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

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

#Tech #Careers #Business #Podcasting Education #Self-Improvement #John White And Nick Korte

13:44

Legendary actor and mental health advocate Glenn Close is on a quest to change how we think about mental health, starting with her decision to speak out about her own family's struggles — a brave choice considering the stigma that pervades the topic. This week, we're revisiting this sweeping conversation with TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, where Close shares the inspiration behind the advocacy group she founded to combat the crisis, underscoring the transformative power of community and the critical need for comprehensive mental health care systems. Want to help shape TED’s shows going forward? Fill out our survey ! Become a TED Member today at https://ted.com/join Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.…

about a year ago 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.

344 episodes

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

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

published about a year ago

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344 episodes

#Tech #Careers #Business #Podcasting Education #Self-Improvement #John White And Nick Korte

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Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

1
A Space for Critique: Lead by Amplifying Voices and Giving Credit with Erin O’Quinn (2/3) 38:45

5 days ago38:45

38:45

Looking to improve the performance of your team? Improve the way they communicate, and you just might surprise yourself. When we take the time to understand how people like to be communicated with and how they like to communicate with others, it changes everything. In episode 331, Erin O’Quinn is back with us to share what it takes to create a safe space for collecting ideas from members of a team so that all voices are heard and the right people get the credit for great work. You’ll hear all this through the backdrop of Erin’s experience as a team lead and people manager, and you won’t want to miss the story of how Erin shifted her personal brand to improve her own job performance in the process. Original Recording Date: 05-14-2025 Erin O’Quinn is a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. If you missed part one of our discussion with Erin detailing her early career, check out Episode 330 . Topics – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead, Giving Others a Voice and a Space for More Contribution, The Tactics Behind the Strategy of People Management, Promotion and Personal Brand 2:49 – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead To this point we’ve talked about a lot of projects with which Erin was successful, and people started to give her more. In all of these cases there were elements of leadership in getting the project accomplished by working with others. Let’s explore how Erin moved into the team lead role. The team lead guides a specific group of people toward a goal and is usually not the people manager of any member of the team. A team lead could be leading a team of people who report to many different managers, for example. Erin began leading programs in her twenties, but at first, some of her colleagues with more experience were apprehensive about Erin’s placement in that position. Erin remembers having great managers who would sense a conflict coming and have a conversation with people before Erin did as a form of blocking and tackling and supporting her in these situations. “With the team lead piece it’s figuring out how to get a successful delivery of something. You may not always run each of these people’s schedules or timelines, so it’s being that program or project manager. And you have to deliver a successful result. Usually for me, with these marketing pieces, it was to an event or to a point…. It was going to have a final point and stop. There was a put up or shut up moment that will happen for every single thing that I touched, and you will know if you succeeded or your failed because it happened or it didn’t. And if it didn’t, then we have another problem, and that’s another conversation you’ll have with your actual manager.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin says the team lead role is about learning how other people work, and one of her biggest challenges was figuring out how to best communicate with people. She gives a few examples: People take criticism and feedback differently. Some people are very shy in a group setting and don’t feel comfortable speaking up, while others are loud and consistently speak up in a group setting. Erin gives the example of navigating how to take feedback from the person talking the most in a meeting as well as feedback from someone who sent an e-mail or had a 1-1 conversation with you after the meeting because they were not comfortable speaking up in the meeting. “Being able to hear the different levels of voices as a manager of a program or a project or a team became one of the challenges that I got really excited about because I knew so many people…they were geniuses when you would put them on a stage or get them speaking to people, but they would get in these…quagmires when they were talking to their managers because they didn’t know how to speak to that one individual.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin saw this kind of thing happening and didn’t want to be in this situation. She also did not want to be the future manager who didn’t let a top performer shine due to not knowing how to make them look better / get seen in the best possible way. Erin would e-mail the team to communicate decisions in a way that showed the rest of the team how she was going to take in team member feedback. She gives the example of sending a message and adding in an important context point one member of the team brought up to her directly. “It became a learned process to how to work together…. A lot of times the loudest person in the room is the one that gets heard the most, and that’s the way that you always go. But…they realized that sometimes there was a benefit to the other quieter voices actually having a say or letting them own a piece of something in a different way and letting their creativity shine in a new way that maybe would have been squashed down in a bigger group so that everybody had something that they had ownership of. There was more pride. That allowed the team to do more things better because they were willing to do it that way. And it was a lot of fun.” – Erin O’Quinn, on being a team lead 7:41 – Giving Others a Voice and a Space for More Contribution Did experience as a team lead get Erin comfortable to start looking for a people manager position? “I think I was always looking for a people management position, but being a woman in tech…there’s a tendency that if you’re not already qualified to do the job you’re taking on you don’t apply for the job that you’re taking on, that you really want.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin mentions there is statistical data supporting the stark difference in the likelihood of applying for a job between women and men. Women feel they need to have significantly more of the required skills for a specific job before they are comfortable applying. It’s been harder for women to get into upper-level management because they are more tentative and don’t push because they think they shouldn’t unless they are perfect for the job. “I think there’s a little bit more bravado that comes from a lot of guys where they’re like, ‘I want that so I’m going to go for it’ versus women who say, ‘I’m qualified for it so I will go for it.’ One is a lot harder to do than the other.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin was on a team that was half men and half women with each person having their own communication style. Erin noticed women on the team would be collaborative with each other and work together well. If put into a larger group with men, they would often not speak up the same way they would if part of a group of all women. “So, figuring out how to be the voice willing to come over the top and say, ‘such and such has an idea or such and such has this approach…let’s look at all of them together’ became my superpower…. And it didn’t have to be me. If anyone else put a new idea on the table let’s at least look at it because even if it wasn’t the perfect idea, it’s going to spur on ideas from others that maybe leads to that perfect idea or a better idea than just the one that was shouted out the loudest. That’s where I started to learn the team management skills….” – Erin O’Quinn Erin first had to learn how to lead a group of people, and the people manager skills came only after getting to that position. Were people initially uncomfortable with their ideas being shared with the entire team if shared with Erin 1-1? Thinking back to the first time this happened, Erin shared an idea without asking first because the person was not comfortable speaking up in larger groups. After doing this Erin went back and spoke to that person 1-1. Everything turned out ok in this case. After later becoming a team manager, Erin would have these conversations with people beforehand to ensure it was ok to share their ideas / feedback with the larger team. As part of these discussions, she would help team members understand the value of their idea to the larger group and both the timeliness and urgency of sharing the feedback. In early management roles, Erin liked to make deicisions, go fast, and consider the right factors and team member input before a decision couldn’t be reversed. John says in an ideation phase, having more ideas is better than having less. But judging the ideas is a separate phase entirely. Erin says it should be but may not always happen that way. “If you go into a room with a lot of people and there’s different levels of role within that room…if I’m not at the bottom, I try not to talk first. There’s a power with having a title or having an experience or what have you where if you say, ‘this is my idea,’ some people who are junior might go, ‘oh, that’s THE idea’ not ‘this is an idea.’” – Erin O’Quinn Even if a person with a high title says something just to get the conversation going, junior team members may think their opinion will not matter. Erin stresses the importance of letting more junior people share ideas first. The team can then iterate on those, and junior team members will not be afraid to participate. It puts everyone on equal footing. Erin tells us there have been a number of times where she asked a question about something a senior leader said in a meeting because she felt like it was a safe enough environment in which to do it. She made sure to ask questions before a decision was made so as not to question the direction set forth by the leader. “If we’re still trying to figure it out or trying to sus out what the goal is, throw everything up then, and don’t be afraid…. If I was doing this with one of my teams I would always start…asking other individual contributors first…. Where should this go? What is your idea? What problem do you see with this? Give them a space to critique somebody else, or give them a space to critique somebody who is more senior to them, even if they have the same title, because a lot of times…some people put a lot of value and weight to somebody else who has years, age years, on them…. The world is changing all the time, and somebody who is looking at it with fresh eyes may have a better approach. And there’s nothing wrong with listening. Even if you disagree with them, hear it out first, and then decide…is what they said worth it? I think a good manager and a good team lead or a project lead can provide a lot of space for more contribution so you don’t get stuck in a ‘this is how we do things.’ I think that is one of the challenges of being at a bigger company. Because you’re working with a matrixed organization and a big machine, you gotta do all these steps and all these processes, but sometimes if you don’t stop and look at the machine, you can’t figure out how to change it. And you will be left behind by these small, nimble organizations.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin has seen very experienced colleagues think they are right because of the extent of their experience, but they might not be. Try listening to fresh ideas and being open to new perspectives. Ask the newest member of the team how they are looking at or seeing something. This can open up questions and topics of discussion that can lead to better results. Erin reminds us there is no harm in asking for this kind of feedback early on. Nick loves the idea of providing a safe space in which people can give feedback and share ideas. Did sending out people’s ideas to the team make them more likely to speak up in future discussions? Erin likes to give credit for concepts. While we do have to be careful about adding ideas after an open discussion concludes to not look like we’re pushing a personal agenda, Erin wanted to let her teams know that people who may have been quiet in the room were indeed participating. Their participation was in a different way than others, and that is ok. It may feel like a time suck, but Erin tells us it is well worth it to take the time to go through a process to understand how people like to be communicated with and how they like to communicate to others. “Understanding that process really can make a huge difference in how a team functions. I’ve been on very dysfunctional teams. I’ve been on very, very streamlined teams…. One of the teams that I was on…it was a great team. Everybody loved each other. Working as individuals with each other, everybody got along, but there were some communication challenges. And we went through this process and learned that certain people, even if they were quiet people, they communicated in a different way than you expected them to….” – Erin O’Quinn The communications exercise Erin mentioned above cleared up a lot of misunderstandings with one particular team and made a massive difference in the way people worked with one another. Erin shares an example of how understanding communication styles helped junior team members gain confidence, dispel fear, and collaborate more effectively with other teammates faster than they would have without that understanding. “If you build the team, you know the players on your team. You kind of know what you’re bringing into a group. If…you’re inheriting a team, setting a level playing field for how people talk to each other is very helpful so that everybody understands the communication process.” – Erin O’Quinn 19:04 – The Tactics Behind the Strategy of People Management When Erin got the manager role, did she feel she was fully qualified before she applied? Erin says she had no doubt at that point and that she probably should have tried it earlier. Erin is in customer advocacy / customer references, and it’s a pretty flat organization. “It’s hard to move up when everything’s pretty flat. Your responsibility changes. Maybe you mentor more or you guide more or you’re seen as an expert by more people. But you’re rarely moved to a different layer of management because it’s usually a fairly flat organization.” – Erin O’Quinn Did Erin seek out the manager role, or did someone encourage her to do it? Erin thinks she had been speaking to her manager about it. She was given a promotion but not necessarily to manage people. When asked what other kinds of things she wanted to do, Erin said she wanted to have a team. “I want to have a team, and it’s not because I need more people, necessarily, to do everything that I’m doing. But, I think that I’ve picked up rapport and skills that I could help others navigate these things in a more meaningful way…. I can help somebody else. That’s why I wanted to be a people manager.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin cites having excellent managers in the past who were great mentors that walked her through processes even when they were very busy. She was able to observe how those managers did blocking and tackling, learn from their strategic thinking, and understand how decisions were made. She was able to understand “the tactics behind the strategy” to make it easier to move into people management later. “Not everybody is cut out to be a people manager. I think there’s a lot more people who could be amazing…thought leaders or individual contributors, and there’s no harm in that. And a lot of tech companies have realized some of the people who are genius level individuals are not designed to have a team of 50 report to them because that takes them away from what they are amazing at…. For me, I realized that there’s only so many things that one human being can do at a time, and I think I’ve picked up the skills and the abilities to actually be able to help others even if what they’re doing is not my expertise. I don’t have to train them in my image. I just have to be able to give them the space and the tools so that they can do what they’re going to be good at.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin has also seen examples of very bad managerial conversations. She mentions one instance of a manager reprimanding an employee who was never told until the reprimand that there was a problem. “In a space where people don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, sometimes it’s ok to be the bearer of bad news. You have to actually just say it.” – Erin O’Quinn, on giving difficult feedback Erin shares the story of having a discussion with someone about specific challenges. The person thought everything was fine and working well, but that was very different than how things were being perceived by others. Erin had to give the person some very candid feedback on how what they were doing was being perceived, making sure not to label it as right or wrong. This person needed to communicate their successes and the gaps more effectively to their management. Erin took the time to coach this person in better ways to communicate via the quote shared below and helped develop a plan for improvement. In the end, this person thanked Erin for the feedback and help because they did not know. “You can’t do that. Until they know that you are the expert, they won’t necessarily believe that saying ‘we’re good’ means anything. So, you gotta prove first that you get it, you understand the metrics the way that they need to see the metrics, and show them repeatedly that you’re delivering these results. And then, after that, if they see the pattern, then you can say ‘we’re good’ and they know that that means that you got all of these metrics down and we’re set…. But until you can articulate it and speak it in the same language, that’s not how it’s being seen.” – Erin O’Quinn, feedback to someone on how to better communicate with leaders Erin likes to address things early on to avoid “kick in the pants” moments like the one shared earlier. If you see something, you should say something. Erin might send someone an e-mail with feedback after a meeting, for example. She encourages team members to take credit for the work they are doing. It is better for a team member to talk about the great work they are doing in front of others so they get the credit. If Erin mentions it, she might get the credit instead of the team member (which she does not want). Erin has even encouraged peers of hers to promote themselves in front of others so that the team overall looks stronger. “The rest of the people are why I’m a leader – because they’re doing all these amazing things, and these are all the amazing things that they’re doing. Give yourself credit. Don’t just say, ‘this happened.’ Say, ‘I helped this happen’ or ‘this happened because I did this work.’ And show the work…. Being able to help people toot their own horn is one of my favorite parts of being a manager.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin tells us there’s a misconception about customer advocacy. People think stories being out there make them magically appear. It takes work to identify the story and give someone the space to tell the story that can then be packaged into something amazing. It’s the extra pieces brought to the story that make it work, and people deserve credit for shaping that final product. Nick likes the way Erin didn’t label anything as good or bad when giving difficult feedback to someone and focused only on how someone’s actions were being perceived. We need to give people a context to work in. If we tell someone something is wrong, they need to understand what is wrong and what is right. We have to set a context and tell a person what people are seeing and the mismatch between what others see and what they are trying to do. Erin likes to help the person build a plan to get the person closer to where they intended to go. “There’s a lot of people who are great at promoting other things, but they’re not great at promoting themselves. For a long time, I was in that boat….” – Erin O’Quinn At first Erin felt like promoting herself and her work was bragging. She wanted to be humble and stay behind the scenes when it came to event marketing. Erin says we cannot move forward if we don’t talk a little bit about what we’re doing. 27:25 – Promotion and Personal Brand John feels like we’ve been talking about personal brands in the last few minutes. What’s Erin’s take on personal branding? Erin says a brand is the feeling we get when we perceive something. When we see company logos of brands, there’s an instant emotional reaction of some kind that happens. “A personal brand is, ‘what does this person mean to you in the context of work?’ Straightforward. Everybody’s got one whether you want one or not.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin says she re-built her personal brand during COVID but didn’t realize she was doing it at the time. She had a number of personal challenges during the lockdowns in addition to just COVID. “Being a mom with a kid at home going through personal stuff during COVID, and everything was on display because everybody’s working from home. It takes a lot of effort to have your business persona and your home persona, and I realized that I was putting up a lot of effort to separate them…. I stopped trying to separate that and just be more present, more me…. I realized that what people said was professional was just being in a box, and I kind of threw the box out.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin had been told earlier in her career what being professional or being approachable looked like. There were some other preconceived notions as well. “I kind of scrapped it and said, ‘I think I’m good at my job because the people that I work with appreciate my candor. They appreciate my sense of humor or my approachability. Just do that and be that all the time. Why try to be something else if it’s working?’” – Erin O’Quinn Erin realized she did not need to separate those parts as much and could bring her personality into all parts of her job. It was ok to do it. After making this change, Erin felt more comfortable, and because she was more comfortable, she was more approachable and able to do her job better. Being more present as a person allowed Erin to have better conversations with co-workers. She was more candid and open. Erin was able to approach customer conversations very differently than before as well. “It makes it easier to have the conversation, easier to do the next step, if they are talking to a person as opposed to a role. Once I figured that out and let it go, my job got so much easier, and I got better at it too.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin has been able to maintain this brand and attitude ever since making the change. Multiple times she has been able to approach something differently or ask in a different way to encourage someone to share their story with the customer advocacy team. It helps eliminate doubt. “Any time I can do that to help somebody get their story out in the world, I’m in to help that.” – Erin O’Quinn John refers to this as injecting human and personal relationships into a business process to remove friction. Organizations are ultimately made up of people. “I think if people realize that they’re working with a person and that person has thoughts, feelings, and emotions you are more beholden to act. If given the opportunity, I’d rather have the conversation in person. I’d rather have it on Zoom than on the phone because I can see your reaction or you can see my reaction, and you know that I’m being genuine. You can’t fake real. You can try. You can be the best actor in the world. You can know how to cry on command or whatever, but there’s a falsehood to it. And I’d rather just be genuine, make an ask or connect with somebody, and it’ll work better. It’s helped me maintain more meaningful work relationships over the years…my whole career, quite honestly.” – Erin O’Quinn Mentioned in the Outro While not mentioned in the episode, Erin has used empathy as a skill in effective team management. This pairs very nicely with Marni Coffey’s use of empathy to build inclusive teams in Episode 278 – Uncovering Empathy: The Greatest Skill of an Inclusive Leader with Marni Coffey (1/3) . Erin’s focus on improved communication even as a team lead was also a focus on developing the people around her. If you listen to Marni Coffey’s story of becoming a team lead in Episode 279 – Change Management: The Hardest Leap and Developing People with Marni Coffey (2/3) , this theme of developing others is reiterated. We’ve heard multiple guests reiterate the need to develop others to be successful as a team lead. Even if you’re not a team lead or a manager, you can figure out how to best communicate with your co-workers by just asking them. Brad Pinkston told us way back in Episode 84 – Management Interviews and Transitions with Brad Pinkston that one of the first questions he asks a new boss is how they like to be communicated with. We can also blend our personality into our communication with people to strengthen connection. There were a number of motivations for becoming a people manager in that episode: Helping other people avoid mistakes Make sure people receive credit for the work they are doing and that they can communicate their work to management in an understandable way. Some of Erin’s work as a manager is getting employees to advocate for themselves to tell the story of the work they did to achieve an outcome. Hopefully you’re communicating the work you are doing in 1-1s with your manager, but don’t forget that documenting your accomplishments is a pre-requisite to these conversations! Erin paid attention to things her managers did well (i.e. how to have difficult conversations) and what some did not do well. Check out Episode 244 – An Array of Decision Points with Tim Crawford (2/2) as a compliment to this episode with some extra considerations on the decision between individual contributor and manager. 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 . If uncertainty is getting to you, check out or Career Uncertainty Action Guide with a checklist of actions to take control during uncertain periods and AI prompts to help you think through topics like navigating a recent layoff, financial planning, or managing your mindset and being overwhelmed.…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

1
A Utility Player’s Advantage: The Work of Marketing in Tech with Erin O’Quinn (1/3) 45:06

12 days ago45:06

45:06

Being a utility player in the sports world is one thing, but what does a utility player look like in the tech industry? Erin O’Quinn, our guest this week in episode 330, says it takes a willingness to learn, approaching what you learn as something that can help you later, and a willingness to advocate for yourself. Erin is currently a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. After studying communications in college, Erin’s first roles were in marketing communications, where she became well versed in the logistics of events like trade shows and developed a distinctive advantage by saying yes to new tasks / projects (even a little IT support for her employer). Throughout this first part of the story, Erin learned what she wanted most from a company’s culture, what it takes to develop a corporate brand, and how to communicate effectively with executives. As you listen to this episode, think about this – what is something you could say yes to today that could help you grow in the future? Original Recording Date: 05-14-2025 Topics – Communications and the Work of Marketing, Experience with the Cultural Elements of Tech Companies, A Return to the Tech Industry, The Strategic Side of Marketing, Communication with Executives 2:15 – Communications and the Work of Marketing Erin O’Quinn is a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. She has conversations with account teams and end customers to truly understand how customers use specific products, the benefits they have received from those products over time, and how success has impacted careers, teams, and the overall business. Erin tells us it’s a fun job. From where Erin began, it’s been a long, winding road to get to where she is now. Upon starting college, Erin planned to be a psychologist and counsel people in a 1-1 staetting. The school she attended (University of California San Diego) had a psychology program more focused on behavioral psychology and less on how people interact. As a result, Erin decided to pivot to studying communications. This ended up being a natural shift. The communications program focused on mass communications and communications as a social and cultural force. Human information processing concepts brought in some psychology as well. Erin refers to herself as a media junkie who wanted to understand how it influences people Some of Erin’s first roles were in MarCom positions, but not all were with technology companies. MarCom is marketing communications, but with marketing in general, the same terms can mean different things at different companies. “If you ever look at job descriptions and you see a title, you can’t just go by the name of a job. You actually have to look at what the job description is to figure out if what you think it says is what it is. But marketing communications at that point meant more of the mass communications…creating publications….” – Erin O’Quinn, on MarCom positions In college Erin became the editor of a newsletter. She learned how to do layouts and graphic design in addition to doing some writing. Her first job was with the San Jose Real Estate Board, made up of local chapters to help members become realtors. Erin would send out the newsletter, but the company also realized Erin knew how to fix computers. When people had questions and IT was not around, people would ask Erin. She became the IT department and the marketing department. The company was switching from Novell to Microsoft. They wanted Erin to help with this transition, and when she asked for formal training to fill knowledge and experience gaps, it was denied. She was worried a poor outcome could be career limiting and began looking for other jobs. The transition to Microsoft, however, did go smoothly. “But I did switch from there into tech because I realized I enjoyed the idea of being a little more hands on with technology, but I like the marketing side. So, I went to a tech company….” – Erin O’Quinn The company Erin worked for developed a back end for search engines like HotBot and Yahoo. Erin accepted a job as an executive assistant at this company but told her boss she would only take it with the understanding that she did not want to be an executive assistant in a year. “I told my boss at the time, ‘I will take this job if you promise me that I won’t be your assistant in a year. ‘I knew that I wasn’t somebody who wanted to be an administrative assistant. I wanted in at the company because it sounded fun and the people were interesting. And I loved not being the smartest person in the room. I was guaranteed to do that at this company. I knew I would be learning all the time.” – Erin O’Quinn Around 6 weeks into the job, Erin was asked to help support the company at a trade show. She expressed a willingness to learn and said yes to her first trade show. The next time she was asked to support the company at a trade show, Erin had to run the entire event in New York City to fill in for a colleague. She learned about unions, working with vendors, and how to set up the booth at the trade show. Since it was a small team, Erin needed to know how to demo the company’s products, who to ask if there were in-depth questions she could not answer, and how to talk to anyone who came by the booth whether it was a CIO or any other member of a technical team. Erin loved the events side. It allowed her to work with many different people at the company. She liked the challenge of either figuring things out or failing. Were there other reasons Erin didn’t want to be an executive assistant long-term? Being an executive assistant (or EA) was more about taking care of an individual and less about doing the work of marketing. Erin was more interested in the marketing work than being a support character. Erin had worked in her own department before and was changing jobs to become someone’s assistant. After developing skills and experience in her previous marketing role, she wanted to keep growing. Many assistants stay in those roles for a long time, and Erin didn’t want to stay in it long because the shift to something else is more difficult if you are an assistant for a long time. Erin wanted to set the agenda and intention with her boss up front, and it made things easier to shift out of the assistant role later. “I wasn’t asking for crazy money. I wasn’t asking for a lot of things, but if I was willing to fight for myself that way up front, he knew that I was going to be somebody interesting to work with. And I think that actually helped me get the job…. I love being a generalist whenever possible. It’s more fun.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin was focused on ambition and optionality. Had Erin been interested in writing up to the point of doing the newsletter to make her a well-rounded communicator going into marketing? When in college, Erin assumed communications entailed either being in front of a camera or writing, thinking she needed to build skills in both areas. Erin tells the story of working with her roommate to resurrect a specific newsletter for the university. Erin used her experience in layouts, and the roommate did the editorial part. Even after Erin and her roommate left the university, the newsletter continued to build momentum thanks to their initial commitment to get it going again. Erin also did an internship at a phone book company. The phone books were published in English, Tagalog , Chinese, and Vietnamese to serve a large Asian community in San Diego. Erin would take translated ads and do layouts as well as reach out to local politicians to get endorsement letters. “I started advocacy in college, whether I knew it or not. I just followed the transcript and did it. It kind of got me set up, I guess, to do it later in life.” – Erin O’Quinn 12:28 – Experience with the Cultural Elements of Tech Companies What did the moves look like once Erin moved on from the executive assistant role? Erin grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has been surrounded by tech since birth. Some of her family members worked for HP for their entire career. Erin’s mother works in the biotech / pharmaceutical industry, and her dad worked as a punch card programmer before he went on to a career in sales. Tech was booming at this time. There were lots of job opportunities, and it seemed like a good industry to enter. The web was still pretty new. Erin had learned HTML in college and filled in once when a webmaster (or website administrator) left. Erin worked on promotional items and ran events. Because she was good at it, Erin was asked to run all the trade shows for the company, and it became her primary job. This involved things like handling logistics, working with product management and product marketing teams, and sometimes working with development teams. Erin had to ensure the technical specifications for what would be demonstrated in the booth were properly captured and that the booth was set up properly. Understanding servers and networking was very helpful because Erin helped set up the booth and especially in cases where they had technical issues at the booth. Erin needed to know other things like how to have people behave, how they should dress, the colors to use, and how to handle marketing for the events. Erin says she eventually became the promo queen at this company. “I was always having fun and always getting to learn. I never felt like I was being stuck in a role. If I wanted to know something different, I asked the question. That first tech company I worked at was very happy to get me involved. They had a very open culture.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin describes some of the cultural elements at this first tech company where she worked (during the .com era) – super soaker fights, barbecue competitions, etc. “…Different levels of creativity. I loved seeing that it wasn’t just the people who were supposed to be creative. By outside standards everybody assumes that in marketing you’re supposed to be the creative ones because you’re coming up with the visual and the brand and the words. But I loved how creative the development teams were and how creative the IT teams even could be at times…. I gained respect not just for people’s technical knowledge or how they could wordsmith but seeing every person at this organization as wholistic people who have multiple skills. I think that also prepared me for being able to move into different organizations after that in a more meaningful way….It was a blast.” – Erin O’Quinn The unique nature of Erin’s role allowed her to meet every person at the company that went from 65 people to 1300 people at one point. Erin worked with events, internal events, and internal communications. She would assist with content creation for company meetings and handle the meeting logistics. What did Erin take away from this experience in terms of the company culture she wanted for future jobs? Erin calls out the way people interacted and supported each other as something she really liked. There is a difference between doing an activity because we have to and doing it because we want to spend time with the people involved in the activity. “To work with people that made me happy to be in the office with every day was something that I decided I needed in a career, and that’s something that stuck with me….” – Erin O’Quinn Based on the cultural exposure she’d had to that point, Erin was able to look at a new company and contemplate what about it she wanted to be a part of. Erin took a brief break from working in the tech industry after a time of layoffs at her company and worked as a merchandising coordinator at Technology Credit Union. The company had a dual focus – expanding their membership and to whom they were allowed to market. Erin realized quickly into the merchandising coordinator that the work came in spurts. Promotions happened once per quarter and took about 4 weeks to handle effective. Things were quiet the rest of the time, and Erin didn’t like this. As Erin began looking for other things to occupy her time, she found a couple of different teams inside the company with no support from marketing. The first was the business development team who would reach out to businesses (tech companies) and promote membership. “And what I rapidly realized was that the people who were doing that were very good at business development at a credit union, but they didn’t know how tech people thought. They didn’t know their audience.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin felt her experience running tech events could help the business development team communicate more effectively with their audience. She created some marketing packages with branded designs and supported their events. The business development team needed to rethink items they might use for free giveaways because of the tech audience, for example. There was a mortgage team Erin worked with to build out their first set of marketing materials to be seen as consistent with the organization. Erin continued to expand her reach in addition to supporting the promotions each quarter. Helping those other groups as well made the job much more interesting to her. Did the additional work Erin did increase her value to the overall organization? She believes it did. The job market was tough during this time, but for credit unions it is about growing and maintaining the membership. Erin was primarily concerned about 2 things – being useful and picking up skills. Previously when she worked at the tech company, Erin was learning on a daily basis. “How can I make sure that I keep that trajectory? Because otherwise, I will get bored, and I don’t do well in boredom…. So, I wanted to find ways to keep myself entertained, and I did. But it drew me back to tech.” – Erin O’Quinn Did Erin communicate the additional work she was doing to her leadership in 1-1 meetings, for example? Erin’s manager knew what she was doing as did the vice president (VP) above her manager. Sometimes the VP would assign her exploratory projects or ideas to test directly. She would get random tasks. They didn’t always lead somewhere, but each one was an opportunity to learn something, making it interesting for Erin. John says Erin was a utility player in this role. She agrees and says this is a pattern for her over time. Erin tells a story from her previous role at Inktomi that involved buying as many matchbox Ferraris she could purchase in San Francisco as a joke for the CEO of the company. “I always ended up with these very bizarre tasks because I would just be up for whatever was needed.” – Erin O’Quinn Breaks between event seasons gave her the room to be creative in the work she took on. 23:55 – A Return to the Tech Industry When Erin transitioned back to working for a tech company after working at the credit union, she returned to a MarCom role and at first wondered what the pace would be like. She worked for a startup-like public company called Opsware. Erin’s first project after getting the job was focused on the company’s new executive briefing center. She tells the story of needing to have a chairman make some final decisions and then slammed into him by accident in one of the office hallways upon their first meeting. Despite the collision, she did get the answers needed, and her managers were impressed. Part of Erin’s work was doing case studies and trying to establish a corporate brand. The company was also building their sales teams around this time. Erin would work with different groups to make usable tools to serve those teams. As the company became more event focused, Erin jumped back into trade shows again, and since this was her comfort zone, anything else they did would be easy. “I was able to bring some of my expertise in the job, but I was also spending a good portion of the time learning about the technology…. I went from a caching and search engine company into a true enterprise software company. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know how the sales teams would operate. I didn’t understand what was needed, but I learned fast because everybody was willing to talk to me and tell me. Being in a company where they want you to learn and they force you to learn, I was all in for drinking from that fire hose.” – Erin O’Quinn When Erin asked people to show her how to demo products so she could fill in for anyone working the booth as needed, they were a little surprised. Erin was insistent on learning the products, only wanting people to help her understand the pitch for a basic understanding, which opened the door to pass a conversation on to someone else if more depth was needed. As the product portfolio expanded, Erin continued to learn the remainder of the products. Erin refers to her time at Opsware as fast, furious, and fun. She later would go on to work for VMware but realized she was at the first VMworld event representing Opsware. At that conference she ran into a number of former colleagues from Inktomi. “That is when I realized I guess how strong of a world technology really was and that who you know sometimes comes in handy.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin also tells us she stores many different pieces of information in her memory that she will find a use for some time later. How you packed a suitcase might help give you a creative idea for shipping something to an event, for example. Candy is expensive to get through customs when going to Europe, for example. Certain things we learn which we will never forget come in handy in other parts of our job. 28:29 – The Strategic Side of Marketing In addition to tactical items, did Erin get involved in some of the strategic sides of marketing like cultivating the voice of the brand? Erin says she worked on a lot of the presentations for the company. She cannot take credit for the voice of the company but was able to work with a marketing agency her company worked with. They had to figure out how to make something look simple and complicated at the same time or prove the complexity was there without showing it to make the message more accessible to people. Erin worked on creating the visual identity of the company and not specifically the brand or logo. Part of that work was translating what they wanted (which might be complex words) to someone who was very graphically inclined in a way that was understandable. “How do these pieces of information get carried through so that it can be explained either very simply, or prove that complexity to show that we’re handling the complexity in a simple way? That process definitely has helped me along the way…. It was learning new skills more around translation and connecting than it was about how to build a strategy for that company until we were acquired, and then I got a chance to do a little bit more hands on with some of the strategic planning.” – Erin O’Quinn, on developing a visual identity for the company Opsware was acquired by HP and became part of HP Software. Once this happened, Erin was one of the only people from Opsware who was not placed in product marketing. They left Erin in corporate marketing, but she did not really fit into a specific bucket because she is a generalist. The event team thought Erin worked for them for a long time, but they later realized she was not part of their org chart. Erin still supported some of their events. Erin was able to work with the brand team, the search engine optimization team, and some others. “Every skill you pick up at some point in your career is going to help you some place else whether you know it or not. That would be one of the biggest things I could stress in that journey for me.” – Erin O’Quinn In working with the brand team, Erin also worked with executive communications for different types of events (a user conference, a sales event, etc.). She was more focused on logistics but got to be in the room to hear conversations about how to convey strategy. “So, I didn’t shape it. I never would take credit for any of those parts, but being there and being in that room where it happens, you learn a lot as to how that works…. You can see the process and then extrapolate that into something else that you can actually build yourself later.” – Erin O’Quinn 32:52 – Communication with Executives Did Erin apply the thing she was learning from being a part of the executive communications in her own communication with executives? This is very difficult for the individual contributor. Erin says her first 3 jobs working in small organizations really prepared her for this. She knew the CEO at each of those companies on a first name basis. This experience built a fearlessness when communicating with executives. Erin tells the story of a developer who came to her at one of these companies and said he wanted to start a cricket team. When Erin encouraged him to go speak to the CFO (whom she knew on a first name basis), he was terrified. Erin offered to introduce this person to the CFO to make it easier. “By knowing them and them knowing me and becoming more comfortable just remembering that they’re people before they are anything else made it much more comfortable for me to do that. So, I do feel privileged that I had that opportunity, but it stuck with me.” – Erin O’Quinn When we speak to executives as experts in what we do, we need to remember executives are experts in what they do (running something much bigger). Understand what an executive’s position is and what matters to them about what you’re going to ask. You might need to give them more context to understand the full details of what you’re asking or understand that you’re asking the wrong person. If you need an executive’s buy in on something, Erin suggests getting to know the person’s executive assistant. “They are much more approachable as a rule, and they are the gate keepers to a lot of executives. So never, ever, in any company treat an executive assistant poorly because they are the most helpful people on the planet. Or they can be very difficult if you treat them badly.” – Erin O’Quinn, on treating executive assistants well. Executive assistants will let you know what your level of access is to an executive. Never take it personally if an executive assistant provides feedback on a better way to approach something. Take it as information they are giving you to help you. When someone tries to help us by explaining their expertise, we should listen and not take it as a critique. “A lot of people can take critique very personally, and the only way to grow, I think, is to be given guidance. If everything that you do is perfect the first time, you don’t get an opportunity to learn because you don’t understand how to fix something. It just means you’re lucky in some situations…or you’re not stretching. If you’re not willing to step out of your comfort zone every once in a while, you’re not going to get that chance to grow…. If somebody offers you an opportunity, unless you know you can’t really put the time into it, say yes. Say yes as often as your schedule will allow because it’s some form of a skill that will help you…. Don’t necessarily go too far backwards, but if something is new, sideways or up…say yes because you never know what skill or what contact or what benefit you’re going to get out of that.” – Erin O’Quinn John says we’ve boiled down this pattern to “if you’re always comfortable, you are never growing.” If Erin gets too comfortable, she gets bored. Boredom is her brain’s way of saying she isn’t doing enough and to try something else. How do we know what we should say no to? We should not take on more than we can physically do or our time will allow us to do successfully. If we need to sacrifice quality in our base work for something, it is not something we should do. For things you really want to do but really don’t have the time, Erin would recommend addressing it with your manager. Communicate the value of what you want to do, and ask if there’s a way to make better use of your time to do it. Be willing to advocate for yourself with your management in this way. This shows initiative and indicates career growth. It might let your manager know that you’d like to do more or take on more responsibility, and it gives them an opportunity to provide some of that rather than you seeking it elsewhere. “Don’t be afraid to have the conversation with your manager. If they say no, then you know where they stand, and that’s not a bad thing either because sometimes they are also doing things to protect you. They may know something big is coming, and they don’t want you to take on something you can’t handle because more is coming in short order.” – Erin O’Quinn Mentioned in the Outro We can advocate for ourselves or the work we do and its impact / value. When Erin reached out to local politicians for endorsements, it was about the work and its impact. The story was similar when Erin started helping other teams inside the credit union who did not have support from marketing. She knew her work would be valuable to help them. When advocating for the work we do, be sure to communicate the work you do and the impact you’re making in 1-1 meetings with your manager. Erin did this, and we think it’s part of the reason she was given more and more responsibilities. Erin advocated for herself and her career in when taking the role as an executive assistant through the transparent conversation she had with her manager at the time. Erin also advocated for herself when it came to having others show her how to demo products in the booth at a trade show. We also see an element of how industry expertise can apply to another company not focused on the same industry. Erin used her knowledge of working at a technology company to help co-workers at the credit union understand technology professionals as an audience to improve the message. Maybe you have a deep expertise in regulatory compliance or working through audits. Maybe you’ve worked for a service provider or hosting company and can take some of what you have learned to another company to improve their operations. Maybe you worked at a technology vendor or value added reseller and can help improve vendor relationships for the company. Amy Arnold used her expertise from working in the public sector to be effective in future roles such as pre-sales. Check out these episodes for more of the story. Episode 281 – Packets Don’t Lie: Quality of Service for Technical Exploration in Network Engineering with Amy Arnold (1/2) Episode 282 – All the Networking Things: Project Management, Pre-Sales, and Broadening a Technical Specialty with Amy Arnold (2/2) 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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Controlled and Proactive: Managing Your Career During Uncertain Times 38:55

19 days ago38:55

38:55

How should we be managing our careers during times of uncertainty? News of layoffs and economic uncertainty induces paralyzing fear and anxiety in many of us. What can we really control in the midst of it all, if anything? This week in episode 329, we’ll talk through a 5-pillar framework with actionable steps you can take now to be more proactive in your career even when it’s a difficult job market. Whether you’re employed and feeling uncertain or recently unemployed, we’ll share prescriptive advice and helpful AI prompts for forward progress so you can work through the challenges and not get frozen in worry. Be sure to check out our free Career Uncertainty Action Guide to access the AI prompts discussed in today’s show. Original Recording Date: 05-15-2025 Topics – Facing Uncertainty with an Actionable Plan, Pillar 1: Building Financial Resilience, Pillar 2: Maximizing Current Job Performance and Visibility, Pillar 3: Execute Strategic Skill Development, Pillar 4: Effective Networking and Relationship Building, Pillar 5: Managing Your Mindset and Control Your Narrative, AI Prompts and the Call to Action 1:30 – Facing Uncertainty with an Actionable Plan Though not feeling 100% when this was recorded, John and Nick wanted to get this episode on an important topic out in order to help our listeners. Maybe you’re coming into this episode with a lot of anxiety. We continue to see news about tech industry layoffs and economic uncertainty. It feels pretty heavy. We spoke about fear, uncertainty, and how to take control in Episode 70 – Taking Control During Uncertain Times . Maybe you feel secure but are hearing whispers about layoffs at your company and are beginning to worry. Maybe you’ve been impacted by a layoff. We see you. We hear you. Maybe you’re trying to recession-proof your skills, feel stuck at your current employer, or have become highly specialized and don’t know what to do. Wherever you happen to be, those feelings are real. The biggest challenge we each have is the risk to job security and financial stability. Though it may seem wrong, forces outside of our control do affect our careers. Today our intent is not to sit and dwell on problems like a difficult job market. We’re focusing on a practical plan to help you regain a sense of control with actionable steps you can take to proactively navigate this period. Our purpose is to provide career advice we wish we’d had earlier in our careers. We want to help listeners accelerate career progression, increase job satisfaction, and be more effective in your existing role. When things feel unstable and when we see layoffs at our company or in our industry, it’s ok to take more of a defensive approach. It’s rational to feel anxious when finances and job security are threatened by layoffs or economic uncertainty. It’s ok to feel that way. We’re here to help channel that energy into proactive career management. We’ve broken this down into 5 pillars / 5 areas where you can take action starting right now. Building financial resilience Maximizing your current job performance and visibility Executing strategic skill development Engaging in effective networking and relationship building Managing your mindset and controlling your narrative 5:01 – Pillar 1: Building Financial Resilience A buffer against the risk of layoffs and income instability is having a savings account with 3-6 months’ living expenses. Do you know the real numbers for your household expenses? If you don’t, take time this week to determine what they are. What is that bare bones minimum set of expenses? How long could the savings you have right now actually last based on your expenses? In Episode 299 – Chronic Stress: Connecting the Dots between Layoffs and Burnout with Cait Donovan Cait Donovan mentioned You Need a Budget or YNAB as one option to help track your expenses. There are certainly other tools to help with this. Maybe you could decide right now which subscriptions you would cancel or what you would stop spending on if your source of income was suddenly cut (i.e. job loss). We covered some of these items in Episode 57 – Preparing for Unexpected Opportunities Part 5 – Personal Finance . Having a liquid savings account that you can easily access and eliminating high interest debt will bring greater peace of mind if something happens to your job. John is thankful for the jobs and roles he’s had over time enabled him to build an emergency fund. He shares how much peace of mind it brought after being laid off from Google in 2023. Catch the full story on that in Episode 220 – John Got Fired . “It let me basically wake up, read the termination e-mail, and go back to sleep. I didn’t even wake up my wife to let her know. This is not great news, but we are in a financial position to survive. And it’s not a problem.” – John White, on the peace of mind that comes from having an emergency fund Nick mentions he’s had success with building up savings by making it automatic. Maybe you could make an automatic draft from each paycheck to consistently save more starting right now. John mentions he has a separate savings account for his emergency fund that money goes into every time he gets paid. It’s a great psychological barrier to spending any of it. Having an emergency fund in an account that is separate from everything else is step 1. Once you have started this and are contributing to it, then you can begin shopping for a high yield savings account which could earn you something on an annual basis. It’s important to know and understand the benefits you’re getting from your employer. Do you know, for example, what the company policy is on severance packages in the event that they have layoffs? Is that in an employee handbook somewhere? Consider the cost of things like COBRA in your state (continued health insurance after job loss for a period of time). Expect an increase from what you were paying through your employer. In the case of a mass layoff, there may be a 60-day WARN period in your state. Do some research on this. John mentions if it’s a small layoff, the company may not be required to do this. Make sure you understand the vesting schedule for any applicable retirement accounts tied to your employer or RSUs (restricted stock units) that are part of your compensation package. We’ve created a guide that we will reference again a little bit later in the discussion. In the guide is an AI prompt focused on finances that you can use with ChatGPT, Claude, or your favorite generative AI tool. This prompt will interview you to help work through assessing the current state of your finances (which is often a high stakes emotional process). It considers things like understanding savings, retirement funds, current cost of living, and what you could cut out in an emergency. The prompt also has some examples of how the conversation might go. We hope you find it helpful! The link to our uncertainty guide and a link to the above prompt can be found here: nerd-journey.com/uncertaintyguide . 10:50 – Pillar 2: Maximizing Current Job Performance and Visibility Our best defense against being let go or laid off is demonstrating that we are providing value to the organization. Visibility builds internal leverage and credibility in both uncertain times and in more prosperous times. Ideally, we want our personal brand and reputation to stand on its own and make people hesitate to cut us because of our importance to the organization. Action points for this pillar… We talked about some of this in Episode 70 – Taking Control During Uncertain Times , and it’s worth your time to go back and listen. Track your accomplishments, and focus on the quantifiable results you have delivered or the impact you’ve made. Quantify whenever possible! Think about reduced process time, value delivered to a project, etc. Leverage feedback from others to quantify your impact. Think about how you can be valuable and adaptable. What is the unique combination of skills you use to bring value to the organization? Proactively make your impact known by: Giving your manager updates Sharing wins in team meetings when appropriate (not in a boastful way) and offering to help others Documenting your contributions Documenting our accomplishments / contributions is the required input to be able to tell the story of what you are doing. Remember that writing is thinking as we discussed with guest Josh Duffney back in Episode 156 – Better Notes, Better You with Josh Duffney (1/2) and helps us formulate the way to say things. We should be sharing our accomplishments with our manager in 1-1 discussions. That would not be the entire conversation, but if you can share something that worked really well, share it. Keep a copy of your accomplishments saved somewhere in your personal files so you have access should you be separated from your company. Documented accomplishments should translate to bullet points on your private resume or LinkedIn describing the quantified results. John suggests we consider practicing the 30-60 second value statement out loud so we can easily explain it if someone asks. It’s important to understand whether you are or are not delivering value to the organization. One way to get feedback on this is sharing with your boss. If your boss says something wasn’t valuable, at least you will know. An episode that pairs nicely with this advice is Episode 284 – Draft Your Narrative: Writing and Building a Technical Portfolio with Jason Belk (2/2) . It’s important to acknowledge that we can follow all the advice given in this episode very well, be valuable to an organization, and still be impacted by a layoff. The advice we’re sharing is critically important because if you are terminated, the work you have done turns into something that builds your resume with quantifiable value statements that you can demonstrate and speak to effectively. From there you can customize your resume for an application based on what they are looking for in the job description. It’s worth putting in the effort now. 15:31 – Pillar 3: Execute Strategic Skill Development We want to give ourselves industry longevity in our careers and increase the optionality, regardless of whether we stay at a company or go elsewhere. Think about the key skills you have today. What will be resilient and valuable in the market? Maybe it’s knowledge of public cloud technologies, a scripting language or automation framework, cybersecurity concepts and principles, or foundational awareness of AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning. Don’t overlook the fundamentals! As you think through the skills you want to build or sharpen, consider the following: What will help you be better at your job right now and prepare you for a future opportunity? Is the skill area you’re looking at focused on a technology your company already uses and plans to use long term? Do you need to go deeper in this area or learn more about it to make what you’re doing more valuable? Does this focus area provide growth for you? Joseph Griffiths told us in Episode 327 – A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2) that growth can take different forms throughout our careers. Growth for you may mean technical skills, but it could also be communication skills. Will the skills you are building be valuable to other companies? Investigate job descriptions to get feedback on the skill(s) to intend to sharpen or build before taking action. Look at job descriptions for roles similar to yours, closely related to yours, or something you aspire to do. Each job description will have required skills that you might not have today. Nick says you’re looking for a double check mark. How can you execute on either building a new skill or sharpening an existing one? Employer training budgets – do you have funds from your employer to use for this purpose? If paying for training yourself, consider cost-effective options like Pluralsight, Udemy, Coursera, or many others. Consider free options like YouTube as well. What if you blocked 2-3 hours of your week for learning? Maybe it’s during work hours, but maybe it’s on your own time. Be consistent, and treat it like an important meeting you cannot miss to build skills over time. John mentioned a resource called Google Cloud Skills Boost that is somewhat neutral in its technology approach which helps you learn transferrable skills even outside Google Cloud technologies. Many companies have public facing training / lab resources which are free to low cost. What if you only have limited time for strategic skill building? How does one decide what to learn? If you had a list of 3-4 things that give you the double check mark as we discussed, you should think about which one is most valuable to both what you do today and what would be next (i.e. longevity in the market). Nick suggests weighing value to your current employer at 60%. It’s important to be good at what you do to continue doing it for the time being. John says this also depends on how uncertain you feel about your position. If your company is having consistent layoffs and things in your role feel very uncertain, for example, you may want to prioritize the skills that are more valuable in the job market. It’s important to tailor the selections to your situation. Also consider your learning style. Do you prefer to start with going as deep as you can in a new area or with a high-level conceptual overview? Think about technology waves and trends. What is interesting to you? What is real vs. just hype? Consider investigating areas that might be the next technology wave. These suggestions are great to keep in mind as we proceed to the next pillar. 21:46 – Pillar 4: Effective Networking and Relationship Building Invest in this now because your network is your safety net, information source, and opportunity, engine. It becomes even more important when things are uncertain. John references an epidemic of AI-generated resumes and AI screening tools that’s causing a bit of a grid lock. Employee referrals are even more important now. Remember the people who refer you for a job role are going to get asked about your strengths and if you are a fit for a specific role. Even an indirect referral such as someone telling you a company is hiring for a specific type of role is helpful. You can investigate this role, see who you might know at the company, and determine if you might be a fit. We don’t want to start building a network when we begin to feel uncertain, but if that’s you, now is a great time to begin. We want to do it consistently and continuously over time if possible. We want to nurture network connections but adapt to what is happening right now. John recommends leading with empathy and checking in on people in your network. Ask how they are doing right now. Offer to help or share relevant information before you ask for anything. Don’t forget to do networking inside your company. Understand the challenges of others outside your team. Who are those leaders within the greater company that you might be interested in working for? Many times, in an economic-based layoff, people will be given time to find other roles within the organization upon being terminated. For networking external to your company, LinkedIn is extremely valuable. Consider participating in online / in-person communities related to your job or the technology you use. Stay engaged with these communities! Actions you can take… Identify 3 people in your network that you haven’t spoken to recently. Reach out this month just to connect with them and see how they are doing. Nick suggests combining this with pillar 3 and asking people what they are learning about and why they are learning about it. This is not asking for a job referral but rather a curiosity and opportunity for feedback on what you want to learn / the skills you plan to develop. John went to LinkedIn and downloaded his connections to a CSV file. He chose a few different people at random to contact based on the strength of connection to that person. This exercise only costs you time. Each person you contact will have a different perspective on the job market, the technology community at large, and the skills that are needed to thrive within it. It provides a diversity of thought that we can learn from. John would highly encourage a similar process for you. Start with people you can think of inside your network, and don’t forget to choose some people randomly. For more tips on professional networking, check out this recent episode for advice – Episode 307 – Sales Skills: Professional Networking and Continued Practice with Ramzi Marjaba (1/2) . 27:27 – Pillar 5: Managing Your Mindset and Control Your Narrative The actions we’ve discussed may seem difficult to take. Fear can cause paralysis and lead to poor decisions. It’s ok to feel fear, but we want to shift our focus to the controllable things we discussed in pillars 1-4. Combat paralysis and inaction by taking action. Consider breaking larger tasks into smaller tasks. If you need to update your resume, it might seem like a mountainous task. What’s the smallest possible step? Maybe it’s updating a job title. Could you schedule 15 minutes to do that today? Even small progress is still progress that we can celebrate. It’s about small, incremental gains over time. See also our discussions on Finish by Jon Acuff with guest host Jason Gass, specifically the one about using data to celebrate progress: 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 Try reframing your perspective. Could this time of uncertainty push you to learn something new you had deprioritized? What if this leads to a role that is a better fit for you? If nervous or anxious energy keeps you up at night, what if you worked on learning something fun for an hour to make yourself tired? Reading a book is a great way to learn and to wind down in the evening. John recently took some time to reboot his blog site – vjourneyman.com and made a blog post describing the way he setup the new site . When John started, he wasn’t even sure his WordPress site was still running. But he broke the task down into smaller pieces, eventually changing to a static site instead of just a WordPress site. John says it was a fun small project he did on his own time that got him energized to write more content. The energy carried through to his day job, and he’s been energized to write more content moving forward as a result. John mentions an article he’s working on about effective use of AI prompts. Stay tuned for that once it is published! Nick says when he takes a break to work on podcast stuff he can feel a difference in energy. John and Nick remind listeners that they are not immune to times of uncertainty. John’s blog project is an example of something he did to energize and empower himself. John is also modeling a pattern we’ve seen – developing proof of work / learning in public. We talked about learning something new in pillar 3. If you’re learning something new, could you write about it and publish what you learned or put your scripts on GitHub? Think about what you can generate that is public facing so people can understand what you’re learning and how you think. This is one way to own your story. John’s blog project illustrates adaptability, resilience, and proactivity. He built a new blog site and is planning to write content on topics he’s not previously written about. When the task list gets long, it’s hard to decide what you should do next. Sometimes we just need to pick something we can finish instead of spending energy picking which thing. If something is easily classifiable as in the top 5 things we need to do, it’s fine to go ahead and do it. If someone needs to reclassify your tasks and let you know something is an emergency, you will probably hear from them. 34:17 – AI Prompts and the Call to Action John created an AI prompt to help with our mindset. This is another outcome from John’s tinkering with generative AI. He prefers Google Gemini, but the tool doesn’t matter so much for you. The mindset prompt can be found in the uncertainty guide. Copy and paste it into your generative AI tool of choice. The prompt will instruct the AI to be a helper and motivator for you and help unfreeze you. It will interact with and brainstorm with you on the most important actions to take a positive step forward and could even create a prioritized checklist for you. The page on our site containing the prompt will have an example output for reference. Your interaction will be unique to you based on the answers you provide. Remember this does not have to be perfect and that something is better than nothing. If you do use the prompt, we’d love your feedback! Reach out to John or Nick on LinkedIn or e-mail us – nerdjourneypodcast@gmail.com . Your action challenge is to visit nerd-journey.com/uncertaintyguide to download the free career uncertainty action guide which includes the advice from today’s episode with checklists and AI prompts to help you. The resources inside the uncertainty guide are divided into two categories – employed but feeling uncertain or recently unemployed. This is about helping people. If you can help us, help people, we’d really appreciate that. Remember we also have a Layoff Resources Page that you can utilize. We believe you can do things to influence your career path even during difficult times. You cannot control everything, but you CAN control what you do. So, what will you do? 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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A Manager’s Preoccupation: 1-1 Meetings and Focused Prioritization with Joseph Griffiths (2/2) 43:18

26 days ago43:18

43:18

Your manager has a preoccupation, but do you know what it is? The answer reveals a clue about their focus and the culture this manager will foster. Join us in episode 328 as Joseph Griffiths shares advice for making 1-1s with your manager and skip-level manager more productive, guidance for the aspiring managers listening, and observations from managing both technical and sales teams. We look at all this through the lens of a manager’s focused prioritization, the difficult part of being consistent, and the reasons we should all use boundaries and limits to improve the quality of our work. Original Recording Date: 04-17-2025 Joseph Griffiths is a tech industry veteran with experience across technical sales, enterprise architecture, and systems administration. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Joseph, check out Episode 327 – A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2) . Topics – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager, Priorities as a Manager, Observations from Managing Different Personas, Manager Preoccupations and Culture Indicators, Advice for Future Managers 2:55 – Optimizing 1-1 Meetings with Your Manager What would Joseph tell the individual contributor who isn’t used to 1-1 meetings with their manager or doesn’t know how to leverage them effectively? “Everyone appreciates a human perspective…. If I as a manager come to the table and say, ‘here’s my agenda for the 1-1 that I expect you to do every week,’ it’s going to be real hard to come to me and be honest about the things you’re struggling with. It’s really, really hard to talk to someone who’s only business. As a manager it’s a lot easier if I just keep it business because then if issues happen or stuff it’s less emotional entanglement. But I think it’s the wrong way to do it. My job is to serve the people. My goal for 1-1 was to first breed trust and comfort.” – Joseph Griffiths The secondary goal of Joseph’s 1-1s was to allow the individual to share items that require his help, encouraging honesty about the challenges. Sometimes, a manager does need to use the 1-1 to deliver specific information that is best shared 1-1 (i.e. compensation changes, policy changes, etc.). Joseph usually had 1 thing he wanted to cover with the individual per 1-1. The rest of the meeting was for the individual to control the agenda. Joseph would recommend we take 5 minutes before a 1-1 with our manager to think about the overarching challenge we’re having rather than what is top of mind. “It’s very easy to walk into there and come out of a bad meeting the hour before and go, ‘I just had a horrible meeting and this is why.’ But is that really the problem, or should we be talking about something that is bigger or wider or more challenging? I think spending 5 minutes preparing with a OneNote sheet or a Notepad or whatever and just writing down…these are the 3 things that I want to talk about…and I need either some guidance for them or I need you to knock down a wall. That’s another one. Ask your manager to knock down a wall.” – Joseph Griffiths, on 1-1s with your manager Every manager is different, so you will need to feel things out with your manager when it comes to knocking down walls. Joseph says we can also bring ideas to the 1-1 for things that might improve the health of the business. If our manager agrees with our ideas, they can support the ideas and give us greater visibility within the organization. Joseph mentions when we have an idea, it is unique and special. But it’s also something we are likely to spend extra energy and effort doing. Joseph consistently sought to support innovative ideas from his team members and promote them up to his leaders. This kind of thing makes both the manager and more importantly the individual contributor look good. People often bring only their problems to their manager, but don’t forget to bring ideas too. Nick says we could all use more practice thinking about those higher-level problems. Even front-line managers need to do this when communicating with their own managers (i.e. think a level higher). Joseph tells a story about a friend of his who is a CEO. This person goes to lunch with his team each Friday. Afterward, he gets a pencil and a pad of paper, turns off his cell phone, and goes to a nearby park to think about his business for a few hours. Anything that comes to him gets written on the pad of paper. On Monday morning, the CEO begins executing on the things he thought of while at the park. This exercise allows him to be more proactive. “I think we could all benefit from turning off the notifiers, turning off the noise, and spending an hour just thinking about where we are and actually making some plans. That proactivity is missing…. The notifiers in the world that we live in are very dopamine driven by trying to get you to react…. We get so busy that we’re reacting to everything that we don’t take time to think, and then we don’t prioritize the most important activities….” – Joseph Griffiths, on a CEO friend’s proactivity It’s easy to be overly busy. Someone once told Joseph, “Busy is the new stupid.” While he did not understand it at the time, he certainly does now. Take 5-10 minutes before 1-1s to think about what you want to say. These 1-1s are opportunities to expand your influence. Take advantage! What about 1-1s with a skip level leader? Joseph encourages us to get a human connection with them just like you would with a customer. This could be the sports team they like or something else. A human connection opens the door to more conversations in the future. “You don’t want to stand around and complain…not a good move. You want to have a conversation that leaves that person thinking, ‘this is a really smart person. This is a person who is doing really good work.’ So, the best thing you can bring to that are stories of things that are going well with your customers in sales or going well with your job function. Those stories are going to be something that they take away from that and share with other people. You’re going to be giving them value…human connection and value are the 2 things you want to provide in that skip-level.” – Joseph Griffiths Second-line managers have direct reports who are managers. They have heard about all the problems and know what is going on because they talk about them daily. Joseph says the skip-level 1-1 is not an opportunity to illustrate problems. 9:42 – Priorities as a Manager How do you optimize your tasks as a manager and focus on the right things? This is something from Nick’s perspective, Joseph did very well as a manager. “It is really easy to get engaged in lots of things and doing lots of things ok. It’s much harder to be engaged in a few things and do them spectacularly. In any company we work for we will have millions of opportunities to do things. We need to choose to do the things that are, number 1, aligned with the role that we have…what we’re getting paid to do…and secondarily the things that have the highest overall payoff for the effort.” – Joseph Griffiths As a technical sales manager, Joseph had a key performance metric – the quota. It’s the only measurement that matters in sales. Joseph also had a team, and he had customers (the company’s customers). He often had to ask how what he was doing helped him hit the quota. There is a natural quarterly cadence in sales. There are a number of activities which happen automatically as a part of this cadence. “It can get very easy to just follow the cadence like you’re riding up and down a hill. And cadence is actually good. What you need to do is understand what you have to insert into the cadence to achieve the results of your KPI.” – Joseph Griffiths If Joseph knew his team would need 60 days to perform a necessary task in the sales cycle, he would plan for them to start those activities 180 days in advance, so everything is complete before it’s time for deal management. Sales can be somewhat unpredictable, so you then focus on what’s most important. “For me, my first job as a manager is the people that report to me. They are the most important thing.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph shares the story of a former manager named Josh. Anytime Joseph would call Josh, he would pick up the phone and tell Joseph “I have as much time as you need.” It wasn’t that Josh wasn’t busy. He just made time for the most important things. We should prioritize things by importance and let other things slide by. Joseph could vacuum his floor every day, but he doesn’t. He puts up with dirt for a couple of days and then vacuums. That is prioritization. Prioritize by importance within your job function. This principle does not change regardless of your job level (individual contributor, manager, vice president, owner of the company, etc.). Delegate to others if it is their job, and let them fail if needed. Do we lose sight of what the priorities are because of having too many tasks? Joseph says it’s negative aversion. We don’t like to say no and are afraid we will be perceived negatively if we do. We can lose sight of priorities at times, but it’s challenging to say no to things. Joseph once had a manager named Adam who told him, “You need to learn the great art of no, however…. You need to learn that because everything to you is, ‘yes and I’ll do it myself.’” Joseph doesn’t suggest we directly say no. We can be helpful without taking on things as a personal challenge. People don’t want to be seen as the one who says no or that they can’t do something. People also don’t want to be seen as someone who is overloaded. Both are triggers to people telling themselves they are unreliable. “As a society, Americans are people pleasers.” – Joseph Griffiths 15:12 – Observations from Managing Different Personas At technology vendors, there is normally a team of salespeople managed by a sales leader and a team of sales engineers managed by a technical leader. At times in his career, Joseph as the technical leader has needed to help manage both teams. What were some of the nuances of managing the technical side and the sales side that Joseph learned? Joseph has needed to do this 4 times as a manager, and in every case, his business partners had incredible sales teams. “The people I was working with were really good, really mature, and knew what they were doing. For the most part, I don’t know that they needed that much management.” – Joseph Griffiths, on filling in to manage a team of salespeople Joseph says salespeople are often more willing to express emotion, frustration, and challenge. Contrast this with technical people Joseph worked with who would bottle it up and go take it out some other way. “It was not unusual for one of the salespeople to call me up and yell at me. I never had that experience with my technical sales team…. They would yell at me and just need to vent the emotion. And after they’d get that venting of emotion out, then we could have a conversation about what the problem is and how we can fix it.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph observed that when salespeople came to him, they had already tried a number of avenues to solve a problem with no luck, and they expected immediate action. His technical team, by contrast, would usually give more advance notice of a problem. What salespeople needed was for Joseph to understand the problem, assure them he would help figure out a solution, and then get them to a solution. Joseph also noticed salespeople were experts at using manipulation and emotion to get what they need. They approached conversations as a negotiation, which was not something Joseph’s technical team did. It took him a little time to get used to this approach. “That’s just my limited experience observations. I loved working with sellers. I have so much respect for them because they do some of the hardest jobs. They find 999 noes before they find a yes, yet they get up every morning and go find that yes. And they get up every morning and keep pushing…. I couldn’t be more proud of the people I’ve worked with and how hard that is to do every day because I can’t do it every day, but they did it. They are amazing, amazing people. Probably the most resilient people we’ll meet on this earth are salespeople. I don’t know anybody else who can get beat up that much on a regular basis from both directions, both their management and their customers, and still keep getting up every morning. But they do it.” – Joseph Griffiths How does this differ from the technical team Joseph managed? The technical team didn’t normally bring problems in an emotional state. It was more about communicating the logical problem and sharing a potential solution. “Technical people want to learn skills. Salespeople want to be inspired…. It’s interesting to see the difference in development models. What I really need to do is just inspire people that it’s possible and give them the tools to go inspire their customers. That’s what salespeople need. Technical people…they need to feel confident about the solution. They need to feel confident about the capabilities that we’re offering and how we’re doing it.” – Joseph Griffiths A salesperson practices their craft most of the time by doing their job. A technical person might practice their craft by tinkering in a lab environment, reading a book, or something else. Suppose you provide a great sales pitch to a salesperson. They can repeat it and sell it. A technical person will, after hearing a great sales pitch, want to know how the solution works. 20:09 – Manager Preoccupations and Culture Indicators How has Joseph built a positive team culture during his time as a manager, including when he first started and during times of uncertainty (i.e. a pandemic)? Joseph mentions a researcher who created a culture indicator and made the claim that “culture is set by the first-level manager and their preoccupation.” There are 3 preoccupations for front-line managers. They reflect how easily information flows within an organization. Power – gaining more of it Rules – following the rules Mission of the company – achieving it Startups, for example, are mission-based organizations. Communication is wide open from the CEO down, and employees have many different responsibilities. The US military is a good example of a rules-based organization. There are rules for how much water to drink, what time you eat and sleep, and other things that make up a day’s schedule, etc. Operating on rules brings consistency of operation at a wide scale. “Every captain of every boat in the sea knows exactly what they’re supposed to do and where their orders are supposed to come from. It’s a very good structure for executing the same everywhere.” – Joseph Griffiths The one we see most often in corporate America is the manager pre-occupied with power / progressing up to the next level of leader. “They (companies) have all these things that they do to try to promote their culture. None of that matters if your boss is pre-occupied with getting their next job because that culture does not exist for you under that structure. Yes, the rest of the company had that. You don’t. The interesting challenge is yes, CEOs can set culture, but I wish more companies would spend more time ensuring that they have healthy culture at the first-line manager level because that’s where it really matters. And the problem is the mission, the culture of the company, rarely becomes the mission of the individual managers, especially in larger corporations…. I believed that when I was a first-line manager, that was the best place to establish culture, and that culture existed in my team and couldn’t go wider than that.” – Joseph Griffiths Managers pre-occupied with power don’t usually want to expand their team culture wider. It is their own desire to advance. Power-based culture is based on controlling the information (a selfish scenario). Motivations for being pre-occupied with power could be due to fear, because it’s the only way the person has ever known, or that it’s the best way to gain the next job. “Individual motivation is individual. It’s about preoccupation. If you have a manager that’s only pre-occupied with making themselves look good, it’s pretty obvious to you pretty quickly. And you’re just going to hope they go away eventually.” – Joseph Griffiths Was it easy for Joseph during his time as a manager to observe these preoccupations in his peers who were also managers? Joseph says we can observe it in others this way, but he was fortunate to be surrounded by peers focused mostly on the mission of the company and creating great cultures for their teams. “A lot of that is because our manager at the time, at that first round of hiring, was incredible at building that culture. So that was the preoccupation of that manager, and it became obvious in the people that she was hiring. This is where it does matter is the preoccupation…as a first-line manager, my boss’s preoccupation also affects my experience. Same thing just one level higher…every level creates its culture. Are we a collaborative culture that we’re working together to try to win together, or are we in competition against each other for who can do best?” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph defines culture as a preoccupation with something. “What are you pre-occupied with every day? That’s your real culture. We have lots of things that we profess to be culture, but when you sit down and you don’t have anything else you have to do, what do you do? You’ll figure out what your culture is pretty quick.” – Joseph Griffiths The question about preoccupation is an interesting one we can ask ourselves. Joseph says a lot of time is spent worrying about company culture, especially in hiring practices. Some companies have a top-level preoccupation with making money and nothing else, while others may have a top-level preoccupation with selling products and trying to do the right thing for the world in which we live. “It’s very hard to be a great manager in a terrible top-level culture…. Experiencing in our local area is one thing. What do we have above us that’s creating an overarching pressure on that? It’s very hard if you’re in a highly rules-based organization…trying to build a culture of mission-based focus can be challenging.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph recommends 2 books by Mike Abrashoff describing how he revolutionized the Navy (one of the worst performing ships in the Navy) through changing the culture to a mission-based culture while still following the rules: It’s Our Ship: The No-Nonsense Guide to Leadership It’s Your Ship Joseph shares a story from one of the Mike Abrashoff books. On Sundays there would be a meal for the entire crew on the deck of the ship. The officers would cut in front of the lower ranking service people in the food line. Captain Abrashoff went to the front of the line and started handing out plates and was the last person to get his food that first Sunday on the ship. This was Abrashoff’s initial step toward changing the culture from the top level, changing a rules-based organization into a mission-based organization. 28:57 – Advice for Future Managers If someone is passionate about changing the culture of a team / organization, should they become a manager? “How about the inverse? If you’re considering being a manager, you should think about what kind of manager you want to be. And you should probably base it on…an investigation of the managers you’ve most liked working for and the ones you have not liked working for and figure out what those differences are…. For me, it’s do more of the positive. Don’t do any of the negative.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph remembers a discussion he had with one of his first managers at VMware. Here’s what Joseph wanted to know. What did all the good managers you’ve ever had have in common? It was a specific set of behaviors. What did all the bad managers you’ve ever had have in common? This was also a specific set of behaviors. Joseph’s daughter works at Taco Bell and is currently getting insights already into what she does and does not like in managers. The assistant managers at the store are also very young and inexperienced. “Think about the times when you’ve done the most work, when you’ve grown the most. You probably connect that, generally, with a really good manager…. Sometimes it’s just a situation where you’ve been forced to grow by discomfort, which also happens. But I prefer to grow by comfort, feeling trusted. Should you think that you want to change the culture and that’s why you should become a manager, teams have their own culture with them as well. Some teams have a culture of cutthroat let’s win no matter what individually. Some of them want to help each other out…. It’s going to take time to change one culture to the other, and you can’t get too frustrated by that. Mike Abrashoff didn’t fix the boat in 1 week. It took him 9 months.” – Joseph Griffiths Should people be thinking about the time and effort required to become a manager before taking on the role? Should we assume it will automatically be more than being an individual contributor? Joseph learned his manager Josh had many things to do but chose to give attention only to the most important things. Joseph shares a story from his time at IBM working as a consultant for a large, multi-tenant service provider. His wife came to an office lunch event, and it turns out people had a huge misconception about how much work Joseph was forced to bring home as a result of the role he had. Joseph’s wife told his co-workers he didn’t bring work home outside of handling critical outage situations. “We, especially since COVID, have consistently allowed our lives to blend.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph would work past 5 PM as a manager only for customer events (part of working in sales) and for total meltdown problems. There were very few total meltdown problems over the course of 3 years. Most days he was finished by 5 PM. Joseph would block 4-5 PM each day for administrative catch-up work, only accepting meetings during that time if they were critical. “I think that we get way more done when we give ourselves limits, when we have balance…. I’m a firm believer that we’ve got to create boundaries so that we allow for the things to happen that need to happen in our lives. And when those boundaries become blurred, we produce far less. We are less sharp. We’re less available. We’re less there. We do not get more done by more hours. We get less done.” – Joseph Griffiths In our previous discussions with Joseph about VCDX, he shared that 1 extra hour in his day helped him accomplish that goal over a 9-month period. Much like Josh, Joseph had to spend his time on the things that were priority. Since he worked in sales, customers came first over anything else, and that priority was the same for members of Joseph’s team. Nick says people seeking leadership / management roles need to learn to set the limits and boundaries as Joseph said, but they should also be modeling this for their team. Nick shares a story about how Joseph modeled this idea of boundaries and limits for him. You can hear more of this story in Episode 179 , but there was a specific year during which Nick had to work during a holiday. Joseph told Nick there was no need for him to work on a company holiday, and if something was an emergency, he should call Joseph and let him take care of it. “I do think that we will wake up after the 40 years of working and ask ourselves a question of who we’ve become, and I hope we like the answer. My answer is not going to be I’ve become a great sales leader. My answer is going to be the person, the character that I’ve developed. And part of that is learning to balance the priorities…. The challenging thing that we look at in our lives is balancing those things, and it does help when we are the same person at work as we are at home…. I think that there are times where we’re tempted to do things that are outside of our values and character in our employment in order to get ahead, and I think those are very dangerous things. Be true to yourself. I’m a big fan of character…. I encourage people to spend time thinking about the person they want to be at the end of those 40 years because you don’t want to be a 65-year-old retiree who doesn’t like yourself. It’s not a good place.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph recommends everyone strongly consider their motivations before becoming a manager. Being a manager is one of the most thankless jobs someone will have. It’s easy to measure the impact of individual contributor actions / behaviors like a presentation, a project, etc. As a leader, it is much harder to measure these things. “I measured my success as a leader in how hard it was to leave that job. If it was hard for me, that means I did it right. If it was easy for me to leave the job, I didn’t do it right. Think about that before you get into management because we need great managers who are dedicated to lifting other people up. We don’t need more managers that are dedicated to their careers.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph would love to see more managers who lift others up and celebrate the differences people on the team bring. He appreciates how different the members of his team were and appreciates getting to learn from those differences. Mentioned in the Outro Are you having regular 1-1s with your manager? If you are, how regular are these meetings? Are they in-person or remote? Consider approaching these meetings mindfully, and put some thought into what you want to discuss during that time beforehand like Joseph recommended…especially if you are part of a large team and have limited time with your manager. Could you write down 3 things you’d like to talk about with your manager in advance of your next 1-1? Spend time thinking, even if it’s 15 to 20 minutes. This is also a time to bring ideas. Maybe you have an idea for how to do something differently or a project you’d like to work on. This time with your manager can help you determine the value of your idea to the team or the organization, and even if it is not, at least you know. It may just mean you haven’t clearly articulated the value of what you are proposing. Consider taking notes during these meetings. This discussion with Joseph aligns with what we heard from Leanne Elliot in Episode 238 – Managers as Culture Keepers with Leanne Elliott (2/2) about managers being culture keepers. Are you considering people management? Think about the actions and behaviors of both the good and bad managers you’ve had. Then ask several people you know the same question to get a nice list of what each type of manager looks like. For some examples of the actions and behaviors of good managers, check out these episodes: Episode 115 – High Flyers, Solid Players, and A Good Manager with Jeff Eberhard (1/2) Episode 138 – Apprentice, Amplifier, and People Developer with Don Jones (2/2) E-mail us the actions and behaviors of the best managers you’ve had, and we will read them on the air in a future episode! 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

1
A Passion for Growth: Storytelling and Interpersonal Skills with Joseph Griffiths (1/2) 39:58

5 weeks ago39:58

39:58

How well do your personal and professional life align to your passion areas? For returning guest Joseph Griffiths, seeking mentorship helped uncover his core passions (service, honesty, faith, and growth) and fueled the decision to pursue people management. This week in Episode 327, Joseph details his transition from solutions architect to business solution strategist and why he sought mentorship along the way. You’ll hear about the impact of storytelling in executive conversations and job interviews as well as the concept of a value hypothesis. Joseph shares a perspective on management interviews, leading seasoned teams, and the critical nature of interpersonal skills for career advancement. Original Recording Date: 04-17-2025 Topics – Joseph Griffiths Returns, Storytelling and Conversations with Executives, Discovering Passion Areas, Management Interviews and Interpersonal Challenges, A Passion for Growth over Technology, Leading a Familiar Team and Progressing as a Manager 2:15 – Joseph Griffiths Returns Joseph Griffiths has worked in technical sales in some form for the last 10 years. Before that, he worked for a multi-tenant service provider and the state of Ohio as a systems administrator and enterprise architect. Joseph last joined us as a guest in Episode 18a and Episode 18b . At that time, we spoke to Joseph about his experience as a solutions architect. We wanted to learn more about what made Joseph want to pursue people leadership within technical sales. Full disclosure – Joseph was Nick’s manager up until about 4-5 months before this recording took place. But Joseph and Nick knew each other for many years before Joseph became Nick’s manager. Nick invited him to speak at Spiceworks user group events, for example. 3:55 – Storytelling and Conversations with Executives Going back to when Joseph was a solutions architect, his role was focused on understanding the pain and gain from a business perspective for customers. He would often run workshops to understand the current state (pains that exist) and build the future state (the gains a customer could get). As the company changed over time, Joseph’s role changed to business solution strategist. While the role was similar, it had a greater focus on speaking to C-level executives. Joseph recalls meeting some wonderful people on this team who taught him how to talk to executives and how to do value management. What was the biggest lesson Joseph had to learn in order to communicate effectively with executives? “You have about 30 seconds, and you better be talking about money. That’s the short version of it.” – Joseph Griffiths A good friend of Joseph’s is an assistant CFO at a large corporation, and Joseph decided to pick his brain on how and why certain IT purchases get approved, and others do not. “And he said, ‘it’s really simple – story and a spreadsheet…. You had better tell me a story that makes sense to my accounting brain, and you better have a spreadsheet that shows me how we’re going to make money, save money, or reduce risk with the spreadsheet…. Those two things put together…if the numbers make sense on the spreadsheet…I’m going to approve it. You come to me with a story about how you’re going to install some new widget, go find the money in your budget. You come to me with a spreadsheet, but the story doesn’t make sense, go find it in your budget. You want money outside of your budget? They better make sense in the form of dollars.’ And so, for me, the biggest thing to learn was I had 30 seconds with a customer to establish why they should keep listening to me, and it’s always dollars.” – Joseph Griffiths, on learning to speak with executives The executives Joseph would speak with likely would need to sell their ideas to a CFO or CEO to get new purchases approved. The business case has to be about making money (improving revenue or margin, for example) or saving money. Joseph had to learn to talk in dollars and understand how the money was being used. This is good advice even if you don’t work in technical sales. Anyone trying to get a purchase approved within their company needs to understand how to speak the language of the decision makers and make an effective business case. Listen to the example Joseph shares related to putting gourmet coffee machines in gas stations and why someone thought this was a good idea. “At the end of the day, businesses speak dollars. It doesn’t matter if you cannot convert what you sell into some sort of dollar metric. You’re going to have a hard time getting approval outside of budget times…. If you really want to accelerate a sales cycle of whatever you’re selling…you need to start to talk about to dollars and the impact to the business of the dollars.” – Joseph Griffiths Was there discomfort in needing to talk about money? Joseph says it was uncomfortable for him initially and for the team he managed. The challenge in these situations is we do not have all of the information. Joseph tells us about the idea of a value hypothesis and sharing this with a customer. “You have a hypothesis of what you think the value is, and it’s going to be wrong. That’s something that…I had to learn early on and sit in front of a customer with the wrong value hypothesis…. I had to be brave enough to put that number in front of them knowing that it’s wrong and having them correct me.” – Joseph Griffiths This exercise was difficult for Joseph. He wanted what he was sharing to be correct. But in sharing the detailed value hypothesis with a customer, Joseph was able to learn the real numbers. It creates a conversation and collaboration with the customer to adjust and correct the hypothesis. Outside of talking about dollars, Joseph has really embraced storytelling in his discussions. What made him put such an emphasis on this skill? Joseph tells us he’s in the middle of writing a book at the moment. One of the chapters is focused on storytelling. “Storytelling is elemental to humans as a race. One of the amazing things about storytelling is it allows you to learn something and be surprised, which are both dopamine hits. That’s really critical in our world where everything is centered around dopamine hits.” – Joseph Griffiths If someone tells us we are doing something wrong, we could be defensive, submissive, or react in any number of ways. It’s not going to motivate us to change. But, if we were told an engaging story about someone who went through something similar and have a realization while hearing the story, it would motivate us to change. “The real power of stories is you see yourself as the protagonist, and when you see yourself as the protagonist of my story, and I’m leading the journey along, you can come to some very interesting aha moments that are very powerful and motivating for you…. Instantly you want to take that story and tell other people so they can have that same aha moment because every time we have an aha moment we feel smart. We feel like we’ve discovered something amazing.” – Joseph Griffiths Most religions in the world and their teachings are based around storytelling. Joseph also tells us that stories have applications at different times in our lives. Stories allow us to use our intelligence to come to some incredible conclusions. Analogies (a close sibling to storytelling) are also commonly used by technical sales professionals to explain difficult concepts. They are useful to help with understanding but miss the aha moment that comes from using stories. Joseph would highly recommend using stories in any kind of selling (even if selling a project or idea inside your own company). After learning to tell stories with dollars, what kind of feedback did Joseph get on his approach from executives he spoke with? Joseph remembers one instance during his time as a business solution strategist involving the CIO of a company who was near the end of his career. This CIO became very interested in coaching people. After Joseph did a presentation with a value hypothesis at the front of it, the CIO looked at him and said, “That’s impossible.” This was a challenge, and Joseph had to make a decision on what he would do next. When Joseph pressed forward a little bit, the CIO stopped him and provided the same response. When Joseph asked why what he proposed was not possible, the CIO provided some of the most useful financial information about the company anyone on the team had learned to that point. It led to a number of sales. “We have to be able to stop and say, ‘why?’ His why was totally different than I thought it was.” – Joseph Griffiths After this specific incident, the CIO in question told Joseph he should have stopped the first time and asked why. This CIO continued to provide feedback to Joseph after future conversations. “That’s one of the biggest dangers…. We’re afraid of those yellow lights or the red lights that come, and we try to speed through them. Never a good idea…just let them talk.” – Joseph Griffiths, on discussions with executives and being challenged Joseph says some of his stories have not landed with people, but the only way to get better at storytelling is to practice. Joseph mentions a friend and co-worker of both his and Nick’s joined Toastmasters and improved his storytelling ability. It’s a great place to get some practice. 13:10 – Discovering Passion Areas Joseph’s role as solution architect and business solution strategist was more of a technical overlay. What titled him toward management? The answer lies within the things Joseph is passionate about – growth and change, for example. The business solutions strategist forced a lot of growth for Joseph. Joseph enjoys being of service to others. In his role as an overlay, he was able to serve account teams inside the company and customers. “I’ve always really found that I am happiest when I’m helping other people.” – Joseph Griffiths This same desire to be of service has driven a number of Joseph’s colleagues past just being technical workers to working in sales, customer success, or some other similar role. When COVID hit, the role Joseph was in as a business solution strategist was becoming less and less utilized (less opportunities, less in-person meetings, etc.). During this time, Joseph found himself struggling to feel happy. He was employed by a company that was doing well and even getting feedback that he was doing well in his role. But Joseph did not feel like he was really being of service to other people. As Joseph started to explore other career opportunities, he joined a mentoring program. This program allowed mentees (like Joseph) to connect with leaders in different business units for mentoring. “I’d had lots of mentoring from my business unit people, but it was somebody totally outside of that. His name is Zac. And the first thing Zach had me do was do this survey that helped me understand myself. One of the things I learned from that was…that I’m passionate about growth and service, honesty and faith. Those are my four things that I’m passionate about.” – Joseph Griffiths Zac had taken the survey earlier in his career and encouraged Joseph to take the survey and fill out a rubric to see how well he was fulfilling his passion areas at home and at work. “And I saw a lot of gaps there. And so, he and I started exploring other career opportunities that would scratch those gaps that were being missed. I had always had some interest in being in management, but I wanted to do it for the right reason. I wanted to know why I was doing it, not just because it was a logical next step in my career…. As a manager a lot of your job is promoting growth in others, serving them, and helping them look good…not looking good yourself. I always struggled when I was on stage receiving an award. It felt weird. I didn’t like it. I much prefer to see someone else on my team on stage getting an award. That means I did my job right.” – Joseph Griffiths Zac created formalized mentoring when he worked with Joseph and would ask a lot of open-ended questions so Joseph could talk through different things. Joseph did seek mentorship from others who provided specific, prescriptive guidance. He tells us the combination of both approaches is exactly what was needed. Working with mentors helped Joseph understand he needed to try people management. “You owe it to yourself to try it once in your career and see if it’s something you like doing or not.” – Joseph Griffiths, quoting a friend’s advice Nick has heard that in many ways, being a people manager is analogous to being a parent. We cannot fully understand what it is like until we do it. Joseph says as a parent there is a need for authoritative control and direct teaching. Joseph tells us the teams he managed were comprised of people who were highly capable. His job was to provide guidance to team members and promote growth in areas that were blind spots. “I was blessed with a very mature team and a team of people who were very good at their jobs and had been doing it for quite some time. Because of that, my management was very different than a bunch of college graduates…. I guess a lot of that depends on your situation, but I didn’t use a lot of authoritative power with my team. It was not necessary or helpful. I spent a lot more time telling them that I trusted them and just trying to remove roadblocks for them.” – Joseph Griffiths 18:11 – Management Interviews and Interpersonal Challenges What was the interview for a management role like for Joseph compared to when he interviewed for an individual contributor role? Joseph had worked with some of the people who would be interviewing him when he was a business solution strategist, and they were kind enough to provide some guidance. When interviewing for a people manager role, there’s a pretty strong expectation that you will bring a visual or a set of slides to the interview. It should cover areas like your management style, what you want to do in your 30-60-90-day plan, and an overview of who you are. “They want to see that you came prepared to tell them who you are, why you want the job, and what your plan is once you get it.” – Joseph Griffiths, on management interview expectations After getting specific guidance from a co-worker, Joseph created a presentation to use in the manager role job interviews. Joseph would recommend answering questions with stories or examples rather than a simple yes or no. Stories land much better with the interviewer regardless of the job you’re seeking. Being a manager does not mean you need to be a robot. You can have emotions about things. In one round of interviews for a people manager role, Joseph remembers being asked what he was most scared of. At this moment, Joseph shared a story about a conversation he’d had the previous day with a co-worker. The co-worker was a woman who was getting harassed at work and needed advice. Joseph listened carefully, provided some suggestions (i.e. that the woman share the situation with her manager for support and help, etc.), and offered to take another call if the person needed to speak further. What scared Joseph the most was having a future employee call him in that same situation. It was an emotional moment during the interview. “Those are the kind of things you have to think about. What are you going to run into, and do you want to deal with that? The one thing about being a manager is your job moves from dealing with customers to dealing with interpersonal problems. Ninety-five percent of your work, the stuff you have to deal with is interpersonal…and that stuff’s hard.” – Joseph Griffiths Was Joseph trying to help people with interpersonal problems regularly even before he was a manager? Yes – Joseph found himself doing this regularly as an extension of his desire to be of service to others. He has helped others in this way for most of his career. Joseph tells us most any book about advancing your career will have a chapter or section about interpersonal issues. He remembers reading a book about an executive coach that the board of directors would hire at a company to help work through an interpersonal issue (i.e. a CFO or COO who is a problem). “The problem is always they have a blind side in understanding how their behavior impacts those around them negatively. So, the higher you get in your career in a company, the more it becomes about interpersonal capabilities and your ability to influence others and less about what you can do. And that’s the reality of the world. We get paid for our ability to deal with interpersonal challenges not our ability to be the smartest person on the earth.” – Joseph Griffiths 23:07 – A Passion for Growth over Technology Joseph is someone we know who has achieved multiple VCDX certifications in the past. Was there any point at which Joseph was afraid of losing technical chops during the transition to focus on the interpersonal issues that come with being a people manager? Joseph reminds us that technology continues to change. Around 4 years ago many people were focused on blockchain. Right now, and probably in the near future people are focused on AI. We’re not certain exactly what it will be like in 5 years. “The reality is that technology changes very fast, and you can’t keep up. No one can. What you can do is have a foundation of understanding how technology works and educate yourself as you’re going along.” – Joseph Griffiths Joseph says he was the most technical when he was working to configure servers, network, and storage every day. That was 10 years ago. Though Joseph’s technical chops have been going down since that time, his salary has been going up. While there is nothing wrong with being someone who is extremely technical, Joseph believes interpersonal skills will be more valuable from a compensation perspective in the long run. “At the end of the day, I’ve never been concerned about becoming less technical as long as I’m growing. Because remember, one of my passions is growth…and it doesn’t have to be in technology. It can be interpersonal.” – Joseph Griffiths In the last few months since leaving a management position, Joseph has spent time learning AI and programming. He’s enjoying doing this, and more importantly, it’s growth for him right now. Joseph feels if you’ve shown aptitude in learning technical skills, you can do it again in the future. Nick reiterates that growth can translate into a lot of different things that aren’t necessarily technical things. We may not always understand this when we work in technology. When Joseph was early in his career as a systems administrator, he did not understand this. Joseph tells the story of a time during his role as a lead systems administrator when his manager left the company. The open manager job was posted, and both Joseph and one of his peers applied for it. Both went through the interview process with their director. After going through the interview process, Joseph’s director stated he was not getting the manager job and gave some very pointed feedback – “you’re not ready for it yet.” Joseph was gracious at that moment but was devastated to hear this. “My initial response was the same response we all get – defensive. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I can tell you… 14,15 years later, he was absolutely right because I was focused on being the best technologist. Leading people is a totally different skill set, and I hadn’t shown any of those skills or developed any of those skills. And I was interested in doing things authoritatively…. That’s not a good way to lead people. It’s not a good way to run an organization. And he made the right choice…. He had the courage to give me some very real feedback that I didn’t understand until years later. And I’m thankful to JJ for that. We’re friends to this day…. When I became a manager, I was ready for it. I wasn’t then, and it would have been disaster…. A lot of people get into management because they think it’s the next step in their career because they’re the best technical person they can be. There’s nothing wrong with being the best technical person you can be and staying there.” – Joseph Griffiths Make sure you understand yourself and why you want to pursue people management. Otherwise, Joseph would advise not pursuing it. We need good managers in companies and want to avoid having poor managers. If someone wants to stay technical / stay individual contributor and there isn’t a role at your company, it might mean changing companies. There’s nothing wrong with being extremely technical and continuing with that pattern throughout your career. “My passion is growth, not technology. You might be passionate about technology, and if you’re passionate about technology then there are plenty of places to go and…great careers in being the greatest technologist you can be. The only guidance I would give you is find a specialization, specialize in it, and prove that you’re the best in that specialization. Don’t be a generalist.” – Joseph Griffiths The growth would come through developing the specialty based on Joseph’s guidance. He tells us that being a generalist can sometimes block your progression path. If you want to be the best administrator of a specific type of storage array, for example, go do it. You would likely end up working for the vendor who makes the storage array if you have that depth of expertise. Nick suggests maybe we should choose our specialty strategically for longevity. Joseph mentioned his brother-in-law’s 23-year career in the Army as an officer. After getting out of the military he struggled to find a civilian career. Once Joseph asked his brother-in-law about the work he did, they found he managed 10,000 people at an Army base. But he wasn’t wording it that way on his resume. “You get specialized, and you don’t translate it to other things. You’d be surprised. The people who were doing blockchain 4 years ago…they’ve got a lot of the basis of understanding AI today…. I just suggest that we’re all going to pivot throughout our career. I’m in the middle of a potential career pivot trying to figure out what I want to do next, and maybe it’s management. Maybe it’s not. As I do that pivot right now, all the things that I learned before are benefits.” – Joseph Griffiths 30:35 – Leading a Familiar Team and Progressing as a Manager What approach should someone take when they are peers with certain people and then become the manager? This is a pretty common question and something Joseph was asked during interviews for the people manager role he occupied. If no one else on the team was interviewing for the people manager role in addition to you, Joseph recommends doing some things to build trust: Meeting with the team to acknowledge team members are good at what they do Admit you have a lot to learn Seek feedback and guidance from team members on what is / is not working, where people need help, what individual team member challenges have been “Ultimately managing people is a game of trust. If they trust you, they will want to do what you ask them to do. If they don’t trust you, they will question every motive and struggle to get those things done. It will be drudgery.” – Joseph Griffiths If someone else on the team was also interviewing for the manager role but lost because you got it… Have an honest conversation with this member of the team, and offer them the chance to get feedback from the interviewers on skills gaps. Give this member of your team the opportunity to develop into that manager role by being the second. Let them fill in while you’re out of the office, for example, to provide some experience and help deciding if people management is really what they want. If this person becomes very unhappy as a result of not getting the manager role and discussions don’t become more positive, it may mean the person needs to move on to some other role. Find out what the person wants to do, and help them get there. Earlier in Joseph’s career when he didn’t get the manager role, it was time to move to a different job. It was (at the time) Joseph’s way of finding something that would give him the opportunities he wanted. “The other thing that I learned from Zac…my mentor in management…sometimes what you want to get done and where you want to go is totally right. But you’re not going to do it in your current organization because sometimes no one sees a prophet in their own land, so sometimes you’ve got to go to a different organization to get what you want. Don’t be afraid to jump and try something totally different because managing people is managing people. If you think that you need to be really good at the job that you’re managing, you’ve missed the boat. The people that you’re managing are really good at the job. That’s why they’re there, and they can help you understand what’s necessary to be successful in the job. I don’t need to be the smartest engineer to manage solutions engineers.” – Joseph Griffiths What are some of the challenges to progressing in your career once you become a people manager? “I consider progression growth of myself, not career ladder. So, what are the things stopping me from growing?” – Joseph Griffiths One thing inhibiting growth could be running into the same situation over and over again and not having opportunities to grow and change. Joseph will often tell his manager not to let him get bored in his role, which can happen every few years. Without enough change, he will get bored and not grow. If we’re talking about progressing to second-line manager (or manager of people managers)… Joseph would recommend determining if this role is aligned with your passions before pursuing it. If it is aligned with your passions, Joseph emphasizes the importance of understanding the greater organization. To a large degree, this is about people and politics. “Some organizations are focused on execution – getting things done. Some organizations are focused on marketing – looking good, looking like you’re getting things done. You need to understand which kind of organization you’re in and do the appropriate type of activity to the appropriate people. But ultimately, the next step of your career…is going to be managing a large group of people. You’re going to get that because you’re able to manage a large peer network of people and manage up to them. You need more people saying ‘yes, that’s the right person for the job.’ And that only happens because they know you…. The day of being handed a job or being tapped on the shoulder…it’s not the culture of corporations is America anymore. You’ve got to put yourself out there and say, ‘I’m looking for that job’ and convince a wide net of people that you should get that job. And that’s something that especially technology people struggle with.” – Joseph Griffiths Mentioned in the Outro If you could interview a former boss on your podcast, what would you ask? Joseph is more passionate about growth than technology, but he emphasizes that growth can mean different things for each of us at different times in our career. Growth might mean learning a new skill, sharpening an existing skill, expanding the scope of the problems you need to solve, working in a specific job role, or working at a specific type of company. Joseph’s suggestion of finding our passions and aligning them to a specific role pairs nicely with Tim Crawford’s advice on the decision between pursuing management and staying an individual contributor from Episode 244 – An Array of Decision Points with Tim Crawford (2/2) . If you’re looking for more on how other guests have used storytelling in their careers, check out these episodes: Episode 122 – Write, Interview, Tell Your Own Story with Brianna Blacet (2/2) Episode 301 – Always a Winger: People Person and Unapologetic Marketer with Amy Lewis (1/2) In Joseph’s story we also see a theme of needing to seek an outside source to learn more about ourselves. In this case it was working with a mentor. It’s amazing how questions from other people can provide clarity. You can also listen to our recent episodes with Daniel Lemire on how he sought clarity from different sources: Episode 325 – Overwhelmed by Ambiguity: DevOps, Innovation, and the Search for Clarity with Daniel Lemire (3/4) Episode 326 – AI Mistakes: Focused Resilience and a Specialization Bet with Daniel Lemire (4/4) 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

1
AI Mistakes: Focused Resilience and a Specialization Bet with Daniel Lemire (4/4) 36:38

6 weeks ago36:38

36:38

If you had something to share, what would you say, and how would you say it? Daniel Lemire asked himself the same question in the process of creating AI Mistakes. As it turns out, AI Mistakes isn’t just a platform for learning in public. It’s something Daniel must be doing. Want to know why? After completing the vision board and gaining more perspective on the layoff event that would change his direction, Daniel knew where to begin. But it took time to translate what he had written on the post-it note about his needs in a role to a role at a specific company. Through intentional mindset shifts, feedback from others, and additional help from a mentor, Daniel chose to make a bet on generative AI. Join us for episode 326 and the exciting conclusion of Daniel’s story. We’ll discuss how the specialized pre-sales role at ServiceNow really is a culmination of Daniel’s experience to this point and how he’s filling some of the sales and marketing gaps from back when he was an independent consultant. Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025 Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. He’s also the creator of AI Mistakes . If you missed parts 1-3 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 323 , Episode 324 , and Episode 325 . Topics – The Next Right Thing and the Genesis of AI Mistakes, Gaining AI Expertise, Mindset Shifts and Greater Clarity, A Role in Pre-Sales, Transition to Working for a Technology Vendor 3:14 – The Next Right Thing and the Genesis of AI Mistakes John wants to hear more about the genesis of AI Mistakes. The timeline starts when Daniel found out that he was in the group of people being laid off. “So, here I am…I think I’ve got things figured out. I’ve done really well. I think I’m going to get a really great appraisal for having taken care of business and done a good job, but actually, I got nothing…. Even now I still don’t know what anybody actually thought of my performance that year that I figured things out.” – Daniel Lemire, on not getting a performance review Though Daniel’s role had been eliminated, he and others were asked to stay on at the company until sometime during the following year (required to get a severance). Daniel recounts having to comfort his team about his departure. They had not learned to regulate themselves as Daniel had. “You’re going to be fine. You know what you’re doing. We’re putting you into a position to be successful going forward. You don’t need me to be successful. You just need to know that you can do this, and you’re good at what you do…. It just means that my next thing isn’t here, and that’s ok. I would not have been capable of having that conversation even a year prior because I hadn’t done the work that I needed to do to understand.” – Daniel Lemire, on comforting his team when delivering the news of his role being eliminated Daniel says this moment was a big confidence builder, and he feels he handled it very well with his team. Many of Daniel’s colleagues who were also part of the layoff did not handle it well. They were very angry. He reminds us these kinds of events are very difficult to go through. Having a severance package certainly helped provide Daniel time. Daniel mentioned his brother went through this kind of situation and did not receive a severance. Years early, Daniel had planned to stay as long as the company would let him, believing if the company decided to end his employment that it would likely result in some type of severance. He and a number of colleagues decided to focus on doing a good job and to deal with job loss if and when it came rather than living in fear about it. Daniel cites this mindset shift as an important point in his maturity to prepare for when the layoff eventually impacted him. “When I got the announcement that that road was going to end, that was like a golden ticket for me.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel ended his consulting business in 2009 after signing an agreement to work at PepsiCo. He was going “all in.” Once he knew his employment would be ending, Daniel continued to do great work until the very last day nearly 6 months later (something he’s very proud of). This was the catalyst for starting AI Mistakes. Daniel filed the paperwork and started developing a plan. He had learned a lot over the years since his last stint as an independent consultant and wanted to be ready for a potential return to it. “Sales and marketing is a thing that matters, and you’re going to have to do it. And I’m ready for this.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel assessed his preparedness for the uncomfortable parts of consulting if he was to return to it after the layoff. It was at least an option. “But the name AI Mistakes came out of the recognition that that is how we learn the best. Even at a very technical level…you have to learn doing it the wrong way to understand what the right way looks like…. That’s why you don’t become an architect the minute you step out of college. You haven’t had enough opportunity to make big enough mistakes…. Everybody’s made a big mistake. If you talk to anybody in operations, I guarantee you they have a sev 1 story.” Daniel Lemire Daniel highlights some of his biggest growth moments being when he really broke something. During these times other people had to pitch in to help fix the problems. We want to foster work environments so people can make mistakes that are not career ending or that they cannot recover from. 9:20 – Gaining AI Expertise Was AI a focus for Daniel when he worked on the innovation team? Daniel says there were several projects the greater innovation team worked on which were AI heavy. The exposure to AI for Daniel began by observing other members of the team and learning about it in the background. Someone was building models to improve manufacturing, and Daniel was able to see the progress and the outcome of that work, which sparked an interest in AI. “The difficulty for me was I couldn’t do any of that work. I just knew that that was the right thing to be doing…. Sometimes my role in innovation more often exactly opposite of what I had been doing previously in my career. Every job I’d had at PepsiCo was being the subject matter expert. I was the big brain. The moment I stepped into innovation, all of that basically went away. The only thing I was really good at that I brought to the team was helping with architecture and mapping out how the systems should interconnect and how we should prosecute the program of dealing with all of the things. I was no longer the expert that knew how to do the specific thing. I was working with the team to make that happen.” – Daniel Lemire A colleague on the innovation team told Daniel about GPT-3 and how it was actually beginning to work. After this conversation, Daniel got an OpenAI account, but despite thinking it was interesting, he didn’t really know what to do with it. At least initially, Daniel couldn’t find the value in this tool. “That is the number one thing I took away from my time in innovation…. What is the value, and how do you succinctly articulate that? …It can be the best technology. You can have the smartest people. But, if they are not willing to put their money to it, it doesn’t matter.” – Daniel Lemire Especially when communicating with executives, being unable to clearly articulate the value of something means it will not get funded. When ChatGPT happened, Daniel recognized it was going somewhere and began spending his time using it. While he initially did not know what to do with GPT-3, Daniel had used Stable Diffusion to generate images for some of the presentations he built during his time on the innovation team. Daniel had originally bought a couple of desktop computers with NVIDIA graphics cards to mine Ethereum as part of his innovation work. He mentions researching cryptocurrency and blockchain (and specifically NFTs ). The best way Daniel knew to learn about these technologies was to build a lab at home. Once there was no way to mine Ethereum any longer, Daniels’ lab environment was left idle. He decided to use it for Stable Diffusion and began to learn how the models worked. “So, I quickly became very familiar with those AI things, and then everything just kind of fell into place…. I’ve learned enough in an enterprise environment that I can actually consult and help people understand what the next thing is that they need to do…. A colleague at work said to me, ‘you know a lot, and you’re not sharing enough.’” – Daniel Lemire The feedback from his colleague is what prompted Daniel to start a YouTube channel for AI Mistakes . See also the YouTube Feed on the AI Mistakes Website . “If I really do have something that’s useful to share, who am I going to share it with, and how am I going to do that?” – Daniel Lemire For many years Daniel would watch YouTube videos in the evenings to keep up with technology trends. Since this helped him learn things, he could provide content for other people to learn in that format. Daniel was also used to writing newsletters for innovation, and he began his own AI Mistakes newsletter. You can view the newsletter and subscribe to it here . He also had the previous consulting experience to lean on. When Daniel was thinking through what would come next for him, he felt AI Mistakes could be that paycheck. He decided to treat it seriously and focus on it. “I went from one day going into the office at PepsiCo to the next day sitting here working the same amount of time building all of the things around AI Mistakes…. I get excited about something, and I get after it. And that’s what I did…. But, having done that vision board, I also knew that…I’ve gotta focus on all of the things. I can’t just be narrow on one thing. I’ve got to think about the bigger picture.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel reiterates that he did take a trip with his wife at one point to celebrate their anniversary. 15:11 – Mindset Shifts and Greater Clarity Daniel feels the work for AI Mistakes (preparation, getting better at speaking, building more expertise, etc.) and the repetition put him in the position to be successful in his interviews at ServiceNow. He knew what to say and how to say it in these discussions, which was backed by proof of work and expertise (his content). Having the public proof of work helped tremendously. Daniel has been able to monetize his YouTube channel as well (something he is very proud of). “It was the iteration and the feedback that I got from doing that that helped me get better and put me in a good position for the next thing, and the mindset things that I tackled in the process gave me the confidence I needed to go into that room and have that conversation on the interview…why I was the right guy for that next thing.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel also mentioned some mindset shifts during all of this such as needing to be working on something even if he could not immediately show the payback on that effort. Daniel needed to have confidence that he was doing the right work focused in the right area and that if he kept doing it good things would happen. When the severance check ended, Daniel did not yet have the next thing figured out. That was a very stressful time. Not long after this, Daniel once again gave up and relied on his faith just as he did after learning a career as a pilot in the Air Force was out of the question. The act of giving up and the steps afterward shaped what happened next. Shortly after giving up, Daniel applied for the role at ServiceNow. John mentions the post-it note did not mention anything about making a living as an AI influencer and coach. “I was looking for insights in many different places.” – Daniel Lemire At the DFW Prayer Breakfast, someone introduced Daniel to a CIO who would end up mentoring him. After a brief phone conversation about mentorship, the CIO sent Daniel a list of questions he needed to answer before they could continue. The questions were to help Daniel determine what he wanted. “To be fair, my needs were pretty ambiguous as it came to a role, and the questions that he was asking me were very much more focused on ‘what kind of role do you want from a career perspective…what job do you want?’ I couldn’t answer it. I didn’t have that answer.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel tells us the job role didn’t matter compared to what the job would do to fulfill Daniel’s needs as a contributor to an organization. He had applied to jobs as an architect, a product manager, an engineer, a leader, and even some focused on DevOps. None of the interviews for these types of roles worked out. After answering the questions the CIO / mentor proposed, Daniel clearly understood he was willing to make a bet on AI. It was a trend / area he believed to be bigger than cloud and mobile combined. A new role needed to be something with generative AI within the scope of things which were familiar to Daniel. The questionnaire from his mentor also helped Daniel sort out the type of company where he wanted to work. Initially, Daniel did not think enterprise was where he needed to be, but it turns out after further reflection, Daniel’s skillset would provide more value to a large enterprise. If Daniel had insisted on his future being an independent consultant, it might have been driven by ego. “AI Mistakes is one of the things I must be doing. There is a very clear calling for me to do that. The calling for me in doing that though isn’t that’s where I need to be earning what helps me take care of my family. That doesn’t mean there’s not a future for that to be the case, but that’s not the reason for the existence.” – Daniel Lemire 20:38 – A Role in Pre-Sales In the last couple of years, Daniel has recognized his lack of deep sales and marketing experience. He is consistently learning new things in his role within the go-to-market organization inside ServiceNow. Daniel says he’s not putting a limit on the number of years he plans to stay in the role. “It’s creating value. I love having the conversations. I feel like I’m really actually helping people… It is fulfilling the post-it note in ways that I could not have imagined…. I think the reason I needed that job was that I wasn’t going to get all of those things from just doing AI Mistakes. Or perhaps I couldn’t get to those things in the time that I needed that to be the case.” – Daniel Lemire, on his role with ServiceNow Daniel confirms his current role is a pre-sales role and that back when he knew things were going to change for him at PepsiCo, pre-sales wasn’t even on the consideration list for what might be next. Daniel loves his current role working in pre-sales and mentions it contains so much of what he needed. John thinks another role which could have fulfilled the post-it note for Daniel is technical marketing. “The thing that I didn’t understand about sales from the very beginning was that it’s not about getting somebody to give you their money. That’s what we all think about when we think about sales, right? It’s transactional.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel has read a lot about sales in the last 24-36 months, recognizing that even if AI Mistakes could make money, he would eventually need to make a sale. “And that’s probably a big part of why I was able to get a role in pre-sales because I didn’t walk into that just being a technician. I walked into that with many volumes of sales learnings in my back pocket. And having done inside sales doing innovation at a corporation meant that I had many conversations trying to convince somebody to give me their money to go and do the innovation thing.” – Daniel Lemire Nick says Daniel’s role as an architect even contained a sales element, especially when encouraging colleagues to adapt cloud and DevOps. The role at ServiceNow was a good fit for Daniel because of the time investment he made. “There’s no reason to buy the technology unless it solves a problem, and you have to get to the heart of the problem. What is the why? Why does this thing matter?” – Daniel Lemire We need to be able to answer those why questions both for us and for other people. John mentions taking a value selling course when he first got into pre-sales and the emphasis on understanding the buyer’s metrics for business success. After a decade in IT Operations, John had never once asked for his manager’s metrics for success. Daniel said he never really had to do this until he was on the innovation team. As an architect, he usually had to convince technical people that something was the right answer, and it never really left the technical domain. Daniel recounts a professor from his graduate program saying, “we have an alignment problem. People that do technology don’t know how to explain to the businesspeople why the technology matters, and until you solve that problem, things are going to go sideways. It really is that simple.” This alignment problem is the number 1 problem both technologists and businesspeople have to solve. John says many people don’t know if they are working on something which makes their company money. It is often easier to keep your job when you work on something aligned with revenue as opposed to something viewed as a cost center. Within a cost center, there is always pressure for the cost to go down. When something is generating revenue, the discussions are more about return on investment. Daniel says it took him reading The Phoenix Project to understand these things even after obtaining his graduate degree. It took the enterprise context as well. All things considered, Daniel says he would not change a thing. 26:51 – Transition to Working for a Technology Vendor What other challenges does Daniel see based on his experience moving from being a technologist to working for a technology vendor? Daniel says he needed to separate himself from needing to have a specific level or title and be willing to put himself in a different position. Daniel is a higher-level individual contributor at ServiceNow in his pre-sales role, he has no direct reports. He works with sales executives and other solutions consultants to help customers. “I had to have the experiences in being a manager and being in charge of the technical things and being the architect and driving the programs to be able to sit down with the people that are at our customers to help them negotiate the challenges that they’re in. But that has nothing to do with a title. That was something that I didn’t understand until I got into it. The reason I was able to get the role at ServiceNow…was because I wasn’t overshooting where I could add value.” – Daniel Lemire John mentions often times an entry level pre-sales position is a mid-career position. There are more junior versions of this role to allow entry for people earlier in their career. In order to generate value in a pre-sales role, it takes many different types of experience and skills. Overall, Daniel doesn’t think he is missing any of the other challenges of stepping into the role. He gives credit to the team who interviewed and hired him and recognized he could do well in this role. In his current role, Daniel works with many different sales teams as a technical overlay / specialist. He is not dedicated to a specific set of customers but rather is a dedicated resource to internal sales teams for supporting their customers. Daniel shares a recent story of getting some very positive feedback on a customer presentation from the account team he was supporting and stresses the importance of feedback for his own improvement. “I tell the account team…‘when we’re done, I want your feedback. If it’s bad or good I need to know because I’m going to touch a lot of other customers, and if there’s something I can improve, I need to get to work now.’” – Daniel Lemire Daniel is very mindful of trying to balance being confident with preventing himself from being too confident. Nick re-iterates what Daniel told us earlier in our discussions – “in the absence of feedback, you can be open to experimentation.” John likes to label his performance in situations as performing well or performing poorly. Doing well or doing poorly does not make a person good or bad. Daniel didn’t expect this but views himself as a performer. It’s about how he can serve others in the moment. Nick says it’s the value he can deliver. If you want to follow up with Daniel on this conversation, you can: Contact Daniel on LinkedIn Learn about his work with AI Mistakes , including his YouTube Channel Mentioned in the Outro Daniel needed additional clarity from a mentor to gain the clarity necessary to translate what he had written on the post-it note to a role at a specific company. If you or someone you know has been impacted by a layoff event, check out our Layoff Resources Page for access to the most impactful discussions on the topic of layoffs with industry experts and technologists like you. Daniel’s statement of “you don’t need me to be successful” and the need to comfort his team about his departure reminds us of Marni Coffey’s story. Go listen to Episode 280 – Life after Layoff: A Leader’s Sense of Duty and A Series of Good Conversations with Marni Coffey (3/3) to hear the parallels. Daniel made a bet on generative AI. When we make a bet on a technology, we want something with longevity in the market that needs the attention of our skillsets. We want it to still be relevant by the time we have enough expertise in the area to get a new job, for example. Compare the way Daniel decided to that of Brad Christian in Episode 264 – Back to Basics: Technology Bets and Industry Relationships with Brad Christian (2/2) . Both are valid sets of reasoning. 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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Overwhelmed by Ambiguity: DevOps, Innovation, and the Search for Clarity with Daniel Lemire (3/4) 45:42

7 weeks ago45:42

45:42

What happens when there is too much change at once after making a job change? Daniel Lemire had learned the principles of DevOps and combined it with his experience as an infrastructure architect to advocate for the adoption of new technologies and processes within a large enterprise. But when Daniel changed roles to focus on innovation and became a senior manager at the same time, there were many challenges for which he was unprepared. In fact, at times it was overwhelming. In the 3rd installment of Daniel Lemire’s story in episode 325, you’ll hear Daniel’s reasons for focusing on innovation in the first place, why he continued to persevere through challenges, the stress and impact of layoff events, and the unexpected way he found clarity amidst the ambiguity. Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025 Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. He’s also the creator of AI Mistakes . If you missed parts 1 or 2 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 323 and Episode 324 Topics – A Personal DevOps Value Story, Planting Seeds of Innovation, The Challenges of Impactful Innovation, Progressing from Overwhelm to Clarity 3:33 – A Personal DevOps Value Story Daniel needed a reset and to determine how he could contribute to the organization where he worked. That’s about the time he discovered DevOps . After a recommendation from a colleague within the security organization, Daniel read The Phoenix Project , and it has changed his career trajectory for the better. He read the book not long after its release. Reading the book also changed the way Daniel thinks so he is able to help companies create value. “…When I read it, I didn’t understand what was so great about it. I just knew there was something there that I needed…. I read it and I got really excited about it. But I didn’t really know what to do with it.” – Daniel Lemire Not long after reading The Phoenix Project, Daniel recommended the book to a colleague who worked on the security and compliance team. There was a character in the book named John who starts off being very stressed but for whom things improve greatly during the course of the story. “After he finished the book, he came back to me and he’s like, ‘let’s do something with this….’ I still didn’t know what to do with it.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel’s colleague recommended they start by meeting and having a conversation. After their initial meeting, Daniel and his colleague started meeting on a weekly basis. They started talking about The Three Ways and how these could be applied to make things better. Daniel and his colleague gave a presentation to a large portion of the IT Operations team to share thoughts on the way people do work and how to improve it. “It really helped them think through some of their organizational challenges and the things that needed to be done because that was also a difficult time across our technology organization because of the big changes that were being made. But the lightbulb didn’t really all the way come on for me until The DevOps Handbook came out and I got the concrete ‘these are the things that matter to a technology organization.’ So much of what I think about from a technology manager perspective has literally come out of that story. It is The Phoenix Project helping me related to what was going on and then the handbook giving me the tools to do the things that mattered that have enabled me to grow my technical accumen into an organizational behavior mechanism…. Ultimately if you can’t apply the lever in the right place, it doesn’t matter…. You can have the best people. You can have the best technology. But if you don’t solve the right problem, you’ve done nothing. That is a contextualization on many different levels.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel cites The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt as another very influential book. He says it helps you understand systems at a bigger level and would recommend it to any technologist, referencing the drum buffer rope concept. We must be able to do the right things within the right context to create value. Daniel achieved continued success applying the principles of DevOps which allowed him to continue into a management role at PepsiCo. Before Daniel was a manager, he needed to work with and influence people to do technical work across the organization. These people didn’t necessarily work with him on a daily basis or have a rapport with him. Learnings from his study of DevOps came together in a meaningful and useful way in these situations. Daniel cites understanding the metrics needed to get the kind of feedback you need as an example. Reflecting back on it, Daniel was excited about what The DevOps Handbook promised. The book’s introduction was telling a value story for the application of DevOps, including examples of organizations that had used the principles of DevOps to increase performance. “You needed everything that was in the rest of the book, but what got me excited was what those things could do. Understanding that promise of improving the system got me thinking more about how to build an effective system.” – Daniel Lemire, describing the introduction of The DevOps Handbook as a value story for DevOps 9:26 – Planting Seeds of Innovation Daniel was already helping colleagues understand how to make effective technical contributions to building systems. The principles Daniel learned from The Phoenix Project, The Goal, and The DevOps Handbook allowed him to push these conversations beyond just the technical – into the business domain. “You’re never going to be successful in architecture if you’re not able to encapsulate the business domain.” – Daniel Lemire It’s important to be able to explain why we do technical things. “Architects, in my view, are really masters of making tradeoff equations. In the infrastructure space, you can install a single server to do something, and you can get that system in place very quickly. But it’s fragile because if any individual component failure comes into play, you can’t do anything. So, you have to build these failure domains that allow you to maintain the integrity of the system, but that’s more expensive…. When I think about what I learned from DevOps, it is balancing those two equations.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel distinctly remembers a chart having to do with the number of developers working on a given project. It’s the Mythical Man Month concept. He gives the example of a baby’s development. It takes 9 months. This is a known limitation of the system. Daniel says architects understand technical limitations in specific areas but also overall system limitations. The limitations are used to make the right decisions in conjunction with the requirements to meet the business need so the overall program can be successful. “The better you are at putting those pieces together, the more successful you’re going to be in solving the problems that the organization at large has.” – Daniel Lemire According to Daniel, an architect doesn’t just put technical systems together and stop there because it can limit one’s success. Daniel mentions receiving guidance from people in the DevOps community to extend his skills beyond the technical. While learning DevOps did afford Daniel the opportunity to do some interesting work as an infrastructure architect, but he eventually reached the point of needing to do something different. Daniel remembers completing a specific exercise for his personal development plan focused on the kinds of things he wanted to do in his career. Daniel wrote down his desire to be an architect and focus on innovation. Daniel was a competent infrastructure architect who understood the challenges of the role very well. He experienced successes driving new technologies like DevOps and adoption of cloud technologies and was extremely proud of those efforts. The next architectural project for Daniel was building a very critical business system in the cloud. It was interesting but not interesting enough. “I knew exactly where I was headed with that program. I thought it was interesting, but I also thought it was boring. And that’s not what I wanted to do next…. I saw the pain that was coming for me by doing this next big thing. I wasn’t excited about it, and I just couldn’t put myself in that position going forward.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel mentioned many corporations across the world have a lot of work to do when it comes to cloud technologies. We are great at adding new technologies but not so got at getting rid of the old ones. The Phoenix Project describes problems and challenges that are applicable to many companies. We can learn from other companies without having to go through the pain. 15:07 – The Challenges of Impactful Innovation “And, oddly enough, an opportunity opened up for me to get to that next level and be a senior manager and go do innovation. Man, I was so excited about that.” – Daniel Lemire Reflecting on it, Daniel was very good at introducing critical new things within the company. He points to the beginning of cloud dialogues with colleagues and how their reactions changed from initial confusion and detraction to full support within a couple of years. “I was one of the guys that said, ‘yeah, we need to go do this.’ I don’t think I was wrong, and DevOps was the same way. Some people were like, ‘I don’t know why this is your thing.’” – Daniel Lemire Daniel mentions conversation he had with a mentor who disagreed about DevOps being what the organization needed to solve certain problems. At the time, Daniel knew he would not win that battle. “The challenge I always had with him was – he’d throw me off my game. He’d ask a really intelligent question that I had no way to answer. I liked that about him because every time I got in a conversation with him, he’d point out something I hadn’t thought about…. Any time I showed up with something like, ‘hey, we need to do this’ he would throw a curve ball at me that it would take me weeks to solve or in some cases months…. He wasn’t wrong…it just turned into this wall for me. Even now, looking back on it, I know that I was fundamentally right in saying this is what we need…. You can take the right next step and not be able to explain why it’s the right next step in the moment, but it’s still the right next step.” – Daniel Lemire, on overcoming challenges when presenting new ideas Trying to answer the questions his mentor asked might keep Daniel from getting things accomplished because he was determined to fill the gaps in his knowledge. John has empathy when it comes to the constant question of changing systems. “At least I know the problems of the system that I know, and new systems bring new problems.” – John White, paraphrasing The Systems Bible John highlights the difficulty involved in knowing whether someone is bringing up an 80% objection or a 20% objection. We generally manage to the 80% because managing to the 20% can cause different issues. See also The Pareto Principle or 80/20 Rule . Daniel has emphasized this theme more often lately in his consulting role. Many of the objections people raise are part of the 20%. Looking back, he is not sure if the objections his mentor raised would fall into the 20%, but we as technologists today spend way too much time on the 20%. John says a lot of time will be spent on the 20% regardless of the efficiency of the 80%. Optimizing the 80% provides more time for the 20%. “I was just really tired of dealing with the 20% all the time, and I really wanted to be able to do a lot of things…. There’s the 80% of the problems that you can solve very, very quickly, and then there’s the 20% of the problems that you just have to spend a ton of time to get there.” The same is true with expertise, right? You can be 80% effective at a brand-new thing in a short period of time, but to get that last 20% it takes much, much iteration. Having spent a decade in infrastructure, I became far too focused on the little bitty things." – Daniel Lemire When he worked in infrastructure, some of the projects Daniel worked on were measured in years. In infrastructure, one cannot take risks. It’s important to put in a reliable system. Daniel needed something different. The opportunity to move into innovation solved this problem. It allowed for fast iteration on things. Daniel tells us he did more projects in innovation than his entire career in infrastructure because of the nature of the beast. Was getting to work on many different projects in innovation something Daniel considered to be a bigger impact? Daniel says no. “So much of the things that I worked on in innovation became shelfware. You can drive a lot of excitement about something new, and you can run an effective proof of concept and show that something is valuable or not valuable. But it doesn’t mean that somebody’s going to stand up and say, ‘I’m ready to go try this,’ especially in an enterprise environment because even ROI often times is not enough to satisfy the ‘why are we doing this?’” – Daniel Lemire Daniel would not say it’s impossible to inject innovations into an enterprise successfully, but he highlights a number of challenges from experience. When Daniel began the work in innovation, he didn’t actually know what it took to do the work of innovation at an enterprise level. It took Daniel years to make progress on cloud and DevOps within the organization. This effort requires addressing multiple dimensions – educating others, building technical accumen, governance, politics, governance, the organization in which you’re operating, and the monetary aspect of it. These are also true for innovation. “What I didn’t understand when I started the journey was that I was signing up to do those things in a much shorter period of time than I was really prepared to do. I knew what to do. I had not done enough repetition to be very effective at it. Now the good news is because I was in innovation the repetition happened a lot faster, but it didn’t make my boss happy that I wasn’t very good at it….” – Daniel Lemire What does not very good mean? Daniel says he did not understand the practice of innovation well enough. It requires doing some very specific things, and upon taking on the role, he was ignorant of those things. Daniel did a lot of reading to get up to speed on these items. Daniel refers to a conversation with Jensen Huang and a journalist about Starting NVIDIA. If Jensen had known what he was signing up for when deciding to start NVIDIA, he probably would not have done it. Daniel says this parallels his experience in innovation – not understanding or appreciating what he had signed up to do. There were some challenges to taking the role in innovation that Daniel needs to share with us. Daniel knew some members of the innovation team and felt he would have fewer interpersonal challenges. He was ready to tackle something new, excited about this opportunity, and understood it would be a difficult task. “I’m aggressively going after jumping into the deep end because consistently…if I throw myself into the deep end, I’m going to swim.” – Daniel Lemire Daniel accepted the role of senior manager of the innovation team in February 2020 right before the global pandemic really started in the US. He was not prepared for it. In some ways Daniel feels like it may have been a mistake, but in other ways he doesn’t have any regrets about taking the role. “In fact, I can remember very clearly the conversation I had with my manager in completing in completing my objectives review going into my 4th year in innovation…. My manager says to me, ‘Daniel, you’re not good at this.’” – Daniel Lemire Though it was a tremendous challenge to meet his manager’s expectations, Daniel understood his future success hinged on getting good at the different elements required to perform the role well. Daniel’s manager eventually took on a different role within the organization. It was challenging for Daniel to have his manager leave knowing he had disappointed his manager with his performance. “It was basically the next month that things started to click for me. He wasn’t wrong in that I wasn’t performing well for the things he needed me to do well at. It was almost in the next breath that things really locked in, and it all started to make sense for me…. I’m also not going to tell you that I immediately went from being not great at this thing to being the best there is….” – Daniel Lemire Daniel says things start to make sense after a certain amount of iteration and feedback just like some children need to fall down many times before learning to walk. Nick gives the example of James Dyson’s relentless drive to iterate and get to a working prototype. See also Invention: A Life by James Dyson . Maybe Daniel’s manager leaving forced him to step up and do better? Daniel isn’t sure what made the difference, but he knows it was what he needed and has been a major contributor to the work Daniel has done subsequent to the position in innovation. 27:27 – Progressing from Overwhelm to Clarity Was the point at which everything started to make sense close to the time of Daniel’s exit from PepsiCo? When Daniel had the tough career conversation with his manager about his performance, he knew he was close to turning a corner. Daniel didn’t plan to seek out a new role just yet. This scenario destroyed Daniel’s confidence. He didn’t fully realize how much of a problem this was at the time. When Daniel’s boss left and he asked about applying for the director position, Daniel said he did not want it. “Somebody had just told me I wasn’t good at doing those things. Why on earth would I sign up for more responsibility when I’m not good at the things I’m already responsible for?” – Daniel Lemire Looking back, Daniel thinks he should have signed up for the director role, feeling he was capable of doing the job. The team had no director for a period of time once Daniel’s manager left. Daniel encouraged one of his very capable peers to take on the director role and had no issues working for a different manager in lieu of removing himself from the director role candidate pool. During this period, Daniel continued to improve his skills as an innovation manager, filling some of those earlier gaps he had. “Right about the time I’m feeling pretty good about where I am and how I’m seeing things and being able to classify and organize and execute the things that I think need to be done…the earthquake happens.” – Daniel Lemire, describing a pending layoff event Daniel could clearly see what was happening over time from his learnings getting the graduate degree. He and his peers in the infrastructure space knew there was a larger organizational plan happening. The only real opportunities in the infrastructure space within the company were if you intended to become a director, senior director, or vice president. "All of us at one point several years ago kind of looked at each other and said, “are you going to hang around until the end, or are you going to jump and go somewhere else?’ I’m a really loyal guy. That’s just part of who I am. It’s really hard for me to pick up and leave because I’m invested. That was what was in play for me. I was just really invested in being a part of the organization….” – Daniel Lemire Daniel remembers getting the opportunity to move into the innovation group. He was moving into a different area and did not feel he would have an “end-of-the-road” problem like in the infrastructure space. It could potentially be the next 10 years of his career. “One of the things I also knew moving into innovation was our innovation team directly reported to the CTO, and the reality of that relationship is if you aren’t satisfying the objectives that the CTO has, you don’t have a reason for existence. So, you have to be very good at delivering on what you’re promising. The stark reality was that as a team, holistically we weren’t delivering to all of the objectives that the CTO had. So, something had to give, and in this case, it was me. I was the one that got cut from the team.” – Daniel Lemire Many were surprised that Daniel was impacted by the layoffs. Daniel doesn’t think performance ratings played into this but isn’t sure. Reflecting back on it, the role in innovation had too much ambiguity for Daniel while he was doing something very different. The time period in which all this happened also made this difficult. “It was too much at once, and it took me years to figure out how to navigate that well and to get back on the horse well.” – Daniel Lemire, thinking about his role in innovation. There are some good things that happened during this progression leading up to the layoff event that Daniel wanted to share with us. A couple of years before Daniel was laid off (and before he moved to the innovation team), one specific round of layoffs of his colleagues created an extraordinary amount of stress on Daniel, and that stress made him sick with gastrointestinal issues. Daniel’s direct boss was impacted at the time, which made it very difficult. “But I learned a lot from that situation because I had not learned how to regulate my emotions attached to what was going on. I was so invested in my reputation and my title. That was what was really important to me, and I didn’t understand that I needed to focus on everything about what I was doing, not just my career…. I needed that recalibration, and I also needed to focus on my health a little bit more.” – Daniel Lemire Joining the innovation team took away the immediate stress. Even though Daniel wasn’t performing as well as he needed to within innovation, it did not come with the same amount of stress as when he worked in infrastructure, and it was an entirely new set of challenges. Daniel was able to recalibrate what it meant to be in a future round of people leaving the organization. “I was able to contextualize what that meant and recognize that that really didn’t have anything to do with me and that sometimes these thigns happen and that I just needed to get myself in order. No matter what was going to happen, that was on me to do, and nobody else could take responsibility for that. So, in some ways it was accepting that responsibility of ‘I need to be in charge of the whole me.’” – Daniel Lemire Daniel mentions that his wife made a decision to go and get some coaching to improve herself, and it impacted him in a very positive way. Daniel was in a bad place, and his wife shared some of the learnings from that coaching with him. At one point Daniel’s wife encouraged him to make a vision board that covered all areas of his life. This was close to the time Daniel had the difficult conversation with his manager in innovation. Daniel’s wife had already made one for herself, and it was extremely helpful. “I’ve gotta tell you guys, there’s something much bigger at play because it was almost the next moment after finishing that vision board that things started to happen…. I honestly believe that if I hadn’t done the vision board that none of those things would have happened. I really think that was the trigger. It was me getting clarity on what mattered.” – Daniel Lemire As a result of making the vision board, Daniel had the overwhelming need to get a LinkedIn subscription and to share content with people. Daniel refers to the things that happened next as “a snowball of change.” “I need to be in a position that I can uniquely fill, to use all of my skills and not just be managing tasks, to apply technical experiences to make the organization better, and to build systems that help people and have my contribution valued.” – Daniel Lemire, sharing what he had written on a post-it note after completing the vision board exercise Daniel says it was completing the vision board and getting the clarity that launched him into a “next phase.” For the first time in several years, he knew what he wanted. At one point he had been merely going through the motions so he could recover from the overwhelm of too much ambiguity. While still on the innovation team, Daniel was starting to think about the type of role he wanted next. “If I had the permission to do something or anything, what would that be? One of the things that I outlined for me was doing things that were outside of my specific role because that was part of how I had been successful in my past, and I knew I needed to get back to that.” – Daniel Lemire John pointed out that nothing on Daniel’s post-it note said he needed to be working in innovation or that he needed to be a senior manager. It was much more general. When we cut it down to the core, for Daniel, it wasn’t about the title or the area he was working in. Daniel says he needed to get clarity about what was important first before his “what’s next” could begin. Nick remembers having lunch with Daniel around the time of the layoff that impacted Daniel and hearing his idea. Daniel’s idea and proposed direction seemed extremely clear based on the time at which the lunch occurred. Daniel says Nick observed the output of Daniel getting the clarity he needed. Daniel also tells us he did not appreciate the importance of getting this clarity and at some point along the way had stopped seeking clarity. "…There’s no reason that you have to abdicate your responsibility to understand what it is that you should be working on. We should all be working on something at every moment, and we should be intentional about the things that we’re working on. I let go of my initiative because of the ambiguity. I didn’t have a rudder, and I wasn’t doing the things that I needed to do to get that rudder back. And I take responsibility for that. I really do. I think I could have done a better job of navigating that situation if I had thought about what I needed to prioritize and thought about what it was that I needed to be doing. And I also needed that…because it got me asking…‘ok, that’s all done. Now what?’ I can’t go back and change any of that. It doesn’t matter. What am I going to do now? " – Daniel Lemire Daniel refers to the scene in Frozen 2 where Anna sings about “the next right thing.” “It’s reflecting on those ideas and those thoughts that was also the genesis of how I wound up falling into this AI Mistakes thing that I started.” – Daniel Lemire Mentioned in the Outro This was another story of someone impacted by a layoff event. If that’s you or someone you know, check out our Layoff Resources Page for access to the most impactful discussions on the topic of layoffs with industry experts and technologists like you. The clarity Daniel gained allowed him to reframe the layoff event, and in seeking the clarity, he figured out what he wanted and needed in a job role. It was the vision board and going through that exercise that made the difference. Nick suspects there is some parallel or possible overlap in the vision board and the Must Have List that Kat Troyer and Liz Bronson (the hosts of RealJobTalk ) shared with us a while back. We usually don’t take the time to perform these types of exercises because we’re overwhelmed or have too much work to do or get distracted by other things. Maybe you need to spend time seeking clarity. When Daniel mentioned he wasn’t sure what to do with DevOps after learning about it, Nick thought this sounded like more missing context. It reminded him of the mix of concrete and abstract learning that Erik Gross spoke to us about in Episode 267 – A Theme of Learning with Erik Gross (1/3) . Daniel’s ‘what now’ question reminded Nick of what Cody de Arkland shared in Episode 86 – Emotional Tech Support and Debugging with Verbose Logging with Cody de Arkland – stating lives and careers are like seasons. It’s more about when is next than what is next. Daniel also shared some book recommendations after this recording that we will mention (both available in audio form): What to Do Next: Taking Your Best Step When Life Is Uncertain by Jeff Henderson Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal What did Daniel mean by starting AI Mistakes at the end of that episode? We’ll share the story next week as we conclude with part 4? 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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Find the Missing Context: Perspectives and Observations from Enterprise Experience with Daniel Lemire (2/4) 56:03

8 weeks ago56:03

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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

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

9 weeks ago46:42

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

10 weeks ago41:14

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

11 weeks ago31:53

31:53

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.…

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

12 weeks ago46:40

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.…

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)

13 weeks ago

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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.…

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

14 weeks ago48:21

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,…

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

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