Making a Powerful Impact with Jeffrey Snover – Ep 81

John Mark Troyer – The Geek Whisperers

What do you do when you know something is important for your company, but your management doesn’t agree? For our guest Jeffrey Snover, building PowerShell was so important he took a demotion at Microsoft to do it. Now PowerShell is arguably one of the most powerful and effective tools to empower administrators across IT using tech from Microsoft to VMware and Jeffrey is a Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect for Windows Server and System Center.

Jeffrey believed that this was one of the best ideas he’d had, and so he was willing to walk against a management headwind to build it. It’s underlying technology, .NET, wasn’t even well-regarded inside Microsoft at the time.

• The existential view of life: at the end of your life, have you had an impact on the world? Going to Microsoft from IBM to have an impact on millions of people’s lives
• When your manager says, “I need more output from you,” they may not be saying what you think they mean. You may need to learn how to influence the organization to get leverage.
• “People who do management should really love doing management.”
• Looking out into the world and figuring out what’s going to matter.
• The ultimate Bill Gates review meeting. The gift of dissatisfaction. “My job’s not tell him what he wants to hear; my job is to tell him the truth.”
• To deliver a significant technical product, you have to have the passion for the product. You must not quit.
• Bullish on IT. There are lots of hard problems for people to solve. But you must invest in your career. Computing should be, and can be, fun. If it’s not fun, do something else. (Lumber? Digging ditches?)
• @jsnover & jsnover.com