Screaming in the Cloud - At the Head of Community Development with Wesley Faulkner

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

About WesleyWesley Faulkner is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, Dell, IBM, and MongoDB. Wesley currently works as a Developer Advocate, and in addition, co-hosts the developer relations focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW.Links Referenced:Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesley83Polywork: https://polywork.com/wesley83Personal Website: https://www.wesleyfaulkner.com/

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck. And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS without such things, forget about it.

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but then automatically add the missing, unmanaged, or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing. Visit snark.cloud slash firefly to learn more. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined again for a second time this year by Wesley Faulkner. Last time we spoke, he was a developer advocate, and since then, as so many have, he's changed companies. Wesley, thank you for joining me again. You're the head of community at Single Store now.

Congrats on the promotion. Thank you. It's been a very welcome change. I love developer advocates and developer advocacy, but I love people too. So it's almost, I think, very analogous to the ebbs and flow that we all have gone through through the pandemic and leaning into my strong suits. It's a big deal having a head of in a role title as opposed to developer advocate, senior developer advocate.

And it is a different role. It's easy to default into the world advocate. And it is a different role. It's easy to default into the world of thinking that it's a promotion. Management is in many ways orthogonal to what it takes to succeed in an actual role. And further, you're not the head of dev rel or dev relopers or whatever we want to call the term. You are instead the head of community. How tied is that to developer relations, developer advocacy, other things that we are used to using as terms of art in this space? If we're talking about other companies, I would say the head of community is something that's

under the umbrella of developer relations, where it's just a peer to some of the other different elements or columns of developer relations. But in single store specifically, I have to say that developer relations in terms of what you think of the whole umbrella is very new to the company. And so I consider myself the first person in the role of developer relations by being the head of community.

So a lot of the other parts are being bolted in, but under the focus of developer as a community. So I'm liaisoning right now as helping with spearheading some of the design of the activities that the advocates do, as well as architecting the platform and the experiences of people coming in and experiencing single store through the community's perspective. So all that to say is what I'm doing is extremely structured and a lot

of stuff that we're doing with the advocacy, I'm using some of my expertise to help guide that, but it's still something that's kind of like an offshoot and not well integrated at the moment. How does it change the way that you view the function of someone who's advocating to developers, which is, from my cynical perspective, oh, it's marketing, but we don't tell people it's marketing because they won't like it. And yes, I know I'll get emails about that. But how does it differ from doing that yourself versus being the head of the function at a company? Because leadership is a

heck of a switch. I thought earlier in my career that, oh yeah, it's a natural evolution of being a mediocre engineer to trying to be a mediocre manager. And oh no, no, I aspired to be a mediocre manager. It's a completely different skill set. And I got things hilariously wrong. What's it like for you going through that shift? First of all, it is kind of like advertising and people may not think of it that way. Just to give an example, movie trailers is advertising. Those free samples at the grocery store is advertising. But people love those because it gives an experience

that they like in a package that they are accustomed to. And so it's the same with developer relations. It's finding the thing that makes the experience worthwhile. On the community side, this is not new to me. I've done several different roles, maybe not in this combination. But when I was at MongoDB, I was a technical community manager, which is like a cog in the whole giant machine. But before that, in my other life, I managed social and community interactions for Walmart. And I had at the slow period around 65, but during the holidays, it would ramp up to 95 direct reports that I managed. It's almost, if you're a fan of The Princess Bride, it's different than fighting one person. Sometimes it's easier to fight like a squad or a gang of

people. So being head of community with such a young company is definitely a lot different than in some ways harder to deal with this type of community where we're just growing and emerging rather than something more well-established. It probably gives you an interesting opportunity because back when I was doing engineering work as an SRE or whatever we called them in that era, it was, yeah, wow, my boss is terrible and has no idea what the hell they're doing. So then I found myself in the role and it's cool. Now do all the things that you said you would do, put up or shut up. And it turns out that there's a lot you don't see that are strategic considerations. I completely avoided things like managing up or managing laterally or balancing trade-offs in different ways. Yeah, you're right. If you view

the role of management as strictly being something that is between you and your direct reports, you can be an amazing manager from their perspective, but completely ineffective organizationally at accomplishing the goals that have been laid out for you. Yeah, the good thing about being head of and the first head of is that you help establish those goals. And so when you take a role with another company saying, hey, we have headcount for this, and it's an established role, then you're kind of like streamlining into a process that's already underway. What's good about this role specifically at Head of is that I help with not only designing what are the goals and the OKRs, but designing what the teams and what the team structure should look like. And so I'm hiring for a specific position based on how it interacts with everything else. So when I'm coming in, I don't say, well, what do you do or how do you do it? I said, this is what needs to be done. And that makes it so much easier to say that if everything is working the way it should and to give marching

orders based on the grand vision instead of hitting the numbers this quarter or next quarter, because what is core to my belief and what's core to how I approach things is at the heart of what I'm trying to do, which is really great in terms of making something that didn't exist before. The challenge, too, is that everyone loves to say, and I love to see this at different ways, is the evolution and understanding of the DevRel folks who I work with and have great relationships with, realizing that you have to demonstrate business value. Because I've struggled with this my entire career, where I know intrinsically that if I get on stage and tell a story about a thing that is germane to what my company does, that good things are going to happen.

But it's very hard to do any form of attribution to it in a different light. This podcast is a great example of this. We have sponsors and people are listening. Ideally, they aren't fast forwarding through sponsor messages. I do have interesting thoughts about the sponsors that I put into these ads, and that's great. But I also appreciate that people are driving while they're listening to this. They are doing the dishes. They are mowing the lawn and hopefully not turning up the volume too loudly so it damages their hearing. And the idea that they're going to suddenly stop any of those things and go punch in the link that I give is a little out to lunch there.

Instead, it's partially brand awareness, and it is occasionally the, wait, that resonates exactly with the problem that I have. So they get to work or they get back in front of a computer, and the odds are terrific they're not going to punch in that URL of whatever I wound up giving. They're going to type in whatever phrases they remember in the company name into Google. Now, and doing attribution on something like that is very hard. It gets even more hard when we're talking about something that is higher up the stack that requires a bit more buy-in than individual developers. There's often a meeting or two about it, and then someone finally approaches the company to have a conversation. Now, does it work? Yes. There are companies that

are sponsoring this stuff that spend a lot of time, effort, and money on that. I don't know how you do that sort of attribution. I don't pretend to know, but I know that it works because these people whose entire job is making sure that it does, tell me it does. So I smile, I nod, and that's great. But it's very hard to wind up building out a direct, if you spend X dollars sponsoring this, you will see Y dollars in response. But in the DevRel world, when you're internal doing these things, well, okay, because to the company, I look an awful lot like an expensive developer, except I don't ever write production code. And then at least in the before times, so what does your job do? Because looking at the achievements and accomplishments last quarter, it looks an awful lot like you travel to exotic places in the company time, give talks that are of only vague relevance to what we do,

and then hang out at parties with your friends. Nice job. How can I get that? But it's also first in the chopping block when, okay, how do we trim expenses go? And I think it's a mistake to do that. I just don't think that story of the value of developer relations is articulated super well. And I say that, but I don't know how to do a much better job of it myself. Well, that's why corporate or executive buy-in is important because if they know from the get-go why you're there, it makes it a little bit easier to sell. But you do have to show that you are executing.

So there are always two parts to presenting a story. And that's one, the actual quantitative, like I've done this many talks. So the output part, I've written this many blog posts, or I've stood up this many events that people can attend to. And then there's the result saying, people did read this post. People did show up to my event. People did listen to my talk that I gave. But you also need to give the subjective ones where people respond back and say,

I loved your talk, or I heard you on Corey's podcast, or I read your blog post. Because even though you might not understand that they've, it goes all the way down in a conversion funnel to a purchase, you can at least use that stand in to say, there's probably like 20, 30 people behind this person that have the same sentiment. So you can see that your impact is reaching people and that it's having some sort of lasting effect. That said, you have to keep it up.

You have to try to increase your output and increase your sphere of influence. Because when people go to solve their problem, they're going to look into their history and their own Rolodex of saying, what was the last thing that I heard? What was the last thing that's relevant? There is a reason that Pepsi and Coke still do advertising. It's not because people don't know those brands, but being easily recalled or a center of relevance based on how many touch points or how many times that you've seen them, either from being on American

Idol and the logo facing the camera or seeing a whole display when you go into the grocery store. Same with display advertising. All of this stuff works hand in hand so that you can be front of mind with the people and the decision makers who will make that decision. And we went through this through the pandemic where that same sentiment. It was like you just travel and now you can't travel. So we're just going to get rid of the whole department. And then those same companies are hunting for those people to come back or to rebuild these departments that are now gone, because maybe you don't see what we do, but when it's gone, you definitely notice a dip. And that trust is from the top up. You have to do not just external

advocacy, but you have to do internal advocacy about what impacts you're having so that at least the people who are making that decision can hopefully understand that you are working hard and the work is paying off. Since the last time that we spoke, you've given your first keynote, which is always an interesting experience to go through. It was at a conference called That Conference. And I feel the need to specify that because otherwise we're going to wind up with a who's on first situation. But That Conference is the name. Specify that.

Exactly. We're going to specify that. Yes. So what was your keynote about? And for a bit of a behind-the- scenes look, what was that like for you? Let me do the behind the scenes because it's going to lead up to actual execution. Excellent. So I've been on several different podcasts. And one of the ones that I loved for years is one called This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte.

I was a big fan of Leo Laporte back in the screensaver days, back in tech TV days. Loved his opinion, followed his work. And I went to a South by Southwest three, four years ago where I actually met him. And then from that conversation, he asked me to be on his show. And I've been on the show a handful of times just talking about tech because I love tech. Tech is my passion. Not just doing it, but just experiencing and just being on either side of creating or consuming. When I moved, I moved recently also, since I think from the last time I was on your show.

When I moved here to Wisconsin, the organizer of that conference said that he's been following me for a while since my first appearance on This Week in Tech and loved my outlook and my take on things. And he approached me to do a keynote. Since I am now in Wisconsin, that conference has been in Wisconsin since its inception. It's been going on for 10 years. And he wanted me to just basically share my knowledge, clean slate, have enough time to just say whatever I wanted. I said, yes, I can do that. So my experience on my end was like sheer excitement and then quickly sheer terror of not having a framework of what I was going to speak on or how I was going to deliver it. And knowing it's a keynote,

that it would be setting the tone for the whole conference. So I decided to talk on the thing that I knew the most about, which was myself. Talked about my journey growing up and learning what my strengths, what my weaknesses are, how to navigate life as well as the corporate jungle and deciding where I wanted to go. Do I want to be the person that I feel like I need to be in order to be successful? Which when we look at structures and examples and things that we hold on a pedestal, we feel that we have to be perfect or we have to be knowledgeable and we have to do everything well-rounded in order to be accepted. Especially being a minority, there's a lot more caveats in terms of being socially acceptable to other people.

And then the other path that I could have taken, that chose to take was to accept my things that are seen as false, but my own quirkiness, my own uniqueness, and putting that front and center about this is me. This is my person that over the years has formed into this version of myself. I'm going to make sure that that is really transparent. And so if I go anywhere, they know what they're getting and they know what they're signing up for by bringing me on board. I have an opinion. I will share my opinion. I will bring my whole self. I won't just be the person that is technical or whimsical or whatever you're looking for. You have to take the good with the bad. You have to take the, I really understand technology, but I have ADHD and I might miss some deadlines.

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I have a very similar philosophy in how I approach these things, where it's, there is no single speaking engagement that I can fathom even being presented to me, let alone the accepting, that is going to be worth me losing the reputation I have developed for authenticity. You will not get me to turn into a shill for whoever it is that I am speaking in front of this week. Conversely, whether it's a paid speaking engagement or not, I have a standing policy of not using a platform that is being given to me by a company or organization to make them look foolish. In other words, I will not make someone regret inviting me to speak at their event, full stop. And I've spoken at events for AWS, I have spoken at events for Oracle, et cetera, et cetera. And there's no company out there that I'm

not going to be able to get on stage and tell an entertaining and engaging story, but it requires me to dunk on them. And that's fine. Frankly, if there is a company like that where I could not say nice things about them, such as Facebook, I would simply decline to pursue the speaking opportunity. And that is the way that I view it. And very few companies are on that list, to be very honest with you. Now, there are exceptions to this. If you're having a big public keynote, I will do my traditional live tweet the keynote and make fun of people because that is A, expected, and B, it's live streamed anywhere on the planet. I want to be sitting at that point in time. And yeah, if you're saying things in public, you can basically expect that to be the way that I approach these things. But it's a nuanced take. And that is something that

is not fully understood by an awful lot of folks who run events. I'll be the first to admit that aspects of who and what I am mean that some speaking engagements are not open to me. And I'm okay with that on some level. I truly am. It's a different philosophy. But I do know that I'm done apologizing for who I am and what I'm about. And that at some point that required a tremendous amount of privilege and a not insignificant willingness to take a risk that it was going to work out all right. I can't imagine going back anymore. Now, that road is certainly not what I would recommend to everyone, particularly folks earlier in their career, particularly for folks who don't look just like I do and have a failure mode of a board seat and a book deal somewhere. But figuring out where you

will and will not compromise is always an important thing to get straight for yourself before you're presented with a situation where you have to make those decisions. But now there's a whole bunch of incentive to decide in one way or another. And it's a journey. You can't just skip sections, right? You didn't get to where you are unless you went through the previous experience that you went through. And it's true for everyone. If you see those success books or how-to books written by people who are extremely rich and like how to become successful and like, okay, well, that journey is your own. It doesn't make it totally like inaccessible to everyone else, but you got to realize that not everyone can walk that path.

You were in the right place at the right time of an early employee at a company that did phenomenally well. And that catapulted you into rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice territory. Good for you. But fundamentally, when you give talks like that, as a result, what it often presents as is I won the lottery and here's how you can too. It doesn't work that way. The road you walked was unique to you and that opportunity is closed, not open to anyone else. So people have to find their own paths. Yeah. And lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice, but there are some things where you can understand some fundamentals and depending on where you go, I think you do need

to know yourself. You do need to know yourself. You do need to know, like, be able to access yourself. But being able to share that, of course, you have to be at a point where you feel comfortable. And so even if you're in a space where you don't feel that you can be your authentic self or be able to share all parts of you, you yourself should at least know yourself and then make that decision. I agree that it's a point of privilege to be able to say, take me how I am. I'm lucky that I've gotten here. Not everyone does. And just because you don't, doesn't mean that you're a failure. It just means that the world hasn't caught up yet. People who are part of marginalized society, like if you are, let's say, trans or if you are even gay, you take the same person, the same stance, the same yearning to be accepted and then transported 50 years ago. You're not safe.

You will not necessarily be accepted or you may not even be successful. And if you have a lane where you can do that, all the power to you. But not everyone could be themselves. And you just need to make sure that at least you can know yourself, even if you don't share that with the world. It takes time to get there. And I think you're right that it's impossible to get there without walking through the various steps. It's one of the reasons I'm somewhat reluctant to talk overly publicly about my side project gig of paid speaking engagements, for instance, is that the way to get those is you start off by building a reputation as a speaker, and that takes an awful lot of time. And speaking at events where there's no budget even to pay you a speaking fee out of anyway. And part of what gets the keynote invitations to, hey, we want you to come and give a talk,

is the fact that people have seen you speak elsewhere and know what you're about and what to expect. Here's a keynote presented by someone who's never presented on stage before is a recipe for a terrifying experience, if not for the speaker or the audience, definitely for the event organizers, because what if they choke? Easy example of this. Even now, hundreds of speaking engagements in, the adrenaline hit right before I go on stage means that sometimes my knees shake a bit before I walk out on stage. I make it a point to warn the people who are standing with me backstage,

oh, this is a normal thing. Don't worry. It is absolutely expected. It happens every time. Don't sweat it. And they're like, thank you for letting us know. That is the sort of thing that's useful. And then they see me shake and they get a little skeptical. Like I thought this guy was a professional. What's the story?

And I walk on stage and do my thing. And I come back like, that was incredible. I was worried at the beginning. It's, I told you, we all have our rituals before going on stage. Mine is to shake like a leaf. But the value there is that people know what to generally expect when I get on stage. It's going to have humor.

There's going to be a point interwoven throughout what I tend to say. And in the case of paid speaking engagements, I always make sure I know where the boundaries are of things I can make fun of a big company for. I can get on stage and make fun of service naming, or I can make fun of a big company for. Like, I can get on stage and make fun of service naming, or I can make fun of their deprecation policy or something like that. But yeah, making fun of the way that they wind up handling worker relations is probably not going to be great. It could get the person who championed me fired or censured internally. So that is off the table. Even on this podcast for example i sometimes get feedback

from listeners of well you had someone from company axon and you didn't beat the crap out of them on this particular point it's yeah you do understand that by having people on the show i'm making a tacit agreement not to attack them i'm not a journalist i don't pretend to be but if i beat someone up with questions about their corporate policy, yeah, very rarely do I have someone who is in a position in those companies to change that policy. And they're certainly not authorized to speak on the record about those things. So I can beat them up on it. They can say, I can't answer that. And we're not going to go anywhere. What is the value of that? It just, it looks like it's not just gotcha journalism, but ineffective gotcha journalism.

It doesn't work that way. And that's never been what this show is about. But there's that consistent effort behind the scenes of making sure that people will be entertained, will enjoy what they're seeing, but also are not going to deeply regret giving me a microphone has always been the balancing act, at least for me. And I want to be clear, my style is humor. It is not for everyone. And my style of humor has a failure mode of being a jerk and making people feel bad. So don't think that my path is the only or even a recommended way for folks who want to get more into speaking to proceed. You also mentioned about like punching up versus punching down. And if you really tear down a company after you've been invited to speak, what you're doing is you're punching down on the person who booked you. They're not the CEO. They're not the owner of the company. They're the person who's in charge of running an event or booking speakers. And so putting that person and throwing them under the bus is punching down

because now you're threatening their livelihood. And it doesn't make any market difference in terms of changing the corporate's values or how they execute. So, yeah, I totally agree with you on that one. And like you were saying before, if there is a company you really thought was abhorrent, why speak there? Why give them or lend your reputation to this company if you absolutely feel that it's something you don't want to be associated with. You can just choose not to do that. For me, when I look at speaking, it is important for me to really think about why I'm speaking as well. So not just the company that's hiring me, but the audience that I'll be serving. So if I'm going to help with inspiring the next generation of developers or helping along the thought of how to make the world a better place or how people

themselves can be better people so that we can just change the landscape and make it a lot friendlier, that is also its own form of compensation and not just speaking from a speaker's fee. So I do agree that you need to not just be super negative Nancy and try to fight all fights. You need to embrace some of the good things and try to make more of those experiences good for everyone, not just the people who are inviting you there, but the people who are attending. When I started speaking, I was not a good speaker as well.

I made a lot of mistakes and still do. But I think speaking is easier than some people think. And if someone truly wants to do it, they should go ahead and get started. What is the saying? If there's something that's truly important, you'll be bad at it and you'll be okay with it. I started speaking because of my role as a developer advocate. And if you just do a Google search for CFPs, you can start speaking too. So those who are not public speakers and want to get into it, just Google CFP and then start applying. And then you'll get better at your submissions. You'll get better at your applying. And then you'll get better at your submissions.

You'll get better at your slides. And then once you get accepted, then you'll get better at preparing. Then you'll get better at actually speaking. There's a lot of steps between starting and stopping. And it's okay to get started doing that route. The other thing I wanted to point out is I feel public speaking is the equivalent of lifting your own body weight. If you can do it, you're one of the small few of the population that is willing to do so or that can do it. If you start public speaking, that in itself is an accomplishment and an experience that is something that is somewhat enriching.

And being bad at it doesn't take the passion away from you. If you just really want to do it, just keep doing it, even if you're a bad speaker. Yeah. The way to give a great talk is to give a bunch of terrible talks first. Yeah. And it's okay to do that. And it's not the entirety of community. It's not even a requirement to be involved with community. If you're one of those people that absolutely dreads the prospect of speaking publicly, fine. I'm not suggesting that, oh, you need to get over that and get on stage. That doesn't help anyone. It's don't do

the things you dread doing because you know that it's not going to go well for you. That's the reason I don't touch actual databases. I mean, come on, let's be realistic. I will accidentally the data and then we won't have a company anymore. So I know what things I'm good at and things I'm not. I also don't do hostage negotiations for obvious reasons. And also, here's a little secret tip. If you really want to do public speaking and you start doing public speaking and you're not so good at it from other people's perspective, but you still love doing it and you think you're getting better, doing public speaking is one of those things where you can say that you do it and no one will really question how good you are at it. If you're just in

casual conversation, it's like, hey, I wrote a book. People are like, oh, wow, this person wrote the book on blah, blah, blah. It's a self-published book that says the best way to run Kubernetes. It's a single page. It says don't in 150 point type, the end, but I wrote a book. Yeah. Yeah. People won't probe too much and it'll help you with your development. So go ahead and get started. Don't worry about doing that thing where like, I have to be the best before I can present it. Call yourself a public speaker. Check. Done. Always. We are the stories we tell and nowhere is it more true than in the world of public speaking. I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about this

for a second time in a single year. My goodness. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you? I'm on Twitter, Wesley83 on Twitter, and you can find me also on Polywork. So polywork.com forward slash Wesley83, or just go to wesleyfalkner.com, which redirects you there. I list pretty much everything that I am working on and any upcoming speaking opportunities. Hopefully when they release that feature, we'll also be on that Polywork page. Excellent. Of course, I started Polywork recently and I'm at thoughtleader.cloud because of course I am, which is neither here nor there. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak about this side of the industry that we never really get to talk about much, at least not publicly and not very often.

Well, thank you for having me on the show, but talking truth to power, like we mentioned before, but being yourself and being a great representation of how people should be treating others, being honest without being mean, being snarky without being rude. And other companies and other people who've given me a chance and given me a platform, I wanted to say thank you to you too. And I wouldn't be here unless it was people like you acknowledging the work that I've been doing. All it takes is just recognizing what you're doing and acknowledging it. People often want to thank me for this stuff, but it's just, what, for keeping my eyes open? I don't know.

I feel like it's just the job. It's not something that is above and beyond any expected norm of behavior. The only challenge is I look around the industry and I realized just how wrong that impression is apparently, but here we are. It's about finding people doing interesting work and letting them tell their story. That's all this podcast has ever tried to be. Yeah. And you do it and doing the work is part of the reward. And I really appreciate you just going through the effort. Even having your ears open is something that I'm glad that you're able to at least know who the people are and who are making noises or making noise to raise their profile up and then in turn, sharing that with the world. And so that's a great service that

you're providing, not just for me, but for everyone. Well, thank you. And as always, thank you for your time. Wesley Faulkner, head of community at SingleStore. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a rambling comment telling me exactly why DevRel does not need success metrics of any kind. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group.

We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.