they join a community? Even for local events, the board members for specific communities / user groups will often say they wanted more women speakers, but even those women who could have given a talk didn’t submit anything. Kellyn shares a story of approaching different women to be co-authors on an Oracle Enterprise Manager book. “I approached a couple different women that I really wanted on the book that really knew their stuff. And they were like, ‘well, let me think on it.’ And then they kept coming back, and they were like, ‘well, I want to make sure that I can do this.’ They wanted to make sure they were 110% sure they could do it; they wanted to make sure they had everything. I had guys who barely knew how to spell Enterprise Manager, and they’re like, ‘I can do it.’ It was insane…. It’s so important for women in tech and anywhere really to stop being so hard on themselves and really jump in. You’ll figure it out later. The women that do that really do as well or better than the guys around them. You gotta stop worrying so much.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn feels her brain is wired more like many of the guys who had the attitude expressed above – jump in and figure things out along the way. Most women are not wired this way. They want to know they can contribute, they can succeed, and that they will not let anyone down in the process. Kellyn says people don’t often encourage women not to worry so much. People often second guess women, and women are taught to second-guess themselves from very early on. Take the example of a young boy bothering a young girl and the girl being told he probably likes her and that she misunderstood. Kellyn remembers her daughter coming home describing the same situation. It wasn’t that the little boy liked her daughter. It was bullying. “To break ourselves out of that mold and just say , ‘I’m going to do this, and I’m not going to care what anybody else thinks’ is very hard…. I just learned really early on that most people are full of it and that I shouldn’t listen to them.” – Kellyn Gorman John mentions the behavior of bullying is not an acceptable output regardless of what motivations might be behind it. John likes Kellyn’s call out of differences in personalities such as the hesitance in committing to co-authoring a book due to a feeling of unworthiness. This is similar when men and women apply for jobs. “A lot of times women will look at a list of skills that are being looked for or responsibilities and say…‘I’m missing two out of the fourteen, so I’m not going to apply….’ Some men will go, ‘well, I have two out of those fourteen. I’m probably the top candidate.’” – John White Kellyn is proud of men for confidence but wants more women to have that same level of confidence. She has helped other women negotiate severance packages, job level classifications, and other things. “Women are really good, by the way, at negotiating for other women. They should always bring another woman in because…we will fight to the death for each other…. People say we’re not as good at negotiating for ourselves. We are very good at negotiating for each other, and I do think we just need to talk it through….” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn says women are told not to be bossy or brazen, and it hurts them in the real world. “But I also think a lot of women…they don’t submit talks because they don’t think anybody wants to hear what they’ve got to say. And a lot of women have a lot to contribute.” – Kellyn Gorman 20:23 – The Backlash of DEI John talks about a book he read by Alison Fragale in which the author speaks to behaviors in the corporate world which are viewed as positive for men but negative for women. While this certainly needs to change, the book covers some ideas for mitigating this in the meantime. Kellyn and her husband have worked together 4 times in total and have a unique working relationship. At Microsoft, Kellyn and her husband worked in the same role and on the same team. They have even served on the same boards together. The two of them have even written e-mails for each other to see what would happen. “…Something that was a little shocking to him was how he could say things, but I couldn’t. There were other times where he would know I was going to do better with some people. There were other times where I would be like, ‘you need Tim. You need to send Tim in. These guys will do better with Tim.’ There was also these challenges of recognizing that DEI made me look a little better than him…. My husband can’t go to his boss and go, ‘I need an ally. I need sponsorship to get my raise.’ I would automatically be given it. There are these challenges, these hard conversations that we have to have….” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn left companies making more money than her husband was at times because it might have looked better to give raises or equity to a woman. She reminds us it is important to push to have uncomfortable conversations about these types of situations (even if no one wants to have them). Based on what we have discussed so far, is Kellyn discounting herself in this scenario? No. "The truth was I would be negotiating for myself, and then I would have a boss come in going, “women are bad at negotiating for themselves. I need to back Kellyn up.’ I was a win-win every time.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn shares the story of when HR at a specific company challenged her salary. “And I hadn’t thought about this beforehand. It just popped out of my head. I said, ‘I feel that if I didn’t stick to my guns, I’d be letting down women in tech everywhere. Best response I could have ever said! Nobody asked about my salary again…. At the same time, my upcoming boss came back and said, ‘Kellyn earned that salary. She should be getting that salary, and no one should be asking her about that salary.’ He was there to be my ally.” – Kellyn Gorman, in response to HR questioning her salary and an example of her boss as an ally Kellyn shares a different scenario related to promotions when her spouse was given a new title at a higher job level but she was not. She had been doing the job for 1.5 years but was not given a promotion despite being promised it. A mentor suggested Kellyn hold her boss accountable for this, and Kellyn told her boss she earned it and needed to see the promotion within a year’s time. She got it, and her boss was an ally. Kellyn and her spouse were then back to a level playing field. Stock awards are a little bit different according to Kellyn. “It happened most of the time with nobody in the room, and it just looked cooler to give it to the girl. That’s when the inequality came out. If you didn’t have those DEI programs though, I think it would have been the opposite way…. That’s my partner down there and my equal, and he’s actually been in tech longer than me. If I had won it one year and then he won it the next, that would have been one thing. But after 5 years that they kept giving it to me… nope. I felt that was unfair.” – Kellyn Gorman, on stock grants John says in the case of stock grants even our advocates may not been in the room when awards are discussed and given. “They’re not small awards. But you recognize the pattern, and again…AuDHD…we see patterns. You saw who was being awarded what and you recognized it was a great achievement of understanding DEI, but there’s also that backlash of DEI. If you don’t have honest conversations with yourself saying, ‘did I award this because DEI looks cool? Or did I award this because I have somebody who deserved this?’ That’s extremely important to still follow through and keep yourself accountable.” – Kellyn Gorman 26:44 – Being the Messenger and Getting Support We heard earlier that Kellyn lost the fear of putting herself into scenarios no one ever wanted. Did she also lose the fear of uncomfortable conversations at some point? Was it a progression like the improvement in her public speaking? Kellyn says this is part of her personality. Her mother used to say, “Kellyn tells me things I don’t want to know.” “Even those in the Microsoft community are aware that I’m brought into difficult conversations. I am the messenger…. I was the messenger in the Oracle community that they didn’t want. In the Microsoft community I’m the one people bring in…. I am the equalizer. It’s weird.” – Kellyn Gorman John points out an element of self-awareness in Kellyn. She knows when she needs to care for herself and cannot be the advocate all the time. “Sometimes the Kevlar needs to be repaired.” – John White Having hard conversations and facing anxiety / fear is a skill. Those people who are surer of themselves and have confidence (like what Kellyn described as being willing to figure things out) are better suited to step into the line of fire and advocate for others. Kellyn says she has received tremendous community support in the role of equalizer / warrior. Kellyn also receives support from her mentees, often becoming close friends with them. Kellyn gets up early On Thursdays to mentor someone in another country, for example. “Those people are also often my roommates at different events. We’re friends as well.” – Kellyn Gorman, on support from her mentees Kellyn remembers forming “pods” with other women in the Oracle community across the country because there were so few of them. They could communicate and share with each other. “This was a bad day. I just need somebody to hear me. Those are important friendships to have. Those are important support structures to have. And I think that’s what women in tech more than anything will have. So, when I say that I need support…I have that. I have a lot of friends. I have a lot of allies. I have a lot of support people. And that gives me strength. I’m also naturally kind of a loaner too.” – Kellyn Gorman When Kellyn is overstimulated by too much noise, she can put on her Apple AirPods to block out all noise. When she needs time to recharge, most people know it. While attending events, Kellyn takes time for self-care. She might need to do that instead of attending an evening event. “I have no guilt about taking care of myself and doing what I need, and when other people need me, I make sure I have those reserves that I can be there. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where I haven’t been able to give of myself what other people need because I am very big about making sure I do the self-care that I need, that I have the reserves that I need, and do step back. I would not have signed on to go back into the Oracle community if I didn’t feel that I was capable of it and it was going to disturb my peace.” – Kellyn Gorman By thinking through situations from someone else’s perspective, Kellyn also has to help her friends set boundaries to care for themselves. “I was taught very on to think with my head, feel with my heart, say what I mean…don’t get any of them confused. Keep them compartmentalized, especially when you’re trying to make decisions…. If you’re angry at somebody there’s a reason you’re angry. Really think it through and figure out why you feel what you feel. I think that’s extremely essential. Don’t get them all meshed up together and say things that really aren’t the reason for that. You have to take some time and figure it out. I’m not one to say something that I don’t mean. It just doesn’t happen with me. I will step back and work through things. I have to. But it has served me well so far.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn thinks about what she wants to achieve, what the other person wants to achieve, and how they can move forward together. This strategy has worked very well over the years. Parting thoughts Kellyn says it’s been incredible to fall into a technologist role accidentally. Today, these kinds of opportunities are rare. We have people coming out of school with Data Science degrees who cannot get data analyst roles. Kellyn was doing desktop support, and someone suggested they make her a DBA. She would later work for Oracle and Microsoft. The opportunities Kellyn has received are thanks to support and allyship from others. “Even though I give myself credit for self-care and working hard and doing all these things, there’s been people behind me the entire way. I could not have done it by myself. It absolutely takes a village, and I try to give that to other people. I want other people to have the things that I have had. I think that’s essential for us to continue technology in a path that’s healthy.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn wants to make sure we use AI the right way. She sees entry-level technologists and wonders how they will gain the level of experience that she has. Kellyn has to address the University of Washington in support of tech careers, and sometimes she isn’t sure what her approach will be or the recommendations she will make to those looking to get into the field at this moment in time. If you want to follow up on this conversation with Kellyn, check out: Kellyn’s Blog – DBAKevlar Contact Kellyn on LinkedIn Mentioned in the Outro Special thanks to former guest David Klee for recommending we have Kellyn on the show! Nominate a woman in technology that you know needs to have her story told to be a guest on our show by sending us an e-mail – nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com . If you nominate someone who is a guest on the show, we will send you Nerd Journey stickers as a thank you for supporting women in technology. Listen to the following recommended episodes for more perspectives from women in tech: Caitlyn Bryan was mistaken for an assistant but was the salesperson supporting a customer Episode 111 – A Career in Technical Sales with Caitlyn Bryan Part 1/2 Kate Emshoff shares the challenges of remote job interviews for women and some tips for the career minded mothers out there. Episode 117 – Bold Moves and Blind Spots with Kate Emshoff (1/2) Episode 118 – The Career-Minded, Curious Mother with Kate Emshoff (2/2) Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi talks about STEM careers and how we can encourage young ladies to go into these fields. It has to start early. Episode 245 – Technical Careers and Championing Women in STEM with Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi (1/3) Amy Arnold speaks about mentoring other women in network engineering and mentions the Women in Cybersecurity community. Episode 281 – Packets Don’t Lie: Quality of Service for Technical Exploration in Network Engineering with Amy Arnold (1/2) Ashley Connell speaks about the gender imbalances within the Spiceworks community and some of the discomfort it caused. She also talks about supporting women returning to the workforce through her business, The Prowess Project. Episode 96 – Sponsorship, Dreams, and the Path to Entrepreneurship with Ashley Connell Episode 97 – Building Your Own Business From Idea to Operations with Ashley Connell We don’t always know the impact our efforts or the example we set will make on others just as Kellyn learned when she returned to the Oracle community. Tom Hollingsworth had a great quote about burnout happening when you think no one else cares. Check out Episode 127 – Countdown to Burnout with Tom Hollingsworth (3/3) . We hope you find a technical community that can support you and all other members. Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YoutTube If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Document Your Mistakes: Manager Interviews and Community Presence with Kellyn Gorman (2/3) 31:53

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How do we determine if a manager is the right fit based on our personality, values, and the way our brain works? Kellyn Gorman diligently investigates a potential manager before taking a job. As someone with autism and ADHD, having a supportive boss is critical to her success. This week in episode 321 we’ll explore how Kellyn got into both the Oracle and Microsoft communities and the reasons she is adamant about developing public proof of work (like blogs and public-facing presentations) that showcases mistakes on the path to learning. Listen closely to follow Kellyn’s transition from Oracle community group participant to leader, from public speaking novice to keynote presenter, and the differences she observed when participating in the Microsoft community. Original Recording Date: 02-21-2025 Kellyn Gorman is a database professional who has worked in the technology space for 25 years better known as DBAKevlar. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Kellyn, check out Episode 320 . Topics – Interviewing and Qualifying Managers, The Importance of Proof of Work, A Tale of Two Technical Communities 3:00 – Interviewing and Qualifying Managers Kellyn had mentioned not wanting to spend time on things which are not valuable, but she has developed a way to determine if sources of information are valuable over the course of her experience. In some cases, she is creating valuable resources that do not yet exist for the benefit of others. Kellyn has also learned how to determine if a manager will be valuable to her and fit in with the way she likes to work. How can listeners ask the right questions to determine if a manager is the right fit for the way they like to work? Kellyn says often times when we interview, getting the job is the main focus, which is understandable. If it is not the right job, it can put you in a very bad situation. With Kellyn being AuDHD , having a good boss is essential for her to be successful. Many times, when Kellyn is being interviewed, the people who are interviewing her have read her blogs , the books she has written, or have seen her speak. “They know me. It’s very normal for them to go, ‘I don’t have to give you a technical interview. I already know what you know.’ Ok, well then I get to ask questions.” – Kellyn Gorman In a job interview situation, Kellyn likes to ask questions about how a manager assigns work and the regularity of updates they need (i.e. regular check-ins vs. clear communication of the deadline and nothing more). She does not work well with micromanagers and needs autonomy and trust from her manager. “Go ahead and run the race. I don’t need to know how. That’s important to me. I am a professional. I am going to do the best job and really take care of that company and be extremely loyal. I need them to trust me to do that.” – Kellyn Gorman When Kellyn worked for Microsoft, a mentor encouraged her to take the Clifton Assessment , and it has been extremely valuable. Kellyn says one’s assessment can change over time and will re-take it now and then. The assessment tells someone what you will be like as an employee (skillset, potential, weaknesses). Kellyn likes to give the assessment results to her boss as “an employee manual.” Not all of them, however, take the time to read it. “The ones that read through that…I know I’ve got a good chance of having a good boss. If they just throw it aside…they don’t even take the time to read it…may have problems. They’re not even curious enough about me to read that assessment. And it’s not a long one. The top-level assessment is like 5 pages.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn’s Clifton Assessment says she is a strategic thinker, a go getter, and that she does not need a lot of management. People can tell her what they need, and she can figure it out from there. Kellyn is looking for a manager who is flexible and trusts her to go and do her job. They need to understand the deep expertise she brings to the table (Oracle expertise, for example). Kellyn wants to make sure a manager understands the challenges of being in an older technology space but operating across a broad set of communities. “I have what’s called…a Lego brain. If you want to know how your technology fits into every other technology, I can tell you. You want to build out a solution and market it to any different provider no matter if it’s Google or Microsoft? I can architect it for you…. That’s all I do for one company right now. I build them solutions. I architect them, and they take them and market them. And it’s awesome, but I needed a boss that understood that…. I need Kellyn’s Lego brain for this.” – Kellyn Gorman A good manager for Kellyn won’t try to control or stifle her talents but will enable her to leverage them to build the solutions she delivers to the company. How does Kellyn prioritize what to address about the way she likes to work during the interview process and what is ok to save for after she gets hired? Kellyn addresses a lot during the interview process, and she interviews for long periods of time. Kellyn spoke to her current manager for a period of 4 months before she was hired. It was a similar time period when she went to work for both Microsoft and Silk. Speaking with other individuals inside a company who can answer specific questions is very important to Kellyn as part of the overall process of seeking a new job. Our contacts are extremely important. Kellyn tells the story of taking a role at Oracle and making good decisions with the help received from Mary Melgaard in navigating the job offer process. When Kellyn went to Microsoft, she contacted Bruno Borges for help. When seeking a job with Silk, it was Tom O’Neal and Chris Buckle who helped Kellyn navigate the process. Upon coming to Redgate, Kellyn had help from Louise Domeisen. “I want to feel secure. I need that secure feeling that I’m making strong choices and understanding.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn has also negotiated other opportunities outside her job responsibilities with potential managers. That negotiation process / those types of conversations can give you insight into what someone will be like as a manager. 11:18 – The Importance of Proof of Work John highlights Kellyn’s emphasis on having proof of work that people can learn from and even discover her by as well as a strong professional network. Kellyn advises every mentee she has to blog and do public speaking. “I am out there. People already know what I know, and it’s a way for people to comprehend and to get a jump in. I have not had to go look for a job in over a decade. We’re talking a good 15 years. People have come to find me and said, ‘we want you….’ It’s really important to be out there. Be present. Just be the best that you can be and show what you can do…. People will come find you, and they will offer you jobs.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn’s job at Redgate as an Oracle Advocate began with an ask that she work for them as an engineer 10 hours per week. The Redgate advocacy team would later decide they wanted Kellyn to join them but initially did not realize she was already working for Redgate part time. They offered her the Oracle Advocate role without needing to interview for it. When Kellyn went to join Silk, she had reached out to Silk and 2 other companies stating her readiness to leave Microsoft and requested they create a role for her. Silk provided exactly what she asked for (a role that would put her skills to work). Kellyn also tells the story of someone asking her to take their role at Delphix. John references themes of learning in public and documenting your thought process (as a beginner or otherwise). We have discussed these with previous guests, aligning with advice from the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. Documenting our successes and failures makes our writing more approachable to those who are beginners or less knowledgeable in an area. John asks Kellyn to contrast how this strategy can help those who are entry level or early career in a specific area compared to those who may be more experienced or subject matter experts. Kellyn has been blogging on DBAKevlar since 2008 and regularly models documenting her mistakes for people to see. Kellyn calls out one mistake she documented related to an Oracle upgrade. Publishing our mistakes showcases our humanity to others. We make mistakes just like everyone one else. Kellyn uses the example of her son thinking she was perfect and helping him understand she makes plenty of mistakes. Kellyn used to see posts from people in the industry detailing the incredible things they were doing. As a result, she thought those people never made mistakes. Kellyn stresses the importance of showing when we mess up and how we cover from it. Kellyn’s husband was her first mentor and worked with her when she was a junior DBA (database administrator). Kellyn’s husband shared a story with her about a mistake he made related to removing a large database index. Her husband’s boss didn’t get upset but rather was focused on moving forward after the mistake. “And that was it…. It happened. Let’s take care of it. And when you hear that from somebody as prolific as my husband was in my view at that time, you start to understand it’s important to share those mistakes. It’s important to talk about your journey.” – Kellyn Gorman If you read Kellyn’s blog , she started off as a DBA learning things the hard way. While Kellyn was documenting things for herself, she also thought others might find her writings interesting if they were published in a blog. From there, Kellyn continued to grow and do more. “This is my path in tech. This is what I’m doing. If you find it interesting, go ahead and read it. If you don’t, I’m alright with that too. It’s alright. I may need this next week when I forget what I did in 10g, so we’re good.” – Kellyn Gorman, on blogging John says Kellyn is demonstrating that she does good work while documenting the outcome as well as the process. Part of Kellyn’s personality is a desire to make others better and to help the community. Kellyn says this is part of the reason she adores the Microsoft community. “I ended up blogging a lot more on the tech community for Microsoft than I did on DBA Kevlar for…recent years.” – Kellyn Gorman, on how her blogging changed after she went to Microsoft Kellyn had been blogging weekly on her own site for years but wasn’t able to keep up the same pace after joining Microsoft. After Kellyn left Microsoft, she added the content to DBA Kevlar so it would be retained. Kellyn emphasizes the importance of keeping track of the public-facing content we’ve created over time so people know it exists. In mentoring conversations with others about blogging or speaking, what does Kellyn think is the biggest hurdle people have to overcome to actually start? “They think they don’t have anything important to say, and I will remind them that some of my most popular blogs are things that I thought was stupid. Nobody’s going to read this. Nobody’s going to think it’s good. And those are the most popular blogs. I…documented using a Windows Oracle Enterprise Manager and monitoring HP UX targets. I thought, ‘nobody is going to read this. This is only there for me because I’m going to have to support this customer long term….’ That thing gets hit constantly, every single day…. It’s not the things you think will be popular. It’s not the things that everybody else is doing. It’s the stuff that nobody else knows. So just start writing and see what happens. Don’t overthink it.” – Kellyn Gorman, on blogging Kellyn documented building a VM image of a Raspberry Pi to use for STEM classes. People loved it and were downloading it for STEM education. John says we don’t know the purpose for which others will use our problem solving. If we document something for public consumption, people will use it in ways we just can’t know. Kellyn says as people in your community retire, they may take down their blogs. It’s a consideration point. She has some of the only deep command line interface content for Oracle Enterprise Manager, for example, and is committed to preserving it for others. “I can’t ever take that down because if I do, it’s gone. It’s gone forever.” – Kellyn Gorman, on technical knowledge that can be lost when subject matter experts / community contributors 21:11 – A Tale of Two Technical Communities Kellyn does public speaking, has written blogs and books, and has been part of technical communities. What was the order in which Kellyn started doing these things? What came first? Kellyn had attended RMOUG (Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group) . It was the largest regional user group in the country and was closed to where Kellyn lived. “I wanted to start speaking, and the reason that I wanted to start public speaking was I found that my ADHD made it very difficult for me when I was in a public space. People would ask me questions, and I absolutely had the answers. But I would lose access to my brain, and I wouldn’t be able to come up with it at that moment…. Even if I knew the information, it wasn’t accessible for me…. I remember my first talk when I went to RMOUG. I went and did the talk, and I was going to do it on temporary table spaces with parallel processing…. The door closed, and my talk went out the door with it…just was gone…. It was horrible. It was the worst talk ever, but it got better. Again…didn’t give up…be persistent…continue to talk. And now I can talk on anything. I’ve got it down.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn would encourage people with questions to talk to her 1-1 at a later time to hide the fact that it was very difficult to come up with answers in the moment. In that first presentation for RMOUG, Kellyn spoke for about 35 minutes trying to go through her slides, but it was a struggle. Kellyn is doing a number of keynote presentations as the Oracle Analytics and Data Summit 2025 , Kscope , Scenic City Summit , and SQL Saturday Oregon . Kellyn loves doing keynote presentations on topics that interest her, but it took her beginning the public speaking journey in 2011 to get where she is now in 2025 (14 years). Kellyn went from attending the Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group (RMOUG) to speaking at events. At one point she approached the board members of RMOUG and expressed her interest in volunteering to give back to the community. Other board members of RMOUG immediately suggested Kellyn run for a term as board member, and she did. Once Kellyn was a member of the RMOUG board, she started running the RMOUG Training Days conference. At the time, there were around 1000 attendees. Kellyn recently attended RMOUG Training Days and reports there were only 80 attendees. “It’s heartbreaking to see where the Oracle community is now. Because of so much content that is out there, it’s hard to get people to go in person to events like this. There’s cloud events. There’s everything. It’s very challenging.” – Kellyn Gorman In 2011 Kellyn was made an Oracle ACE . This is a community recognized award. One year later, Kellyn was named an Oracle ACE Director (the highest award from Oracle). In 2014 Kellyn won Women of Tech of the Year for the state of Colorado. Also in 2014, Kellyn and her future husband Tim Gorman were doing keynotes across the world. Being a part of the same community ended up eventually bringing the two of them together. Kellyn stayed in the Oracle community through 2018 / 2019. In 2012, Kellyn attended her first SQL Saturday , which is focused on Microsoft technologies. Kellyn immediately wanted to know how this community was able to get so many women attendees (40% were women at SQL Saturday compared to 7% at Oracle community events). A couple of the speakers at the SQL Saturday event explained the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and Women in Tech initiatives that Microsoft had. “It made total sense to me. It was what I was trying to bring over to the Oracle side. They just weren’t ready. They just weren’t ready on the Oracle side. And I was just utterly amazed. So, I started going to SQL Saturdays.” – Kellyn Gorman, on discovering the Microsoft community Kellyn worked with SQL Server technologies and had built some expertise in that area. In 2016, Kellyn attended her first PASS Data Community Summit . “I just loved the energy. I loved the inclusivity…everything that they were doing. I just was so impressed…. This is the way user communities are supposed to be. It’s all about you do you and I’m alright with what you do. It was just incredible. That was pretty much my love affair starting with the Microsoft community….” – Kellyn Gorman, on her love for the Microsoft community Mentioned in the Outro Special thanks to former guest David Klee for recommending we have Kellyn on the show! Nick had not heard of the Clifton Assessment before speaking to Kellyn. It’s a great idea to do something like this to help identify strengths that perhaps others do not point out to you. Knowing our strengths can be leveraged when we interview for jobs (part of the career narrative we need to tell in interviews). Kellyn asked people inside the companies she was targeting for her next role for help during the job seeking and interview process. She found a harbor pilot just like we discussed in Episode 317 – Own Your Job Search: Be the Captain, Find a Harbor Pilot . Kellyn’s attitude toward blogging is much like that of Duncan Epping as discussed in Episode 304 – Next Level: Shifting Specialties and Broadening Your Outcome Goal with Duncan Epping (2/2) . The purpose is documenting a learning journey that showcases mistakes. It’s ok to be part of multiple technical communities. It doesn’t have to be just one! Kellyn has been part of the Oracle and the Microsoft communities. Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YoutTube If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Becoming DBA Kevlar: Roadblocks, Perfectionism, and Technical Orienteering with Kellyn Gorman (1/3) 46:40

för 29 dagar sedan46:40

46:40

What if your strategy at work was to take on the problems no one else will? For Kellyn Gorman, this is a strategy that suits the way she works and learns best. Kellyn is a multi-platform database professional with 25 years of experience in our industry, and she’s also known as DBAKevlar. This week in episode 320 you’ll hear what it was like to grow up in a perfectionist home as a child with autism and ADHD, the health challenge that forced Kellyn to start over professionally after losing 9 years of memories, and how she went from working at a shoe store to becoming a database administrator. We talk through ways to mitigate perfectionist tendencies by accepting work quality that’s good enough, being kind to yourself, and time calibration. Original Recording Date: 02-21-2025 Topics – Meet Kellyn Gorman, A Perfectionist Environment, Hitting a Roadblock, Pursuing Unexplored Areas to Remove Barriers, Reaching Good Enough by Tuning for Time, Strengths and Weaknesses in Neurodiversity, No Fear in Asking for Help or Giving Help to Others 2:17 – Meet Kellyn Gorman Kellyn Gorman is a database professional who has worked in the technology space for 25 years. Kellyn’s focus has been heavily on Oracle, but she also has experience with SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and much more. To sum it up, Kellyn excels in multi-platform database administration. Should we have written our questions for this episode as database queries? 3:25 – A Perfectionist Environment Kellyn is the oldest of 3 children and has perfectionist parents. Kellyn is autistic and has ADHD. This is often called AuDHD. See Kellyn’s blog post on the strengths of ADHD/AuDHD . Listen to some of the challenges from Kellyn’s childhood. “So, this perfectionism was always placed upon me to do so much more because I was an intelligent child. But you would get me into most school environments that have a lot of structure…and my brain was like 25 McDonald’s drive-throughs all taking orders at the same time…. And that can perpetuate this idea that you are really failure instead of innovative and kind of doing things very differently than what is that structured expectation of what is fitting inside the box. I did not fit inside the box.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn started to get the feeling of not living up to expectations. Kellyn speaks to having an extreme awareness and being able to recognize patterns. She saw the need to structure her own box, which made a huge difference in what being a perfectionist meant. At around age 15, Kellyn told her parents she planned to move far away (and she eventually did to escape what was expected of her). Kellyn’s mother had specific plans and ideas for what success looked like for Kellyn as well as her younger sister. “You comprehend that idea of what your parents may have and their ideas for you and what they think is successful is very different than what you might have decided. By the time I hit about 21 / 22, I was on my own idea and learning how to be good to myself, learning how to do things differently.” – Kellyn Gorman, on the mismatch between her parents’ definition of success and her own definition of it 7:32 – Hitting a Roadblock “I ended up coming to I guess you’d say a complete roadblock in life because that perfectionism was constantly weighing on me even though I was very aware that it wasn’t the right thing for me. I ended up having a medical crisis where I ended up having 5 strokes between 21 and 26. I had to re-learn how to do everything…. I lost nine years of memories. I lost 50% of my visual field. I had to re-learn how to balance a checkbook, how to drive…it was huge.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn mentioned she was lucky to have so many others around her for support during this time. Circuit City opened up in Kellyn’s town, and they were looking for people to work in the computer department. Two of the guys working with Kellyn at a shoe store suggested Circuit City hire her. They had nicknamed Kellyn “Kevlar” because they thought she was bullet proof. At the time Circuit City hired her, Kellyn had never worked on a computer (zero experience). She still had a small speech impediment from her strokes then but performed well even on her first day in the role. “And that was my journey into tech. They found out I had a knack for software. I had learned how to fix computers. As my brain healed, this was all coming about.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn’s husband was doing desktop support at the time and suggested she give it a try as a next step and kept progressing from there. “What you find out is that a lot of people talk about what they’re going to do. Not many people do…. I remember working in the shoe store and not being able to arrange shoes in size order…. It took me 3 days to do that when I first started. When you come from that place, everything else seems easier. You’re not so overcome by the idea of perfectionism…. It’s just it’s a new challenge and you’re going to take it on, and you’re not scared…you just do. And so, I would take on the things that nobody else would touch.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn worked with 14 other people (all men), all of which wanted nothing to do with database software like Sybase or Oracle. Kellyn figured out how to do it. Kellyn tells the story of people from Oracle wanting to know how she was running more than one 16-bit Oracle application on a Windows 95 computer. Those folks later told the company CIO that he needed to make Kellyn a DBA (database administrator) and encouraged sending her to certification training. Kellyn’s first official DBA role was at Duke Energy. She inherited a massive SQL Server cluster that no one else wanted to touch and had no experience working with it at the time. Kellyn had to learn about it without Microsoft’s help, but she figured it out. “So, I just kept doing that wherever I went because I found that people remembered your successes. They didn’t remember your failures…. The whole idea that you were Kevlar or you were bullet proof or that you were perfect had more to do with that you were doing and just did one more time past the failure…fall down 7 times, get up 8 kind of thing…. You could fail all you want as long as you were trying.” – Kellyn Gorman 12:04 – Pursuing Unexplored Areas to Remove Barriers Did Kellyn’s learning process as she recovered become something she learned to apply to anything? Kellyn thinks yes and says she was no longer afraid. What we see on television about amnesia is not like what it really is. Kellyn remembers her brain “unfogging” around 5 months after her last stroke. Doctors realized after extensive testing she was missing 9 years of memories. All of Kellyn’s adult memories, including her college education, were gone. She could not perform her duties as an accountant and needed to start completely over. “My mindset was this is where we’re at. Wipe off the dirt. Pick yourself up. Start moving…. I just stopped being afraid of falling on my face because I was already down there.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn has never been afraid of making progress in a new area little by little as a result of everything that happened. She’s never been afraid of taking on difficult tasks (which might be an ADHD thing). “I think that I figured out what was the trick of me getting from the starting line to the finish line and continued to kind of build on that and doing that every time when I was going somewhere and perfecting it…. It’s served me very well.” – Kellyn Gorman This reminds John of a pattern he’s seen in his own life and in the lives of others called Smart Kid Syndrome. When people start to say you’re talented in certain areas, one might get focused on being perceived as being really good at certain things and shy away from things that are difficult or that are new. Because of Kellyn’s situation and the loss of memories, she didn’t have any choice but to take a beginner’s mindset and a growth mindset. “You don’t miss what you don’t remember…. And it may be a little bit ADHD again in me that they joke about out of sight, out of mind with us. For me, it’s very much like that. I don’t remember those 9 years, so I don’t really miss them.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn says she has some memories of memories and reinforces that amnesia is not the way it is portrayed on television. Listen to her describe what it was like. Part of what motivated Kellyn to pursue the areas others didn’t want to touch was that it allowed her to learn things in her own way without any barriers. Kellyn sees herself doing this even today for 2 reasons: When other people know a great deal already, Kellyn doesn’t feel she can contribute as much. In these areas, Kellyn can learn at her own pace and do things the way she wants to do them without being bothered. Through experience, Kellyn knows the ways of working that suit her best. She doesn’t do well being micromanaged, for example. “…I know that I’ll be able to be my best me there, that I’ll be able to do things, and no one will be interested in any part of it…not until I’ve turned it into something really, really big and special. Then everybody gravitates to it.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn is also preparing herself to do something / build something special and then lose it. She cites this as the biggest hurdle for which she has to prepare. Nick thinks focusing on the doing and the areas that other people aren’t interested in or don’t care about removes the shame of messing up. Kellyn says the hard things come easy to her. It’s the silly details she ends up missing. Kellyn tells the story of a conversation with her son when he was a teenager. He said something about Kellyn being perfect and never messing up. “I always mess up. I don’t give up.” – Kellyn Gorman, speaking to her son Kellyn realized her kids only saw the end product, and most people see her that way too. “I didn’t realize that what people see, even though I talk about the stupid things I’ve done and talk about the challenges that I’ve had, nobody seems to remember that. All they seem to remember is ‘you wrote all these books and you’re doing this, and you designed these systems, and you did Oracle on Azure….’ I don’t think we see ourselves like other people see us. I think we’re much harder on ourselves.” – Kellyn Gorman John says people see the output and don’t see the process, which may be a cognitive bias in humans. We can’t always control the output or the outcome but often want to judge based on these. We can control the process. Maybe when we say we’re trying to control perfectionism what we’re really talking about is an obsession with progress and not giving up. Kelly says it’s also about being satisfied with your output. She recalls walking away from situations that didn’t go as planned but knew she tried her best. In these situations, Kellyn is kind to herself. “If I didn’t do the best that I could have, that’s probably when I’m going to be more persistent and say, ‘you need to try again.’ But there have been situations where I’ve done that, where I’ve just said, ‘you did the best that you could. The output isn’t what you hoped, and you’re going to have to let this one go….’” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn has seen people she’s mentored and many she admires be very hard on themselves in certain situations despite doing the best they could in the situation. “That’s when perfectionism I think really comes back and bites a person. It really hurts them and harms them…when they don’t understand, ‘you do not control the entirety of this world. You can only control yourself.’” – Kellyn Gorman John thinks when Kellyn is kind to herself or critical of herself, it’s about the process and not about the outcome. For those who are not kind to themselves, the thing they can control and improve is their process. Preparation and interaction with other people are part of process, but we don’t control everything, including how much time we had to do something. 23:05 – Reaching Good Enough by Tuning for Time How do we start to design our processes to accept a quality of output that is good enough? Or does perfectionism force us to think our work must be of the utmost quality regardless of other constraints? Kellyn likes to break things into bite size pieces and determines the level of quality she can produce based on the time she has for that piece. If there is more time, she can revisit and increase the level of quality. Kellyn shares a story of getting asked to do a presentation at a conference the evening before the presentation was to take place. Kellyn wrote the abstract and then worked on the slides that evening for 2 hours and was able to say they were good enough. The next morning Kellyn worked on the slides again to the point where she was totally satisfied with the quality. “But if I didn’t have that time because I was not awake…I would have let them go. I would have been satisfied either way, but I was saying, ‘if I have more time, I will allocate to that. But I would have been happy either way because understanding there were time constraints…this was a last-minute request from somebody. I’m going to knock it out of the park no matter what because I know the topic, but my slides may not be of the pristine level that I like. So that’s kind of how I approach it.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn says in this case she did a great job with the presentation and was very happy with it. She focused her topic to fill a gap in content that wasn’t discussed at the event. Kellyn’s story made Nick think that in any given situation there are layers in which we might need to make good enough. Kellyn knew the topic well. That part was of the upmost quality. It was the slides that might have turned out to be good enough based on time constraints. This mirrors decisions Nick has to make when producing the podcast. Kellyn says this comes down to priority also. “What are the things that must be done? What are the things that could be done, and if I have time I’ll allocate more? What are the things that just don’t matter? …I am very much about time management for thigns that are valuable.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn does not like having her time wasted and likes to allocate time to only things that are useful or valuable. How did Kellyn learn to delineate efficient uses of time to help herself prioritize? Kellyn feels she’s always been this way. When she works on optimizing database environments, nothing is off the table – the application, the database, the network, or the hardware. “There are reports that you can pull from Oracle that tell you all about what’s using CPU, what’s using I/O, what’s using memory…. I’m always looking at elapsed time…because you tune for time, or you’re wasting time. It’s all about time. What is consuming the time? That to me is efficiency. I think that’s extremely important when you look at all aspects of life. What can I do that is efficient use of time that can provide valuable output, and if it doesn’t provide valuable output, it is a waste of time…. I have to have proof that shows what I allocate time to makes sense.” – Kellyn Gorman Kellyn thinks this is part of AuDHD. People who are autistic understand social cues well but do not accept social cues that don’t make logical sense. The autistic brain also has an insane sense of justice, and these qualities apply to all areas of life. “If it doesn’t make logical sense…if we cannot put order to it, we’re not going to be able to be supportive of it…. Because I see patterns and I see output, I should be able to track it and say, ‘this is an efficient use of my time. There will be productive output of this at the end, and yes, I will do it this way.’” – Kellyn Gorman, on the AuDHD brain Kellyn shares a scenario of co-workers pointing at something specific causing a performance problem in a database environment, but they had no data to back up their claim. John says this sounds like following the scientific method. When we as human beings have a hypothesis, there’s a cognitive bias toward searching for anything that supports what we think might be true. Maybe fighting this bias is a skill? Kellyn does a pretty good job at fighting the bias. “I would not be doing my job if I didn’t request that we have some data behind this before I spend time on it.” – Kellyn Gorman, as a response to colleagues without data backed assumptions of what might be causing a problem John suggests this is coaching and trying to help people get better at their jobs, encouraging them to gather data on their hypotheses. Listen to the story Kellyn shares of being in a meeting where someone just wanted her to agree with them without data. 32:22 – Strengths and Weaknesses in Neurodiversity John highlights Kellyn’s attribution of some of these things to AuDHD. He shares being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and wishes it had been earlier. John loved spending time on things that were interesting and hated spending time on things he perceived to be unimportant, a waste of time, or just not interesting…regardless of whether the task or tasks would help him make progress on a project. John says he does not feel it is an aspect of his ADHD to hate wasting time. Kellyn says when she is trying to address something tedious, the activity level in her temporal lobe decreases, making it harder to focus. The way Kellyn would compensate for this was to pair up with someone neurotypical. “I could handle this monstrous 95% workload, but he’d come in the last 5% and clean it all up. And then he could go back in the corner and code like he loved to. That’s how I work best…. Little tiny things, tedious little silly things could get away from me. Understanding that and accepting that and accepting those weak points but understanding that I had these massive amount of strengths…this is alright. These weaknesses are alright. How do I find people who can help me to make sure they don’t become an issue? And that’s how I address my ADHD as an adult.” – Kellyn Gorman, on finding people to support her weaknesses John mentions compensating behaviors like staying organized also help him. Kellyn likes to switch between tasks constantly to keep activity up in her temporal lobe so nothing becomes boring. Kellyn asks managers to load up her task list and clearly communicate the deadline for different items. Then she can start working through the tasks in her own way (and finishing all of them). “It’s the way that I work. Because I know that way it can’t become tedious if I’m constantly task switching and moving about different things. It works wonderful for me. It’s not for everyone, but it does work with my ADHD.” – Kellyn Gorman John has a little bit more hyperfocus, and he mentions there is one label of ADHD that applies to many executive functioning issues. 36:08 – No Fear in Asking for Help or Giving Help to Others John asks about being self-taught. When we’re teaching ourselves something and just starting, it can seem overwhelming with so much material to learn. Did Kellyn combat perfectionism when learning new things through time calibration or using some other tool? Kellyn says it’s partly that she’s not afraid to ask for help. Going back to that first SQL Server she inherited (which we referenced earlier), the database team was not on speaking terms with the application and user support team. “So, for 3 weeks, I banged my head against a wall trying to figure out SQL Server, trying to figure out how to do this; and I was incredibly overwhelmed. I finally said, ‘that’s it. I’m not doing this. This is not a smart idea.’ So, I walked into the manager of that entire team (development as well as users), and I said, ‘so I hear that the DBA team and the…team are not on speaking terms…. I’d like to change that right now, right here.’ I was a brand-new DBA. I had nothing to lose…. I could not have done that job without them….learning from the application developers, learning from the people who used this application every day, understanding the data…. I had to go them, show weakness…and I learned a lot. They knew I was willing to put in the time to understand and learn SQL Server.” – Kellyn Gorman This database contained all pipeline data for the western US for Duke Energy. Kellyn had never worked on SQL, never managed databases, and was suddenly responsible for managing all of the hourly and daily data. To learn SQL Server scoured documentation. She also learned how to calculate lock escalation for database tables (which impressed Microsoft). Kellyn is giving back to the people on her team now, recommending O’Reilly books by specific trustworthy authors. Kellyn has followed these authors and their content for years. She knows whether what they write is valuable, and this is a critical skill in a world where some of the content out there is written by people who don’t truly understand the subject matter. Kellyn shares a discussion she had with someone else in the Oracle community about being part of the last generation that will understand Oracle. Things in the cloud are black boxes, and no one is talking about the internals (architecture, diagrams, etc.). “For my folks that I’m working with right now teaching them Oracle I have written in 4 months 250 pages, and I told them I’m going to turn it into a book. And I’m going to call it ‘All the Documentation Oracle Forgot to Write….’ This is why they can’t get the answers. There are no answers out there. It’s really interesting that we are saying everything is a black box. Nobody needs to know how it works. And the truth is if you don’t understand how it works, it’s really difficult to develop for it. It’s really difficult to troubleshoot it…. It’s really challenging as folks are trying to learn, trying to become more, and some of the old ways…it always returns to us as being the most valuable…. The way we taught ourselves, we had to really work with it…. We were building out real application clusters manually across networks that couldn’t handle it, and it was amazing. It was amazing what we were able to comprehend from that where now you can just go out to the cloud, and it does it all for you with a couple clicks.” – Kellyn Gorman, discussing that being self-taught today is different than it once was Mentioned in the Outro Special shout out to former guest David Klee for recommending we have Kellyn as a guest on the show! Through this interview Kellyn is modeling that we should be sharing our mistakes and challenges so that people don’t think we’re perfect or that everything we do succeeds. Going where no one else will go looks like bravery on the surface, and it is very brave. But at a deeper level, this is a strategy that works for Kellyn because she knows herself and how she works best (the type of environment to be in to succeed, desired level of autonomy, etc.). Learning and the building of expertise are natural byproducts of executing on the strategy of going where no one else will go. Getting to good enough in the output of our work requires being intentional about which aspects are good enough and which are of a higher quality based on how much time we have. This advice is very much in line with advice from Finish by Jon Acuff. Acuff talks about choosing what to bomb or what you will be bad at to save time. We did a 4-part book review with guest host Jason Gass which you can find in the following episodes: Episode 272 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 1 – The Day after Perfect and Cut Your Goal in Half Episode 273 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 2 – Deliberate Time Investments and Avoiding Distractions – this episode discusses the concept of choosing what to bomb Episode 274 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 3 – Get Rid of Your Secret Rules and Use Data to Celebrate Your Imperfect Progress Episode 275 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 4 – The Day before Done and Perfectionism’s Final Roadblocks We ended this week’s discussion on the topic of our industry and the difficulties of learning how everything in the cloud works at a deep level. Good documentation and good sources of information (which Kellen is both recommending to others and building herself) are essential in becoming a good troubleshooter. David Klee spoke to this in Episode 315 -A Love for Troubleshooting: Skill Development through Documentation with David Klee (1/2) . Remember to check out Kellyn’s blog – DBAKevlar . Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ Leave a Comment on Your Favorite Episode on YoutTube If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Upward Focus: Manage, Coach, and Create Value in the Space that Fits You with Richard Russell (2/2)

för 5 weeks sedan

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If you think the job of a manager is to serve their team, think again. This week in episode 319 Richard Russell returns to make the distinction between how to manage well and the specific job of a people manager. As part of our discussion, Richard shares his transition into people management and how he later determined it wasn’t the right fit, his decision to pursue consulting, and the way he landed on coaching. We also highlight the importance of determining the definition of success in your work and finding the space that fits you. Listen closely for tips on how to find the right coach who understands your world. Original Recording Date: 02-17-2025 Richard Russell spends most of his time coaching leaders who work in scale-ups, big tech, and other corporate environments. If you missed part 1 of the discussion with Richard, check out Episode 318 . Topics – Pursuing People Management, The Job of a Manager is Upward, A Transition to Coaching, Comparing Coaches and People Managers, The Space That Fits You, Finding the Right Coach, The Greater Context 3:02 – Pursuing People Management Once you become a team lead you can go to maangement, stay team lead, or just be an individual contributor again. What made Richard want to move into people management? Richard’s biggest realization was that people who were really good at specific technologies were better than him and getting even better at it faster than he was. “Relatively speaking to people in my peers, I’m going to continue to fall behind, and the reason for it is because I’m not actually that interested enough to get really good at it…whereas they are…. I followed things that I was interested in, which was people.” – Richard Russell In his early days, Richard was quite interested in Linux and programming ang got very good at it very fast. But then he lost interest in it because he got interested in other areas like business strategy, how people think, what management is, etc. Richard remembers a teacher in high school commenting that he was a natural leader people would follow. Richard didn’t see himself in that light at the time because he was “the nerdy one.” Over time, as Richard was able to influence people (even before his role as a people manager), he began to recognize it was the result of an interest and care for people. Richard shares a story of what motivates him using the example of a colleague he was able to help improve. “These things stick in his mind – that care, that coaching, that attention that he got…the explanations that he got that were patient…and the trust that I had in him then moved him…. That interaction, that fundamental interaction with a human is the thing that continues to motivate me.” – Richard Russell, describing his impact on a colleague Richard is always interested in technological bits and pieces, but eventually he will lose interest and move on to something else. When it comes to people, he’s never lost that interest. Richard went into people management because he felt the topics related to it were and would be deeply interesting long-term. These interests might include topics such as people and how they think, how to influence people, how to solve communication challenges between people, aligning people with a business strategy, how to create value, what a good product is, etc. How did people look at Richard’s experience as a mentor and team lead when he was trying to move into people management? Were those experiences as relatable as we think they are? Richard was a team lead at Deutsche Bank. He then became an individual contributor at Google with roles as a Technical Account Manager and Sales Engineer. The first people manager role came 4-5 years after he began working at Google. “In various situations you express leadership in formal or informal roles,” – Richard Russell At Google Richard did a number of things that were acts of leadership, such as: Running an event called TGIF and doing some public speaking / discussion moderation Working closely with a team of engineers in India to develop software to get public transport data into Google Maps (not formally responsible for the effort but providing leadership and guiding people) If Richard were interviewing someone now for a manager position, he might ask the following: Tell me about a time when you got results from people, got them aligned on a problem, or solved an interpersonal problem with people Examples of mentoring and growing junior employees Tell me about a time when you got a group of people headed in the wrong direction to go in the right direction. “A lot of this work is about people influencing and connecting the people to needs of the business and management. To answer it, yes, all of that work as a technical lead or a team lead or whatever it was in various situations…it’s all massively relevant.” – Richard Russell 8:07 – The Job of a Manager is Upward How can listeners decide if people management is the right choice? There is a debate about whether leaders are made or born. Richard thinks anyone can learn the skills of people management, but it’s important to consider your interests and motivations when thinking through it. Richard made an error when going into people management that he sees a lot of people going into people management make now. “The error that I made…in fact, I alluded to this earlier…the error that I see a lot of people making is they see people management as being going to bat for my team. My job as a people manager is to look after my team and to defend my team and to be a servant leader. But often we look at our managers and think they’re not quite defending us enough or they’re not representing us well enough…or all the problems come downwards and so on…. So, I’ll do it differently. And I’ll get up there, and I’ll make it better for my team. And that’s a good thing in many, many ways. However, the job of manager is not to serve the team. That’s the how. That’s how you do it. That’s how you do the job. That’s the best way to do the job. But the job is to provide value for your business, your organization, and your management. The job is upwards….” – Richard Russell Technical people especially who go into management may disregard the fact that the job is upwardly facing. At one time Google questioned whether managers were even needed, and when they tried operating without very many and it failed miserably, they started to look at what was really needed from managers and overhauled some of their management theory. Servant leadership, mentorship, and guidance are certainly part of it. Managers need to understand what the business really needs so they can help their team understand what the business needs and get the results. “This is the big thing which I think is the misunderstanding I think a lot of first-level managers, especially in technology have – what the job is.” – Richard Russell, on the job of a manager What is the difference between a first-level manager and a second level manager’s job in terms of providing business value? First-level managers can make the mistake Richard highlighted, but in most companies, this will not get you to second level maanger. The second level manager is responsible for providing value but also for developing first-level managers. Some of this development is helping the first-level managers re-orient from previous experience as an individual contributor to focus upward. In addition to helping first-level managers learn to be upwardly focused, second level managers need to be even more upwardly focused. “Management is primarily an upwards focused job. This may be counterintuitive, and it may be controversial among some people. But the job is not to serve your team. The job is to deliver the value, and the how is to serve your team…because you don’t get results unless you do that. That statement is the reason. It’s not because it’s a good thing to do. It is a good thing to do. It’s not because it’s the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do. But it’s not because of that. It’s because as a business, what businesses do is they make money, and they provide value to customers. And they sell things, and that’s what defines a business. You’re hiring people in order to eventually make more money and sell more things to businesses and have your teams create more value. And, if I want to do that with knowledge workers, I’ve gotta have managers who serve them well and do well. But it’s so that we can make more money so that we can run a business.” – Richard Russell Richard says in the past, people managers didn’t really understand the “how” of the job and didn’t care about teams. There has been a big movement toward servant leadership over time. Nick says it sounds like there is a difference in the overall goal and mission of a role and how someone performs the duties to fit that. Richard says this is not a subtle point. The manager’s job is managing situations to get the best results and not necessarily to make the team happy. It’s a tradeoff that can at times be difficult to navigate. Sometimes a manager will need to be unpopular, even if trying to serve their team. Richard gives the example of putting a poor performer on the team on a performance improvement plan or getting them off the team. 13:29 – A Transition to Coaching Did Richard want to keep going to higher levels of management after his experience as a first-level manager? Richard had ambitions of being a founder, a CEO, or some kind of executive after stepping into management. At the time, his definition of success was actually what other people expected of him or what he thought other people expected. It took a long time for Richard to realize these were not the things he wanted to do or where his energy came from. We said management is about providing business value to the company, and this is something which is very important to Richard. There are 2 things Richard struggles with as a manager: The first is putting the value delivery ahead of the people. Richard is very motivated by and cares about people, and it makes him a soft manager. He would rather primarily be developing people. Secondly, Richard finds some aspects of delivering results very difficult such as delivering projects, plans, or documents. “What I found is that when I was a people manager, when that pressure comes down on me or the team…I am not a good people manager in that I can’t care for my people. I can’t do that well. I can’t be the servant leader when I’m under pressure. I did not have that capability…. My shift first of all from being a people manager and wanting to be an executive to realizing I’m not sure I’m motivated to do that. I’m not sure I’m capable of doing that – deliver results through people and put the results first and still care for people…. I think the best way of delivering results is to care for people. That’s one of the best mechanisms to do, but when I’m under pressure, my way of dealing with pressure in those situations…I don’t have the capability to do the caring for people that’s going to get the results to deliver them. And that’s a characteristic about myself that I’ve learned that I’ve found very difficult to deal with because I fundamentally deeply do care about people. And when I’m under pressure in that management role and I’m pushing that pressure onto my team or doing whatever I’m doing, I’m not getting the results. And I’m not making them better. And I’m not happy. And I’m stressed. It’s not a good place for me.” – Richard Russell When Richard realized management was not the right place for him, he went down the path of doing consulting. It was a lot of teaching, helping people solve problems, and doing some delivery work. Based on his characteristics, Richard found consulting was still too far down the path of delivering results. “That’s why I’ve moved to being a coach because actually my job is to care about people…. I can do tough love when my job is to care about you and to help you grow, and I can do that really well in those situations because I don’t have the stress of making sure you’re delivering a result that I need for my success.” – Richard Russell Richard’s success as a coach is aligned with the things he actually cares about. He cares about his clients and helps to develop them into better managers and leaders (i.e. clients get better results, are more capable as managers, have happier teams, etc.). Richard gets a great deal of energy from these conversations, whereas being tasked with delivering a strategy or a plan makes him stressed. “I’m quite passionate about this for people who are listening. Where you get energy from and what motivates you, if that’s really lined up with what success in your job is, that’s a wonderful place to be. And if when you’re doing these things you are the person you want to be, that’s great. If it’s not, maybe look at what change needs to happen. Quite a lot of people I know are just deeply motivated by operating and by building things and by creating things and solving technical problems. And that’s their motivation. …That’s fantastic. And if you can do that and you can care for people and you have those skills of managing and leading people and influencing people and understanding the business…then you’re capable of being an executive. You can get to any level, really. And that might be great for you. That might be the right thing. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care about people, you can still get there. You’re just going to cause a lot of pain along the way for other people, and it’s not going to be good. But you can get there…. I wouldn’t recommend it.” – Richard Russell 18:39 – Comparing Coaches and People Managers We’ve spoken with others about coaching and being a people manager and some of the similarities and differences. What does Richard think the comparison looks like based on his experience? Richard believes each person who wants to be successful as a people manager needs to be a great coach. This is non-negotiable. There are 2 main differences between coach and manager according to Richard. The first is relationship – people managers coach their teams in certain situations and during 1-1 meetings, but there is a manager employee relationship still in place. The same manager who is coaching you is assessing you and doing reviews of your performance. A manager can support a promotion, a transfer to another team internally, and make the call to end your employment if that needs to happen. “There’s a whole lot of perceived agenda. A good manager…can coach in those contexts without agenda. It’s about the person and developing the person, and I have had great managers who’ve been able to coach me and help me figure out what’s going on / find the right place while also not holding that as a threat or having that affect their assessment of me. It’s hard to do, but it’s possible. Being a great manager, you need to be able to do that, and it’s really, really important.” – Richard Russell The second difference is that a manager’s job is to deliver results. Part of delivering results is developing a competent team. If a manager has a team member who would like to transfer to a different team, it creates a conflicting agenda. The manager still wants to deliver results and may be losing top talent, but they also want to support what is best for that team member. Richard says good managers should support what is best for a team member, even if that means leaving the team. “If you’re really good as a manager, one of the things you do is you develop a reputation for identifying, hiring, attracting good people and developing them and seeing them move on to greatness. And then people will really want to come to you as a manager. Then you get the best people…. When you have these great managers in big companies and they move around, the first thing that happens is they bring along 4 or 5 or 10 of their best people from around the company and gather them together…. There’s a massive talent in that, and that’s partly about coaching and how you invest in your team and how you invest in their skills…so coaching is super important as a manager. And it is in many ways the same set of skills except that it’s in a context which is different.” – Richard Russell Developing a good reputation for fostering talent as a manager can be helpful in companies of various sizes. This is partly about how you coach and develop your people and invest in their skills. As a coach, Richard’s only loyalty is to his client and their interests. The only real conflict that could come up is if Richard as the coach had a moral or ethical qualm with something the client is doing. Richard works with his clients to improve what they are doing, which can mean the person wants to get promoted, for example. Richard is there to help the person do that and thrive as a person. “Everyone I come across…it’s never just I want to get a promotion, or I want to get more money. There’s a deeper why…. Figuring out how to get people in touch with that and what’s going to make them happy in their careers is really important.” – Richard Russell Listen to Richard tell the story of a fisherman who gets an unsolicited suggestion for creating a fishing business from a banker visiting the area. But creating and selling a business (what the banker thought success would be) wasn’t the definition of success the fisherman really had for his life. Richard once defined success as being a successful executive. At one point he had a team of 100 people reporting into him. When Richard told a friend of his from Google about having a team of this size, his friend said, “wow, you’ve really made it.” Richard would later come to realize the role was not for him, and it was not who he wanted to be. “Can you not create something that’s more like that now? Can you get more control over your life now about your work life balance? You’re traveling 4 days a week. Is that what you want to do?” – Richard Russell, on uncovering the deeper why behind what his clients want to do Richard uses the example of his wife. For her, is a promotion really the right thing? A promotion involves more travel, more pressure, and more stress. “I think most people, myself included, adopt definitions of success and failure from our context and our environment and from other people, and we internalize them. They’re not always beliefs that serve us. The people I’ve seen who are the happiest in their life, most fulfilled, and most successful in ways that matter are people who’ve managed to figure out what success means to them.” – Richard Russell Some define success as the ability to tinker with hardware and software without the need to have direct reports or manage a team. Richard gives the example of an extremely talented individual at Amazon in this category. While we might say the person could be way more successful, the life this person has is the one he wants / chose. It goes back to how this individual defines success. Does the coach have the ability to be more transparent with someone than a manager can be without feeling conflicted about the level of transparency? Richard says yes because there is usually only one agenda. It might seem like a conflict of interest if Richard wants a case study or referral or testimonial, but it’s fundamentally aligned with what a client wants. Managers have things which can pull them in other directions like HR rules, employment laws, corporate risk, etc. A manager’s need to deliver results and the desire to retain someone on their team (even if the person wants to leave the team) creates a conflicting agenda. Richard says it is possible to not be conflicted about these things, but it is difficult. It requires courage, confidence, and experience as a manager. 28:11 – The Space That Fits You What are some of the interesting conflicts or interesting differences between being the owner / entrepreneur of a coaching business and actively coaching clients? Conversations with coaching clients are very personal and confidential. If these could be shared, they would make great marketing materials. Any kind of marketing materials must be sanitized / obfuscated so as not to be personally identifiable. This seems like a conflict of interest, but one can simply learn to develop marketing materials without violating client confidentiality or trust. Doing marketing, administrative work, and content creation is a different kind of work. Richard made a shift in his business over the last few months (which is how he and Nick connected originally). He was spending a lot of time on LinkedIn producing content for brand awareness of his business and at the same time doing consulting work, and he found it to be consistently difficult. “Let’s try and move my own marketing to things that I feel are more natural for me and more energy productive, so I spend more time on longer form content on Substack. I’m creating something that I think is valuable for people, so I’m motivated to do that…. Now sharing it becomes not such a piece of hard work.” – Richard Russell Richard also likes to be a guest on podcasts like Nerd Journey. He feels engaged in these kinds of conversations and does not feel the need to produce a sound byte. It’s about providing value and making the audience think. Richard is also interviewing people for his own podcast. He finds it interesting to learn from the stories of others and share them with other people. The realignment of Richard’s efforts makes the work easy because they are aligned with who he is and what he wants to do. “When I’m doing good marketing, I’m kind of doing the stuff that I’m doing when I’m doing good coaching. It’s the same stuff with a slightly different context…. That’s really deeply aligned with what I believe in as a coach and what I want to do for my clients and how I want to help them.” – Richard Russell Nick likes the process of continued iterative alignment with Richard’s interests and the things that give him energy. The ADHD brain can drop things once they become uninteresting. But once Richard got interested in people, he never found it boring. The focus remained. Richard has always been interested in people as well as business, strategy, and marketing. A topic can be very interesting (business, strategy, marketing), but the work of producing the value in that area can be quite difficult. Richard will continue to find these topical areas interesting, but he realized the need to ensure the production of value is in way that gives him energy. Producing a book, a training course, a project plan, or some other thing that requires very long periods of intense focus can be difficult for Richard. He loses interest in the thing he’s working on but not the topical area in which it resides. Richard tells us some of the realizations he has shared came from working with his own coach. When originally asked about what gave him energy, Richard wasn’t sure how to answer. He needed to think deeply on it and iterate a little bit. “I was quite convinced that being a consultant was the right path, and solving strategy problems was the right thing to do. But I realized after a while that what gets me going there is those conversations, especially helping them get a breakthrough themselves…not producing a piece of strategy or teaching them how to do strategy or creating content that helps them do that. Maybe consulting is not for me because if I do that…the more successful I am the less energy I have. And I’ll get down about it.” – Richard Russell, on why consulting isn’t the right path Listen to Richard describe the process of obtaining and helping a consulting client and which things gave him energy compared to those that drained his energy (writing proposals, setting up meetings, producing an artifact as a takeaway, etc.). Richard talks about his original move into systems engineering and how getting trouble tickets gave him energy. They were problems he would get to solve. Nick says it sounds like Richard is encouraging us to break things down to a task level to analyze what gives us energy, but we should keep in mind the topical areas that get us excited. For Richard, it seemed like it was the intersection of people, business, and technology. “You can’t always be 100% on I only do things that energize me. There’s always washing to do…. There’s always some of this. I do think that figuring out where your fit is is partially about…you’ve got to be realistic about what people want and what demand there is…. Figuring out what demand is and figuring out what I’m good at and where I get my energy from…that’s the whole Ikigai thing, right? What people want, what the world needs, what I am good at, and what I enjoy doing – in the middle of that is…your sweet spot.” – Richard Russell Richard remembers going through school and choosing his degree / looking at the careers guide. It seemed like making a selection was putting himself in a box that would define who he was for the rest of his life. It took Richard a long time to realize it’s about his ability to relate to people and how he makes people feel which is in the intersection of all the areas we discussed. Richard came to realize that what he does with people is valuable. “It’s not everyone who does this. And not everyone has this motivation. And not everyone is interested like that…. I find it interesting, and I find it motivating…. I get value from it. Just getting comfortable with who I am and where value really is, and it’s no longer defined by phrase on a paper or degrees or doing things that people think are clever. It’s a really big change. For different people it’s different…what fits you but finding that space is really important.” – Richard Russell Nick believes it takes some sampling and iteration to understand where you need to be. What Richard has found is similar to the concept of area of destiny . Richard felt like early on he was in a technical box, and he was proud of it. He encourages us to be proud if that is the box where we fit. Over time, Richard met people whose background might be different than what they were doing. He cites examples like a systems administrator colleague with an arts and music degree, a doctor who became an agile and scrum trainer, etc. Seeing people make these changes and shifts helped Richard understand he no longer needed to define himself the way he had been (in a specific box). “I don’t need to define myself by that box anymore…. You can move boxes, and it’s fine. And there’s lots of value in lots of different boxes or spaces or whatever you want to call them.” – Richard Russell 39:26 – Finding the Right Coach How would someone recognize they have found a coach who can help them? Richard says see if they help you. For context, his sales calls are coaching calls. Part of this is determining if you and a potential coach can speak the same language and understand each other. Richard remembers meeting some coaches who didn’t have the right background to help him. “I can’t feel like I connect with you because I don’t feel like you’ve been where I have been or anywhere like I’ve been. I don’t think you understand my world. I’ve had other coaches who haven’t had those lists on their CVs. But at least they speak the language, and I understand that they’ve had the exposure to other people to figure it out.” – Richard Russell, sharing thoughts on coaches who were not right for him Richard’s background helps him connect with product and technical people. He has been in big tech companies and in startups and can speak the same language as others in them now. No one needs to explain what a sprint is to him, for example. When you know the person coaching you understands where you are coming from it creates trust. It fosters a conversation about a problem so a coach can help you work through it. Richard says there is a blurry line between coaching, advising, teaching, and consulting. The coach has to caution against giving too many answers. Coaches can give some answers, but part of the work is understanding the person and what they are trying to do. “Did I get value from this, and would I want more of that? Do I trust this person? Do I feel like they understand me in a way that matters to what I need to do? And, are they helping me? …Did they help me come up with answers? Did I get the change that I want? Do I feel like I’m making progress on these things? If it’s literally just they told me things and they answered questions, it’s probably not going to be deeper change for the long term. But at the same time if there’s none of that, do they even know my world? Do I trust them? You have to have a bit of both of these things.” – Richard Russell, on how to determine if a coach is the right fit for you This brings us full circle back to building trust. Some of the things Richard shared in finding the right coach could also be things we use to determine if working for a specific people manager is right for us. Richard feels like technical managers need at least some context, even if it’s not the same degree of experience as the people they manage. Richard shares the story of a manager he had who came from marketing and law. This person asked all sorts of questions when he onboarded and wanted to understand what systems did and how they interact. Knowledge of the systems and their function empowered this manager to have conversations about them in an effective way. 43:41 – The Greater Context Nick feels there is a nuance to communicating with executives that technical people do not always understand. Richard says this happens with people who are functionally skilled in whatever function it is (technology or some other area). “Your manager may not know the same level of details that you do about things, and that’s normal and that’s ok…. Some of their judgements might not make sense to you…. The real thing is to spend the time to learn how they think or why they’re making decisions…how they’re thinking about something, how they’re prioritizing…. Largely this is about understanding the broader context that they have because by nature of the position in the organization they have broader context. They have much more connection with up – with managers above and across as well…. They should be able to help you understand at least the pieces of that broader context that you need to know. When you’re relating to them, whatever level you’re relating to…first of all spend time to understand their needs and what’s going on and what they need from you. I made this mistake early on in my career with my own manager of basically not having interest in what he wanted and having my own opinions on everything.” – Richard Russell Richard says it’s important to understand the metrics and how your manager prioritizes things. Be open to learning the greater context. It is extremely important to be coachable and open to learning. Richard shares the story of a CTO who would ignore non-technical topics in executive meetings. Richard then encouraged this person to pay attention and ask questions when other executives were speaking about their own functional area (i.e. when the Marketing person was presenting their plans, etc.). As it turns out, the CTO knew about an upcoming software release that could help a marketing initiative, and because he was engaged in the conversation and willing to understand the greater context, both executives built trust and benefited from sharing their respective knowledge. Richard encourages us all to take the time to understand the context from areas outside our own. “This is the big difference between executive and junior, and this is the thing that executives notice about juniors. You’re paying attention. You actually care about the context in which you’re working. The thing that defines the value of what you do…you’re caring about it. You’re someone I can teach.” – Richard Russell Much of the job of an executive is getting the context and figuring out how to communicate it downward in a meaningful way. A CTO, for example, has to build a competent technical team and then has to give their team enough context to be able to make deicisions that are useful. The CTO would be the main communication conduit for this team. “Somehow through the mechanisms that you use to communicate with people in this larger organization, you have to give them enough context such that they can then be empowered to make decisions without then having to come back to you…. So, this is all about empowering people, and this relates back to that whole topic of servant leadership and doing it well by serving teams…giving them enough context so they can make a decision and then coaching them to make better decisions. And, then understanding what misconceptions or errors are they making and where and why and then figuring out…how do I influence that? What other context do I need to get, and how do the decisions they’re making actually fit into the rest of the organization? And where else do I need to influence? …This is about empowerment. You can’t be empowered unless you have the context. And in fact, the context in some ways constrains you, so you have to give the constraints. And that empowers people.” – Richard Russell Managers must learn how to communicate context. Nick loves the fact that Richard’s illustrations show that we all have gaps and need to get better. If you want to follow up with Richard… Visit his website Visit his YouTube Channel – @richardarussell Visit the Scale Up Leaders Substack If you need a coach, Richard is currently taking clients! Contact him, and tell him you listened to this episode. Mentioned in the Outro This episode pairs nicely with the following past episodes: Episode 308 – Probe and Discover: Coaching for Impact with Ramzi Marjaba (2/2) Episode 228 – The Displacement of Joy with Scott Egbert (2/2) [Episode 269 – Monetize Yourself: Leveraging Your Most Valuable Knowledge with Erik Gross (3/3)](https://nerd-journey.com/monetize-yourself-leveraging-your-most-valuable-knowledge-with-erik-gross-3-3/ There was a mention of Ikigai in this episode, which is a state of wellbeing that arises from devotion to activities one enjoys, which also brings a sense of fulfillment. It can be simply translated as a reason to get up in the morning. This idea seems similar to our discussion of area of destiny .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Consult and Build Trust: Influence the Business and the People with Richard Russell (1/2) 48:21

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48:21

Have you ever felt a work task was boring or a waste of time? It might be because you didn’t understand why you were asked to do it in the first place. Richard Russell, our guest this week in episode 318, struggled with this in his early role as a programmer. All he wanted was to understand more about the business problem his work was intended to solve. In that role, however, Richard never got those answers, and he would later move into systems administration. Richard has developed a pattern of pursuing the things which he finds interesting – a pattern that began in college and has continued over the course of his career as a programmer, a systems administrator, and as a consultant. Each of these roles combined with his interest in the business prepared Richard for the role of team lead in the banking industry. Join us as we explore the team lead role and why Richard progressed to it, how he built trust as a consultant and as a sales engineer, and his genuine interest in people. Listen closely to learn strategies that will increase your ability to influence others, ask the right questions, and build strong working relationships with colleagues and customers. Original Recording Date: 02-17-2025 Topics – Meet Richard Russell, An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science, Moving from Programming to Systems Administration, Consulting and an Interest in the Business, Combatting Ego and Building Trust, Sharing Your Priorities, Progressing to Team Lead 2:43 – Meet Richard Russell Richard Russell spends most of his time coaching leaders who work in scale-ups, big tech, and other corporate environments. Most of Richard’s clients have some executive responsibilities and come from a product or technology background. Many times, these clients are transitioning into product / tech leadership roles or CEO / founder roles. Richard made the relatively recent transition from doing consulting work to focusing on coaching. Richard resides in Luxembourg with his family. 3:29 – An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science What prompted Richard to study math and computer science in school? Richard’s father was an electrical engineer and was very enthusiastic about that career path. Richard had a Commodore 64 as his first computer and tinkered with various others over time, even getting into programming. In high school, Richard did very well in the hard sciences – math, physics, and chemistry. When forced to choose a non-science course during his senior year, he chose economics because it seemed the most mathematical. Though he did start out studying engineering in college, Richard made some changes to focus on the things he found most interesting – mathematics, computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, theology, etc. Richard found applied mathematics quite boring at first (just solving differential equations, for example). It was more interesting to him when physics and engineering teachers taught mathematics because there was a need to solve a problem. Richard later went into pure mathematics and found it the most interesting of all. Richard says computer science was something he got into primarily because of his talent in mathematics. Nick remembers hearing physics majors in college echo the same sentiment as Richard. They learned more mathematics in physics courses than in their respective calculus courses. To Richard, initial learnings in calculus seemed to be solving complicated problems that were not applied to anything, and it was a sharp contrast to the way problems were presented in physics or engineering. In the sciences, Richard had an interest in the practical need. In pure mathematics, he had the interest in learning anything within that discipline. Richard started wanting to learn more about the applications of mathematics and became really interested in the abstract concepts of mathematics. Was it a similar pattern when Richard learned programming? Richard says he gets interested in topics, and he wasn’t interested in the complications of applied mathematics (i.e. doing integrals, for example). When it came to computer science, Richard was interested in how things worked and some of the theory behind it. He also liked the ability to express creativity and control what appeared on the screen through programming (which required no artistic talent). Richard later became interested in businesses and how products are built. He had no background in product management and wanted to build games. “The mathematics behind, especially graphics, was very complex, and it was exactly the stuff I didn’t like doing. Whereas the business games and business side of applications or programs or websites and so on…they are quite simple in many ways. The complexity is really about…what do I actually want to achieve as opposed to how do I achieve it. And so that became much more interesting to me. A lot of that is related to my interest in product management as I went on further and in business generally. I have this habit of obsessing over topics, whatever they are, whatever I’m interested in…so I got deep in whatever topic it is.” – Richard Russell 9:40 – Moving from Programming to Systems Administration Was Richard still obsessed with programming once it became his job? Richard tells us within the last year he was diagnosed with ADHD. “I tend to just find things interesting and obsess over them. When it’s work it’s not necessarily interesting inherently. It could be. It might not be. The decision on whether it’s interesting or not is independent of whether it’s work.” – Richard Russell In his first job, Richard was doing software development but worked on a product that was very boring to him. The product was internally facing administration tool that did asset tracking for national parks. The product had only 6 users. Richard would be given a user story and have to build something from it (a web page, etc.). “I remember thinking…why are we doing this, and what problem are we actually trying to solve? Why haven’t I met any of these people who are using this thing? Why do I not understand what they’re trying to do? Is this even a good way of doing it? It’s just like we’re taking an old database system and turning it into a web application because that’s the thing you do. The whole thing…it was fundamentally…on a deep level boring because I wasn’t talking to the people who were having the problem. I didn’t know what we were solving. I didn’t know why we were doing it. I was just producing web pages.” – Richard Russell Richard then shifted from programming to systems administration. The goal was solving problems, and there was a person who had a problem, which made it interesting. Sometimes Richard would need to go and talk to someone to solve a problem. But if a system was down or not performing well, Richard understood the impact to the user base. He was motivated to solve the problems because they impacted people who would then appreciate that the problems were fixed. Richard also worked on patching for Solaris servers (again, a problem to solve). Richard contrasts the work in systems administration to his work programming and building web pages. It would take a long time to create a release, and once the release was live, he would never find out if what he did was of any value to anyone. There was no feedback or ability to see the impact of work completed. In his role as a programmer, did Richard express his feelings to his manager that the work was not making an impact? Richard says he kept his feelings to himself but also does not believe he was aware of what was specifically frustrating him. In that environment, developers were basically handed something to build and told to go build it. It was not obvious that developers would have an interest in the business. This has changed over the last 25-30 years, however. What were some of the challenges of moving from development to the systems administration side? Richard thinks his advice for someone looking to do that now would be well dated. But at the time, Richard had worked with Linux quite a bit and even ran a Linux Install Fest. He also tried to start a startup based on systematic remote administration and patching hundreds of Debian Linux servers. Richard mentions he had played around with Linux in his spare time because it was interesting. It became a hobby. Richard feels that today software development is more connected to the business, while systems administration is somewhat removed from it. Richard built a lot of computers earlier in his career and mentions people have moved up the stack. Doing this same thing now is an increasingly niche area (i.e. the hardware portion). “From my own personal interests, I found it much more motivating to be with people and businesses influencing people and understanding how and why people buy things and what kind of things people buy. That’s much more interesting to me now…. Sysadmin type work is very much a service. If you look at any business, sysadmin or anyone doing IT infrastructure…it is a cost center. It will always be a cost center…unless you’re in a business where it is a business where it is the profit center, which is very rare. In most cases it’s a cost center. When you’re in a cost center you’re always one of the people who gets secondary importance in the organization…at best.” – Richard Russell Nick clarifies that systems administration could mean hardware, software, the hypervisor layer, the virtual machine layer, the operating systems, administration of the pipelining tools that development teams use, etc. Richard mentioned he’s not hands on with most of these things any longer but that levels of abstraction continue to rise. Ideally people would want to be in an area that has some demand for the specific type of work (i.e. a growth area). Think about businesses who make money from doing what you are doing as opposed to businesses where what you do would be a cost center. 19:15 – Consulting and an Interest in the Business How did Richard’s early consulting experience fit into the story? After moving from developer to systems administration, Richard chose to go independent. He provided systems administration services to a number of small businesses in his hometown. Richard refers to it as freelancing. Did Richard like working with multiple customers instead of just working in systems administration full-time for a single customer? One characteristic of ADHD minds is the desire to have variety. Richard likes having variety in his work and the ability to learn something new. Richard knows not everyone feels this way, and he’s had numerous colleagues who would rather go deep into something, own it, and build it over the long term. When consulting with small businesses, you work as a peer or expert along with the people who have the business need, and in Richard’s opinion, the conversations are more interesting. Richard was able to discuss the business problems with his consulting customers and make a recommendation for a solution only after he understood what they were trying to achieve. When working inside a large organization on a team of systems administrators, he was removed from those decisions and focused more on task completion to solve problems, but the systems administration work was still more interesting than his work as a developer when given a spec to build. The human relationship aspect was also very interesting to Richard. It wasn’t just working with colleagues but meeting people who were not experts in the same area and translating their need into the right technology recommendation. Nick feels like Richard’s move into consulting is a mirror of his move from the application of mathematics in the sciences to focusing more on the abstract concepts of pure mathematics. Solving a system problem could be thought of as the application part, and the business problems and challenges and translating back to a solution could be thought of as the more abstract part. Nick feels many people don’t naturally know how to ask the right questions to discover business problems and map them to technology solutions. Did Richard know how to do this or have to learn how to do it? Richard says he’s always had an innate interest in these types of things, and this is the reason for his decision to study philosophy and psychology while in college. It takes time to develop deep expertise in mathematics and engineering topics to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it. Richard also had an interest in marketing and business but felt they were magical areas he didn’t understand well, usually feeling he was the one who knew the least about them in any room. But the interest in these areas drove him to keep asking questions about them. “So over time I kept asking questions and learning stuff and eventually figured out that actually, it’s not that complicated. It’s not that hard…. I have a voracious appetite for reading books…and I read books about marketing and strategy and influence and psychology and management…. So, I’d read a lot of things and pick things up there…. It took me a long time to realize that…actually I do know quite a lot about this stuff now, and I don’t need to have the degree in that topic to be something of an expert in some of these topics. But I certainly learned from these books and from other people how better to go about certain types of questions….” – Richard Russell Richard cites reading The Mom Test as extremely helpful in learning how to understand what types of problems people really have as opposed to the problems we might want to solve. When someone says they have a need or a problem, Nick says we often go to solutioning / presenting a solution before truly asking enough questions. Are people bothered less when asked more questions than we might think they will be in these cases? Richard shares a story from his time at Deutsche Bank. He had moved from Australia to London to take the job and worked with a team who was developing software for trading foreign exchange (traders in banks would use it). At the time, he had little understanding of foreign exchange, banking, or finance and sought help from co-workers to understand the terminology. “I did a little bit of analysis…. Looking at this…that means that every week we trade 2 Australian GDPs. That’s a lot of money…. So, I talked to my business analyst on the team…just asked him, ‘can you teach me about this stuff?’ …He just sat down and explained to me who is doing this, why they’re doing it, and so on. I remember looking at these things and thinking, ‘why does anyone want to buy that thing, this credit default swap?’ …It’s really interesting the way these things work. So, I learned all that from this guy who was a business analyst. He had been in banking for 30 years…. When I asked him, he was like, ‘cool – I get to explain my area. I get to explain what I know.’ …Most of the time…people are willing to explain to someone interested.” – Richard Russell, on learning the banking industry from an analyst colleague The analyst above helped Richard understand the need for liquidity, why certain types of products and systems existed, why some customers wanted to buy specific products (i.e. balancing risk and reward, etc.), and why other companies might not be building the same thing as the bank. We should not be afraid of asking questions within our own company to better understand the business. Richard says this was the exact opposite of his work building software. He remembers going to the trading floor to ask people what they do each day and why there were 9 different screens displaying information, for example. Nick recently heard a personal development teacher talking about learning who recommended telling people we don’t have enough information to understand something yet when asking for clarification / explanation. Richard says one of the worst things we can do is be shy about asking the seemingly dumb questions. Ask why something is being done or why people want a certain thing. These types of questions have an interesting nuance. “Often, people are too shy about asking questions that sound like that. You never learn, and then you never have any idea…. The person on the other end can kind of figure out if you really don’t understand it, and what they want is for you to ask the dumb question so that they can go, ‘cool – now I get to explain the basics to you so you’ll understand. And now that I’ve explained it to you, I now trust that you understand it. Now I trust you more because you’ve asked the question.’ I often find in most of my work these days asking that question really helps.” – Richard Russell Richard will sometimes ask questions he knows the answer to in order to get people to explain something to him in a way that they believe he understands. It’s a little counterintuitive, but then the person will trust him. 31:11 – Combatting Ego and Building Trust Do most people have to get past their own ego when asking these questions? Richard says yes, especially if you come from an intellectual / academic kind of background. He came from an environment where it was important to be right. This comes out in two specific ways for Richard – 1) when someone asks him a question and he doesn’t know the answer and 2) asking seemingly silly questions to get more information on certain topics. In the early days when asked something for which Richard did not know the answer he might try to improvise or make something up (which did not add value). Richard tells the story of getting some coaching from his manager when he was a sales engineer at Google. The advice was to admit he did not know but commit to finding the right answer for the customer. Also, Richard would share with the customer that his company has solved the problem for organizations with similar setups in the past. “What I was doing in that situation as a sales engineer…is first of all acknowledging that I don’t know…but then also building their trust in our organization and my ability to navigate our organization and our ability as an organization to serve people like them…that they will get the result that they want…. I realized my job in that role is not necessarily to even answer the questions. It’s not to give information. It’s to create trust. That was my role. Some of it was about influencing and getting data and changing things…but most of it was about creating trust. Part of that was about learning that I have to create trust in my client…when I don’t know the answer…. There’s a great deal of pride in not knowing and saying you don’t know…very hard to come to terms with ‘I don’t know but trust me.’ But in a sense that actually does make a difference and it does help people, and it’s not misleading because we will figure it out and we have done it.” – Richard Russell Richard recalls a different scenario not so long ago when he was speaking to a group of business and marketing leaders. At that speaking session, someone introduced Richard as one of Europe’s leading marketers just as he walked up on stage. He initially did not consider himself an expert and had to get over the impostor syndrome in that moment. Much of the knowledge gained for that talk came from asking those questions that seemed silly at first. “When you do ask the dumb questions about whatever they are, you’re just getting people to talk about stuff that’s their expertise…. I don’t have much fear of asking silly questions anymore at all. I used to have a massive fear of it. I think just these various experiences of realizing that most of the things that are going on are not about whether I know or not. It’s about can I figure out the answer or can we find the answer or can someone find the answer…what do we need to move forward in whatever we’re doing? And how do we get that thing?” – Richard Russell 34:44 – Sharing Your Priorities Nick says when you tell someone you will find the answer and you go find it, you are developing a reputation that others can count on you to find answers. “Funny enough also…a lot of these questions…they don’t actually need the answer…. Sometimes the question is a mechanism to find out ‘can I trust you?’ Sometimes they’re worried about something that they don’t actually need to worry about, and they learn something else along the way – they don’t need to worry about it. This is especially the case with e-mails. You have these e-mail requests that come in, and sometimes some of them come in and they’re urgent…. And sometimes, you ignore them, and they go away, and it doesn’t matter. Judging which ones are the right ones to do that with can be hard…. There’s a lot of things that come in that aren’t actually important.” – Richard Russell Another aspect of getting back to someone with an answer is understanding why they need the answer. Richard likes to share the list of things he’s been working on to get answers for with someone and then ask if the person still needs them. Sometimes the answer is no because trust has been developed. This can be applied to e-mails by responding to ask if something is still needed (usually after a decent amount of time has passed since the request came in). It might save you time spent on something which is not necessary any longer. By asking if someone still needs something we are showing that we care, that we remembered, and that we were listening to what the person had to say. When something is deemed as still important, you can let the requestor know where it ranks on your priority list and then ask again how important it is / whether it is more important than other items. “Having that active conversation about ‘how important is this’ is a really useful tool to figure out what the most important thing actually is.” – Richard Russell This can work with managers, directors, customers, or other stakeholders. These individuals may have many requests but actually only care about a few of them. We can do the prioritization and bring it back to them to help us decide if something should take prioritization. Nick says we need input on priorities from others and that we should not be ashamed when we ask for guidance. “What I recommend doing, especially as you get more senior, is literally just maintain your own priority list…whatever you think is right. Use your own judgement on that. You might be wrong. And then share it with your managers or your stakeholders and say ‘here’s my priority list, and here’s my capacity. I’ll draw a line under what I think I can get done this week….’ And, have a conversation about it. It’s an opportunity for at least a good manager to educate you on how to make priority decisions…or for your stakeholders to explain ‘this is way more important than that because of…’” – Richard Russell Sometimes the conversations about priorities and how long something will take can be very helpful. Richard tells the story of a project he felt would take him 2 weeks just to develop a plan. Someone coached Richard that 2 weeks might be enough to finish the entire project and coached him on the way in which he was approaching the project. Richard said it helped him realize the project was not as challenging as originally expected. Something similar happened on a large project when Richard worked at Amazon. Something that was expected to take 6 months only needed 2 weeks of time to complete, but the team only came to the realization after truly understanding what they needed to accomplish without letting the scope creep too much. “But having that conversation and clarifying what the real need is, why it’s important, how you’re going about doing it…it was a bit of coaching, a bit of context setting, a bit of…just brainstorming together, a bit of collaboration…and presto – 6 months of work turned into 2 weeks…of a team of 4 or 5 engineers.” – Richard Russell 39:48 – Progressing to Team Lead One step between an individual contributor and manager can be team lead or technical lead. What would Richard say the team lead role really is and is not based on his experience as team lead for the bank early in his career? The team Richard was on was somewhat like a DevOps type of team today, but at that time it was a mix of DevOps, 3rd level support, and systems administration. There was a team of 6-7 people with variable levels of skill. Richard was among the most skilled on the team but in his opinion not the best. “The reason why I got that role was because the people who were more skilled than me or better than me were number 1 not interested in it, number 2 quite difficult to deal with…and demanding and critical of other people when they didn’t get it right. And then thirdly, they weren’t that interested in the business, the customer. …My counterpart at the bank would say…the reason why they wanted me to be the team lead was because I’m the only one in the group that really cared about the business and asked questions about their business…. Everyone else was just doing work, whereas I was interested in understanding it.” – Richard Russell Being a team lead isn’t just about rallying other employees, helping them focus, or coaching them. This is only a part of it. All of this is for one purpose – delivering value to the business or the customer. “To me the difference between a team lead and a manager is probably more about the formal responsibility of performance reviews and the administrative kind of people stuff. The team lead is kind of like that person who is…doing the leading part and getting people in the right direction without necessarily assessing individuals’ performance or hiring and firing and doing performance reviews and so on. That was what my role was anyway.” – Richard Russell, on being a team lead Richard was the person they felt they could trust for the business. His manager and others felt like the team respected him. Richard would coach the junior people and get the senior people working in the right direction. He calls the job “an influencing thing.” Richard thinks being placed in this role kind of happened naturally. A specific dynamic formed, and then there were conversations about formalizing the role at some stage. Richard calls it more of a practical role more so than a formal role. It was about caring for the client’s needs (the business) and being able to influence / coach people. “It had nothing to do with me having the best technical skills. I was good, and I was able to teach people…able to coach people…. It had nothing to do with me being the best technical decision maker.” – Richard Russell Richard mentions a member of the team who was extremely technical (more so than Richard) and was developing an architecture to solve a problem. Richard would help him understand the need for simplicity and getting things completed faster rather than engineering the perfect solution. It was about delivering short-term value. What was Richard’s interaction with his manager like when he was a team lead? Their conversations were more about how well the team was working, how individuals were doing, and if they were the right kind of people to put in a client-facing role. Richard had input on hiring / firing decisions as well. Richard also acted as the main point of contact with the client to stay aligned on what the team was trying to achieve and why, communicating this in both directions (to / from client and to / from the team). “The conversations in that role became much more interesting because I’m interested in the business and the people.” – Richard Russell Mentioned in the Outro We talked about Richard’s progression to team lead in this episode. As a late celebration of International Women’s Day, go back and listen to advice from some of the ladies of Nerd Journey to get different perspectives on the role of team lead. Episode 279 – Change Management: The Hardest Leap and Developing People with Marni Coffey (2/3) Episode 246 – Learning to Lead and a Culture of Excellence with Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi (2/3) Admitting we don’t know is something we can learn to do. It’s learning humility, just like when you ask those seemingly dumb questions about things you don’t understand. Do you still need this? This can certainly be great to help manage priorities. It could be a way to get someone to say they don’t need something as Richard mentioned. Asking this question could also be a way to discuss urgency and deadline if those have changed or just were not communicated. To learn more about what Richard does in his coaching business: Visit his website Visit his YouTube Channel – @richardarussell Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Own Your Job Search: Be the Captain, Find a Harbor Pilot 39:18

för 7 weeks sedan39:18

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Cruise ship captains rely on the expertise of a local harbor pilot to safely dock the ship at a port. What if we as the captains of our careers sought the expertise of a harbor pilot to help us navigate a potential employer and their processes? Not sure how to find one? This week in episode 317 we explore this analogy of the captain, the harbor pilot, and how the collaboration between them makes for a safe docking event. We’ll talk through what a harbor pilot might look like, how you can be a harbor pilot for others, and how you can find one for yourself. Original Recording Date: 02-20-2025 Topics – A Topic Idea from Taking a Cruise, Common Mistakes of the Captain, Understanding the Harbor Pilot, Finding a Harbor Pilot, Wrapping Up 1:01 – A Topic Idea from Taking a Cruise Today’s episode is just John and Nick. We’re taking a break this week from having guests and want to share a topic based on a personal experience Nick had recently. Nick and his wife like to take cruises, and on a recent cruise he attended a special panel discussion with the captain and other senior officers. After some discussion about the jobs and careers of the captain and his senior officers, someone asked a very interesting question, and the answer to it gave Nick the idea for this topic. Here’s the question: What is the role of the harbor pilot that boards the cruise ship before we dock in every point? The collaboration between the captain of the ship and the harbor pilot is what allows safe docking of the ship at a port. This concept gave Nick an idea of how this can apply to searching for jobs. The captain in this analogy is the job seeker. The harbor pilot is a person with expert knowledge of a company who can guide you (someone who knows where you’re headed). What is the split in responsibility of the captain and the harbor pilot? The captain knows everything about the ship / vessel and is in charge of all operations. They know the capabilities of the ship. The captain knows the ship’s planned course of sailing and the approach planned for docking at a specific port. There is an entire bridge team working to operate the ship, and all are accountable to the captain. The harbor pilot has expert knowledge of the port. They know the weather patterns. They have worked with many different ships and are there to help the captain dock the ship at a specific port. Regardless of what the harbor pilot says or brings to the equation, the captain makes the final decision on what will be done. Even though their collaboration is a partnership, the captain has to be the one to give the orders. A captain has to take in the guidance from the harbor pilot through the lens of what the ship can do. The captain may choose to follow the harbor pilot’s advice or go against it in some cases. John sees many implications here: Am emphasis on collaboration between the 2 roles The captain has ultimate responsibility for the outcome of the ship regardless of who they collaborate with. The captain has to own the decisions. “You’re the captain. You’re ultimately responsible…just like if we are job seekers or managing our own careers, we are ultimately responsible for the outcome of that career.” – John White 4:55 – Common Mistakes of the Captain What are some common mistakes that a captain (or job seeker) might make? John thinks of not taking responsibility or just handing over responsibility for docking the boat to the harbor pilot (i.e. becoming a passenger and just doing what you’re told rather than being the captain). What does that look like in greater detail in a job seeker? Nick says maybe it is going wherever the wind blows you or only considering opportunities that come to you. This could also mean you didn’t do any planning. The captain has to chart the course for the entire voyage including the selection of routes to take and the order in which the ship will visit ports. Have you researched the company to learn as much about the culture as possible? Are you prepared to answer technical or other kinds of questions? Have you thought about the questions you want to ask in an interview, and do you know how to ask questions that suit the way you like to work as discussed in Episode 314 – Make Goals Inevitable with ADHD: Stressors and Entrepreneurship with Skye Waterson (2/2) ? “Here’s the part of the sea that I’m in. These are the potential ports, and I need to know if my ship is appropriate for that port. That’s some of the deep research, And then, once we decide as captains of our careers that we actually want to do some much, much deeper investigation of a specific port, of a specific career branch or an organization to go to…we need to actually navigate how to dock….” – John White Other examples would be blindly applying to a company without doing any research or relying too much on a recruiter to help you navigate the opportunity (i.e. being too passive and not following up when a recruiter doesn’t respond in a timely manner). At some point, the captain has to make a decision whether to take advice as it’s given by the harbor pilot or to adjust it / go against it because the captain knows the ship better than anyone just as you know yourself better than anyone. Maybe a harbor pilot is used to more container ships, and a lot of the advice you get is geared more toward other types of ships. You as the captain have to know your unique capabilities and take customized action based on the advice. Listen to Nick’s example of this scenario from a recent cruise. The captain knew the ship had a particular type of propeller that could be rotated to hold the ship close enough to the dock / pier so passengers could safely enter / exit after someone had parked a small boat in the path of the cruise ship. “As the captain…the outcome that you need is not just docking, but you need…a way to get your passengers on and off…. It’s not just landing at the company. It’s landing with the right role with the right team.” – John White Nick says an obstacle in your way at the pier may require a different approach like we discussed to dock safely, but in a different scenario it could also be a red flag indicating you (the job seeker) don’t visit the port at all. John gives the example of very non-standard job roles being a red flag at a company. The other end of the spectrum would be ignoring all the advice about the port (a company) or not seeking advice in the first place. This assumes you are the expert but have also ignored local knowledge and local context. How many times has the captain even visited that port compared to their overall time on the ship? Nick argues that we can’t be experts at the port where we’re trying to dock the ship. The harbor pilot helps ships dock at this port on a daily basis. John feels like he has made this mistake before. About once per half, if a recruiter reaches out, he has a conversation with them to understand a specific role and practice interviewing skills. John stresses the importance of our need to maintain interviewing skills. At times John has approached these conversations without the same level of preparation as when he is seriously interviewing (i.e. not even looking for a harbor pilot). Nick has made a similar mistake. Sometimes recruiters have reached out with an interesting role, and he was just too busy to dig deeper other than saying thank you. That’s kind of like disregarding the port as a possibility. 13:35 – Understanding the Harbor Pilot We said the harbor pilot has expertise on the port itself. What might the harbor pilot look like at any given company? This could be anyone who currently works at a company or who has worked there in the past. This person would understand how the company runs internally and details of what a role is truly like. Nick says connecting with a harbor pilot can help us set the right expectations when considering a job at a specific company. It sets expectations about docking the ship at this specific port and how you might do it safely. John says the person acting as a harbor pilot may understand internal priorities and how to navigate those. It could even be someone who has gone through the interview process at the specific company for a similar role, even if they don’t work for the company currently. People who have gone through the interview process at this company in the last 6-12 months will be more helpful than those who went through it 5 years ago, for example. John thinks the harbor pilot could be people at the company who interact with the specific role you’re targeting. If you’re looking for a role in sales engineering, maybe you seek out someone in professional services or technical account management. If you’re looking for a role as a cloud engineer, consider people in IT Operations, architecture, networking, or perhaps even cybersecurity. If the company provides goods and services, what about finding someone who is a customer of that organization? Ask the customer how their interactions have been with that company just in general. If the customer works with representatives of a company on a regular basis (i.e. like working with representatives of a technology reseller), it provides insight into the responsibilities of different roles at the company. Customers who are part of a formal advocacy group for a vendor’s technology solution may have even greater context to share on the roles and responsibilities of people at that vendor and the overall company culture of the vendor. Advocacy program members may also have good relationships with employees at the vendor and could be willing to connect you with someone to have a deeper discussion. Loving the technology being used at a company (regardless of the role you are seeking) is one sign it might be a nice place to dock your boat (but not the only sign, of course). Nick thinks we would turn to our immediate professional network first. Hopefully we have kept professional connections warm over time. Ramzi Marjaba had some great suggestions in Episode 307 – Sales Skills: Professional Networking and Continued Practice with Ramzi Marjaba (1/2) even if you haven’t. If you reach out to someone, be honest about what you’re trying to do and the help you need. All they can say is no. John realizes he has acted as a harbor pilot to others who have reached out to him in the past. Nick re-iterates that John was his harbor pilot for a particular job in the past. Several years ago, when John was a harbor pilot for Nick…he referred him, explained the process, shared some of the expectations of the role, etc. But, in this case, Nick was still the captain. More recently, when people have reached out to John, he has offered to have a conversation with them. John will provide context to the person on the organization, even if the open role is in a different group from where John works. A harbor pilot might be able to give insight into the skills required for a specific role and how it has changed over time as a result of the company’s direction. Nick refers to this as some of the stuff that might not be in the job description. John says the words on a job description may mean a very specific thing within the context of a specific organization. When he was at Google, one of the interviews was to determine how “Googly” a person is. It meant something very specific. To take another example…if a company says it is looking for people who can embrace change, what does that mean for that organization? Does it mean job responsibilities might shift every 6 months, you have a different manager each year, that you might have to relocate, etc.? You need a harbor pilot to tell you. The harbor pilot has more context on where you’re going. Nick thinks a great recruiter could be your harbor pilot. He remembers in times past working with excellent recruiters who helped and guided him through every stage of the interview process. Nick says some of it is going to be determined with how much rapport you have built with the person you want to be your harbor pilot. With good rapport established, people may be willing to introduce you to others they know perhaps without you needing to ask them to introduce you. John gives the example of having systems engineer in your title. Sometimes you might be contacted by a recruiter for a role with the same name but in an industry that uses the term differently. In manufacturing, for example, a systems engineer may be responsible for integrating the hardware manufactured with the software. John will usually take the time to politely explain to a recruiter what his experience has been as a systems engineer (in this case working inside a sales organization) so the person understands the nuance in the role across different industries. Even this exercise builds rapport and could lead to future opportunities down the road from the same recruiter. Recruiters in California are not allowed to ask candidates about their current salary. In addition to sharing that he is not interested in a role or that its pay range would not be enough to want to change jobs, John can make the recruiter’s life easier by sharing his salary requirements. “The more vested a recruiter is in landing you, the better…harbor pilot they are going to be…. When they feel like now they’re a little bit more invested in you, that’s when they’ll be way more communicative.” – John White John has also had recruiters give him additional context about why they reached out to him over others (i.e. a need for specific skills / experience, etc.) which might step beyond what the job description says. The key recommendations from John on this are building rapport, being open and transparent, and continuing with a conversation. Nick reiterates that we shouldn’t discount our own ability to be the harbor pilot for someone else. “Wherever you work, whatever you do, whomever you know…you could be this for someone else seeking a job. And perhaps, if you have done that for somebody else and they get the job or they have a good experience…you’ll understand the flip side of that coin.” – Nick Korte, on being the harbor pilot for someone else John says we might reflect more on it if someone for whom we have been the harbor pilot gives us feedback on their experience and the value we provided along the way. 26:31 – Finding a Harbor Pilot There are many people who could be a harbor pilot for you, but how do you find them, engage them, and get them to help you? The harbor pilot has a vested interest in your success. Crashing the ship can also be a poor reflection on them. We mentioned it earlier, but immediate LinkedIn connections are one option. Try looking through job descriptions for the top technologies listed as required competencies. Look for community groups centered on these technologies (on LinkedIn or otherwise) in your area (or even outside your area). Finding and connecting with these community group leaders might be helpful to gain insight as to what types of companies use specific technologies. Community group leaders may even know someone at the company that has the job opening or help you make a connection that could help in some way. John doesn’t recall looking for a Nutanix User Group or even a virtualization user group when he was interviewing for his role at Nutanix. He could have tapped the community to get their point of view on Nutanix as technology vendor, etc. If you’re in a role at any company and deal with vendors or technology resellers, try asking them if they have worked with a specific company to get a perspective. Don’t do this using your work e-mail account, of course! Resellers of a specific technology can speak to interactions they have had with employees of different vendors. Perhaps the vendor you work with could introduce you to someone they know at a specific company who could help (i.e. someone who would be willing to do an informational interview). We discussed informational interviews with Mike Wood in Episode 169 – A Thoughtful Personal Sabbatical with Mike Wood (2/2) . John has both given and asked for informational interviews in the past. The purpose of them is to gain more information on the company and not an expectation of it being a formal interview with the hiring manager. John tells the story of having a good conversation with a friend of a friend at Nutanix before he joined that was extremely helpful. Try to think through who to reach out to through the lens of what is most important to you in a job / employer. Is it company culture, being paid well, great benefits, what managers are like, etc.? Your priorities might help you choose who you know that could speak to these points. GO back to the Must Have List created by the hosts of Real Job Talk. If you are actively managing your network and genuinely listening to people over time, you will understand what different people in your network care about. If they care about the area you want to know more about, ask them if they know anything about the specific company where you’re interviewing (or even its competitors) that can help you. John finds the analogy exciting and is starting to view some things we have discussed in the past through a different lens. We’ve been discussing actively managing your network, reaching out to people, and the importance of getting people to help us navigate situations and organizations. We spoke about being a harbor pilot for someone else. What if we reverse engineer that situation where we are a harbor pilot to someone else? Think about the connection the person who reached out had to you. Understanding the connection might help you identify ways to find your own harbor pilot through similar connections. Maybe that’s another outside the box way to help yourself find a harbor pilot. Be curious as to how people found you and why they reached out if you’re giving an informational interview. You might have a blog, a podcast, or something in your LinkedIn or social media profile that makes you more approachable because your work is in the public eye. This applies to others you could reach out to for help. Asking some questions of the people who reach out to you for help will make you a better interviewer and sharpen questioning skills for when you are in a job interview situation. By asking you for help, the person asking is interviewing you. Taking the time to have a conversation allows both them and you to practice interviewing. One of the best books Nick has read in the last year is called Talk to Me by Dean Nelson. Nelson is a journalist who wrote this book about asking better questions and being a better interviewer. Nelson breaks down popular interviews and the questions asked, and it is fascinating. The concepts discussed in this book apply broadly across many fields. Reading this and internalizing the lessons will make you a better job candidate and a better job interviewer. 36:30 – Wrapping Up You are the captain. You make the final call, and you have to own the decisions. You should know everything about your ship (as much as can be known) and have a willingness to take advice from the harbor pilot. Seek expert guidance from a harbor pilot, and have a true collaboration with them. Accept that they are experts at something you can’t be an expert at (your ship at their harbor). We discussed what the harbor pilot might look like and how to find them. Maybe acting as a harbor pilot for others will help you find a harbor pilot in the future. In the maritime world, the harbor pilot has to come help the captain of the cruise ship. It’s mandated by law. In the case of the job seeker, it is going to take some work to get the harbor pilot onboard. It likely will not be given to you. The responsibility and planning have to be there if you truly want a harbor pilot to help you dock. Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Do the Prep Work: Keep Your Eyes Open when Career DR Planning with David Klee (2/2) 55:37

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How prepared are you for a career emergency like losing a job? Disaster recovery plans for your career, just like troubleshooting, start with good documentation of technical and business accomplishments. David Klee returns in episode 316 to share the prep work required for building and testing a disaster recovery plan for our careers. You’ll learn how to use David’s technique of looking in the mirror (inside yourself) and out the window (out into the world / greater technical community) to quiet the fear and document and identify transferable skills that can be listed on a resume, on LinkedIn, or shared in a job interview. As we talk through each topic or recommendation, David shares concrete examples from his experience to illustrate how they apply. Original Recording Date: 01-20-2025 David Klee is a returning guest and the owner and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies . If you missed part 1 of this discussion series with David, check out Episode 315 . Topics – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window, Accomplishments as Repeatable Processes, Transparent Outcomes and the Hero’s Journey, Avoiding the Cold Start with Prep Work, Testing a Career DR Plan 3:28 – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window We all have intentions of keeping disaster recovery plans for our careers and lives up to date, but we fall short. “The tech side is arguably the easier part. DR for the career, especially in this day and age…if you get cut today…what are you going to do? What’s the next step? Are you ready to take an unplanned detour in life? Who do you know? What do you know? What have you done that you can talk about or reference to help you get the next leg up? What have you done that’s so proprietary that you can’t mention a spec of it or it’s so proprietary that it doesn’t transfer out of that job?” – David Klee, on disaster recovery for your career David talks about his first job in college working for a market research firm. The firm had a platform with its own scripting language that could be used to build websites or surveys. David acted as an intermediary between the team that built the platform and the team that used it. “I spent three years there. What did I learn? I learned how to script in a language that does not leave that company borders. That’s not a good career builder unless you intend to stay with that company for your entire career, and this is the 2020s. Good luck with that.” – David Klee John says this could be something we could ask about in an interview. A company is basically asking for an employee to be a captive of that group because of the proprietary nature of the language. David says in most cases like this an employee will not know it until they are in the situation. "It takes keeping your eyes open…no matter how much you enjoy your job…is the captivity of this job worth it? Is there job security? Do I enjoy what I’m doing? Am I growing, or am I just moving laterally? What’s worth it? " – David Klee In this job at the market research firm, they found out David was a good troubleshooter, and they wanted him to fix bugs on the platform others had built. Even when David proposed that it would be faster to rebuild the platform on newer versions of software, they insisted he focus on patching the existing platform. What does David mean by keeping your eyes open? “Keeping your eyes open involves looking at yourself in a mirror. And then, look out the window.” – David Klee David says to look in the mirror we should think about what we want to do, what we enjoy doing, and what we do and don’t like about our current job. Early in his career, he wanted to break out of just being an IT worker. He wanted to be a business driver rather than part of a cost center. “Look at your value to the business. Am I there just keeping the lights on? And what about that do you enjoy?” – David Kleep Looking out the window involves thinking about what you’re doing, what you’re getting paid, and how much you’re appreciated by the business. What are you doing that can be transferred to another business of any size, and how much satisfaction of doing your current job would be retained in making a move? “You don’t have a lot of answers when you’re just starting out, but that’s where you start talking to people. Find people in that area of any specialty, be it IT or whatever, that you enjoy, and there’s probably a community around it. I got lucky. I found the SQL Server community in 2008…. Here’s a room of 50 other people that enjoy the same exact thing. This is cool, and I can talk about it with them.” – David Klee Someone David knew well started a SQL Server user group in Omaha, Nebraska. David found out about the group and was there for the very first meeting. David got to know the community around a specific technology. He would ask people where they work, what they did each day, what they did and did not like about their job, what they wished they could do more of, etc. “You’re getting paid twice as much…interesting. So, there’s less that I don’t like in that role. There’s more of the stuff that I like, and your company gives you time to focus on the stuff that you like to do. Ok, let’s talk. Who do you know, and do you have an opening in your company? …or, I’m not there yet qualification-wise to be able to get that job, but hey, you do this stuff day in and day out. What can I do to learn more? What can I do to push myself? If the company that I’m at is just focused on keeping the lights on, what can I do on the side to grow? …it’s that want to grow and do more that not everybody has…. How can I learn everything that I need to know to go beyond an IT Operations lightkeeper kind of role? What can I do to help the company see the value in IT to invest further in it?” – David Klee, giving examples of what we might talk to others about at a community meeting David considers himself a lifelong learn who wants to know as much about everything as he possibly can. 9:41 – Accomplishments as Repeatable Processes David talked about being a cost center compared to being a business driver. John says at the individual contributor level, the delineation may come down to what you’re working on. Are the systems for the company or a specific product that is customer facing? David says think about how much money the business makes per day because you kept a system up and running. When David worked for a performing arts center, he saw the business need for improvement in volunteer management for each show. David also wanted to learn how to program in .NET and took it upon himself to build a volunteer management system. He knew nothing about .NET and worked on this project outside of his normal work week to beat the deadline for the next season opening. “I built a volunteer management system. It integrated with the ticketing system. The house managers could hit a button, open a show directly from the ticketing system. It pre-filled and populated everything. They had templates for all the positions they needed…. The first week it went live it saved 55 staff hours between 2 people. That was cool…. That’s the resume builder right there, and that actually enabled me to get my next job…. That’s the resume builder because not only did you learn a tech skill…but it showed that you can think about the business and not just a tech feature.” – David Klee, describing the outcome of his work building a new volunteer management system John emphasizes the need for quantification so the next person looking to hire you can understand your value to the organization. Saving that many staff hours per performance translates to dollars. David says this allowed 2 people working 80-hour weeks to work only 50 hours per week. Nick highlights an irony. Many companies do not have enough systems documentation to troubleshoot effectively when there is a problem. When we are applying for a job, we need documentation that indicates our expertise level to be deemed competent enough to go and work on a system which a company may not have documented well. But, if we do not document our own experience well, we have a problem! We have to be able to prove our competence and experience to another company. We might be able to succeed in a technical interview by answering questions, but we need proof of our expertise. Companies may want us to do and not document, but around performance review time documentation becomes critically important. This is at odds with the overall culture as it relates to documentation. “And the documentation onus is on you. They’ll never give you the time to document your successes because they don’t want you to jump ship and bring that list of successes with you. So it’s on you. How much time do you have nights and weekends to keep up on this stuff? You have to make the time.” – David Klee, on documenting our accomplishments / successes How detailed should the list of our own successes / accomplishments be? David says it should be detailed enough to make it repeatable, keeping in mind we cannot take proprietary information from a company. David says the knowledge of building a volunteer management system has stuck with him over time. He has built web applications ever since. “The framework has changed. The foundation has changed. But the knowledge of how to take a business challenge, justify and quantify the impact of solving it technically, implementing it, and then measuring the outcome…if you can document that, that’s what you need for the proof…. What did you do and why did you do it? Give me 3 sentences on how you did it and then tell me the outcome.” – David Klee, on documenting accomplishments According to Nick, getting the refined outcome statement for your resume for an interview takes writing down your accomplishments a couple of different times. Document everything in a brain dump format, refine it a time or too, and pull out those impact statements that are most relevant for a specific role. David says we have to make the time to do it so we can stand out. He also shares the kinds of questions he asks a current mentee. The guy David is mentoring mentioned he had built a web application to help track household finances. It was a PHP front end with a SQL Server back end that ran in his home test lab. QuickBooks may have been easier, but David’s mentee wanted the experience of building the application himself. When asked how much time it took, David’s mentee said it took him longer than it probably should have, but he wanted to learn how everything worked. David will often give his mentee new ideas for things to explore, and the mentee will spend his weekends tinkering. “The tech side of this is easy. Even just a lateral move in the business…how do you justify that you’re going to actually solidify a business need to fill a role? If it’s a promotion, how do you justify that? You have to keep track of those.” – David Klee David gives examples of the outcomes of some of his consulting work – saving an airline over 30 million dollars in database licensing, added 500 million dollars to the valuation of an electric vehicle startup, worked with 4 of the 10 largest hedge funds in the world, migrated 140 terabyte SQL Server database across the country in 18 seconds, etc. To go back one step, David has multiple sets of documents – business accomplishments and technical accomplishments, stressing that these are two different things. He spends one Saturday morning per month making notes on his accomplishments. “And to be able to just rattle that off and say…we did that, and we can do it again. Not only did we have a good outcome with it, but we documented the process. It’s a repeatable process…. Anybody at that company could follow that process and not call me again to do that. And I’m happy for that.” – David Klee, speaking to the success of migrating a very large SQL Server database which came from not only doing it but training people at the company to do it next time The above migration / process or recipe can easily be applied in a quick, useful way to help another company. 18:37 – Transparent Outcomes and the Hero’s Journey David shares the story of one of the most successful troubleshooting experiences that came from a SQL Server migration project with a 2-week timeline to get it onto new hardware after the SQL Server had been running for 8 years. There was no documentation of the environment, and no one at that company who had tried the migration previously could figure it out. “We got this running 3 hours and 10 minutes into a 4-hour maintenance window. I didn’t sleep for a day after that because I was so jacked from nerves. But it worked. And the next morning, because I couldn’t sleep…I’m on a laptop on the couch documenting every single thing that I did and took all the screenshots that I’d been taking through the entire time, stitched them together, and built them a how-to document. They didn’t ask me to do it…but they now have the how-to for how to do this again down the road…. Nobody there had bothered to look into why the system stayed up and running those 8 years.” – David Klee, recounting a very difficult troubleshooting exercise Because David knew infrastructure and coding, he was able to dig into all the right areas to make the project a success. David documented the technical outcome and the business outcome from the troubleshooting session. He also did a post-mortem to explain why the business should have invested time and resources to understand that system before they attempted a migration. He also recommended they re-write a specific application because they no longer had the source code. Nick says the technical and business outcomes David generated from his brain dump are evidence that he’s a good troubleshooter. “The hilarious thing is that at the end of the day, for the business, nothing changed. That platform that they used thousands of times a second was still up and running, so literally sometimes the business outcome is transparent. To be able to tout that to the right people, they get it. But to the non-seasoned recruiter, they don’t know. So, you have to be able to spin that…. You don’t have to embellish anything, but you have to know what to bring to the surface to get them to actually understand the significance of what you’re talking about.” – David Klee John wonders if the right outcome for the business is that nothing went wrong? David says this is how he got into virtualization. Nothing went wrong when he moved systems for the performing arts center from physical to virtual during a time when tickets were on sale. Not crashing was the success. In other cases, database migrations for large companies have been minimizing downtime and disruption of the business (i.e. fitting into a tight maintenance window). Technical outcomes in these situations were things like completing a database upgrade, moving to newer hardware, successful patching, reducing future problems, etc. The business cares about uptime alone. A business might not understand a system is critical because of underinvestment, and they may not see the value of the system’s uptime as a result. When someone puts forth a ton of effort to reduce downtime for a specific system, people might not care because they don’t know. David doesn’t have it in him to let problems / systems crash and burn. Not everyone operates at this level of moral standard. John says a business demonstrates what is and is not important based on budget, time, and attention. It’s difficult as an employee to go on a hero’s journey and fix a problem (potentially sacrificing mental and physical wellbeing) for no recognition. “I’m with you to a point. But at the same time, if the hero’s journey to fix something for no recognition means I’ve grown as a technologist with a transferable and portable set of skills that will elevate my next step, is it worth it? And in some cases no and in some cases yeah. That volunteer management system at the performing arts center…that was 600 hours of work in 4 months outside of an 80 hour a week job. That was a lot. But that skill showed that I can build tools to solve business problems. It gave me a more modern framework to implement that skill, and it gave me an industry standard means to demonstrate it. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment and a workaholic, so I come at this from a rather jaded perspective. But if your home situation and family situation allows you to do it for bursts, I claim it’s worth it. You don’t have to do it all day every day for 25 years, but to do it in bursts to hit a marker that you give to yourself…you’re not running an ultra-marathon by training for 20 minutes a week. There’s work that comes along with it, and there is sacrifice in a lot of this stuff because the knowledge isn’t just going to pop into your head. And work’s not going to give you the time to learn this stuff. They’re just not…not unless you have a truly special organization…. You’ve got to push yourself. It pushes your career. It pushes your ability to prepare.” – David Klee 27:25 – Avoiding the Cold Start with Prep Work What if the business you work for goes under / goes out of business? What will you do tomorrow? David says this has to be in our minds. From a business and technology perspective what do we do? How can we make the next step easier? Nick thinks we would need to know Where all documented accomplishments are (if that’s been completed) Who to call and network with about job prospects Understand / have a tight handle on our finances “It’s a hard one, and that goes back to the loop of personal troubleshooting and documentation. Say you do a job for 5 years. Your last day on the job…are you going to remember all the accomplishments that you had during that 5-year tenure? No. Are you going to remember that monthly? Sure. Take a Saturday morning. Sit there with a good cup of coffee or something, and just write. Throw it in a Word document. Throw it in Dropbox or OneDrive or wherever…. It doesn’t have to be pretty…. What did you enjoy? What wins did you have? What problems did you solve? What did you learn? What did you do for the business? What did the business do for you? If the business did something cool for you and you liked it, maybe that’s a pre-requisite for hiring at your next job. A couple of the companies I worked for…they were nice enough to send me to some conferences. I learned a ton. Document it. Take the time. Yeah, it’s time out of your week. It’s not fun. It’s not enjoyable. But at the same time, it gives you a foundation to say, ‘I did this.’ And if you’re looking for another role, and if it’s a role dissimilar to what you’re doing today, how can you adapt what you’ve done to the new industry or the new role or the new vertical? And that’s a hard one for people to wrap their brain around. All this stuff applies. You just have to spin it the right way.” – David Klee David shares that his brother finished a career as a music teacher at a high school and became a police officer. Transferable skills were things like working with crowds, training and educating, getting people to work together, etc. David mentions a friend who worked for a database monitoring company and built software and tooling for that company. This friend later moved to the financial sector. Though the database being monitored might be different, the framework and the foundation for documentation / monitoring / quality assurance testing / user acceptance testing all still applies. John says the typical scenario is someone losing their job and needing to come from a cold start. The person has done no disaster recovery planning and needs to run their disaster recovery plan. “Clear your mind, and start thinking. Give me the top 5 things about the current job that you really enjoyed, and then make a beeline and run…. If you like infrastructure, look to see who’s hiring in your town. Look for those user groups…. It doesn’t take more than a meeting or two if you’re comfortable around people to actually get to know some of these folks…. Dig in your heels. Get yourself out of your comfort zone and go to these things and start talking to people.” – David Klee David mentions meetup.com and the Azure Data Community as great places to find technical user groups. Don’t rule out business user groups as well because it doesn’t have to be tech focused. David says we don’t have to be way out of our comfort zone to say hello to someone at a user group, tell them what you do, and ask what they do. Nick says we can even ask people if there is someone they know that we should meet. “The worst thing you can do is nothing. Nothing will not move you forward. Even a basic conversation, if nothing else comes from it, you’ve still talked to somebody. You’ve still got a connection now.” – David Klee John says many of us have critiqued an employer for a lack of disaster recovery planning or business continuity planning, but at the same time, we haven’t done that same kind of planning for our own careers. We have to take accountability for that in our own lives. “Nobody is going to hand you a new career or a job promotion on a silver platter…. It just doesn’t happen. And for all of the folks that sit around waiting and they just think that better things are around the corner…the odds are, if you don’t push, better things are not around the corner. It may not be any worse, but it’s probably not going to be any better Career paths in IT with a company that’s willing to invest in you are rare these days. They want you to do a job, and that’s what you’re there to do. There’s not a track for promotion or advancement. So, the convention in the US is to quit your job and find a better one to get that promotion. I hate to say it. I’d love to have career paths. It just doesn’t really exist all over the place, so it’s on you. What are you doing?” – David Klee For David, his action was going independent and working for himself. It gives him the freedom to select technologies that have business value and learn them to the depth of being able to tell other people how to use them. This choice (business ownership) allows him to be flexible and change direction when needed. If the world changes or shifts, we can pivot our careers. David was an infrastructure admin who became a software developer, a database administrator, a consultant, and a consulting firm owner / nerd of all trades. “You can pivot, and it all just builds. And that list of accomplishments, that prep that you’ve done to build the foundation to make essentially disaster recovery for your career easier. Failing over a database to a different site that’s already been replicated is a right-click go kind of operation. If you’ve pigeon-holed 20 years of your life on a system that is totally proprietary and non-transferable, what are you going to do?” – David Klee David tells the story of a friend from one of his first jobs who was laid off after 25 years of working on proprietary systems. The friend had not done the prep for career disaster recovery. It took 7 months to figure out what to do after that for a job with half the pay. “The prep wasn’t there. It drives me nuts because the prep needed to be there.” – David Klee, commenting on the lack of preparedness of a friend who was laid off 35:47 – Testing a Career DR Plan Even for those of us who agree we need a DR plan for our career or have some form of one, what elements might we not be thinking about? What are some of the unknown unknowns? David says if we were to take our company’s IT systems and fail to DR right now, something will not work because of an undocumented change, a software update, etc. “No DR strategy is perfect unless you test it, and who wants to test a career DR strategy? …It goes back to…can you troubleshoot? Can you identify the things that are missing now that you’ve failed over and what isn’t working? …Go through the feedback loop. Can you improve and clean up and fix? And, arguably, don’t make it equal to where you came from. Make it better. Because then, the bar has now risen, and it’s just an uphill climb after that. There’s no downhill slide.” – David Klee The only way Nick can think of to test a career DR plan is to follow the documented plan you have to see how fast you could get an interview and into the final round. David says even if you’re content where you are, go look for another job. If you get an offer, that’s a pretty good DR plan if the job you looked for is something you want. If you try this and can’t make it past sending in a resume, you have a safety net because you do not have to leave your current job. “You can start to look at the mirror. What am I not doing that’s making me less marketable to these folks? And that’s a hard pill to swallow…. If you’re not intent on leaving your current job, there’s really no harm in it….” – David Klee Nick cautions about burning bridges. If you are going to interview for a role, really consider it. Be kind and courteous to recruiters and the people you speak to during the process, especially if you have to turn down an offer. David says if you have a job and you’re looking for a new one, there is nothing wrong with taking a job that will better your situation. “There’s a certain number of hoops you have to jump through to get a job. Have you even written a resume recently? Have you written a cover letter if you think that’s necessary? Have you submitted a job application and gotten a recruiter to call you back? …And, have you been able to get past that…recruiter screen to get to talk to whatever the next level is…? And if you are consistently getting to hurdle 5, maybe you don’t need to worry…. The vast majority of people don’t even start because they think about that last hurdle – what if they offer me somehting and then I need to make a decision about whether to leave or not? Well, that’s not the situation that you’re facing yet.” – John White John mentions chats with hiring managers, skip level leaders, vice president level personnel, and even technical presentations as hurdles and levels in the interview process / road to getting a new job. Not taking that first step in the process is the mistake everyone is making. As a consultant, David does consistent job interviews (5-10 times per week probably). He’s had a lot of practice. “It takes some experience, so start the process. Because if you are just jittery, nervous, can’t speak a sentence to these folks…how are you going to make it to that next level? How are you going to get to the point where they’re extending you an offer? It’s hard. It takes time. It takes experience. It takes a feedback loop of improvement in yourself to understand how to approach those things. And I’m not saying just interview to waste somebody’s time, but if you are seriously looking, interview for things that may be tangential to what you’re interested in in the hopes that they may actually be better, a better fit, a better path…because the more experience you have with it the better.” – David Klee, on interviewing David got a job as a database administrator (DBA) because he knew a lot about infrastructure and had some SQL Server experience. They made him a DBA, and David really enjoyed it. A business doesn’t refuse to investigate disaster recovery because the disaster recovery target might be better than the existing infrastructure and present a difficult decision. John reminds us that people make similar statements about their career disaster recovery every day. “If the poop hits the fan, what would you do today? What would you do tomorrow? What would you do next week? What professional network have you built up? What proof do you have in the industry of what you’ve actually accomplished? Who can you call to vouch for you? They always ask for references. What can you do? What can you reference? What can’t you reference? What can you make veiled allusions to? …I hate the phrase ‘brand awareness…’ but to have visibility and verifiable proof that you’ve actually done something – that’s powerful. You need to have that, and it goes back to the prep. Push the fear aside. That’s the hardest part. A lot of folks are afraid of the end result. A lot of folks are afraid of the process. A lot of folks are afraid of the act of change…because it puts you out of your comfort zone.” – David Klee John thinks all of these fears are stand-ins that prevent us from facing the fear that losing our position is a very real possibility. Facing this fear of the possibility of losing your job could produce crippling indecision too, so people decide not to think about it (the worst thing you can do for disaster recovery). David takes us back to that SQL Server User Group meeting in 2008 and says back then he did not like speaking in front of a crowd. He would help coordinate things from time to time but was always the guy in the back. People at the user group knew the kind of work David did each day, but he didn’t think much about it as something to share in a presentation. In 2010, they decided to hold a SQL Saturday event in Omaha. When a speaker backed out at the last minute, one of the leaders asked David to speak on SQL Server virtualization instead. David agreed to do the presentation and really enjoyed it. There was someone sitting in the back of lthe room during David’s presentation that day, and it just so happened to be the author of SQL in a Nutshell Kevin Kline. Kevin e-mailed David 6 months later to ask him to co-present on the same topic at a very large conference. In November 2011, David delivered his first big technical presentation at the conference. “I figured there’d be 30, 40 people in the room. No. They closed the doors 30 minutes before the presentation because they hit the 500-person fire marshal limit. And we give an hour-and-a-half presentation in front of a packed room, and it turns out his role in the presentation was to be comic relief between sections and he wanted me to give 95% of the presentation. That was, right there, what let me get into consulting for myself…. That was the thing that showed that this thing that I leaned how to do on my own is something that not everybody could do, and it gave me te confidence to be able to run with it – both from a tech presentation perspective and a career perspective and literally make it work…. It was a topic that I knew. It was the unknown knowns. And from telling people about it I had the experience of being able to share it in a way that they could understand even though the topic was foreign to them back then. And it worked. It clicked. I would say that was the career disaster recovery to a better infrastructure. Things just skyrocketed after that. I spoke at 118 SQL Saturdays after that. It set the awareness in the community of what I could do so that in 2013 when I went independent as a consultant…we got our first customer day 3 all from somebody seeing me at a SQL Saturday event talking about this topic…. So unbelievably cool…it’s everything that accidentally came together in the whole career DR except I would say this was a proactive career failover for disaster preparedness…. We’ve been in business now 11.5 years…. I look at tomorrow. Where do I need to add stuff to the career? Where do I need to add more awareness to any of this stuff? Where do I need to be so that if the world shifts in a year, I’m ready? Every day I look at the mirror. You have to…because if you don’t, you’re going to be caught off guard. It’s the last spot you want to be in both for you and your family.” – David Klee David still has the photo from that conference that someone took looking from the stage to the audience during his session. David put himself in a position to be lucky by going deep in multiple areas, sharing his work, and learning in public. “That one presentation in 2011 was 12 years in the works.” – David Klee, on all the events that led to the presentation that changed everything…or as John says, David became an overnight success 12 years later David’s business is still running strong despite the pandemic, and he doesn’t have to market. The work comes to him because of the brand awareness he developed. For this, he is very thankful. And the accomplishments are documented in the public eye. To follow up on this conversation with David: Visit davidklee.net or heraflux.com (the home site of David’s consultancy, Heraflux Technologies). You can also contact David on LinkedIn . Mentioned in the Outro Can you see the loop of personal troubleshooting and documentation now? After listening back to this discussion with David, Nick was reminded of Episode 284 – Draft Your Narrative: Writing and Building a Technical Portfolio with Jason Belk (2/2) . We never used the word narrative in this discussion, but that’s what we’re building by doing the documentation. Documentation is an input to having a narrative in the first place. We have to take the time to do the documentation of our accomplishments to avoid the cold start situation of needing a job having done no prep work. There were so many questions David suggested we think through as we document. David says we’re documenting repeatable processes. But it turns out the documentation process itself is a repeatable process that we can use for our work solving a problem and for our accomplishments. After listening to this, is the documentation of your technical and business accomplishments up to date so you can share them in interview discussions, promotion discussions, and even in conversation in community groups? Look in the mirror and out the window, and find the communities that can help you learn! Special thanks to David on suggesting the topic and collaborating with us to create a create a great discussion. If you have an idea, please e-mail us or contact us on LinkedIn. Let’s collaborate and create a great show! Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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A Love for Troubleshooting: Skill Development through Documentation with David Klee (1/2) 48:03

för 9 weeks sedan48:03

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Can writing documentation beef up your troubleshooting skills? This week in episode 315 David Klee returns to explore the connection between effective troubleshooting and documentation. We’ll discuss appropriate levels of detail for documentation and explore it as a skill building exercise. Listen closely to hear why good documentation can make all the difference in a regulatory compliance audit as well as in emergency situations. Also, we’ll talk through some interview questions you can ask to determine the value of good documentation within an organization. Original Recording Date: 01-20-2025 Topics – An Exploration of Troubleshooting, Pre-requisites for Effective Troubleshooting, What Should Be Documented, Forms of Documentation and Emergency Preparedness, Interview Questions and Employer Perceptions 2:32 – An Exploration of Troubleshooting David Klee is a returning guest and the owner and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies . If you missed the previous discussions with David, you can find them below: Episode 119 – Tinkering into Specialty with David Klee (1/2) Episode 120 – A Time to Build with David Klee (2/2) Episode 309 – The Consulting Life: Managing Travel and Becoming a Better Communicator with David Klee (1/2) Episode 310 – Finding a Better Way: Contracting, Independence, and a Consultant’s Reputation with David Klee (2/2) David approached us about an idea for another topic to explore. After many years in the industry (11 of them as a business owner), David began to think about patterns he has seen and what has made him and many others successful. “What has actually made this work? And it’s the art and the science and the luck of troubleshooting…. What makes some of the best technologists arguably some of the best troubleshooters in the world, and then how do you apply that to life? …There’s a lot more than just knowing a technical feature or two or being able to Google faster than the person next to you. I have a lot of fun with this topic.” – David Klee, framing our discussion Philosophically, David believes troubleshooting is as much an art as it is a science. There is a foundation one needs to be a good troubleshooter, and David tells us this stems from our childhood curiosity about why things do what they do. David tells the story of learning to use a screwdriver at age 5, taking the family’s VCR apart, and successfully putting it back together again (which may or may not have landed him in trouble). Over time some people have a constant need to know why something is what is / why it works the way it does. David sees this present in some people but not all people. “When you look at those that are truly great at an industry…they want to know why, and they don’t stop until they know why.” – David Klee David mentions the Dunning-Kruger Effect , which speaks to breaking up the things we know and don’t know into 4 quadrants: Unknown unknowns are the things that get people into trouble because they think they know these but do not Known unknowns – David considers this area enlightenment in IT and a way to know where the boundaries are “Unknown knowns are the things that I consider you a master at a technology or a topic of anything because what you know becomes so integrated into your frame of reference and your being that you don’t know that you know it. You just do it. And, when you hit that point of a mastery of something…you may not be able to explain how you do it or you may not be able to tell somebody the steps to do it. But it’s just muscle memory. It’s just go. You do, and it works…. The truly good educators are the ones that can actually take what they know and dial it to the level of the people that they’re talking to. Some experts cannot do that, but they are so good at what they do. Others can. It’s fascinating…. It’s the unknown unknowns that gets people into trouble. It’s the unknown knowns that really separates people.” – David Klee We did not mention known knowns, but it would be the final quadrant. John says it’s the idea that you can master a skill or process but not have mastery of teaching or explaining that skill or process. Doing ang teaching could overlap, but they do not always overlap. David comes from a family of teachers, actually. His parents were traveling road musicians who fell into education, but they have always continued some sort of musical pursuit on their own. “It’s neat…to be able to explain to somebody how something works and why. I love it.” – David Klee When Nick thinks about troubleshooting, he thinks about both high pressure and low-pressure situations when we’re trying to figure out why something is not doing what it’s supposed to do. David says we’re trying to determine why there is an unexpected outcome and what we need to do to get to the expected outcome. “It’s a formal methodology or informal methodology for understanding why something does not have an expected outcome and working through the process that is an iterative process – either elimination or identification. And you end up with essentially identification, review, remediate, rinse and repeat until you get the desired outcome. That’s about as formal of a definition as I can give you.” – David Klee John thinks this may disguise the art in the troubleshooting process of knowing what issues may be more likely than others. People might discover something is not working and change 10 things. If something then starts working again, how do we know which change (or combination of changes) actually resolved the problem? We are far less likely to undo the changes once something begins working again. John mentions being good at troubleshooting in areas in which he has lost the fear of something going wrong. While John feels comfortable troubleshooting computer systems and software, he’s not good at troubleshooting car problems due to limited knowledge and a feeling of high stakes. Someone with a better knowledge of cars may perceive the stakes to be far lower when making a recommendation for fixing problems. David says it depends on what you are troubleshooting. There is a risk qualification element that needs to be considered with the process used in troubleshooting. David shares the example of troubleshooting a payment processing system with a group of folks who didn’t know what they didn’t know. The process they had developed to troubleshooting ran the risk of preventing payment processing for the entire company. David describes determining the need to speak to the group of people who built the system in order to troubleshoot the system safely. 11:43 – Pre-requisites for Effective Troubleshooting Nick mentions we highlighted a pre-requisite for troubleshooting being knowledge of the systems we’re troubleshooting. What is the correlation between how good a troubleshooter one can be and how well one knows the systems involved in troubleshooting? If we know our systems well, we know what is / is not possible within a given set of constraints. One example is knowing the ramifications of changing different database settings. “You know what’s going to happen because you know the platform and you know your environment, and you know how they come together. If you know this stuff you can resolve these issues a whole lot quicker.” – David Klee Knowledge of the platform and environment would mean we know the systems which interact with the one we are troubleshooting, the impact of the outage, the right person to call for help, and the questions you need to ask them. It can be much harder when you inherit a system someone else built and no documentation on why it was set up the way it was or how other systems communicate with it. Likely you also don’t know what types of changes have been made to it over time (whether they were band aid type fixes or some other kind). John mentions we’re highlighting domain knowledge of a system and its specific failure modes combined with what has happened in the past to diagnose and fix those things. A resilient system should have these things documented. David says the flip side of this is being someone coming in from the outside who has never seen this machine before. Think about the scenario in which you are asked to troubleshoot a system which people with all the domain knowledge can’t fix. As a consultant he runs into this pretty regularly. It can be challenging, but David says it keeps him sharp. Someone troubleshooting a system like this has to keep track of what’s already been done, what should have been done, and what questions need to be asked to extract domain knowledge from others when information hasn’t been documented. One must also know the platform well enough to successfully understand a system’s current state (which might be different than what people tell you). “Perception of a system’s state might be entirely different than the reality of the system’s state. That’s a hard, hard art to master right there.” – David Klee John says someone who doesn’t know a system may have a better chance of doing effective diagnosis. The person who knows a system well is going to make assumptions someone who doesn’t know a system would likely not make (i.e. the database is running great, etc.). David stresses the importance of quantifying performance when we’re troubleshooting. Preconceived notions about an environment might lead to subjective explanations. When he walks into an environment to troubleshoot a problem, David wants to look at the raw data. This data can help provide the true nature of a system’s state and perhaps prevent finger pointing between teams. “Show me the data. Show me why you think this. And most of the time, people cannot produce that data.” – David Klee Even trend information on how past issues of a specific kind were resolved counts as data and may provide a nice starting point for troubleshooting. David tells the story of a database administrator and a storage administrator getting into a shouting match over a specific problem. Each of them wanted to be right, but neither had data to back up their claims. In the end, both were right – the problem was somewhere in between the database and the storage in the network and operation system layers. Listen as David describes it in detail. “But it’s ‘I’m right. You’re wrong.’ There was no ‘I understand that my telemetry is showing me this, but your telemetry is showing you something different.’ Put the data together, and draw a line between them. It’s the why is this showing 2 different things.” – David Klee on troubleshooting telemetry data from different systems 18:29 – What Should Be Documented What type of documentation would be helpful to have in situations like the one David described (the network and database administrators getting into an argument)? David says it would have been ideal to have a diagram of the entire environment that highlights the data communication flow between systems. “If we were able to literally have every single hop there, then you essentially start at both ends, and you start collecting the data until you meet in the middle. If you know the pieces involved, you can collect the system state and the telemetry behind it. That’s the easy part. You just have to know how to draw that line.” – David Klee Should each hop in the flow of data be instrumented from the beginning or only when there is a problem? David says you need data to baseline for good performance, and when there is a problem, you have to compare the telemetry for each part of the path to that of the baseline. David feels like he spends 25% of his week benchmarking and baselining things for people and has developed methodologies for different types of systems across technology stacks. “How can you tell me it’s running slow if we don’t know how it was running when everything is fine? You have no objectivity to gauge it’s slow.” – David Klee John highlights the challenges of diagramming these types of systems or applications. We need to represent physical connections, virtual connections, and even API calls for example. There are many layers involved, each of which can change. David thinks of a system he might be troubleshooting as an ecosystem rather than something static. He gives the example of a desktop computer and how a single software update can change everything. “To me it’s document what’s in your domain. Document it the best you can. Imagine you get hit by the beer truck, and somebody else has to come along and follow you…. I want you to know everything there is to know about why this machine was setup the way it was, what it took to get this thing running stable including custom tweaks, the raw architecture behind it, the configuration, everything I can possibly think of…mostly because I’m probably going to be the one to upgrade this thing in 4 or 5 or 6 years. I want to know – what did I do to stabilize this thing? Why is it setup the way it’s setup? And if somebody else needs to come along and support this…” – David Klee, on the purpose of good documentation David gets calls from customers during problem situations asking why certain configurations were made, and when this happens, he will send them the same, extremely thorough set of documents he produced and shared with them when the system was originally built. David has high expectations for what good looks like when it comes to documentation. The output from a SQL Server and infrastructure health check provided to customers will be around 250 pages on average. The spirit behind this is so customers have the what and the why. David highlights some big successes from producing thorough documentation for customers. David’s company saved a customer over $30 million in SQL Server licensing because of effective tuning, and due to this work, the firm later won a massive SQL Server migration project as a result. “They liked the documentation. They liked the why and not just the what.” – David Klee, on thorough systems documentation as a differentiator of his business John says people often don’t want to document things for the next person, but many times the next person who comes along is you 6 months later. These things need to be documented well or perhaps put into a knowledge management system. David documents things so he isn’t forced to recall them from memory months or years in the future. He could be documenting a quick change or something that took 40 hours to find in the process of solving a problem. When making a change to something weird or nuanced, David will document it and make sure he and his customers have multiple copies of it. “There are things all over the place with the kind of tuning that I do. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d have no clue. You’d just have weird symptoms here or there, but these things are so nuanced.” – David Klee How can we balance thorough documentation with the need to make progress and not impede it? An organization has to be on board and allow technologists the time to document properly. If this doesn’t happen, the entire IT organization suffers. The technologists who made changes to solve a problem will forget what they did very quickly when forced to move on to the next fire immediately. “I think that’s why I run into a lot of the states that I do out there…. Something broke. Nobody’s had the time to think about it or look at it or document it or review it…. Here, you figure it out.” – David Klee 25:25 – Forms of Documentation and Emergency Preparedness Is the documentation we’re talking about something kept in a change control system, a wiki, and asset management system, or just some large document somewhere? If enough history is provided, David tells us the format doesn’t matter. Some places use a formalized change control process with tickets and platforms like ServiceNow. It’s a process that works for those organizations. Some organizations treat infrastructure as code and leverage JIRA tickets for tracking changes. “As long as I have a list of what has changed and when and why and a reference document that shows why the system is configured the way it I, any nonstandard change, any reason why the system is in use, anything. What’s it talking to? What’s placed on it? What firewall exclusions, routes…? If I have that, I know 90% of what I need. It’s that last 10% that’s always…specific to a given machine. But if I know the why, the what, and the where…you can figure out the how.” – David Klee Make sure your documentation is retrievable even if a system or platform or datacenter is offline! David has one customer who prints out the documentation once per month and puts it into a fireproof safe to take one example. There are many ways to ensure the documentation is retrievable in a critical situation. We need to make sure it’s available offsite somewhere (digital or printed copy). Who should have access to the documentation? David says more than one person for sure. Things can happen to people like getting hit by a beer truck or being in a natural disaster. “If you have one copy…single point of failure; I don’t believe in that. Two, three, four copies – park it on a USB drive at a bank deposit box. Park it in a public cloud that key members of IT can get into. The odds that that goes down…slim.” – David Klee Nick mentions the access to documentation (i.e. the run books) would need to be part of onboarding and offboarding new team members. David tells the story of helping a trucking company build a DR plan several years ago. The company was in tornado alley and had around 800 virtual machines. Due to regulations in the trucking industry, there is a requirement for constant telemetry feeding back to corporate systems from the trucks themselves. “I don’t believe in just testing a handful of pieces of DR every once in a while. We fail over and run from DR for 1 week out of every month…. They fail over the first Friday night of the month. They fail back on the second Friday of the month. Half of IT gets off the 3rd Friday of the month, and the other half gets off the last Friday of the month. I think it’s great. They love it…. Anybody in the room can fail over the entire company with the run books that are provided and maintained by every member of IT.” – David Klee, speaking to a DR plan for a company he helped architect In this scenario, the company’s CIO chooses 4 random members of IT staff who cannot be part of the DR exercise (i.e. simulating that they died). If any member of the team has to call one of those 4 team members during the fail over or fail back, the DR exercise fails. The company we’re talking about not only says they have DR. They demonstrate it to insurance companies and auditors, and their insurance is much less as a result. The full failover to / from DR takes about 43 minutes. The process took about a year to get right because of so many moving parts, but it works very well. How detailed should a company’s disaster recovery or business continuity plan be for the purpose of audits? David says there are varying degrees of detail. Some auditors may be checking a box, only looking for backups and offsite copies of data. Good auditors would ask to see the detailed process of how things failed over and how long it took. Some companies do disaster recovery and only fail over one system (maybe even without all the dependencies). “The good auditors are the ones that ask how long, when, not just what. Those are the auditors that most people in IT hate.” – David Klee David shares the story of a database administrator friend of his who was, in an audit, asked about the disaster recovery process and if he could demonstrate it. The auditor then noticed a 400-page book about SQL Server backup and recovery that David’s friend had written. David’s friend mentioned the book was the genericized process, but he then produced a specific document of the process at that specific company. It answered the auditor’s questions in 5 minutes. 33:12 – Interview Questions and Employer Perceptions John is wondering if we may have uncovered some good screening questions for job applicants to use in interviews related to this topic. We could ask about the company’s knowledge management strategy, the way they document how systems work, or the level of importance placed on documenting disaster recovery / failover processes. David says the employer should have an immediate answer for this. If they don’t, it’s a red flag and may mean you are the one who has to do whatever it takes to get stuff up and running again. Different parts of the business might document things in different ways (all of which could be effective), and processes might have different levels of importance when it comes to business resilience. John gives the example of documenting an employee onboarding process and where that ranks in overall priority compared to other things. David shares the story of a company whose disaster recovery plan includes helping the families of the IT professionals who need to engage because of an emergency situation. This includes transportation, housing, and much more. What types of questions might David ask a prospective job candidate on this topic? David would ask how someone documents why something works. David also asks for a 5-minute technical presentation covering a facet of what they are working on and why they enjoy it. “It’s an interesting twist because it tells me…can you talk to somebody who knows something about what you’re doing? Can you convey it in a way that people can understand? And it helps me get into their brain. Why do you like doing this?” – David Klee These types of questions help David understand how much someone enjoys working in the technology field or they are in it solely for the money. Do most employers see value in a prospective employee having the experience in writing detailed documentation or disaster recovery plans, or is it a mixed bag? “The company should love it. I can’t say they always do.” – David Klee Some employers may think you are too deep in the weeds or that you spend too much time on paperwork and process to effectively get things done. Companies could be solely focused on getting things done, which can be a problem. Companies too focused on process may be very inefficient. David says it’s an interesting balancing act and sees this play out differently inside different organizations. The approach may depend on the type of business and what they are trying to do. “If a person’s process behind this stuff doesn’t line up with the company, you may not be a good fit.” – David Klee John mentioned the good and the bad of systems being designed to prevent change. “Database technologies are very evolutionary. I see people that can’t embrace positive change to be as big of a detriment as people that embrace negative change too haphazardly.” – David Klee David highlights an example. This company needed a more highly available database environment but was too reluctant to migrate to one. The change was too much for them to embrace even though it would provide a great benefit. This isn’t about a poor value statement for the change. No one wants to put their job on the line if something doesn’t work. David mentions a mandate from the top of a company for availability, but no one at lower levels is willing to make changes to achieve it. This is a case of a mandate not being enforced. “It’s we’re willing to sacrifice what we know to move into unknown territory carefully, cautiously, one piece at a time…and they can’t start the process.” – David Klee John says this may be due to cultural or political undercurrents not visible to someone on the outside of the system. David references a previous conversation we had on the show about consulting and the level of exposure to politics. David reiterates one of the reasons he loves consulting – because he does not do well with politics. Are consultants brought in because of company politics? The fun part of consulting according to David is when a company brings you in to tell them what they need to do. When a company brings you in and tells you what to do as a consultant, you have the ability to say no if asked to take an improper or incorrect approach (another reason David loves consulting). In environments where detailed documentation is seen as valuable, can this get someone a promotion or perhaps even save their job? The answer is 100% yes. David gives the example of a company which had a security incident last year. The database administrator was seen as someone who always said no to things, wanting to look at code before it was released to production or have changes happen during normal working hours, etc. After the company was hit by a ransomware incident, the database administrator (or DBA), recovered the machines in 7 hours. It took 2 weeks for all other systems that used the database to get back up and running again. The database servers had proper change control, use of service accounts, firewalling, etc. and were the most resilient because of that. “Data was up all because…questioned everything, didn’t trust a bit. I trust you, and I trust your intentions. But prove it.” – David Klee, on the mindset needed for resilient systems Mentioned in the Outro When creating system or change documentation, remember that one person you could be writing the documentation for is you in the future. You can also take the attitude of providing the right level of depth in documentation so that others can fix the problem without needing to call you. Having appropriate levels of documentation in a place where everyone can find it can make it easier for team members to rotate in and out of certain areas and support taking uninterrupted vacations. If your company or team isn’t documenting systems or changes at a deep level, maybe you can be the one to start the trend or help operationalize it for your team. Try speaking with your manager or team lead about the value of better documentation and ideas for getting there (maybe differently than it has been done in the past). Even making small improvements is progress, and it could be the kind of progress that helps you progress to team lead someday. For additional interview question ideas related to documentation and knowledge management, check out Episode 293 – Enterprise Knowledge Management: A Consultative Approach to Solving the Right Problems with Abby Clobridge (2/2) . Troubleshooting is about drawing a line between two points and checking telemetry at every point in between, but when we are troubleshooting with others, it is an opportunity to show empathy, to collaborate effectively to solve a problem, and to learn from colleagues. Maybe you can learn from the way colleagues on other teams document their changes and see how it compares to the way your team is doing it. Documentation lends itself well to ensure we are prepared for a business emergency Contact the Hosts The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte. E-mail: nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com DM us on Twitter/X @NerdJourney Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_ If you’ve been impacted by a layoff or need advice, check out our Layoff Resources Page .…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Make Goals Inevitable with ADHD: Stressors and Entrepreneurship with Skye Waterson (2/2) 41:51

för 10 weeks sedan41:51

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Does the ADHD brain experience stress differently in situations like being laid off, for example? According to Skye Waterson, ADHD coach and our guest in episode 314, stress actually has the potential to hit you harder after a crisis. In this discussion, Skye shares practical tips for setting achievable goals as a job seeker or an entrepreneur and the importance of taking a long-term view throughout the process. We talk about the strengths of the ADHD brain in the tech field and how to determine if a work environment is the right fit when you’re interviewing. Skye also shares the reasons she decided to walk away from academia to start a business and some of the lessons learned along the way. Original Recording Date: 12-29-2024 Skye Waterson a former academic turned entrepreneur and ADHD coach. If you missed the first part of our discussion with Skye for a slightly different perspective on the ADHD brain, check out Episode 313 . Topics – Stress and the ADHD Brain, ADHD Strengths in Tech, Setting Goals and Maintaining Accountability, Walking away from Academia, Reflecting on Entrepreneurship, Job Interviews and Finding an Environmental Fit 2:34 – Stress and the ADHD Brain * Nick suggests we talk about stress in the context of the current job market. We’re seeing layoffs across tech and other industries continue. How do these stressful and traumatic situations affect the ADHD brain differently than perhaps those who do not have ADHD? * “There’s no conclusive thing that I can think of in the research that I’ve done that we experience stress in a different way…. What I would come back to with ADHD is that we have impulsivity struggles and we have executive functioning struggles. And so, it comes back to this idea that you’re ADHD all the time. When something stressful happens to you when you have ADHD…you have to deal with all of the emotional regulation, all of the thinking…all those things can mean it hits harder.” – Skye Waterson * People with ADHD can struggle with rejection sensitivity and self-criticism. Self-criticism could be partially due to receiving a lot of criticism when younger (positive or negative). * Stressful events can hit harder as well if you have PTSD or other mental health struggles. * Skye gives the example of getting into a car wreck. After it happens, you have to call the insurance company, figure out what to do with your car, and do many other things. * “And especially once the dopamine is gone…you might be good in the crisis, but post-crisis, you now have to pick up all of this executive functioning task work and do emotions. So, you might be struggling way longer than somebody else might be struggling…because now you have to deal with all this actual admin work as well.” – Skye Waterson, on experiencing stressful situations with ADHD * If we put that same set of challenges in the context of someone losing a job, someone would need to figure out how to spend the time they have left at a company (could be some or none), update their resume, update LinkedIn, and decide what to do next. * “I’ve worked with a lot of people in that job space…. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re starting a small business called finding another job. It’s really complicated…. Really it does have to be a system that you break down…. What is my goal? My goal is to get this job. What are the steps that make this goal inevitable in a day? …Make it an achievable goal for you to hit those things and focus on that and give yourself dopamine for that rather than…my goal is to wake up every morning and try and get a job. That’s very,…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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Dial in Your Dopamine: Motivation, Focus, and the ADHD Brain at Work with Skye Waterson (1/2) 43:10

för 11 weeks sedan43:10

43:10

Are push notifications directing your day? While useful in some ways, push notifications can also become a huge distraction, especially for the ADHD brain. This week in episode 313 we’re joined by Skye Waterson, a former academic turned business owner and ADHD coach, to discuss practical strategies for staying focused in your work. Since dopamine levels affect our motivation, we might need to make adjustments to our dopamine levels to help increase our focus whether we work in an office or from home. Skye will explore some of the unique challenges of working from home with ADHD, thoughts on the ADHD brain’s struggle with procrastination, and the importance of clarifying our daily priorities. We also discuss the purpose of developing daily routines that will decrease stress and support working memory. Original Recording Date: 12-29-2024 Topics – A Different Perspective on ADHD in Our Careers, Baselining ADHD and Work Environments, Motivation and Dopamine at Work, Working from Home and Managing Distractions, Developing Purposeful Routines, Communication Preferences and Managing Push Notifications, Procrastination and Prioritization 2:11 – A Different Perspective on ADHD in Our Careers * Skye Waterson is a former academic who found out she had ADHD at the beginning of pursuing a PhD. As a result, Skye decided to focus on ADHD research. After doing a bunch of research on ADHD, Skye posted her findings on the internet. Once the pandemic hit, Skye began coaching and loved it. She has grown her coaching practice into a 6-figure business and recently transitioned to working with business owners who have ADHD. * We’ve discussed ADHD on the show previously with guests Jon Towles and Kristen Carder, but this time we’re going to approach it from a different angle. Here are the links if you would like to go back and hear those discussions: * Episode 129 – The Challenges of a Superpower with Jon Towles (1/2) * Episode 130 – The Excellent Advocate with Jon Towles (2/2) * Episode 216 – Experiencing a Neurodivergent Diagnosis with Kristen Carder (1/2) * Episode 217 – The Vulnerable Parts of ADHD with Kristen Carder (2/2) 3:15 – Baselining ADHD and Work Environments * How would Skye define what ADHD is and is not? * ADHD is a persistent and pervasive struggle with executive functioning (an area where Skye is heavily focused), impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation. This comes from shifts in the brain as seen in the neuroscience. * Skye tells us the DSM-5 is most commonly used for diagnosing ADHD. The DSM-5 is a set of criteria and questions one would get asked by a professional (usually as psychiatrist but could be other professionals depending on your country) to diagnose ADHD. There are slightly different criteria to diagnose ADHD depending on whether you’re a child or an adult. * When diagnosing adults, professionals are looking for whether your struggles have been pervasive over time. * There are two primary types of ADHD: * Primarily Inattentive – it may not show up, but this usually means you are distracted * Primarily Hypera...…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

1
A Bridge to Community: CNCF Ambassador and Technical Translator with Julia Furst Morgado (2/2) 38:17

för 12 weeks sedan38:17

38:17

How should we use our influence as technologists? For Julia Furst Morgado, it’s not about increasing followers on social media or hitting some kind of metric. It’s a focus on educating and helping others…being a bridge into a technical community for someone else. This week in episode 312 you’ll hear more about Julia’s role as a global technologist for Veeam. We discuss the realities of traveling heavily for work and attending events while continuing to learn and build community. We’ll explore Julia’s involvement in the open-source community as a CNCF Ambassador and how she overcame impostor syndrome as a public speaker. Part of being an ambassador and a bridge to technical communities is also acting as a technical translator, making complex topics easier to understand. Listen closely to hear the full story. Original Recording Date: 12-19-2024 Julia Furst Morgado is a global technologist at Veeam. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Julia, you can find it here . Topics – Public Speaking and Acting as a Bridge, CNCF and Open Source, Finding Balance and Focusing on Helping Others, Work Travel and Community Building, Global Technologist and Translator, Parting Thoughts 2:28 – Public Speaking and Acting as a Bridge * Did Julia know there would be a large component of her work in the role at Veeam that was public speaking? * Julia did not realize this would be a big part of her role at Veeam. She was excited to be offered the job even before finishing the boot camp but had also heard one’s first job in tech can be hard when you are changing careers / coming from a non-technical background. * While Julia had a strong professional network already, she knew the role would be an exciting challenge. * “I said ‘yes, count me in.’ And I love what I do. I love what I do. My team is amazing. I couldn’t dream to do something different. It was perfect. I couldn’t have asked for something different.” – Julia Furst Morgado * How did Julia prepare to give public presentations? * Julia tells us she used to be more introverted but learned to get out of her shell and not fear judgement from others. It was the same with public speaking. * She tells us being prepared helps us be confident to deliver a public presentation. * “The problem for me was impostor syndrome. The problem wasn’t getting on stage and presenting and not stumbling or…forgetting the slides. For me it was impostor syndrome because I never worked in production. Even to this day I never worked in production…. And I’m up there talking to engineers, senior engineers, even CTOs, CISOs…. Who am I to be up there without experience? That’s what really bothered me for a long period, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.” – Julia Furst Morgado, on impostor syndrome * Julia says it took some self-talk to shift her mindset going into these presentations. She told herself it was ok to be up there speaking. She may not know everything about a topic but can still present confidently on the topic. If someone asks a question Julia does not know how to answer, she can find the right resource to get the person’s question answered. * “But I’m just that bridge. I’m a very good bridge from the technical to the external audience…so communities at conferences and events.” – Julia Furst Morgado * John highlights the feeling that people expect a presenter to be an authority. He calls what Julia has done being a gateway to other resources like product management or solution architects. To do this, you have to be honest with yourself about what you know and what you don’t and at the same time be willing to direct someone to the right person to get an answer....…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

1
The Uniqueness of Tech: 100Devs, Coffee Chats, and the Hallway Track with Julia Furst Morgado (1/2) 43:25

för 13 weeks sedan43:25

43:25

What would you do with a free pass to a tech conference? Julia Furst Morgado had to decide whether to attend KubeCon without ever having been to a tech conference. After deciding to attend, she came back from the conference with a new perspective and a job offer. While this looks easy on the surface, there’s much more to the story. In episode 311 we’re joined by global technologist Julia Furst Morgado. We’re going to explore Julia’s early career in law, the shift to marketing, and how that ultimately led her to the tech industry. Julia will tell us her reasons for attending a boot camp and how informational coffee chats and “hallway track” networking at tech conferences were instrumental in building her professional network. If you’ve heard the phrase “learning in public” but have never done it yourself, get ready for some inspiration from Julia’s story and tips on how you can get started helping the greater technical community. Original Recording Date: 12-19-2024 Topics – Meet Julia Furst Morgado, Life before Tech, Learn in Public, Pursuing a Boot Camp and Building a Professional Network, Tech Conferences and the Hallway Track, Details on 100Devs 2:37 – Meet Julia Furst Morgado * Julia Furst Morgado is a global technologist at Veeam. * Julia’s role is as a community-facing technical evangelist. She is heavily involved in the technical community and shares feedback with product managers to improve future product functionalities. * When new product releases happen, Julia also gives presentations, hosts webinars, and writes blogs to educate the technical community. * Though not directly part of her job, Julia organizes a number of events that benefit the greater technical community. * Would Julia’s role be classified as technical marketing? * A more appropriate classification would be developer advocacy or developer relations. * Julia works within the Office of the CTO, but many times these roles can sit within a marketing organization or even inside a sales organization (which ultimately depends on the company). 4:35 – Life before Tech * How did Julia get interested in technology in the first place? * Julia transitioned into the technology field about 2 years ago and has achieved a great deal in a short time. * Julia is from Brazil and was born in Sao Palo and went to law school there. Julia had a sister studying law, and not knowing what she wanted to do after high school, Julia pursued law as well. * Julia later moved to the US after getting a student visa and studied business at the University of California at Berkeley. She went on to work in marketing as a marketing manager at an MSP (managed service provider). * Before working for the MSP, Julia never would have considered a transition into technology. * Working with the engineers at the MSP taught Julia quite a bit. As the only marketing person at the MSP, she had to do a number of things. * “It sparked that want to be more technical. And during the pandemic I got laid off, and I did a coding boot camp. And that’s how I transitioned into tech.” – Julia Furst Morgado, on working for an MSP as the spark that got her interested in tech * What did Julia not like about law? * Julia describes the law field as a different world. People wear jeans and t-shirts at technology conferences, but you won’t find that in the legal field. People wear suits and are very formal just like we see on Netflix and other television shows. * “I worked at an office that was very toxic, and I just decided that’s not what I want. And to begin with, I wasn’t even sure…that I liked law.” – Julia Furst Morgado, on pursuing a career in law…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

1
Finding a Better Way: Contracting, Independence, and a Consultant’s Reputation with David Klee (2/2) 49:04

för 14 weeks sedan49:04

49:04

Does a successful consulting career mean you should only work for yourself? David Klee insists you first need to become a skilled consultant with the right kind of reputation. In episode 310, part two of our focused discussion on the nuances of consulting, we dive into the realities—and the pros and cons—of contracting, working full-time for a consulting firm, and the independence of running your own business. These represent 3 of the 4 ways someone could work as a consultant. Building on last week’s conversation about what makes a great consultant, we discuss the importance of developing a reputation and some tips for how to do it. David also shares his approach to assessing consulting talent, highlighting the key traits that make a consultant stand out. And we’ll also hear why, after 11 years owning a consulting firm, David can’t see himself doing anything else. Original Recording Date: 12-18-2024 David Klee is the founder of a niche consulting company called Heraflux Technologies . If you missed part 1 of this discussion with David, check out Episode 309 . Topics – Contract Work as a Consultant, Working for a Consulting Only Firm, Starting a Consulting Firm / Doing Your Own Thing, Keeping Consulting Enjoyable 2:25 – Contract Work as a Consultant * Another way to do consulting work is to be a contractor. How does this work differently than full-time employment? * Full-time employment could be 1 project for 40 hours per week, but it is unlikely. It will more often be a certain number of hours per day working on a few (or even several) different projects. * “Things just kind of float to where you’re juggling anywhere from 3 or 4 to 20 projects at the same time. A contract is going to be a tightly defined scope for a block of time for either per day, per week, whatever. And it’s going to run a duration such as 2 months, 6 months, a year…something like that where you’re able to refine what you do. It’s generally speaking going to be a task or a set of tasks, and that’s what you do.” – David Klee, contrasting being a consultant working full-time for an employer that does more than just consulting with being a contractor * A project you work on as a contractor is controlled. You know when it starts, what to expect, and when it ends. * A contractor has to line up the next project once one ends. Knowing the endpoint can help you understand when it’s time to begin looking for the next project. * Contracting might allow focusing or going deeper on the work you are tasked to do instead of getting too broad. David gives the example of needing to build a data warehouse for a specific ERP system within 6 months. * David says contract work is safe and sustainable. In fact, one of the first projects after David started Heraflux was a contract engagement which required travel to Connecticut and working 5 days per week at a customer location for 6 months. * Where can people find contract job openings? Are these on company websites, on LinkedIn, only available through headhunters, etc.? * David says it works best if you can go through a headhunting entity. Companies may post contract positions on LinkedIn or popular job sites, but a headhunter can evaluate someone’s skill set and share a set of projects that align to that skill set. The candidate can then select which projects they would like to interview for, and the interview may be with the headhunter, with the end customer, or possibly both. * “It’s a way where instead of you looking (and there may be phantom jobs or people just fishing for who is out there) the headhunter is usually going t...…

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