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