Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology, business, and culture
with the finest minds in computer networking.
Hello, Tom. How are you? Hi, Russ. I'm
doing really well. How about yourself? Fine. Whiteboard
looks pretty full. Kids have been busy.
Yep. Yep. That one's a schedule. We just
started school and our oldest oldest just started
middle school. So we're all figuring out how
to balance the kids in different schools for
the first time. So pretty fun. Okay. Cool.
And the plants doing okay?
Plant's thriving. Yep. Right there. Yes. Rick Graziani
came on the show just to see the
plant. Yep.
That's pretty funny. We talk about the plant
more than we do anything else. Does it
have a name?
Oh, good question. It doesn't.
What do you think its name should be,
Alexis?
I mean, Tom Junior is the obvious one,
but Tom Junior. There we go. Or Tom,
I'd be thinking Tom Thumb.
Well, maybe we'll have a naming contest out
here on the hedge. Best name wins and
I'll name the plant that.
Oh my goodness. I'll have to put that
on LinkedIn or something.
Take a poll. Take a poll. So hello,
Alexis. For anybody who is interested, that is
Alexis who is in the background there. Not
in the background. She's just talking.
She is our guest for this episode of
The Hedge. And we wanna talk about
advocating for yourself,
being a self advocate in the network engineering
world. How is that different than being a
network a self advocate in any other world?
Because we're supposed to be technical, first of
all. And second of all,
because most technical people, most engineers
don't like people very much,
and they don't like advocating for themselves.
They like to, like, sit in a corner
like I do,
where, you know,
just leave me alone and let me do
my stuff. Quit making me do all this
paperwork. It's a great cartoon I saw once
of two people sitting across the desk from
each other, and apparently, one of them was
the manager. They were doing a review,
and the person was
saying on the other back on the other
side of the desk, the person being reviewed
said, what do you mean develop my soft
skills? I went into computers so I wouldn't
have to know anything about people.
That just captures the whole
I think,
and I think that's a sentient that's
echoed. Right? Even among some of the more
vocal people that you've seen on the Internet,
But dealing with computers is easier than dealing
with people.
Right? Because those computers tell them tell you
tell
computers do what you tell them to most
of the time.
Right? For better or worse.
Yeah. And for the as long as you
pass them the right debug flag, they'll also
tell you what they're thinking. Right?
There's no debug flag on people. I I
don't know. It sounds like a good idea.
I should put one on my wife.
Turn on the debug thing on the back
and She should put one on you.
Could she handle it? I don't
know. That would be pretty funny.
So what is so so Alexis, when we
talk about advocating for yourself, what what does
that mean to you? What is, like, maybe
someone's listening and thinking what does that even
mean? Like, am I my own lawyer? What
is this?
Yeah. I think it's a really important topic
and, you know, the number one thing when
I talk about this
that I want people to take away is
that no one is going to be a
better advocate for
you than yourself. Because a lot of times
we come into college
and we get our first jobs and maybe
we're assigned a mentor or we're given a
boss or there's a senior engineer that we're
tied to
and we kind of assume that, well, if
we work really hard, people are gonna notice
and we're gonna go rewarded for it. And
this mentor or buddy or boss or coach
or
peer, whoever it is, is gonna be the
one that's speaking up for you.
And that's not always the case.
Right? I I've had it personally happen to
me. I've heard about it happening to friends.
Because at the end of the day,
you might go and work really, really hard
on something and you're grinding away. You're really
putting your all into it,
but no one is coming to peek over
your shoulder
and check your work.
That might have happened in college,
right, or even in elementary school where there
was participation trophies being given out and things
were, you know, incentivized
by grading systems or, you know,
gold
stars. But in
corporate America, in the real world, once you
graduate,
it's not necessarily the case.
Yeah. In fact, I think it's very, very
common that
people don't
really pay attention to what you're doing unless
you tell them. And I I do this
all the time. I will sit here and
I will write up
20 pages of documentation on some really cool
idea,
and then two weeks later, somebody will say
to me,
whatever, like, did you ever think about that?
I'm like, there's 20 pages of documents right
here.
Did you did you read what I wrote?
Yeah. Did you read what I wrote? Which
by the way is is not always good
because a lot of people I hate to
tell you this, but a lot of people
are functionally illiterate
in the tech world. That's a sad thing.
But either way, yeah, and I don't really
say anything to anybody. I just wrote it
up. That was an idea.
And then, you know,
I just let it sit there because
why? Who am I gonna tell? That's most
of the time what I feel like. Is
who am I gonna tell? My manager?
Well, I don't know. I don't know how
good that's gonna be. He's just gonna say,
well, he's just gonna say, well, why are
you working on that one? Should we be
working on this thing over here or whatever
it is?
And so that's kind of an issue in
our world that people don't.
Like I said, Alexis, you know, we're only
advocate for real most of the time. Well,
and especially especially when we're thinking about post
COVID. I mean, we're all sitting in in
our home offices right now.
It's even harder to do that. When you're
not physically in the office, you don't have
a coworker that's stopping by your cubicle to
go, Oh, what what's that you're writing Russ?
That looks really interesting. Yeah. Like you're really
focused.
What are you doing?
Right? It's even more important to bring that
element into
advocating for your work and being able to
articulate
what you've done and the impact that you've
made. It's not just
the work, which
for a lot of engineers,
or especially people who are more introverted,
which a lot of engineers are,
that's hard because
speaking up is uncomfortable
and it is almost work on top of
the work.
Yep. It is. It is. What are so
so what are the what are the practical
opportunities to
advocate for yourself? Like, the obvious one is
the annual performance review or whatever. But that's
really formal.
There are many others. What, what do you
Alexis, what do you think? What are the
opportunities that come up where you can advocate
for yourself?
Well, I would start first with the relationship
you have with your manager, and it really
depends on what type of manager you have.
Some managers wanna have a really personal relationship
with you. Some managers want to be very
involved in your work or what you're doing
or how you're managing your time.
Some it's much more transactional.
Did you did you do your tasks this
week?
I'll see you next week. And that's it.
And
for me advocacy,
you can do the checklist of your week
to week tasks, read your KPIs, or your
bug reports, or whatever else you're working on.
But are you able to have a deeper
conversation with them about your six month or
twelve month or three year goals?
Maybe you don't even know what those are,
but as your manager,
career development is technically part of their job.
And, if they're not proactively having those discussions
with you, it's up to you to take
control of that conversation and bring it up
to them.
So, hi,
Mr. Manager.
I have been in this role for three
months now. I feel like I've really gotten
to know the team.
I've gotten my feet wet. I kind of
understand where I fit in at this company,
and I wanna understand how I can make
a deeper impact.
Personally,
I am a junior network engineer. I'm, you
know, a level one.
In the next
year to two years, I would like to
be a level two. Do you think that's
feasible?
And if so, what do I have to
do in order to accomplish that? And kind
of setting the stage early for the roadmap
of where you wanna go versus what happens
with a lot of people is they will
work for a year and a half to
two years and hit all their checklists, hit
their KPIs, you know, do their tasks. And
then after two years they go, well, why
haven't I been promoted?
Right? So it really is taking control of
that conversation aspect. Now is it up to
your manager to bring it up to you
or you to bring it up to them?
It could be either.
I think in a perfect world, your manager
is the one
that's taking control of their team's career development,
but we don't always see that happen. Yeah.
As a matter of fact, you will sometimes
not always not not all that common, but
it does happen.
When your manager prefers someone else over you,
and you end up having to be an
advocate
outside your team,
not to your manager
because your manager is actually blocking you
from being from being effective.
And so you have to learn how to
move around that
and not necessarily just skip level, but also,
like, you work with other people on other
teams.
Let them know what you're working on. Talk
to them. Help them.
And then the then then the goodness spins
around,
and it becomes difficult
to
push you down in a sense after a
while. It's always possible.
There are some managers who are just they
just they take wrong they take you get
on their wrong side in the first three
months, and it just doesn't matter what forget
it. Yeah. They never forget it. I've been
there too, Russ. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I
think I think you I think you need
to be mobile in your organization regardless of
what your manager style is. Even if your
manager is like your cheerleader and your best
friend, I think you still need to go
out to other teams because the opportunities don't
always come up in your team. The other
thing is, I mean, if you're really good,
if you're someone that your manager is gonna
wanna keep you, and sometime your manager is
keeping sometimes your manager keeping you is not
aligned with your interest in your career as
good as the manager might be. And so
I I think what you're saying, Russ, is
I think is universally true. You get around
and see other people, and then when those
other opportunities come up,
then
the thing I like about that is it
puts you in the driver's seat. You're not
waiting for your manager, like Alexis saying, you're
not waiting for your manager to make good
things happen for you.
And you're also conversely not
I I don't think for me, I'm less
emotionally affected. If my manager's a bad one,
like, I'm I'm less emotionally effective up if
if I'm already going to talk to other
people. Like, okay. Well, he's not gonna help
me, but there's all these other people that
will. And and it's good. I can still
have a good relationship with this bad manager,
and and I don't know. I think it
helps.
Well, and I think your point to expanding
your network, maybe you're in a really large
company where you do have multiple departments that
you can do your networking with. You can
also network outside of your company.
The industry is so huge. There's no reason
to say you can't have a mentor or
an advocate
outside. I mean, even especially now,
traveling with Megaport,
I see the same people at conferences
all the time. Right? Every three months, I
run-in the same group of people, whether it's
at a Nanog or a Cisco Live or
at, you know, XYZ event.
I've ran into the same people on different
continents.
It's just I'm like, you're here too? This
is crazy.
And you start to build those relationships. And
if something happens or if you really do
need some advice,
they might have a different take on it
just based on their experience.
Yeah. In fact, I worked in a team
once at Cisco
was really one of the better teams, one
of the best teams I worked at in
Cisco,
where we never met in person because we
lived all over the world. But we all
saw each other at the IETF three times
a year.
Mhmm. And so the we had team dinners
at the IETF
because it was the only time we physically
saw each other. It's like, that's crazy, but
that's but it worked
really, really well. Now another thing I often
wonder about is picking your projects.
So we tend to go along,
and my manager says,
work on this.
I've I don't I've seen lots of times
where people have done that, and then that
entire team gets laid off
working on that project.
And just because you or,
the project gets squashed.
And all of a sudden, you come to
the end of the year and you have
nothing that you can say,
I finished this this year,
because some external person
squashed your project.
And you worked diligently
and really hard
for a lot of hours and a lot
of time trying to figure out how to
make something work,
and they just toss it.
And that's that's another, I think what do
you think of that, Alexis, as far as
advocacy?
Yeah. I think it's tough, and especially watching
something that you worked on, you know, get
tossed away like that. But I think it
goes back to being really intentional with the
areas that you wanna grow in and what
you want to work on. So maybe you
have your assigned project that you need to
work on because that is where you are
assigned
delegated hours are going towards. Say it's a
network
upgrade,
but you want to grow grow glow you
want to grow more into cloud or AI
because you realize that's coming down the line
and there's another adjacent team
that
that's not your project, but can you help
out? Can you shadow?
Can you have someone on that team mentor
you and get you involved so you can
still acquire those skills and add it to
your resume
without taking ownership. Now would it be a
stretch? Would you be working extra hours?
Maybe.
But at least you have a legitimate project
that's not just a lab and some
random
dashboard.
Right?
Something I've heard in,
conversations before, especially when I was, more junior,
people would say, wait a minute. How did
you get how did you get that project?
Like, kinda like, I'm ahead of you in
line. How could how did you get that
project?
And and the answer was usually,
and I don't think I would say this
to them, but the answer was, well, I
just went and started doing it. Like, all
of you are waiting for someone else to
give you permission to do something interesting. And
sometimes, like, that's I mean, I would say
a lot of times, you you don't wait
for permission. You go do good stuff. And
all those people that are that are quietly
waiting and hoping that their manager will give
them something cool to do, they're gonna keep
waiting, and you're gonna be able to do
the thing that is that is engaging to
you.
Yeah. And I well,
to that point, yes.
As long as it fits in your time,
you know, you do wanna be cognizant
of your being paid and brought on the
team to do this job, and you do
have your assigned things now to do.
This is where this is where, like, working
for large companies is helpful because large companies
have no idea what their employees are doing
for the most part. And as long as
you can deliver on the things that like
you said, Alexis, as long as like, you
you can't fall behind on the things that
you're expected to do. But I I have
I have seldom worked for a company that
was actually using me to my full potential.
It was it's been, like, 50% utilization at
best. And so there's there's plenty of time.
And I don't know. Maybe I'm weird. But,
like, I think there's plenty of time to
go and involve yourself. And but sometimes,
it does mean that you need to do
some stuff in the evening. Sometimes, you know,
and and it depends. If it engaged you,
that's not a big deal. Or reach out
and do some networking. I, you know,
I don't know that I've met a senior
engineer yet
that has been like, no. I don't want
a mentee. I don't want anyone to shadow
me. Please leave me alone.
Right? More often than not, when you talk
to older engineers and you're like, hey. That
sounds really cool. How did you learn that?
What are you doing? Would you bring me
along with you?
It's just especially if it's a Zoom call,
it's just an extra person on Zoom. Yeah.
Exactly.
But I'll also say this that much more
space. If you if you're in a company
where they
discourage you
from doing stuff on the side,
because there are some companies that will say,
oh, you shouldn't be working on that. You
have this that you need to be working
on. If you're in that kind of a
company,
find the door.
Yep. Or if you're working for someone like
that. Right? Because, again, ideally,
in an ideal world, your manager supports your
interests and wants you to grow in areas
that you are interested in growing in. And
if it's an area that benefits you and
benefits the company,
and you're checking all the boxes for your
standard job,
you should be able to go and pursue
things you're interested in and want to grow
towards. And if you're being
discouraged from doing that, like you said, Russ,
I think it's a pretty clear sign that
you should start looking other places.
Yeah.
There's there's another avenue too to take, which
is not just so we're we've been talking
a little bit about going and working on
things that are sort of in progress that
you think are cool.
Another thing that's that I found really helpful
is to find something that and this this
depends a lot on the culture of your
organization, but find something that needs to be
done
and do the work to advocate for the
for that capability or whatever it is and
figure out how to start getting it done
and then and get the right people to
sign off. It's a ton of work. It's
a ton of overhead because you gotta go
sometimes you gotta go loosen up purse strings.
But I've been amazed at how much I
can do just as a single engineer.
Mhmm. Hey. Our infrastructure needs this. And you
look at it, and it's millions of dollars
of CapEx over five years. And you're like,
how in the world is one engineer ever
gonna make that happen? I've seen it happen.
I've made it happen before. Like, you can
you if you if you can have the
right relationships and talk to the right people
and be in the right place at the
right time, you can go and propose something.
And once you do that, there's so much
CapEx tied up in it. That's your job.
That's no one's gonna because you're the expert
on that project. And, like, I think there's
more opportunities for that than we think. It's
just that we don't wanna do the nontechnical
stuff that that has to happen in order
to to to build that opportunity. Well, because
think about, like, how many different steps you
just outlined in order to bring something like
that over the line. You need to recognize
find the problem, recognize the problem, propose it
to your lead, your management, whoever it is,
Engage
however many vendors maybe you're running a proposal
process so now you're scoping a solution between
three different vendors.
You're working with the VAR
or whatever partner you have in your organization
to implement that and you're involved in the
whole life cycle all the way through
installation and management.
Now, you didn't just learn the techno like,
the technical skills to get that implemented.
Think about, like, the internal sales skills, the
proposal skills, the communication skills.
It's
the full stack. So And then when you're
finished, you have the full stack. I just
I think you can
I think you can jump into something like
this without that much risk?
Like, you can you can and
no doubt, you will try. And there have
been times when I've tried, and halfway through,
they're like, no. No. You know what? Stop
this. This is not this is not what
we need. Let's just work on something. Like,
okay. But but the 50% of it that
I did get through, I learned a ton
of stuff. And I was and and never
you can do it alone. Never can you,
like, you cannot work on procurement as a
network engineer. And you don't want to. Right?
You don't you you cannot work on on,
talking with circuits people and negotiating with service
providers. Ugh, why would you want to? Like,
no. No. You go make friends with the
person that does
and and that kind of thing.
And I don't know. I I feel like
it's easier than we think it will be.
I think we look at something like that,
we're like, too much work. But,
I don't know. Not always. It's not always
as bad as it it is.
Most of that's gonna depend on culture, honestly,
and how the culture of the company is.
Because in some companies, you're still facing this
idea of no mind, mind,
mind.
Right? So you've got to find ways of
getting around that and friendship,
building the connections as you talk about Alexis,
that's a big way of getting around the
mind.
Yeah.
Well, because people start to people start to
see you as an alley, and Yeah. It's
a big thing.
Russ, I know you were customer facing once
upon a time. Tom, I'm sure you were
at some point as well.
But
people if people like you and trust you
and they know what you're about and they
know what you're doing and they know what
you're after they're more likely to include you
or to say yes.
I was trying to avoid I've got a
couple notes up here on the side since
we're talking about advocacy from a
presentation I did a couple
a couple times, but
to bring up like personal branding for a
second your brand, your reputation,
a lot of times when this gets brought
up online
people think it's about what you're posting on
LinkedIn or what your profile is
or whatnot. Right? But, especially
in a corporate
setting, it's just what people think of you.
How are you showing up to calls? Are
you always five minutes late? Do you always
look disheveled? Do you always have terrible lighting?
Is your virtual background popping in and out?
When you come to the office do you
look prepared? Do you look half asleep? Do
you always carry in the same coffee cup?
Or you're always wearing a baseball cap? Right?
When you speak in meetings, you know, how
formal are you?
All of those different pieces that form people's
impressions of you or what they remember of
you like all of that those in person
elements also contribute to your brand, and that
has nothing to do with what you're posting
online.
Yep. And for instance, a very common one
we have in the engineering world is you're
sitting in a meeting and somebody says,
we need to put a layer two VPN
over here. We need to do what dot
one queue.
And five different people will jump in.
And it's like, no. No. No. No. We
should do no. We should do that. No.
We should do this. And all of a
sudden, like, it becomes a brawl or it
becomes one person
just flat out trying to dominate the meeting
by constantly sniping at everyone else's
answers or what they're doing. It's like
there's some degree to which your personal brand
is also, you know what you're doing, I
let you go do it.
I trust you. And when you trust them,
they're gonna trust you.
Right? There's like a bidirectional trust thing here.
Yeah. So, Alexis, when you talk about being
customer facing,
one thing that I did at Cisco was
probably the one of the most fun things
I ever did, there's other things as well,
was
on the deployment architecture team, I went to
customers and I said, where does your network
hurt?
Right? Where does your network hurt?
They would tell me. Trust me. They would
tell me. Right?
And then I could say,
well, let's figure out how do we design
around that. And in the meantime,
they're giving me features
and products
that I then take back to the company
and say I've seen five customers this week
say it hurts here.
We need to do something about that
problem.
We've gotta stop customers from hurting
there. And so that was an absolutely
fantastic job because I could build trust on
both sides of the aisle.
So that was that was probably
Yeah. Internally, and that was one of the
best jobs of being a a solutions engineer.
Right? Because you could help the customers, but
you also get to advocate for them internally.
Yeah. Whether that's like, with tack, or a
good product, depending on the day. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, tack was always just a big
fire,
constant fire.
The only thing fun about global escalation was
no matter how bad the network was, it
wasn't getting any worse.
You always walk out with a cape in
global escalation because
there's no place to go but up.
So, yes. So I think the advocacy thing
though is partially to putting yourself in that
position. Like,
you may not have a customer facing role.
There is not well, I shouldn't say this.
There shouldn't be any sales engineers
who care if you're on the back line
someplace
if you join a customer call,
especially if you're in a in a technology
company.
Right? Okay. If you work for a grocery
store, maybe you don't wanna join the customer
calls.
But if you work for a tech company,
you should try to weasel your way into
getting on the customer calls
and hearing what they say.
Yeah. Or just asking questions. Yeah. Just asking
questions. Experience. Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, as far as to circle back
to, like, advocating for yourself in your
career development sessions,
I think it goes back to, like,
having a windsheet,
making sure that every we talked about,
personal branding a little bit so
what people think of you, how people think
of you, and all little interactions add up.
So, when you show up to a meeting
are you prepared? When you have your one
on one with your manager do you walk
in with an agenda?
And you know what you did this week?
Or when they say, hey, Alexis, how was
your week? And you go, and they're like,
what did you work on? And you go,
let me check my calendar.
Or, can you look at the list of
things that you checked off
immediately and go well I did this, I
did this, I did this, I did this.
I had a really
good call with Russ and Tom, and I
learned a lot in this area it was
really interesting because this
do you have something to show or present?
Instead of,
well, it was another week.
How's yours?
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Definitely true.
And even if you can talk about the
things you've learned. Now, this looks different for
late career people than it does for early
career people, by the way. This is something
like, when you've been doing this for thirty
years, people say, what do you wanna be
in five years?
I don't I don't even know the answer.
Like, I have no idea what you're asking
me. What new technologies would you like to
learn?
I I don't know.
Like, I've been doing this for thirty years.
I don't I don't know. I don't want
I don't want any new technologies. Yeah.
Well, I think the answer there is to
say, you know, I I'd like to be
mentoring people or whatever the case might be.
Although you have to be careful about being
a people manager too. I was a people
manager once in my life, and I regretted
it every day from the day I stopped
from the day I started until the day
I stopped.
Simply just aren't cut out to be people
managers.
So be very careful about saying, I wanna
be a vice president. Yeah. I know. How
about you just, like,
really think about that before you make those
kinds of goals?
Well and I think that's hard too because
for
and
not for, but in a lot of organizations,
the path up, once you're looking at the
ladder,
management seems like the only option.
Right? When there really are more technical options,
especially at larger companies where you could be,
what's it called,
like a field CTO
or,
like a senior architect
where you're an architect over other architects, where
you get pulled in for the big problems
or the really hard ones, and you're not
necessarily managing people, you're mentoring people, you're still
a senior or an individual contributor,
but other people rely on you for help
versus you are responsible for a team.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. And that's, you know, some particularly if
you're if you're interested in that kind of
thing, go to a vendor.
Go to a vendor, go to a, I
don't know, go to a cloud company, something
like that. Because
those companies have senior level technology people don't
think that you're gonna become a senior level
technology people person
working for a retail store
for the most part, because those positions, they
just don't exist.
They just they're just not there.
And so
Well, and a good way to find that
out, again, is to do more networking with
senior engineers on your team or talk to
your manager. Yeah. And say, you know, my
goal is to be a distinguished architect.
I saw someone on LinkedIn that had that
title, and it sounded really cool. And I
see what they do. And their job looks
awesome. And I think that's what I want
to be at the pinnacle of my career.
How can I get there?
And your manager should be honest and be
like, hey, we don't have that one. You
might wanna look for else. But is there
experience we can give you here to help
you grow in that direction?
Yeah.
Yep.
I actually held that title once, Alexis.
Really? Yeah. Cisco. That was that was my
title as distinguished architect.
And then I went to work for all
sorts of other companies that don't have that
position.
And that's yeah. It's kind of an odd
thing. But yeah. So
yeah. I think advocating for yourself. I think
the whole idea of a personal brand, like
you said, it's not just
what you post on LinkedIn.
It's not just what you write in blog
posts, although I think being publicly visible,
even if nobody reads it is still important.
And people struggle with that concept.
Why should I wrote blog posts if only
five people are gonna read them? Because you
should? I think about it, I think about
it kind of like a
online portfolio.
So if you think about it, like,
if I was going to look for a
new hair salon,
or I want to try a new restaurant,
or I need to go to a mechanic,
the first thing that I do is I
either type in Google or I pull up
Yelp, and I read reviews, and I look
at photos, and I look at videos, and
I I see
what other
experiences people have had with that business
before I even decide to make a call
for an appointment or walk in the door
to check it out myself.
And your online presence
or your online portfolio,
your resume,
your LinkedIn, whatever it is if you have
a website, a blog site,
it's your
work, your business.
Just like Yelp,
the hair salon,
right? Your digital presence
is your portfolio of your work.
And like you said Russ, there's a ton
of different ways you can showcase that outside
of your resume that are
searchable,
whether that's through LinkedIn, whether that's through Google,
whether that's through YouTube, whether it's through GitHub
when you're posting content on any of those
platforms,
they come up in search results. So, recruiters
can find you and you might get your
help. You might get yourself exposed to opportunities
that you're not even aware of.
Yep. Absolutely.
I think there's also a ton of kind
of on the personal branding concept still,
there's a ton of value. Like, you mentioned
Alexis, like, are you always the guy that
wears a hat? And I'm wearing a hat
right now.
And I I happen to wear I happen
to just in our stand up meetings, I
happen to wear a hat. It's just what
I do. I don't I don't know. It's
just a habit that I have. I'm a
remote worker and so it's fine. But,
but the thing is, there's other things that
that can be part of you that are
just just what you do.
And and arguably,
you know, what you wear, you know, that's
an that's a great example of something really
visible. It's easy.
But, like, how you how you show up,
meaning,
when when someone asks you for help,
how do you respond?
Is it based on how much that person
can do for you? Or is it based
on what your
what your values are? Is it, like, are
you always very straight up with them and
very, like, to the point? And and maybe
that's you and that's what you have to
be, but be that way with everybody. Or
maybe you're, like, really kind or maybe you're
just, like, really, you know, you're someone that
no matter what, someone can ask you questions
and and they know that you're not gonna
come down on them for, oh, why didn't
you already know that or whatever. Like, whatever
it is, that the way that like, that
to me,
it doesn't
and usually, that's almost 90% I would say
more than 90% of the time. That's when
you're operating with your peers.
And it it might it might feel like,
well, that's not gonna get me anywhere. But
in my career, it absolutely has gotten me
places. Because first of all, it puts me
in the habit of being the person that
I wanna be all the time.
And then when when people people want to
work with you, and then when you go
to do these extracurricular
things, people are like, oh, yeah. That guy's
cool. That girl's cool. Like, yeah. Yeah. I
wanna like, to me, that is as far
as personal brand. I know them. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And I like them, and that would
be yeah. I'll I'll do some extra some
extra stuff too because I like working with
them. That is worth, I think, a lot
of effort to Yeah. Oh, yeah. Who who
you wanna be the person that when you
go to a conference,
people want to go to lunch and dinner
with you
at work. That's that's what you want to
be.
Because because that's how you're gonna meet people
and that's what you're gonna get, you know,
you're gonna
sorry to cut you off for us. Go
ahead.
I was gonna say, Tom, it's repeated.
It's not just you can't just be nice
to one person or on one call or
only on Tuesdays.
If you wear a hat every Tuesday no
one's gonna remember it. But, if you wear
it on your daily stand up every day
of the week and one day you don't
wear your hat, the team's gonna be like,
Tom,
you good?
What happened today?
Even,
you know, Russ, earlier
we were talking about,
good good managers that can tell when something's
off.
Right? Yeah.
You show up positive at work every single
day and then one day you have a
bad day and your energy is just way
off or, you know, you make a nasty
comment or you snap and someone's like, woah,
that's not like you at all. What's going
on?' Right? Those are the actions you want
to cultivate because people have an overly
positive
experience with you. So, when one thing happens
that negative, when one thing happens that is
negative, they're like,
'Woah,
you good?
Yep, definitely true. And don't make it all.
You know, you've said you've kind of said
this, both of you kind of said this.
Don't make it about the transaction.
Make it about the person.
Transactional really all relationships
are to some degree transactional,
but no relationship should ever be purely transactional.
And the less transactional
that it is to me,
the more of a real relationship it is.
It's never about what I can give or
take. It's about the person.
And we don't do that very well in
our industry, unfortunately.
It's just a sad
well, if I get to know you, will
you co author a book with me? Will
you do this? Will you do that? Will
you give me content? Like
no. That that's true, but there's huge opportunity
in that. It is really easy to stand
out among network engineers. Like, most of them
are gonna be crusty. They're gonna be, what
do you want? And I'm I'm I'm so
scarred by my awful
pain that I feel in my job that
everybody is just my enemy. Like, there's a
ton of network engineers that do that. And
so it's pretty easy to stand out and
just be not that. Yeah. And you will
be remembered because everything around you is not
that. Yep.
And also if you get in,
in with the community, I
to put a generic term on it, the
community or the technical community,
most people who contribute
or write or create content,
we all kind of know each other and
help each other and so if one person's
working on something and you need something,
people are more willing to help you because
there is that give and take. And also
you feel like you know each other through
reading each other's works or blogs or videos
or whatever it is.
Yep, absolutely.
Okay, well I think this horse is dead.
I was gonna say Russ, I do, I
do have a hard stop in ten minutes,
but It's fine.
While we're on the subject of community, if
we want to talk a little bit about
Oh, sure. Go right ahead.
Is that okay? Yeah, go right ahead. I
didn't know if you were okay with me.
No, I'm always fine. It's fine.
So Russ and I are both speaking,
on an event that is going to be
held in late October.
So
I don't think I ever introduced myself, actually.
But I'm a technical evangelist
at a a company called Megaport.
And what Megaport is
really good at is connecting data centers to
the cloud. It's kind of what we became
known for. And I joined Megaport in October
as a technical evangelist, and I came from
Cisco. So, my whole background was networking.
And, when I came over to Megaport it
was all cloud this, cloud that, hybrid multi,
cloud everything. And so,
I was a little bit out of my
element I had a lot of learning to
do and when I did my initial scoping
of things I wanted to work on I
noticed that there was a lot of resources
to learn cloud, there was a lot of
resources to learn networking,
but there wasn't a lot in between.
And, increasingly what we're seeing with a lot
of our customers, with even my customers at
Cisco,
is that network engineers are being told that
now you're managing these cloud connections
because they are network
connections into the cloud.
And, you've either never done it before, you
don't have experience, you don't know if you're
doing it correctly,
but you got to figure it out and
there's not a lot of resources online.
And
so, my brainchild,
when I came to Megaport was to hold
this big virtual event with all of our
partners
whether that's VARs, cloud providers,
you know senior engineers in our network
to come and host an event to help
all engineers at any technical level
be better at connecting into the cloud. So,
it is a free event for the community,
there are there actually isn't a standard megaport
demo included. We wanted it to be completely
vendor agnostic.
We've got people from all of the cloud
providers, all of the big data center operators.
We've got people like Russ
coming to present as well,
and it's gonna be a really great time.
If y'all would like to come, it's gonna
be great.
Yeah, I think it'll be awesome.
So great.
Okay.
So Alexis, where can people get in touch
with you? I don't know if you have
a blog or anything. But where can people
get in touch with you if they want
to or
follow you or whatever the case is?
I don't have a blog.
But if you look me up, I'm on
LinkedIn, Alexis Berthoff,
or Instagram or TikTok at digital
dot b y t e. Okay. Cool.
And Tom, go ahead and say it.
LinkedIn. Alright. We'll see. We got it. We
got past that.
Also, we should since we started this, we
we should keep keep this going. Who let's
name the plant.
If you wanna name the plant, you can
find me on LinkedIn or Russ.
And
if you have a cool name, then we
will name the plant your name.
Man, I should've put my name
That's just weird. You should. You should you
should you should make a suggestions
and and, you know, see where it goes.
Alright. Cool. Alright. I'm Russ White. You can
find me here at the hedge. You can
find rule11.tech.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
On x, every now and then, not a
ton, but I do log in from time
to time.
Most time, once a week when I publish
a new hedge, that's when I actually log
in.
And so we know that we live in
an attention driven economy, and we thank you
for spending time with us and giving us
your attention.
And we hope that you had a lot
of fun going all the way to the
bitter end of this poor podcast,
and we will catch you next time.