Screaming in the Cloud - Episode 37: Hiring in the Cloud “I assume CrowdStrike makes drones”

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

What’s hiring in the world of Cloud like? What are companies looking for in possible employees? What kind of career trajectory should applicants display? Today, we’re talking to Don O’Neill, who has had an interesting career path and the archetype of who most companies want to hire. He’s been an independent contributor, platform leader, and Cloud consultant. Currently, Don is platform engineer manager at Articulate, an eLearning software solution for course authoring and eLearning development. He works with platform engineers to automate Blue Ocean pipelines with Docker, Terraform, and various Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, such as Elastic Beanstalk. Some of the highlights of the show include: Don reached out to his network to ask people that he had a professional relationship with about who was hiring and what challenges they faced Don’s “Therapy”: Go to meet-ups to talk about DevOps topics; serves as a “I’ve-got-to-get-my-hiney-out-of-the-house-and-get-some-social-time” Don’s journey from being a “wee lad in the industry” to a senior member/leader and giving back as a way to recognize those who helped him along the way Hiring Horror Stories: People going through borderline ridiculous levels of hiring games and terrible interview paradigms Companies sometimes look for something too specific - exact match instead of fuzzy match; they never have time to train, but time to look for a perfect unicorn Articulate’s Hiring Process: Day 1 - Slack interview; Day 2 - Technical pieces; and Day 3 - Pairing with others Articulate looks for people enthusiastic about technology, able to learn, and with emotional intelligence; company values independence, autonomy, and respect Companies that spend several hours to make a hiring decision tend to have less success with those they hire Cloud Certificates/Certifications: Can be valuable for applicants with no real-world experience; they don’t indicate how they’re going to work or learn Applicants need to demonstrate a base level of knowledge; if they don’t have a skill set, they should start a project to learn about something - learning is fun If you’re established in your career, reach out to someone just starting out to guide them If you’re starting out in your career, reach out to people to talk about the next steps to take in your career (contact Corey or Don) Links: Don O’Neill on Twitter Articulate Hangops.slack.com CoffeeOps AWS Azure Docker Terraform Elastic Beanstalk Autoscan Marchex Apex Learning Dice Monster Indeed Switch App (Tinder for Jobs) Kubernetes Spotify in Stockholm CrowdStrike re:Invent AWS Summits Digital Ocean .

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, cloud economist 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. This week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud is generously sponsored by DigitalOcean. I would argue that every cloud platform out there biases for different things. Some bias for having every feature you could possibly want offered as a managed service at

varying degrees of maturity. Others bias for, hey, we heard there's some money to be made in the cloud space. Can you give us some of it? DigitalOcean biases for neither. To me, they optimize for simplicity. I polled some friends of mine who are avid DigitalOcean supporters about why they're using it for various things, and they all said more or less the same thing. Other offerings have a bunch of shenanigans, root access and IP addresses. DigitalOcean makes it all simple. In 60 seconds, you have root access to a Linux box with an IP. That's a direct quote, albeit with profanity about other providers taken out. DigitalOcean also offers fixed price offerings. You always know what you're going to wind up paying this month,

so you don't wind up having a minor heart issue when the bill comes in. Their services are also understandable without spending three months going to cloud school. You don't have to worry about going very deep to understand what you're doing. It's click button or make an API call and you receive a cloud resource. They also include very understandable monitoring and alerting. And lastly, they're not exactly what I would call small time. Over 150,000 businesses are using them today. So go ahead and give them a try. Visit do.co slash screaming, and they'll give you a free $100 credit to try it out.

That's do.co slash screaming. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their support of Screaming in the Cloud. Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Don O'Neill of Articulate or Articulate. What are we pronouncing it as this week? I don't exactly know. Awesome. That's one of those beautiful phrases that we read rather than say, which is awesome. So Don is a little bit of an interesting character, which is normally what you say when you're trying not to insult someone to their face.

But in his case, it's reasonably true. You've sort of had an interesting career arc here. You've been an independent contributor for a long time. You spent eight years as a platform lead at Microsoft, of all places. From there, you've transitioned into another lead role, currently at Articulate. And you're in the process of assuming a management role. So with all of that, looking at the trajectory for your career, I thought it would be a bit interesting to talk about hiring in the world of cloud.

So let's start at the very beginning, I suppose. I've worked with you on projects before. In fact, I've allowed to mention that you're currently a client, which is awesome. More than that, I've known you for longer than I've been working as a cloud consultant. And for a while now, you've been something of a named resource in that if I run into a weird problem and want to get feedback, I'll ask Don is sort of one of those, I guess, instinctive reactions I have. You're a named resource, for lack of a better term. And that is something that is not exactly common,

but it's also not impossible to find either. I mean, you're sort of the archetype of what a lot of companies are looking to hire, as long as they have a reasonable ask for the hiring process. If you have your own leadership principle series that you grade everyone on, or it's critical to you that your hire is to be able to tell you accurately how much a 747 weighs, great. I can't help you down that path.

But I'm curious about, effectively, how you came to be. What is your career trajectory from your perspective? Well, it started out in many years ago now at a company called Autoscan Incorporated. And what they did was a, they were a hired gun AutoCAD drafting resource. And they quickly realized that I had systems administration skills at the same time. And they quickly asked me, hey, can you do this hired gun systems administration work for us? And I was like, okay, sure.

The best jobs always start with here, catch. Yeah. And so they converted me from hourly to salary at a salary that I won't speak of because it was amazingly small. But it was a great opportunity for me to grow that skill set in terms of customer service, getting to know what they needed and delivering in a pretty efficient manner. So from Autoscan Incorporated, I got recruited by Adam Jacob to come work at MarchX, which is an advertising, internet advertising firm amongst a bunch of other things. I'd known him in a social skill, and he said, hey, I think you would be interested in this job. I think you could take advantage of your Linux skills. You obviously have Windows

skills. So why don't you come work with us? We'll do production operations together. It'll be a lot of fun. So I said yes, and I'm really glad I did. I joined a team of about six platform or operations or service or whatever you want to call it, engineers. I think they're calling them DevOps this week. Yes, yes. A lot of folk call them DevOps or SREs or some combination of the both. And three quarters of their time is spent arguing about nomenclature, which is neither here nor there. Yes, so true. So true. And so my primary responsibility there at MarchX

was making sure that all the Windows stuff stayed up, build out new things, a little bit of Linux. So I learned a lot of Debian and Ubuntu-related stuff at that point there. And from there, I hopped to a very short gig at a company called New Motion. It was less than six months, and I got recruited to Microsoft from there, joining Microsoft in 2008 as a service engineer, working on the safety platform team, helping keep people safe on the Internet from malware and phishing attempts. Super large scale stuff, really interesting stuff to work on. And I spent about eight years there and came to realize that I wasn't going where I wanted to go in that I wanted to do more DevOps stuff. I wanted to program more and be more architectural and infrastructure as code and all that sort of stuff.

So I said, well, what does that look like? So I started looking around in about June, and this would have been 2016. And I didn't land until October at a company called Apex Learning in the educational space and quickly became a pretty valued resource and growing into a senior DevOps engineer and then effectively doing lead DevOps engineer work without actually having the title and all that sort of stuff. So it goes. And from there, I started looking around for what the next thing looked like. And that's when I found Articulate.

My personal network is what helped me get that job. And I was actually on a Slack called Hang Ops. And my now boss reached out to me when I mentioned, hey, I'm looking for a new gig. He's like, do you want to talk about coming to work for us? And I said, sure, let's talk. So I talked with him and just had nothing but great vibes. And I talked to the tech lead, a gentleman by the name of Brian. And when I was talking with him, it was a video chat. It's a hundred percent remote company. So there's no in-person this, that, or anything

as far as interviews go. When I talked to Brian, it felt like I was talking with an old friend. And we just clicked. And it wasn't much longer after that. I had been interviewing at a couple other places. It wasn't much longer after that. I said, Articulate's the place for me. Remotes for me. Autonomies for me. We had talked about what it meant to be a member of the team. And we had talked about management, growing into management from the get-go. And that really tripped my trigger. So I said, yeah, that's where I want to go. So that was May 1st.

I joined May 1st. And well, as of next week, or by the time you listen to this, as of this week, I will be promoted to engineering manager. If we publish early, that's going to surprise some people. But there's a few things you just said that are extremely resonant

with how I tend to view the world. First, the fact that you said when you're looking for a new job, it came through your back channel networks of friend networks. But if I'm hearing you correctly, you didn't spend time on Dice or Monster or Indeed or Tinder for Jobs or whatever it is people use today to find work. You reached out through a back channel network and started asking people that you had some professional relationship with who was hiring and what challenges they were looking at, correct? Yes, that would be an absolutely correct assessment. I very heavily leverage my personal network. It's one of the only ways I've ever found for me to find jobs that made sense. I don't have a

traditional background. My resume has never been something that people look at and say, wow, how do we get that person in? I've always been a little bit out there. And I find that those conversations are incredibly valuable. The counterpoint is that for people who are early on in their career, who are starting down the path of figuring out what the job is going to look like, what their career is going to look like. They don't have those networks yet. And it's difficult when you're new to the industry to be able to figure out how to start building that. Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things that I enjoy as a thing, I call it therapy, and I'll explain. So I'm a co-leader of the Seattle Coffee Ops.

And Coffee Ops is a welcoming meetup that helps people who might be new to the industry or people who are very familiar in the industry to come together and talk about DevOps topics. Sometimes the topics are straight-up technology. Oh, let's talk about Kubernetes. Let's talk about Docker. Let's talk about whatever the hot thing is at the moment. And sometimes it's about the people part of the job. Because I think that sometimes gets lost,

is that there's technology and there's people in the DevOps world. And it's really a mix of the both. I've been enjoying being a leader in a lot of ways because of the welcoming nature of the community and because I've developed a lot of really great professional networking contacts and friends, really. It happens every other week at Chef headquarters in Seattle about 8 a.m.

And surprisingly, we get 50 to 60 people show up at 8 a.m., which is a lot for a meetup, especially an early morning meetup. The nice thing is that actually serves a second function for me. It actually serves as a I got to get my hiney out of the house and get some social time. And so that's, it's kind of a dual function. If I were to make a recommendation to somebody who's just starting out, go to some meetups, maybe come to a Seattle coffee ops. Obviously you've got to be in Seattle, but coffee ops is all over the world, the States. We'll throw a link to that in the show notes as well, along with the hang up Slack that you

mentioned earlier. It's important. I've always found, to be able to tell people where to go in the context of starting to bootstrap professional network, especially in this space. Something that sort of surprises me when I talk to people who are not in the tech industry, who are in other disciplines, they don't tend to have the Slack communities. In some cases, they don't tend to have conferences where they talk about the problem that they have, where they wind up effectively reinventing the same problems at every company because there is no strong sense of community. And for all of its faults, I do think that's something in which technology excels as an industry.

Yeah, absolutely. The thing I think about a lot of times is, I was once just a wee lad in the industry. And now I've become, you know, a senior member or a leadership member. Well, you've become larger. Yes. And I, along the way, I got a lot of help from a lot of people. And so for me, I really just, I just am inclined to give back because I would never have gotten where I got to if I hadn't had help from other people who are further or larger, as you say, in the industry. And so it just feels like the thing to do as far as I'm concerned. I think you're right. It's one of those areas where there's just not a lot of, even today, formalized education to some extent, where this is a field where we get better by doing things. otherwise not have. Where every person you're hiring looks, when you're making that hiring

decision, when everyone looks like someone who's been doing this for 15 years, well, there's only so many of those people that go around. And while it's nice to be able to say, oh, the last time I saw this problem, it was X and we fixed it by Y, that isn't as scalable throughout the industry as we might otherwise wish it were. But we still wind up seeing people going through borderline ridiculous levels of hiring games, trying to, I don't know if it's based on ego, I don't know if it's based upon trying to build a story where they've magically cracked the secret sauce and turned themselves into more of a cult. But there's so many terrible interview paradigms that we've seen out there.

And I'm curious, when you were on your last job hunt, did you manage to encounter any hiring horror stories? Things that just made no sense when people reached out saying, hey, we're looking to hire. And then you're stuck trying to tell them politely that their job posting is crap. Or they're hiring something that doesn't exist on this planet and they're about to be in for a world of pain as soon as they realize that. I've definitely encountered some very interesting job descriptions over my

recent hunts and some just really interesting hiring experiences in person and otherwise, I interviewed at a place and I'll choose to keep them out of the spotlight. That's probably a good idea if we don't want to get sued. Yeah. And it was a company that I wanted to work for because a friend was working there and I very much want to work with this friend. So I get all the information from my friend about kind of where I got to go. And, you know, there's like a building I got to go to. And what I didn't know is that there was actually two floors to this building. So I had gone to the wrong floor and I knocked on the door because there wasn't really a receptionist at all. And, you know, that's fine. It's kind of a little like a startup inside of a larger company and it's a little bootstrapped and there's not a lot of structure. And okay, that's cool. But they weren't really ready for me to come and interview. And so

they're like, oh, hey, okay, I guess we're interviewing you. And so it ended up being a great interview. They did give me an offer. I ended up choosing to go to a particulate instead. But it was a really, really interesting experience. Another one that I had was just incredibly slow about actually getting to interview me. I was really eager to make a move. I had a limited timeframe in which I needed to make the move because I'm a parent, I'm a husband, I have bills to pay, and savings only goes so far. It would have been maybe two, three months before they would have actually gotten around to interview me. I was like, that just doesn't work for me. That just doesn't work at all. Yeah, especially in tech, where it's one of those stories where we often tell people, well, be careful, you might get fired.

And in the market that we're in right now, you could be unemployed for dozens of minutes. No one is going to sit around and hope for a quarter that a job offer comes through. People generally want to, to some extent, be midway through a tenure at their next job by then. And it's, okay, that's great, so come back to me when you're serious. Companies keeping people in holding patterns is always a bit of an interesting one. Here's a story I will actually give. I interviewed for a SRE-type role at Spotify in Stockholm once, and they told me that they would get back to me. And I just crossed the seven-year anniversary of that job interview,

and I've got to say, Don, I'm starting to think maybe I didn't get the job. I don't think you did. They could just be doing some really extensive background checks. Yeah, maybe so. I mean, you never know. Maybe the hiring requirements are a little bit more strict there. No, and I don't say this to throw them under the bus. It's easy to drop the ball on things like this, but that's the narrative that people remember.

People remember these things. And at the very least, a thank you for your candidacy. We're going in a different direction. And then you throw in the wording of, yeah, we'll keep your information on file in case we wind up revisiting this down the road. Keep in touch, yada, yada, yada. And that's great, but it doesn't wind up leading to an outcome where people are making jokes at your expense most of a decade later. So it's one of those areas where there are ways to handle this appropriately on both sides of that table. Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I interviewed for a company that I was pretty eager and wanting to work for,

a drone. So iFly Drones. So it was a drone mapping company. I refuse to accept, based upon the name, that CrowdStrike does not make drones. They tell me they don't. I'm convinced they're hiding. But please, continue. Yes, yes.

You would think that they would do that, Yes. So anyway, I go and interview. It was really exciting for me because it was 100% remote. And I had a hobby that I thought i think they made the right call but the the thing that i would reflect on is that i think they were looking for a very a little bit too specific of a thing they were looking for an exact match instead of a fuzzy match and i think that in my mind is a little bit of a problem uh in the industry is sometimes places are really looking for the precise match instead of being willing to understand well well, this person isn't a perfect match, but they have enough of what we need that we could teach them the rest and grow them into what we want. Trying to find people that you can grow into roles is fascinating, but often you'll hear stories where, oh, it would take six months to train someone up on this role. We need to hire someone who can hit the ground running. And then the DREC is open for nine months. People tend to

say one thing and do the other. You never have time to train, but always time to look for the perfect unicorn. Yeah. Yeah. And they exist. But at the same time, man, if you have a little bit more open-mindedness about how you hire and what you hire, I think you're going to get some really great employees that are very appreciative of the fact that you took a chance on them. And I think that inherently brings loyalty along with it. It's important to remember too that excellence is situational. A completely amazing employee at one company gets fired at another. It winds up not just being about the individual, but it has much more to do with the fit between the environment that they're in,

the problems they're working on, the time. There's a lot of factors that play into this. So if someone was amazing at a previous job, that doesn't guarantee they'll succeed in their current job or vice versa. Oh, well, so true. So true. So now that you're donning that mantle of management, how do you intend to approach hiring? We actually have a pretty unique approach to hiring at Articulate. We have what we call a Slack interview. Because we are globally diverse and geographic or in time zone diverse, we have a lot of asynchronous nature in what happens with our job day to day. So we have a three-day process that we go through. So day one, we invite the person to the Slack and then we get to know them on a very social,

kind of like just really general way. Day two, we tend to dive into the more technical stuff. And then day three, what we like to do is we actually like to spend an hour pairing up with people and getting a better sense of how they interact, you know, what their curiosity about a thing might be and, you know, do they fit? We don't always pair, but we tend to try to do that. This ends up being a very interesting format. And there are pros and cons, because of course, if you're an introvert, maybe talking with a bunch of platform engineers all at once might be really intimidating. So we're trying to look at that, and we're constantly adjusting the way that we do the interviewing.

But at the same time, we tend to find that it really susses out a good match versus a bad match pretty quickly. We've done a number of interviews, and we've recently hired about five new people. We're still actually looking for a platform engineer in the APAC time zone, and it's pretty, pretty exciting stuff. Interestingly enough, this particular type of interview or style of interview is completely different than the interview I went through to join the team. And we actually joke a lot that if any one of us who have already been hired were to go through the same process, we may not get hired. Not to say that it's a real tough thing, but what we tend to do is we tend to look for not the exact match, but an enthusiasm about a particular technology or something that we're doing that interests them and the ability

to learn as well as emotional intelligence. We value independence and autonomy and respect very, very much at Articulate. It's a very important thing to us. So it's been a really interesting thing to be a member of from the other side. I'm doing a fair amount of interviewing with the rest of the team fairly regularly these days, and it's very interesting. Not to put you too much on the spot for this one here, but how much time do you find that it takes from a candidate to go through your interview process from initial approach to offer? We move pretty quick. When we make a decision, we make it pretty quickly. Right, right. Sorry, I'm trying to ask more clarity. I want to, I guess my question for you is more along the lines of, is this a three-day, full-day endeavor on the client side? Is this a couple hours each day? I mean, how does this wind up, I guess, acting as a time sink for a prospective candidate? Well, we don't presume that you're going to have three days worth of time.

That's sort of what I was getting at. I wanted to throw you under the bus in case of a perfectly wrong answer. Yeah, it's been interesting because each candidate engages in a different way and to a different degree. Some people just, they actually have a lot of time on their hands. They're bored at their job. They want to get another job. So they'll just be on Slack and chat all day long. Others are, you know, very realistic. They're like, hey, this is the set of hours that I'm going to be available to chat.

And so I'll be on and I'll chat during that time. But our expectations are chat when you can and as much as you can. And if you have to go, that's fine. We understand this is a very asynchronous thing. And we have people in the Netherlands, we have people in India, so they have to be involved in the conversation too. So it might be, I'll ask a question and 12 hours later, I get an answer the next day when I hop back online. Again, it's a different style of interview than I think I've ever seen. I can't say that I've ever seen anybody do it that way. Does it make it right? I don't know. It seems to have been working out pretty good for us.

Got a number of really awesome employees in the last three or four months that I'm pretty excited about. It's always nice when you can demonstrate success. What I like about your approach specifically is that it doesn't seem to bias for people who are unemployed or can otherwise just take the better part of a week off to go and sit through 15 different rounds of interviews. One thing that I've firmly believed for a long time now has been that you can wind up telling an awful lot about a company by how they buy their people. If they're spending an enormous amount of time trying to make a decision, they go through 15 rounds of interviews for most roles,

it winds up very quickly becoming a situation where there just isn't an awful lot of probability of success. Another thing for the job seeker, they oftentimes end up feeling like getting a job is a full-time job and being exhausted after just a couple of interviews. I think this approach might work better. I don't know. I certainly enjoy it. It means, yes, there's a lot of time that you could choose to put in,

but again, we don't assume that you're going to do that. We are very flexible about how much time a person will put in. I think it's one of those things that winds up being different on a case-by-case basis. It's challenging to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution, and different companies are going to have different constraints. That's kind of nice about it. It means that different companies can have the luxury of biasing for different things as they go through this process. To that end, and I'm sure that regardless of how you answer, you're going to irritate at least half of the people listening. Do you find that when you look at a resume for a prospective

candidate, do you find that certificates or certifications in the world of cloud act as a distinguishing characteristic? Is it signal of any sort, positive or negative? How do you view them? So as a person that doesn't have a single cert, I tend to bias against them just because I think that they can be valuable if you have no actual real world experience. But I don't think they say much about how you're going to work and how you're going to learn. Those to me are the much more important things like, hey, can you learn the thing? Great. We'll talk to you.

Do you already know the thing? Awesome. Can you expand upon the thing? Awesome. And yeah, you're right. That's probably going to, this is a debate, an age-old debate, certs or no certs. I'm firmly in the camp of no certs. I don't find them to be valuable. I tend to come from a position that mirrors yours, but I've broadened a little bit in that. In the interest of full disclosure, and I had a blog post go out about this recently, I have a single AWS cert, a cloud practitioner,

generally aimed at non-technical people who want to understand the business of cloud. This serves me absolutely no professional purpose, but it does get me into the certified lounge at reInvent and the AWS summits. It's this really weird entrance questionnaire to a lounge pass is how I tend to view that. That said, if you are new to the field and you're looking to demonstrate

that you have a passing familiarity with a particular vendor or cloud computing. I'm hesitant to wind up dinging people for having it. I think that it definitely provides at least a fundamental baseline of they probably know at least X, Y, and Z, and it gives you context to view them through a particular lens. I don't think that it necessarily replaces experience, but once you have experience,

the value starts to diminish rather significantly. The other side of that too, and I do start to hold it against people past a certain point, when you're having a conversation with someone looking at their resume and you realize that they hold 23 active certifications. Yes, I met someone who did that once. And okay, you are probably one of the best people I've ever met at sitting down and passing tests. But I'm trying to hire people to, you know, do work. It would be awesome if you could show up and do work. Oh, I can't. I have another cert exam to cram for. It's not the answer we're generally looking for in those moments. Yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting space. I think you've got something there. I think you're really onto something that,

especially for people that are new to the industry, you really need to demonstrate that there's some base level of knowledge. So I don't think that certs are meaningless. I just find that for somebody who's got some time in the industry, that they're not as meaningful. Just a quick tale about myself. When I was looking to make the transition from the service engineer at Microsoft to more of a DevOps engineer, a lot of places were looking for AWS as a skill set. Now, I knew Azure, and most people know that Azure, if you know one cloud service, you probably can translate that into another cloud service. So there maybe needed a search. So what I ended up doing is just going and getting one of the training, buying a subscription

to a training place and saying that I'm going to go and get some of the certifications that they have and show some basic proficiency. And they do end up showing up on my LinkedIn resume. And that's useful because it allowed a person to understand, okay, so this person has this related thing and they know about this other thing. So they can probably manage to do the thing that I need them to do. So that's actually a bit of advice that I do tend to give to people. If you don't have a skill set, go start a project and learn about that thing. In my case, I wanted to learn Chef. Go do a project that forces you to learn that thing and maybe manage a VM with Chef or go learn how to do Docker or Terraform or whatever. And I think that works out really well because it makes it fun. It makes it fun to learn.

Learning is fun. It really is. I'd agree with you. The challenge that I always run into is it's easy to bias into a trivia competition. How would you go about solving for X, Y, and Z under the following constraints? And it turns into a geek slap fight where you sort of figure out

which one of you has the better mastery of trivia. And I enjoy those games over drinks with friends in the bar. I don't find that they're valuable or valid in an interview context. Because first, not everyone has this stuff off the top of their head. And frankly, whether you do or don't is not an indicator as to your capability. Secondly, if I'm the interviewer, I'm sitting there in that room,

and I have a job. I already know what my career looks like at that moment. And whether I turn out to be the best trivia person or not in that room really doesn't matter to me all that much. But for the person on the other side of that table, this is the next step in their career. There are very few higher stakes conversations that most people tend to have on a semi-frequent basis. It is absolutely not a level playing field. Yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more. It's one of those things where if you have a cert, great. Awesome. But I don't think it's a hard requirement. Like I said, I don't have certs, but I have experience. And I don't think I'm going to struggle to stay hired. Well, you're going to have to pry my job from my cold, dead hands first. But if I were in the market, I don't think I'd have a problem, honestly. I feel like you're right. It's one of those areas where finding the right company and finding the

right people to collaborate with is incredibly valuable. And to that end, I want to ask our listeners to do one of a couple of different things. First, if you're established in your career, take a little bit of time to reach out to someone who's just starting out and see if you can act as a sounding board. See if you can help guide them toward the next thing that they're going for. An introduction to someone who has a problem that looks like them would be a fantastic way to change someone's life at almost no cost to yourself. Secondly, if you are just starting out in your career, reach out and start talking to people about these things. If you are at a loss for who to talk to about career next steps, feel free to reach out to me. I'm cory at

screaminginthecloud.com. Feel free to send me an email. I will either share my thoughts with you or point you in the direction of someone who's aligned with what it is you're trying to do next. I found that early on in my career, I was stifled for a lack of mentors. And being able to find people who can help me advance took longer than it should have. I'd be further ahead now if it hadn't been such a burden. So that's one of the things I try and do to make the world a slightly better place. Yeah, that's awesome, Corey. That's super awesome. Feel free to reach out to me too, syntaxerror, S-N-T-X-R-R, at gmail.com, syntaxerror2 on Twitter. I would similarly be happy to talk to you at length about maybe what your next steps are. In fact, get us both on the phone at the

same time and we'll argue with each other to a draw, at which point you'll learn probably very little, but it'll be stunningly entertaining. Yes, yes it will. Don, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it. Well, thanks for taking the time to have me on your show. Well, that's how we know that I've completely had you bamboozled with my marketing. Well, that's standard for the course, right? Absolutely. Don O'Neill from either Articulate or Articulate. I'm Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at Screaminginthecloud.com or wherever fine snark is sold.