Software Misadventures - Practical Guide to More Effective Mentorship | Dave O'Connor (Google, Twilio, Elastic)

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

After 17 years building SRE teams at Google and serving as the Site Lead for Engineering in Dublin, Dave joined Elastic as the Sr Director of Engineering and later VP of Engineering at Twilio. Following a recent career break, Dave now divides his time between coaching engineering leaders and consulting to help busy teams be more effective. In the heart of our conversation, Dave shares the frameworks and practical tips he's amassed for making the most of the mentorship experience.   Segments: [00:01:45] Growing remote SRE team as the Google Dublin Site Lead [00:19:49] Company Culture vs Company Values [00:23:47] How to find companies that are serious about remote work [00:34:26] Coaching vs Mentoring at Big vs Small companies [00:38:35] How Google does coaching & mentoring [00:41:38] What makes a good 1-1 [00:46:56] Considerations for seeking out a mentor [01:03:27] Getting external mentorship while working at a small company [1:08:20] How to set specific goals for mentorship [1:20:13] The “CIA” Method for career decision making [1:31:08] How to sunset mentorship 1-1s [1:35:20] Venturing into consulting to help busy teams be more effective [1:42:13] How to get started with consulting   Show Notes: Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerrowadat/ Dave’s personal website: https://log.andvari.net/pages/about.html Dave’s coaching website: https://www.strategichopes.co/ Service Level Objectives by Alex Hidalgo: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/implementing-service-level/9781492076803/ The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-staff-engineers/9781098118723/   Stay in touch: 👋 Let us know who we should talk to next! [e-mail]

It's funny, people make the assumption that if you go to somebody who has dedicated their life to a course of study or a course of practice, and if somebody who's just coming up with that demonstrates interest and comes to them and says, can we talk about this technique that you've dedicated your life to, that they'll go, no, I hate talking about that. Right. They won't. Right.

They generally won't. They love talking about that. Like they'll talk about that until you're sick of it. with the people and the stories behind them. So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they have learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way. Hi everyone, it's Guang here. In this episode, we're chatting with Dave O'Connor,

who has spent 17 years at Google building out the SRE teams in Dublin, before leading engineering at Elastic and Twilio. The focus of this conversation is around mentorship and coaching. Like how do you go about asking someone? What do you talk about? What kind of goals should you set? And how do you go about sunsetting an existing mentor-mentee relationship. Both Monik and I really enjoyed learning from Dave, not just because he's had a ton of experience on this subject, but that he's done a lot of introspection before arriving at his passion for it. Without further ado,

let's get into the conversation. Dave, super excited to have you with us today. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So we thought we would start with asking you about your time at Google. You were the first SRE hired outside of the US. Can you tell us more about how that happened? Yeah, I mean, technically, if you want to split hairs, that is true. I ended up interviewing at the time, this was 2004, and the tech industry, such as it was in Dublin was quite small. So I'm based in Dublin, Ireland. And so I knew some folks who already worked there in different parts and I got referred and all of the usual stuff happened and I didn't know what S like

nobody knew what SRE was at the time. They were sort of, so you want to come in as like a sysadmin because I was a sysadmin. I did the standard thing. I got some calls and did some phone screens and they didn't have anyone to interview me in Dublin, so they actually flew me to California to interview me. That sounds like a fun trip.

Yeah, the first time I'd been in the US was to interview for Google. So this was obviously in a sort of a small, such as it was back then, place where a lot of the foreign direct investment of big tech hadn't really moved into dublin just yet and so this was quite unusual it was yeah definitely an

eye-opener coming in and um google did what a lot of places were doing back then which is that like let's hire a couple of people and see what happens people places that are moving into dublin or moving into any european city or whatever it is, tend to think about it a lot more holistically now. They say like, let's hire their leadership. Let's make sure that we have the people infrastructure on the ground. Let's make sure that we've done our cashment area analysis. So we know that we're going to be able to hire a hundred people here rather than five people here. This was before being so

introspective about that. They were just, let's hire people, see what happens.

But yeah, what happened is we kept on hiring people because it kept on being quite useful.

And the remit changed as things went on as well because again, not a lot of thought

being put into it or a certain amount of thought being put into it. It's like,

oh no, it's hard for some people to follow this one. And then a while later it was like, oh, it it's hard. Some people do follow the sun. Right. Um, and then like a while later it was like, oh, it turns out they're smart. Let's get them actual work to do.

Right. And again, it's not, as I like to say, it's not because the folks who are doing this from the mothership were bad people. It's cause they were busy people. They were like, okay, to, we believe the follow the sun is good model. Um, and now we've hired some people who are good to know that we want to give them enough that you know and as i like to say to somebody who's sort of starting a a group remotely is like give them a give them an amount of responsibility that scares

you both all right give them an amount you know so like they're not sure if they can do it and you're not sure either right and that's that's about the right amount of tension where like you're going to keep each other honest and you're going to do all of that and so a lot of the early stage stuff was yeah there's a certain amount of like just do good work and the mothership will recognize that by giving you more work because that's their work but work is more work um but yeah a certain amount of making sure that we get self-assured enough in the remote site that we're able to come back and say okay cool i know you're dropping 20 headcount on us or 50 headcount on us or some ridiculous amount of headcount on us what are those people going to do and can we be a little bit more organized about

how we you know actually do this as a mandate, right? Can we think about what these teams are going to own and what these teams are going to do that? And the first couple of times we sort of had to go back and say, because the answer was, we just want to follow the sun and try not to say too many words because you have confusing accents, right, the first time I came back and said, no, thanks. You know, like, no, we would not like the headcount. We would not like to expand.

This doesn't sound like high quality work, right? And having the air cover to be able to do that was actually really, really valuable. So that was the very early days where we, just crazy amounts of growth, crazy, crazy amounts of growth, and trying to figure out how to do it constructively. Before the serious question, were you jet-lagged

during the All-Star interview? Oh, it's still a jet-lag, right? I was the kind of jet-lag you were when you don't even know what jet-lag is, right? Because it's an 11-hour flight, and it's eight time zones. So not only was I jet-lagged,

I came to know jet lag very intimately in the years following, right. But it was like jet lag, but also like, am I dying? Is this, is this what it feels like? I'm not sure. I don't know what time it is. And I can't sleep more than two hours at a time, but yes, I was for my, for my interviews. So. Sorry. Do you have a tip? Like, is it better to book like night flights if you're going like, well, yeah, what's uh, give us some advice here for long distance travel. I have, yeah, I, I, I checked my passport that when I finished with Google, I had 47 US stamps in my passport.

And so, um, flying, flying east is actually way worse. Um, so flying west, I tended to try and land in like the afternoon, evening, and just power through to regular bedtime and then do it that way. Going back east, like arrive home on Friday because your weekend is screwed. You're going to not know what time it is for a couple of days, anything up to a week, depending on how badly the flight goes. So don't make plans, which kind of sucks, but

it is what it is. I empathize. My home's in India, obviously, and I visit almost every year. So I'm very familiar with that. Planning when you sleep on the flight, that's another tip. Try and sleep when it's a time zone, it's night where you're landing,

that kind of helps. Asking your family to ensure they have a whole lot planned where they keep you busy for the first two days and don't let you sleep, even if you want to sleep, that helps too. It's like, oh, you're going to be terrible,

but please be entertaining. Yes, yes, pretty much. Just like on-site interviews. I like that. So going back, sorry, to the, so you were talking about dropping headcounts on you guys. Like, wait, so they, like, how does that even work? So like, they have an idea of like,

they want to grow this office and it's just all different teams? Or like, they're like, okay, this team and like, and then you just kind of grow it out. How does that work? It works massively differently in, in, in different companies, but the way, um, the way headcount and SRE worked back way back in the day is the different business functions would show up and say, Hey,

we've got stuff in production to run. We think it's going to be 10% of our headcount cost. And so here's the, again, as you get up into the rarefied air of VPs talking to VPs, they talk in very simple terms. Their tools are a lot simpler. Like they have like a, a hammer and a screwdriver and they can hit you with one or the other. Right.

And it like, they're having these conversations about headcount where it's like, I will give you 5% of the headcount that I got, and then there will be SRE for product X, right? And so at that point, if I'm running SRE, I'm like, okay, where do I put that headcount? And how do I create a mandate for product X, right? If I'm sitting in New York or Sydney or Dublin or whatever it is, I'm like, okay, I got to put half of it here and half of it in the other site. And what's important for me as a leader is that the sort of say, okay, what, where is the mandate for each of those teams?

What is one of those teams like doing everything and the other team is just like follow the sun, right? Um, and how do I sell that in that sense? I think you spoke to Todd briefly about like what a site lead is. Yeah. And so I was a site lead for a double. I wasn't a site lead for a way, way back in the day. It was just sort of a collective, like, let's be angry about things, you know, things that we all did.

That's not how Ted put it. That's not how Ted put it. Well, yes, I think it's which you concentrate all of the anger into one person. So other emotions too, I'm sure. But what happens then is that you then go to the people in that site and say, hey, I'm going to create a new team in your site. And it's going to be this. And sometimes the people on that site come back and say, okay, what are they going to own?

And if you don't have a good answer for that, they're not going to be very enthusiastic about helping you in a local sense like they're going to say okay you told me to hire a seven person team and you haven't told me what they're doing apart from be on call overnight like only one person can be on call at a time so like what are the other six gonna do right and you'd occasionally get somebody who just didn't have a good answer right who would say i'm not really sure i'm kind of nervous about handing off something to eight time zones away so i'm going to just hire the people and see how we do and yet sometimes you have to come back and say no nothing you know like like let's have a let's it's not like no we will not hire these people

it's more like let's have a more in-depth conversation about what it actually means to hire a team here and what it means to be because like i'm not going to be hiring doves like i'm going to be hiring good people who are every bit as good as the people who are sitting in sunnyvale or new york or wherever a team originates right so they're not going to stay they're going to show up and say, oh, this was a trick. Okay, bye. And then they'll go on to do something else because even back in the early 2000s in Dublin, it was like people didn't have to stay. There were plenty of places to go.

Right. So in a way, it was a case of almost like coaching people towards like hey so you don't really have an idea what this team is going to do how can we do better at even having an elevator pitch for what that team is supposed to do and what kind of people do you want me to hire because i got some blank stares about that as well right it was like what kind of people do you want on this team? And they're like, I don't know, living, breathing, qualified people. I'm like, okay, all right. So yeah, there's an element of, you know, the responsibility in a way of being, for being a forcing function for quality in the site, especially if it's a site remote

from the mothership, the locus of control of the company itself. That is one of the biggest struggles I've seen with offices that are not, like that is in a different time zone, especially across multiple time zones where the overlap is, you have to either wake up too early or stay up too late to have a decent overlap of time. And I think this is the biggest challenge where like, what is that team going to own and something that is meaningful, something they don't have to keep waiting for the HQ to tell them what to do about and something they can feel an ownership for, because that's how they feel motivated to do the work too. And I've seen some teams do this really

well, but I still see that as a struggle, especially when it comes to infrastructure, for example, where it's like, this stuff is supposed to run all the time. Yeah. And there's two main things that we really do have to be on top of. Like there's no substitute. And one is defining the mandates of the team, however you want to do it. Like put together a sort of a roles and responsibilities thing, and even roles and responsibilities can be a bit of a cop-out, right? Mm-hmm put together sort of an ownership matrix, right?

My ownership, I mean, ownership, right? I don't mean like, hey, you're on the hook for this thing that's annoying. It's more like, hey, you're on the hook for this thing happening and I don't care how you do it. If I don't care, I mean really don't care. Like I'm not going to show up and start second guessing. Because as you say, you need to be able to devolve and to say, I've got like a one-hour, two-hour overlap in my working hours with you.

So I'm not going to be chasing you about this. I'm just going to make sure that we put together okay orders or objectives and that they get done. And the second part is making sure that you're regimented in how you use that time and how you're going to be using that time in a useful way. Because it's peak meeting time, right? And you want to be very conscious of people's time and energy and effort and be up to date on the things that you need to be up to date on i'll be able to do a lot of the other stuff asynchronously right you know i i as a lead don't want to be showing up in my precious hour or two of overlap time a day and say give me an update on everything i want to be sort of saying like give me the update on the thing that

like i need to know about today or point to me where I can find this update in general, where I can just go self-service all of that. And it can be tempting to sort of say, well, that sort of stuff will happen organically, but it mostly doesn't. But I think people mean well, unless there's a sort of a regimen there of keeping teams up to date on things. And unless there's a sort of a regimen there of keeping teams up to date on things.

And unless there is a structure whereby I, for example, don't have a team lead on one side who insists they have to keep up to date on absolutely everything because they don't trust people in the other side and all of the usual nonsense that comes up with that sort of thing. That is the other part of the equation. Like to create a mandate, you also need people who you actually trust to say, okay, I'm going to define this mandate. And I think this goes back to the tension that you talked about. It's like equal amount of tension

on both sides. You need that. Absolutely. If I'm sitting in Dublin or wherever it is like that, I need to be able to be assured that I can hire the best possible people

and that I'm not going to have to explain to them on day one, by the way, your job is like 50 or so bullshit, right? But by the way, yes, you own this thing, but beware of this guy who's going to show up because he actually owns it. And that kind of thing, because I can't hire those people otherwise,

like they'll leave. Like I said, they're every bit as capable and have every bit as much of an aspiration career-wise and personal fulfillment-wise as somebody you hire in, you know, Southern Illinois or whatever it is. So about that, like in terms of hiring, I imagine the first few hires, they flew everybody back to the mothership, excuse me, to do the interviews. At what point and like what was the process like of gaining sort of the trust from Mothership to just do interviews locally and actually be able to make the final call? Yeah, I mean

partially it was critical mass as you say, right? I mean I need to be able to put together an interview panel locally and I need to lean on other like European sites sometimes to do that and put that together. But it is a trust thing, right? It is a like, much as we might say, oh, uh, like we can put in place processes and everything is going to be completely consistent, everything like that.

This is one of those trust things. Like you're going to like the head of SRE over there and say like, do you trust us to make completely devolved hiring decisions? Right. And the answer was no. That was the right answer because, again, you don't know if the site leader is going to be just hiring his mates and cronies, right? That's the thing that you're going to be suspicious that might happen, right? So that's fair enough, and I've seen it happen, right?

So partially you want to make sure to be seen to be making good decisions and good calls. And so in, in the case of Google, what happened is that we, we put together interviews and then we would have a hiring committee, uh, and then, so part of the first step was like getting some folks from Dublin on hiring committee where like the actual hiring decision is made and have them demonstrate good judgment and have them see how the sausage is made such such that they can then sort of say okay here it is um in in a lot of cases you could do it we would do it in a stage

basis based off of like you know we had our applicant tracking system which is sort of like a proto greenhouse way back in the day where everyone would enter interview feedback and the interview feedback was quite structured and if you wanted to make an assertion about like the quality of interviewers in dublin i could put you at their interview feedback and say okay is this good or bad feedback please let us know who you can do better and some of it was was simply trust it was simply down to and again it was it was a macrocosm of the inter-team trust thing we were just talking about, right? Yeah, I mean, we're all technically adults who know how to do the job. But do you trust me enough to make actual hiring decisions?

Again, it's a tough one, right? Nice. That's a lot more legit than what I was thinking, which is if you make one good hire, you get two more headcounts. If you make one bad hire where someone steals all the office snacks, then you take off one headcount. Anyways, sorry. Manage management by preciousness and punishment. Yes. I know. No, I think back, back, um, certainly open to, I want to say about 2010, um, we were

never headcount constrained and this applied globally at Google. It was like, like I want to say we're not headcount constrained. And this applied globally at Google. It was like, I want to say we're never headcount constrained. We always had more headcount than we could conceivably hire. So it was literally hard. And often we would make decisions on team placements based off of hiring performance at different sites. So things became quite heated where, you know, sites in similar-ishish time zones in the case

of, of Google, it was Dublin and London and Zurich, right. Where it's like, okay, who's able to hire 50 people in the next six months. But you know, you want to make your pictures that you can hire 50 people in the next six months. And we were just like, I don't know, like they're everywhere. People have like weird, this is a weird calculus that you're trying to think of. If I'm a lead in the US and I'm trying to hire a sort of a, and the same goes later on as I got into the slightly higher strata of leadership, right? When I was hiring in Sydney and Sunnyvale and New York and et cetera, I'd have the same

thing. It's like, I care about results. Right. Sydney, can you hire me X people in the next six months? And they would come back and say, certainly we can. And I'm like, well, your track record suggests otherwise. I'm not kidding me, but you know, Sydney is a very fine site, but that's what it became is that again, as an overall global lead, as I became like, I had to care about results

and I had to care about, like, I don't care about the details of how you do it. Can you do this? And that's fine. You know, you'll go with what's good for the business then so as you were mentioning different sites and offices one of the challenges at least when you're starting up a new site and if you don't have that anchor person culture is another part of it too it's like yes you need some people you need the mandate you need the people there but the same time you also need some of that culture to also propagate to that site obviously every site will have its own identity that works it'll look slightly different from every other site and i

think that's okay but part of like um i don't know the right word for this but what you say that it feels like the same company still feels like the same team, just a different office. Um, how do you make that happen? Um, so to an extent, the answer is that you don't. Okay. Right.

So I want to break down kind of what you're, what, partly what you're just describing, but also something else into two things. One is, one is culture and the other is values. Yes. So when, when we talk about

what we want to instill in a new office, if you're setting up a new office, do you want to instill the values, be they sort of engineering values or other values into that office? And actually, if you go look at, well,

Google has their thing. If you go look at, both Elastic and Twilio have their thing as well. It was part of what attracted me to those two companies, right? Where it's like, just like, here are our values as a company. And Twilio has like, draw the whole hell and be an owner and all of these kinds of things, which might look like corporate nonsense at first glance, but they are serious about these things internally. And when you think about what are the parts that you want to 100% instill into every single

engineer at the company, those are your corporate values. Those are yours. These are the things that we care about. This includes diversity and inclusion and this includes, here's how we think about product and here's how we think about the balance between product and reliability and all of these sorts of things. And that's great. We want to 100% do that.

Culture is a lot more fungible. And you said like, okay, the culture can be different in different offices. It's going to be, and it should be. You want to take the parts of that and hope that the office sort of forms itself around something good and useful and unique that will attract people. That's not the only outcome you want, but for the most part, if you get some folks in a random place on the planet and within the catchment area, for the most part, if you get some folks in a random place, you know, on the planet and within the catchment area, for the most part, you know, people are going to be gravitating towards that place. Um, they're going to form their own culture.

Yeah. Right. And I was involved in some of this stuff earlier on in Dublin, where it was referred to as like, let's make sure that the Google culture or gold comes to Dublin. And for the most part, well, the parts we really cared about getting installed was values. It wasn't culture at all actually. Um, um, obviously you want to make sure that the local ish culture doesn't

sort of go off the rails into anything toxic or anything that's like at odds with our values. But for the most part, I, I tended to sort of separate these two things very much in my mind. And it's why for the most part as well, like a lot of the engineer brains that I was working with saw these like, hey, let's do, you know, let's do cultural related things and their eyes glazed over and they didn't want to hear about it, right? Because again, it's a taxonomic thing, right?

Values are like you can unequivocally get behind those. You can say, okay, here's, for example, what our CTO says about how we do this, that, the other, right? These are non-negotiable. These are things that you sign up to by coming to work at this company. The rest of it gets invented by whoever happens to work at the office,

you know, and who and every interacting with locally. Yeah, that's a really good distinction. I think culture and values and that makes sense. So you mentioned Elastic and Twilio. These are the other two companies that you worked at after Google. And right before the call, we were discussing remote work. And these two companies actually have or had, have had a remote work culture pre-pandemic and pandemic kind of forced a bunch

of teams to work remotely and some of that is changing right now which is also interesting to say the least where people are being asked to come back to the office and not everyone's happy about that so i was curious like can you share what what makes the difference in this case like what does an actual healthy remote culture looks like that doesn't get reversed? I think with remote work, first of all, yeah, COVID was an enormous curveball for lots of people who have been having the discussion about like, well, how much do we like people working from home? Because we called it working from home before we invented terms like hybrid and what have you. So in a lot of cases, we were already having these discussions. I know when I was back at Google then at the start of COVID and we were having these discussions like,

can we sort of formally allow people to work from home one day a week? Do we think the sky would fall with all if we allowed that to happen right and so that all that all you know sort of went out the window for a while when covid came along and everyone was at home for a while right is that like oh people can work just fine at home except it wasn't actually true um people could work just fine because they were in crisis mode. Like they were in this mode of operation where they were experiencing like an unprecedented thing that they had never experienced before. Right. You're so it's not like, oh, you're working from home.

It's like you're working from home when you could leave and there's a pandemic going on and you're experiencing grief. I know. Good. Uh, and, and I remember coming to this realization there was i think it was the article i read and some folks i spoke to until they were people were sort of coming to me like a month or two in saying um i i feel kind of meh i feel kind of like not good you know i don't like this and i and i goes beyond, um, I think it goes beyond just like the situation that I'm

in where I'm like, I'm sitting at the kitchen table with four kids around me screaming that I'm trying to work. And the thing they were experiencing was grief, but it was no different from any other kind of grief that you experienced when somebody just takes away a part of like, there's a part of either how you operate or how you self-actualize or how you sort of you know define your existence that just got taken away one day it was gone from one day to the next and you weren't allowed to prepare and you weren't allowed to sort of plan and you weren't allowed to sort of really come to terms with it you just had to pick up and keep going right and that's great

so that's the thing that you know is that is real and applies in many situations. And so I think that a lot of cases, as we've sort of worked through a lot of this, a lot of companies sort of said, oh, hey, we're going to be doing remote or doing hybrid or whatever it is indefinitely. And that was a nice thing to say you know allowed people to make plans you know allowed people to sort of say okay should

i move to a shack in the wilderness with a good internet connection yes okay i can do that now a lot of those same places didn't really follow through on a lot of the things that were required in order to do that because again these things don't come up until they become emergencies. One of the primary things that I kind of was thinking about because I was involved in Google was we have an apprenticeship program for like career changers or people coming back to the workforce for people to learn how to be SREs. And we had interns and we had step interns coming in for the job functions and everything like that.

That all just went away. was gone right you know and so i was like how do we how do we turn people from fresh new grads who have never experienced the workplace into people who can exist in this ecosystem and nobody knew like we don't know right and so i i think it's very uh it's very comforting for a certain personality type to say well i've i've been perpetually online my whole life i can deal with this but the thing is like that was the concern as one of my co-workers put it like are we are we breeding a new generation of cave dwellers right right? Is there going to be just a whole generation of engineers who haven't really learned how to operate in a fully office-based collaborative environment, right?

And if we're doing that, is that a good thing? You know, like one thing I always had in the back of my mind as I came from the, like, everyone talks on the phone to everyone sort of looks into a tiny video conference to what we have now yeah will the technology get to a point where we don't need to all be sitting in an office looking at each other right and I think my approach to that is sort of over the years is refined in that I think we probably have like if you like you don't need to go to the office today to do your work that's fine do you need to meet your co-workers every so often and develop real

relationships with them and understand that they are humans and everything like that yes right you do right do you need three days a week do you need three days a week for that probably not but then we get into what, sorry, then we eventually get into what you were asking about. Is that like, there's a crucial difference between saying, oh, hey, we're fully remote or oh, hey, we're hybrid and saying, oh, hey, we're fully remote and hybrid. We've actually made some decisions that we can't take back there. Like this is how we now structure our work. Here's investments that we have made in working asynchronously. Here's the real changes that we have made around business practices and reporting and

all of these things. Like, we have divested our offices, right? This one is one big, you know, example of that. See? Yeah, I think there's bulk knowledge. I think Twilio shut down some offices, right? Because they were serious about it. They were saying, like, I mean, we don't

need these offices anymore. They have low occupancy. We're going to provide people with the ability to get hot desks in WeWork or whatever emerges from the ashes of WeWork. And that we consider to be a better investment

than keeping an office space. That's a sign that somewhere is serious about this. You're making a decision that, you know, that they kind of take back. Right. Whereas if you look at, for example, Google who have gone explicitly in another direction, they have like. Hundreds of millions of euros real estate in Dublin alone. Right.

They're not selling it. They're not, they're not getting real. And that's good. Like they get, they get to turn around and say,

here's our direction, here's where we want to go. But the challenge, especially for folks looking around at jobs and being told about hybrid work

or remote work in the last six to 12 months and probably for the next little while is, you don't know if the employer is actually serious. So when I was looking around, I looked for the signs of how serious people are. So are you still investing in virtual estate? That's a good indication. Where are you actually hiring people? Are you still trying to hire people within certain catchment areas?

Because that's kind of sus, right? Another interesting one is like, where is, like, what time zone is the center of the universe for you? Because it's not a bad thing that it is. For example, Elastic, the center of the universe was like East Coast US,

which is somebody sitting in Dublin was great. But it's the West Coast US, which is somebody sitting in Dublin was great. But it was West Coast US. And that's something that if you're asking people to work asynchronously or to work collaboratively with closed time zones, which you are, is super important to think about, right? And even down to stuff like

what collaborative tools do you use? Like, do you use Slack for everything? Do you use, like, you know, again, as you get down to brass tacks of like, how do you actually do work, right? You can often spot a lot of the sort of like, well, we get the team together, like, I guess roughly that, and you can tell kind of the difference

between folks who are really taking it seriously and who are just running themselves a bit ragged, right? And who are, who really need the shot in the yard, which is back to the office, right? You know, and once we're back to the office, everything will be wonderful and back to normal. We're at a point where I personally, I'd rather companies were upfront about it. So when I see, I think it was Amazon there recently saying like, we're going to go back to the office. And I was like, great, horrible for people who have made investments in moving to a shack where they go to internet.

That shack. Yeah. That shack. Yep. Right. But like, horrible for those people. I truly empathize with those people because I did something similar years ago. But like, I'd rather companies said, set out their stall and said, here's where we want to go.

Here's what we want to do. Right. Because there's nothing worse than having the carpet ripped out from underneath you when you've been told something different or when you've been asked, it's been assumed that this will happen. Right. And as I spoke to recruiters, like I turned down a number of places back when I was trying to do full-time work, you know, that were just like, yeah, we're seeing how things go. I'm like, right, bye, see ya, make a decision.

Because the best people will move towards what they're more suited to, right? And what they want to do. Like I live on a Greek island. I'm not going to move anywhere else. If you're telling me that maybe you won't make me move, then I'm not going to even go work for you. That's just how it works. So I'd love for more companies to be really upfront

about what they're actually going to do. Set expectations, right? I'm getting a startup idea, just kind of ranking companies based on like how actually friendly they are to remote. The cheap map

of where your employees are and where your open recs are and if they're all in the friggin' Bayer

and then like maybe have a think about whether they're serious or not. Our listeners do not steal

my idea. So from Twilio and Elastic and twilio now as you mentioned you're doing kind of two things and we want to pull threads on both of those uh but we'll start with the coaching part so tell us more about coaching um i i again i give you the dry academic version of it, but like my experience of, of coaching, um, such as it was and mentoring, because I'm kind of interchanging those two things, but I, what I mean by coaching is a slightly more structured version of mentoring where you're like working through some tools and some sort of specific outcomes and working someone towards a goal that they have and it's very much driven by the person being coached and the coach is like

you could draw parallels with coaching for sports right the sports coach isn't the best at the sport but they're the best at you know asking annoying questions and pushing the person and really knowing enough that they can really push somebody in a direction that they're able to sort of the best description i've seen is like a facilitated conversation with yourself right but you often thought that you should really have but you haven't because it often requires a second person or that person as a coach. The mentoring part is very much about a lot more focused on the way that the job is done. And so mentoring is very much an overloaded term.

And so the way I got into coaching and mentoring, so I finished up with Twilio back in March of 23. And I went and got an actual qualification for being a coach, which because that matters to some people. It was an interesting course, lots of stuff. But a lot of stuff, it's not something I knew of already, but it was like, this all makes total sense.

Cool. Okay. All right. This is like, I haven't been making, like I've been making it up as I go along, but I haven't been completely off the mark. But why I wanted to do coaching and why I wanted to do mentoring is put in very simple terms. I miss one-on-ones.

I've managed a lot of people. And one of the things I did when I sort of said, okay, I'm going to have a go at not working full-time for a while. And one of the things I did as an exercise there with the assistant coach,

is I sat down and I said, what parts of the work that I've been doing do I enjoy? Do I unequivocally enjoy, and if I could just edge my way back into doing things again, I would want to do. And having one-on-ones with somebody where somebody is really getting something out of those one-on-ones that's that those have been some of the most fulfilling parts of what i've been doing over the years as a manager and as a leader right is that people come back and say like the thing that you said was not bullshit and i would like to subscribe to your newsletter so if you look at it purely cynically i wanted to be able to like sign up to you know have a number of one-on-ones per month or per unit time that is the right amount for me, given how busy I am right now, which is not very for

the next of the while, but what I will get busy and then be able to sort of say, okay, that's it. And, you know, obviously there's money involved, which changes the equation a little bit, but for the most part, it was something that even if i do go back to full-time work which i expect i will at some point it's something i want to keep on doing well it is because the important part of and and one of the big things of finding a coach or finding a mentor is often smaller companies don't have the capability to do that, right? But both because they just don't have the expertise on board or because there isn't somebody suitable, right?

And by somebody suitable, I mean, like, is a good coach or mentor, right? So we can get into that. And is far enough removed from your work that they don't actually have a vested interest in the outcome of what you're doing. And I think that's a huge plus when you're going out finding a coach and mentor, because often oftentimes, and again, I'm most familiar with how Google does coaches and mentors, right? Which is you show up and it's like, this person is your mentor. You know, they're on the next team over.

So they are going to be somewhat familiar with your work. Right. And maybe they might actually care about some of the outcomes of your work, but they're going to be a person that's doing that and would provide them with no training and you know, they're your mentor. Right. Um, and actually a good thing that, that Google also did was they would assign you somebody else and it was called your buddy.

Right. And they would be a lot more like, here's where the bathroom is. You know, here's the right amount of times you're allowed to punch your coworkers. It's zero. Right. You know, that kind of thing. A lot more practical. And they would generally be on your team.

They'd be your own team, kind of like, here's a person who's going to make sure that you you show up not covered in breakfast and whatever um so the the mentor would be a lot of a lot more about like okay let me guide you through the sort of the corporate hellscape of getting up to speed on everything um at such a large company. That's all great and all, but at a small-ish company, it's a lot more, you know, that person's probably going to care about what you're doing. And they shouldn't. In many cases with a mentor,

and it's why, again, I've specialized with technology folks in particular, and then an added bonus is SREs, because that's my background in particular, right, is that I can mentor SREs, right? You know, I still have enough left in my thumbs that, you know, I understand a lot of the technology and I'm able to sort of give people slightly specific advice. It shouldn't get too specific, but one of the the key things that i bring to the table in a lot of these sort of external coaching engagements is i don't care what you do and that's an advantage like i don't care whether about about the sort of political

landscape of you know whether your project is useful or is going to get funded or everything like that but if you're asking me like, how do I deal with a certain situation? Or hey, how do I put together SLOs for a service like this? Or hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z? That we can segue a little bit into like, okay, next session is going to be, we're going to sit down and look at the SLOs for your service. But session after that is going to be about

whether you want to be an SLO at all. That kind of thing. And again, you can get that at a large enough company because there's just going to be this sort of panel of folks who are somewhat suitable. And the same goes for execs, right? If you have somebody who's a brand new director, right? Are there other people who have been brand new directors

and could probably talk to this person? A large company? Absolutely. A small company? No way. So that's kind of the nuts and bolts of what I'm up to is sort of providing that for smaller companies. So many follow-ups. Okay.

So when you said you really missed the one-on-ones, my first thing that popped into my head was I was rescheduling a meeting with my manager. He pulled out his computer, look at the calendar. There's like seven one-on-ones back to back. Oh man, his face, he was not of joy. So you mentioned what you liked about one-on-ones, but like what makes a good one-on-one? And for people, like, do you tell them like hey you know right like we only have this much time every week like you know do this this this to make it more constructive like how do you think about that

yeah um i was a little spoiled um certainly in the last few years because a lot of the folks that I would have been managing directly were quite senior. So a lot of my direct reports would be directors plus, right? Or staff engineers plus, right? And so I got to cheat a little bit there in that what I would say to these folks is generally I would have biweekly one-on-ones and I would say these one-on-ones and I would say these

one-on-ones are about you but they're not I don't want a big long list of updates maybe we can bring some stuff where I can help you specifically and that's great to do with the work that you're doing or the projects that you're doing but for the most part like I want to hear like don't wait for a one-on-one it's why I did bi-weekly rather than weekly, just so there was long enough of a time that I could still be grumpy that somebody waited until the one-on-one to tell me about something. Right. So, yeah, sneaky like that.

So, like, the one-on-ones would be about them. We'll be like, okay, you know, let's talk about either your career, something that you're dealing with at the moment that i can help with by not doing anything outside of this room but just giving you advice or etc that where we can just have sometimes it was just a conversation about a given subject that they needed a sounding board for all of that sort of stuff and all of the sort of like oh hey here's an update on my projects oh hey here's a thing I really need you to actually do.

I was like, do that in real time. Come to me async with that stuff. You know, again, being in a remote company helped with that. But obviously not everyone gets to do that. But that's my, if you can cheat and do it this way, that's what makes a good quality one-on-one. What makes a good quality one-on-one previously is, yeah, I had a similar calendar to the one that you saw.

It was probably similarly terrifying where you'd have like errors and errors and one-on-ones every day. What I generally would tend to do is, and I would have a stock set of questions. And as a lead, you want to be predictable. Like you want to be, you want to be somewhat pretty, right. You want to have it so that, you know, you're not that people aren't terrified of coming

into the room with you because you're going to ask them something, um, something unexpected. But for North Park, I'd like the first thing I'd ask is like, how are you doing? Right. And then the last thing I would ask is like how are you doing right and then the last thing i would ask is how can i help right now that's about as much structure as i put them one-on-ones because different people need different things you know and so you might see those seven one-on-ones like um some of those last five minutes you know some of them is like it's like people showing up saying we only talk about today no okay coffee okay fine right um and some of them's like people showing up saying, we only need to talk about today. No. Okay. Coffee. Okay. Fine. Right.

Um, and some of them are like people who are going through career horrors and really need a lot of support and everything like that. Um, the same thing applies as well between one-on-ones and meetings. Like, do you want to make sure that that one-on-one needs to happen? And some of the, what I would often do is i would work either with my admin or by myself and say every two months i'm going to just spreadsheet and reassess who i'm having regular one-on-ones and look at the frequency and really think about here's somebody i meet with why weekly should that be monthly and then you know we we run through that and i mean you know i'm sort of i'm able to budget you know the amount of time i'm spending in one at once

um and it also gives me the capability to sort of include new people right so sometimes i'd say hey i should start talking to somebody else in this side of side of the business or whatever it is and that we're able to do that but for the most most part, in a lot of those cases, I'd also have to have, go have a conversation with some of those folks and saying like, hey, we're going to go to monthly for this. It's not because I hate you, right? It's because it's for other reasons. It's for, it's because like we don't need to catch up biweekly, but I'm still around. Like nobody's dying.

Like nobody's disappearing. We're able to, you know, you're able to ask me things in real time, everything like that. I just want to make sure not to lose contact. But it is applied all the way from like biweekly to monthly to quarterly to whatever it is. Anything beyond quarterly is just like punchless. Um, like every six months, one-on-one is just like pointless. Like every six months

one-on-one is just like, nah, you know, like, okay, hello, are you still a human person?

Yes, I'm also still a human person. Okay, bye, we have nothing in common. Bye, see you next time. Yeah,

it doesn't make sense. So there is an aspect of one-on-one that you usually have with your manager and I think in that case there is shared context the manager has invested

in your career growth. I think people usually find enough to talk about in those one-on-ones. But when it comes to having a mentor, especially at big companies where you get matched through, let's say your manager finds someone for you saying, hey, this person is probably a good mentor for you through, I've seen both sides where it's like the manager recognizes what you need and has worked with someone else at the company who is probably a little ahead of you, who is good at the thing that you can get better at and then kind of match you up for some time. I've also seen cases where it's like, hey, here's a good person, a good engineer. Why don't you have a mentorship relationship?

But then when the two people get on the calls, like, yeah, so what do we talk about? And I think in this case, what happens is for mentors who have done this enough, know the right questions to ask to figure out, is this something that should even continue? That's part one. The other part is the mentees don't always come prepared. And in some cases they do.

So can you speak to both sides of it in terms of what you've seen to be good mentors and good mentees? Yeah. And again, I think one of the primary mistakes in finding a mentor for somebody that I've seen, and this applies more so with internal mentorship and internal coaching specifically, is treating it as an error, allowing it to be seen as a kind of a remedial thing, whereby the manager is like, oh, hey, I think it would be good for you

to talk to a coach or a mentor for a while, right? That can be a tough thing for especially a senior person to hear because they're like, how am I screwing up? Right. And again, as, you know, as somebody who does coaching and mentoring professionally,

I'm just like, that's probably the primary obstacle to more people engaging with a coach or mentor is that they see it as a, as a like, well, there's clearly something wrong with me. Right.

And Guang, you would, you had mentioned earlier on that it's like, oh, are you employed earlier on? Like, how can you miss one-on-ones if you know they're so horrible and the thing is with coaching and mentoring i'm generally you know as an external partnership generally i'm talking to people who have already self-identified as i could do with some help from a coach and from a mentor and so there is a big hump between like somebody going along with business as usual to arriving at the doorstep of somebody saying like,

I, with the full sort of knowledge of everything that is happening, I'm coming to you as a coach and a mentor, and I'm doing this because I see it as an investment in my future as opposed to because I screwed up, right? Or because I've got clearly missing parts of my you know abilities that you can fill in right because because neither of those things are generally true like if a manager goes to a person says hey I'm going to go get a coach for you because generally either it costs the time of a senior person or money you know most of which are not in one limited supply. And so that's one of the major parts of framing that relationship

in the context of something that's positive for people. In this case, let's say someone recognizes that they want to invest in their growth and they seek out someone, let's say someone recognizes that they want to invest in their growth and they seek out someone let's say internally in this case yeah uh what's a good way to structure that conversation from a mentee's perspective just like hey let's have a mentorship like because many times i've seen people reach out to other senior engineers to say hey can you be my mentor and they're like well what exactly do you need help with?

Is the first question someone would ask. It's like, let's figure out if this is a good fit. How should mentees think about it being a good fit? Cake is what I would say. Yes. Proibes. No, in a lot of cases, that senior person is still just a scared monkey who thought, I'm tired to think.

And they're, they're thinking to themselves, they're not thinking like what, when they ask like, why, what do you need help with in particular? What they're actually asking is why me? Right. Um, and so if you, as a mentee or a potential mentee are looking around for a mentor. One of the things to think about is like, who do I want to be like when I grow up?

Or who clearly has the skills or has gone through this sort of crucible that I feel myself wanting to go through, right? And so some good examples of this would be like, I'm thinking about whether to become a manager or I'm a brand new manager who clearly hasn't done this thing. Like, do I know somebody who has been through this battle and, you know, come out the other side, only semi-skate and can I bounce some ideas off of them and do that? And so it doesn't have to be as formal as like, hello, will you be my mentor?

Because this reason, right? So a lot of coaching and mentoring happens very informally. It's just like, hey, let's have a couple of coaching and mentoring happens very informally. It's just like, hey, let's have a couple of chats over coffee about a thing and I'm going to bounce some ideas off of you and that's a thing. That can be perfectly fine, right? But as the mentee, then if you have somebody that you are thinking of going and asking and saying, hey, can we set up a couple of things to talk through this up? Know why that person in particular and be upfront about it and say, hey, here's why I'm talking to you.

And here's what I think would be useful. And, you know, if you want to have a little bit of like, hey, here's what I can offer you, right? You know, in terms of like, we can talk about this and we can, we can strike this relationship or whatever it is. But for the most part, and again, it, it's somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If you're going to somebody senior and saying like, Hey, can we have some chats about this thing?

Or can you mentor me in this particular area? And they're like, Nope. No, it's for the most part. You probably didn't want them anyway. Um, but again, if you don't ask, you don didn't want them anyway. Don't do that to you. But again, if you don't ask, you don't get. But the act of asking should involve a like, why you? Like, why in particular am I coming to you?

And the same applies if you're going to your manager. Like, it's rare that I would have had somebody coming to me saying like, hello, I need mentoring, right? They're coming to me and saying like, hey, I'm having real trouble dealing with this kind of person or that kind of person and the conflict really does my head in and I don't really have the ability to do all this sort of stuff. And I, as the manager, have to translate that to,

let me put you into the path of somebody who's good at that and got to be able to give you some pointers. And it can be as simple as that. In this case, when someone's seeking out a mentor, and in this case, let's say they recognize someone, I've seen in some cases an interest to reach

out to really senior people who are a little farther removed from what the person is working on. In some cases, it'll be like, let's say, a senior engineer wanting to get advice from, let's say, a director or VP. Now, that's an interesting conversation to have, but having that as a recurring thing, I don't know how much helpful it would be. If I think about that, I think it's having someone who is a little ahead of you but can relate to your situation and give practical advice is helpful.

But I'm curious to get your thoughts like do you think that matters at all um i think that this there's a there's a distinction here to be made between two different things like what if it is like if you have somebody who's a little ahead of you and you know you need to be bouncing ideas off of them and you know sharing concepts and all that sort of stuff that person is a a peer, right? That's a normal relationship, right? The mentoring relationship is a little more around like, let's talk about the methodology. Let's talk about the outcome. Even though you're probably not completely removed from you work for the same company, so you're not completely removed from what I'm working

on, but you're far completely from, you know, what I'm working on, but like, you're far enough away that you don't care about the outcomes, right? You're able to sort of go, there are the outcomes of what I do in particular, right? And so, you just care about me. You just care about the outcomes, like, you just

care about the sort of, be it the platonic correctness of what is going on, how I'm doing my work, right? Well, that I think is the distinction, right? You know, if you're like talking to the TL on a team beside you and having good back and forth conversations, like that's just stuff you should be doing. Everyone should be doing that. Where it becomes sort of more of a mentoring thing is that like, hey, I'm completely out of left field here. You're a much more senior person or not out of left field here you're a much more senior person or not even necessarily senior so you're a much more experienced in this area person for me

let's do this right and again as somebody who has been on the receiving end of that conversation quite a bit over the years of my career is that like you do want to do a little bit of due diligence and saying like okay is this for real is this somebody who's like so somebody who's showing up and saying like i really need help with this particular part of things i'm like okay yeah fine versus like i want to be seen to be meeting with a senior person which is again you just got to be a little bit careful with that and again that's it's one of the things that, again, going back to what you were saying, one of the things that I miss one-on-ones, but in particular, I miss high-quality one-on-ones.

And again, it's people who are coming to you for the right reasons and with a thing that you can help with, such that I'm getting something out of it as well. It's a fulfilling line of work, right? That somebody is coming and they're not just saying like, here's all the shit I did this week. Okay. Bye. Right. That to me is bad quality one-on-one. Right. A good quality one-on-one is like, here's something I need help with. Here's the general lay of the land in particular where I'm able to sort of say, okay, you know, let me push you in a particular direction and that you're able to then come back maybe not next time but like time plus one or time plus two and say do you know what that actually

really helped and that's where i get that's great i really wanted to go back to that of like you know for each one a good one on one where they want to subscribe to your newsletter there's i imagine 10 where you're just like you know like cool story right like but how like as a mentor from the mentor perspective like how do you do the diligence that you mentioned like how do you kind of you know get and like do you get rid of the people who kind of just are like you move them down the spreadsheet like how do you deal with low quality one-on-ones? I mean, same way you deal with regular things. Obviously, there's a huge distinction between a low quality one-on-one you're having with

somebody you weigh off into the organization somewhere and a low quality one-on-one is like one of your directs or one of your indirect reports, right? If you're having low quality one-on-ones with them, that's kind of on you, right? Because it's something that, you know, you should be pushing for that to be of higher quality or whatever it is. But to a certain extent, like if I'm meeting with the head of the Biddley Bop department, so we're off there and we just stare at each other for a couple of minutes in every one-on-one. Yeah, I'm going to do that less often, right?

And the same applies to meetings, like meetings with multiple people in already, right? If there's a weekly meeting and nobody's really getting a lot out of it and it's just happening by momentum, somebody has to have the diligence to be able to say, is this meeting nonsense? Can we have it less often or not often at all? Right. And everyone breathes a sigh of relief when we all go about our business.

But yeah, there is a distinction to be made between good quality one-on-ones where you're responsible for that quality, right? And the manager and the report share responsibility

for the quality of one-on-ones. Like, the manager should be setting out, like, hey, here's what we need to be covering in this one-on-one. And the manager should be setting out like, hey, here's what we need to be covering in this one-on-one. And for the most part, it is that person's time. Not the manager, the employee. I don't want a nice word to use, a report.

It is their time. If they want to come into their one-on-one someday and say, hi, I want to talk about my career today. Then that's what that one-on-one someday and say, hi, I want to talk about my career today, then that's what that one-on-one is about. And again, go back to my sort of model for like, come to me with stuff straight away rather than in the one-on-one. If the manager is then sort of saying,

no, no, you need to be telling me all this stuff because otherwise I don't know what you're doing, then in my book, that manager is screwed up. They can't operate without that one-on-one then. Coming at it with my SRE bias, I need to be able to clear the decks some days, right? I need to be able to turn around and say, what else is happening? Shit's on fire. It's bad. See you next week. See you two weeks from now. It's not disastrous if that happens, right? You know, it kind of needs

to be that way. And like, I get that cop out because again, SRE, sometimes stuff explodes and you just disappear for a day or two. But any manager really should be able to do that, should be able to say no one won this week, bye. And things don't fall apart just because it

doesn't happen one time. Met a question for you. How coachable a person is do you think that can be coached as in like can i nudge right like if i think ronick could really use some mentoring can i be like yo you should uh you should go seek out some mentoring like is that always like a bad idea because like if you're not looking for it like it's just not helpful or yeah there's a thing to be done. Yeah.

No, if someone's going for a coaching in particular, they need to want it. You know, they need to understand why it's important. They need to know where there is. And like to go into the sort of nuts and bolts a little bit of the sort of more formal coaching method, right? Is that kind of coaching involves change, right? You know, coaching involves like, here's the way I'm doing things and I want it to be different and I want for that difference to result in an outcome that I'm able to actually, you know, elucidate on, right?

And if you don't have that, then you're dead in the water, right? You know, so it's why in my case and in the case of most sort of professional coaches you'll go to is the first half hour session is free is is it what we call a chemistry session right where somebody will show up and say hey here's the change i want to make or not even here to say that but more like here's the outcome that i want i want to be a director in two years' time. I want to be this. I want to do a good job as a new manager. I want to do, you know, other examples like that. And I'm like, cool, all right.

Now we can kind of work together. You know what you want, and you're prepared to make a change and commit to a change in order to do that. And the change is not just a change in your situation, but a change in how you go about your day-to-day business and your longer-term business. But if you have a manager who's like, I'm going to get you coached, right? And the person's like, no.

And then they show up for the first session and you're like, my manager sent me, right? It's a waste of time. It hasn't happened to me yet, but no, I have found a couple of conversations where people will show up and sort of say like,

hey, I need help on this specific thing, right? And once that's done, then I'm good. And I'm just like, all right,

I don't think I can help you with that, right? I guess probably somebody in your workplace that can help you with that specific thing,

right? Or in some cases, people will show up and say, I need help with that specific thing right um or in some in some cases people will show up and say they need help with this specific thing and i'm like i i am not the talking professional you should be talking to right you know you should be talking to a counselor you should be talking to somebody else i'm not going to say that are they allowed but i'm going to say like hey it sounds like what you're talking about goes what goes beyond you know your work situation and maybe a multiple person to be talked right and so there's there's a number of you know situations where i'll sort of go you know what this is probably not not an amazing idea for me to try and work through this because i'm not a mental health

professional of any right of any kind of strategy so So staying inside your specialization and inside your lane is important. I think the CEO was super helpful in terms of like trying to network through. And then basically it's like, you know, tell me like, right, like what kind of profile that you want. I'm going to try to find someone like via my like VC network or something like, you know, which I was like super grateful for. But yeah, like, do you have any advice or approach on that? Yeah, I mean, what you just said, like, if you don't ask, you don't get inspiration. So there's, um, if you're at a small startup, if you're at a small industry, yeah, chances are more often than not, you're going to want to go externally, right? Because if there's like 10 people working at your company, maybe one of them will be a good mentor in some respects, but coaching wise, no, it's too small and incestuous to really kind of get a good outcome there. Sadly, in a lot of cases, it is down to, hey, can people tap their networks and find me somebody to talk to, right? Either

completely informally for an hour per hour or whatever it is, or go to somebody like myself who's into it slightly more formally and, you know, into it slightly more formally. And, you know, with a particular sort of, and again, everyone has their kinds of specializations, right? I mean, you can go to, there are coaches out there who just do career changes. There are coaches out there who do like post-parental leave getting back into things kind of thing

you know there are coaches out there to do like new manager and new exec or you know dealing with the c-suite all this sort of stuff so you can get as specialized as you want really and at a startup yeah for the most part you want to be going to the person who is hopefully paying the bills and say listen i can really do with some help here. And if they're smart, they'll know that that's a smart investment to make in their people and they'll try and go out and find somebody who's suitable, you know. For cases in this case where, let's say the employee of the startup is following some people on the network, like, hey, here's this engineer I've been following, let's say their blog or their talks, or somehow they get to know about this person. And they're like, hey, I want to be

like that when I grow up, like in a way that you put it before. And they reach out and they take that initiative and say, hey, I would love to talk to you about this. What's a good way to do that reach out? A lot of it goes back to the, again, if you don't ask, you don't get kind of thing, right? And I've made those connections for people in the past, right? I mean, I know some moderately senior people within SRE and within the industry and et cetera, and I've made introductions like that in the past. And so in some cases, you know, LinkedIn is a pretty amazing tool in some ways, right? And so one of those ways is like knowing if somebody you know, knows the person that you want to do that and can make that intro right and can just do that.

And I've done that a number of times where I'll just, you know, I'll say, they'll sort of say like, can you introduce me to this person? I'd like to pick their brains about particular thing. And it's funny, like people make the assumption that like if you go to somebody who has dedicated their life to a course of study or a course of practice, and if somebody who's just coming up with that

demonstrates interest and comes to them and says, can we talk about this technique that you've dedicated your life to? They'll go, no, I hate talking about that. Right? They won't. They generally won't. They'll talk about that until you're sick of it. And so there's a socialist pretty pervasive

that's like somebody who you would consider to be like a luminary or whatever it is in their area aren't going to talk to you because they're too important. Right. And that's, I found that to not, I found that to not be true for the most part. And no, there's, and again, if you don't ask, you don't get, right. You know, you have to be able to sort of say, Hey, this is the thing. And the worst thing that could possibly happen is that they'll come back and just say, listen, I'm talking to a half a dozen people in a similar way already. Can it wait six months or something like, so that's what it comes down to.

Right. If you go look at my coaching practice website right now, it's closed. I'm talking to as many people as I want to be talking to right now, like I'm as busy as I want to be and that'll open up again in the future. But like, people have a capacity, but in general, if you're going to somebody and saying, hey, can we talk about this thing, they're going to want to talk. I have two follow up questions on coaching and mentoring, and you can take them in any order that you would would like so one of them is on the similar lines that i just mentioned in this case um i think reaching out to a potential mentor that someone wants to talk to but i think having a specific goal is

helpful it's like i would like to get your thoughts on this specific thing or learn about the specific thing um funny story uh a few years back as a guy at linkedin we get this benefit of talking to coaches um where like these are professional coaches too and they don't necessarily have a tech background but you can go and talk to them about stuff i was like seems cool let me give it a shot i tried it and i thought it was like the coach was fantastic but i was like i've they asked me a lot of questions about what do you want what are your goals and i'm like what are my goals i have no idea like what does a good goal even look like so i just felt that i wasn't ready for that conversation at

all uh so i was like hey i i just don't know what i need to do or let me think about a bunch of questions you've asked me what i'm getting at, what do some of these good goals look like when someone reaches out to someone and say, hey, I would like to pick your brains on things. An obvious one that I've seen is, I would like to get promoted in X amount of time, or I would like to get promoted period. That's the most common one I've seen, but I've not seen others apart from I'm dealing with this difficult situation that I need to know how to handle better. So that's one question. The second one, I can wait on the second one.

Let's do this. Let's do that one. No, because it's a really excellent question. I'm not just doing that to solve for time. It's what I was hoping you'd ask. One of the most prevalent things, and again, I've first-hand experience of this, right? One of the most prevalent things,

especially in tech, I want to say, is that you run into people all the time who really don't have aspirations. Or they don't have aspirations that are focused outside of just get promoted. Right. And so that's a very, very normal thing. And it's in some ways, just based off of my last year or so working with a lot of

folks, it's actually kind of sad, right? Is that you have folks who are, you know, at varying career stages. And again, if you're an early career stage, it's actually fine, right? Like you want to get promoted. Yeah, sure. equilibrium yeah sure right you get to like staff level in there yeah okay or director yeah okay um and i run into people who get there and then go well now what do i like yeah right and they genuinely don't know right and i was in that situation a number of years ago right where you know i'd gotten to where i got to at google where i was kind of going like okay well what's next and the thing is

there was like beating your head against the promotion you know door until you reach the age of 65 or or earlier if you're lucky right like do Like, do you want to do that, right? And I often had, again, and you intimated it there, right, in the back of my mind, like, what do I actually enjoy doing, right? What is it that I would do for free, maybe, right? If I had my bills covered and I was able to live comfortably and I would do it for free, right? I would do it in return for food and board, so to speak, right?

And I genuinely didn't know. I had no idea, right? Because you've just been moving towards some sort of nebulous goal you can't quite put your finger on, but is punctuated by levels and promotions, right? And so somebody that I was studying with as part of my coaching studies put it very succinctly. They said, like, if you come to an industry like this without your own aspirations for what you want in life, your employer will be happy to provide those for you.

It's like the free lunches, just like the, you know, whatever it is. They'll give you this standard issue aspirations yeah right and those standard issue aspirations hopefully will last you for your career but oftentimes they don't and you get to a point where you're like that's some people get to this point that's like senior engineer or you, sort of career sort of stages where they just go like, I hate this. I want to do something else, you know, like, and I work people, and another good example is, is going into management, right? Where I worked with people who were managers for several years and hated it, right? But the thing is they never actually sat down and were willing to sort of really talk through and work through, like, do you enjoy doing this work?

Right. Because if you ask them that question in that many words, they'd give you this puzzled look. Right. And they'd sort of go, I don't understand the questions. Right. That's really sad. You know, that's really something that i you know again from the 10 000 foot i view i can look at that when i say that's a really sad answer

right because you not only like i'd actually feel a little better if you came to me and said i hate my job right you know like but i have people coming who are like not saying they hate their job because that's tractable you can deal with that right but people who are coming to me and saying like not only do i not like not only do i not know if i hate my job i actually don't know what i like anymore right and that's sad so to get a little closer to answering your question of what a what a good like problem statement looks like. And in your particular case, when you spoke to a coach and you find yourself having those sort of invasive thoughts of like, I don't know what I want, you know, I don't know what

my aspirations or my goals are. That's something a coach can help with, right? It's tough because it takes time and it takes introspection and pushing and prodding and poking. But there's not a significant number of people that I speak to who their problem is or their goal is, I want to have through with you, Dave, about like what I'm working on and where I spend my time and what parts of it I enjoy and I don't enjoy. And then I want to put together a career plan for myself. And maybe that'll involve changing employers or changing job tracks. But I don't want to jump the gun by taking any rash decisions. Now I want to go through it with, as I sort of said earlier, like a

curated conversation with myself about this stuff. Because that's a very hard thing to sit down and say, you know, wake up on a Tuesday morning and say, do you know what? I'm going to reappraise everything I hold dear today. That's off of my list. I want to do that today using a spreadsheet, right? You know,

and then I'm going to make a plan for both career and often personal life going a couple of years in advance then i'm going to move towards that because that's that's really scary you know if you're in a if you're in a corporate environment that is very happy for you to continue pushing up that slope of levels and promotions really scary to turn around and say no i reject that i have my own plans for myself. I want to do something else. And even coming up with those plans, as you say, is a very fine thing to go to a coach with him to say, Hey, I like I'm on the, I'm in the rat race,

so to speak. Like I'm there. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I want to be there anymore. Right. I want to figure out what I want for myself and what parts I like, what parts I don't like and structure something around that. So again, that's been my journey. That's what I've been doing. But anyway, to actually answer your question, oftentimes the conversation becomes, I don't know what I'm like. And so I, you know, let me, let me see what parts of that you would enjoy and would not enjoy and maybe workshop that a little bit. Another one would be the, like, I'm a senior engineer and I'm about to become maybe a staff engineer,

and so I'm going to lose my thumbs. I'm going to not be really writing so much code anymore, and that makes me feel squeaky and I don't like it. How do I make sure I'm being just as useful in a non-code writing mode of operation than in a code writing mode of operation? Because I spent the last 20 years doing coding Olympiads and being really, really good at typing at the computer.

And now I need to be really, really good at saying things into the computer. And that's scary. And so that's another one. It doesn't have to be very sort of nailed down. In a way, like you come and, you know, I've had a chemistry session where I said, hey,

you don't need my help, right? Because somebody came and said, hey, here's the thing that I really want to do and here are my plans to move towards that. And I'm like, cool. Have fun. It sounds like there's not a tool i can i can do like that all sounds like a very fine plan you should do it right you know and if you're not there yet then yeah it's open to a coach what might potentially move you towards things now Especially, again, a coach who's familiar with the background of your career can help as well.

Two follow-ups that I don't want to miss. So there are two cases you mentioned here. In one case, for folks who may not necessarily have access to a coach, but want to figure out an answer to this question, or at least want some structure to think about this question, which was, what do I actually want? Do you have any resources that folks could look at? And obviously, like, if they can, please go find a coach,

but not everyone has access to that. So in terms of resources, I don't have a direct answer for this. Like, I mean, logically, if you think about it, you should just sort of like read up on the differing career paths, you know, like read the staff engineer's path and read the manager's path and go through that. But go through it with a filter of like, what do I enjoy doing? Right. You know, what brings me joy? And joy is not a word that is

often used in a corporate setting, but, um, you do have to let that in occasionally, right? And there is a, there's sort of a pervasive meme in, in society that like, oh, it's okay for you to hate your job, right? That's just something you got to hold your nose, you know, whatever number of hours a day, um, and, and deal with it, right. And then I think that, um, people generally buy into that because change is scary. Right. Um, and change is scary, right? People are conditioned to, to hate change, right. You know, and, and much of my career has been spent dealing with the

outcome of people who hate change, right? You know, and much of my career has been spent dealing with the outcome of people who hate change. But there's reading through the paths and seeing what it is. Stay off of LinkedIn because it's full of people

with brain worms who think hustling is the path to true joy. So people, please don't. Talk to, spend your time

around people who you feel you want to be like and that's I mean very careful with that phrase because it can be interpreted to mean like only hang around with your type of people think about whether you can

box off some time to really think about this in a 10,000 foot high view way and some of this can be like take a day or two off and go this in a 10,000 foot high view way, right? And some of this can be like, you know, take a day or two off and go sit in a park somewhere and think about what you enjoy, right? One of the methods from coaching, which is one of the back office secret cabal tools

that are used within mentoring is what's called the CIA method, which is very, very spookily named, but it's essentially you breaking down things into what you control, C, versus what you can influence, I, and then what you must accept, A. And so I've gone through this exercise with a number of folks who are just like

i don't know i don't like what i'm doing but i'm not sure why and stuff is stressing me out and etc etc and just do your list of three things and then in a work setting or even in a personal setting just sit down and say like what do i have direct control over actually what can i do like the obvious one there being i can quit, like quit your job anytime you like. It mightn't be a good idea, but you can't. You know, what can I influence? Like where can I use my influence internally to affect change and how this happens? And often really thinking about like what you can do just by agitating them by asking and you don't ask, you don't get where we keep going back to that.

Yeah. And then the other part, which is accept, right. And here's where people tend to trip up a little bit because they write stuff down and then they find themselves saying, Oh no, I shouldn't write that and accept.

I can, I should write that in influence, right? Because you've got your amygdala working away in the background there, right? You've got your animal brain going like, well, I just got to gotta accept that like if i don't do as my boss tells me i will die like he will kill me literally right because that's the default threat you know again we're still scared monkeys who thought sandhead to think we haven't done this 50 years ago now we've done

it and so you just you come to accept this as part of the sort of the instinctual sort of like well okay do you have to accept that your job is full of interrupts and shitty right or do you have to accept that certain things are true about your organization do you have to accept that um you have this toxic co-worker do you have to accept certain things like that or do you have a certain degree of influence and if you have this toxic coworker? Do you have to accept certain things like that? Or do you have a certain degree of influence? And if you have a certain degree of influence, how can you affect that influence? Often that's the most effective exercise if you're sort of doing it,

if you're doing coaching at home in your bathtub, right? Is that just writing down those three things, control, influence, accept. And as you're writing down, pay attention to when you're about to write something down and then you, control, influence, accept, and as you're writing down, pay attention to when you're about to write something down and you're like,

oh, hang on, I can put this one step up, right? Then think about what you can do to actually affect that influence or affect that control. Because again, oftentimes people are their own

worst enemies. So like, okay, I'm doing too much on call. I don't like doing so much on call. I spoke to one person many years ago, right? You know, I'm doing too much on call i don't like doing so much on call i spoke to one person many years ago right you know i do too much a call it stresses me out i don't do too much and i went and looked and they were volunteering like they're volunteering for more on call right and like it was for the money right it was like okay right so what you're saying is you like money more than you like being happy.

That's weird. Um, but you have direct control over that. You can stop volunteering. Someone else will take up the slot. You have control over that, right? You don't know if, you know, you don't have to sort of, you know, you don't have to sort of like exert any kind of influence over anybody, right? You don't have to ask even you just say, oh yeah, I'm not signing up for next couple of weekends.

Wait. And it's mad what you can run into when you really start just writing all that stuff down, the stuff that stresses you, or even the stuff that doesn't stress you out, that just has an effect on your day-to-day life at work. What can you control? What can you influence? What can you accept? And how can you move things between those, those spheres?

I, I love that's like a really interesting twist to the, uh, prayer for, uh, serenity of like, right. The, may the God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know the difference. Uh, yeah, I'm going to visit that. I'm, I'm, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody came up with it based on that but the courage part is the important part right and in a lot of cases

coming back to what you were saying Ronak right around people often don't they don't have the aspiration to change the situation because they don't know where to get started and they hate change and

that's that's okay that's not a character flaw like hating change is an instinctual thing right you know so um yeah that's it's a good it's a good comparison i hadn't heard that one before cool may i just follow up on that because like is it okay to instead of find something that gives you happiness, to find something that you hate the least after trying a bunch of things? Is that something you can be content with? Or should your life mission be try to find something that makes you happy? Is that not all of our life missions? No, I think there's a new i think

there is a nuance to that question i'm glossing over um there's a certain and i'll i'll relate it to sort of an anecdote from my my own happiness to like purely selfish things. It's like, well, how will you be happy Dave? Well, I'll be happy if I don't have to work and I don't have to talk to all these assholes and like I can just go off and ride my bike.

That's not nice, Dave. That's not nice. Not you assholes specifically, just in general. But when it comes down to it is that if you seek out the parts you hate the least, even the language that you use is important there, right? And you shouldn't be satisfied with here's the thing that I hate the least. And again, it's a lifelong journey to figure this out. So where I came to was I had put together this whole thing of me being this horrible

misanthrope and that was sort of my personal brand almost. It's like, you know, Dave's grumpy about this, Dave's grumpy about that. It turns out to come into the realization that I really enjoy helping people. And I really enjoy helping people in their careers, helping people in getting to a better place where they're at. And just helping in general, you know, and instructing and teaching and all of that sort of stuff. I really enjoy it. It took me a long time to really just fully internalize that realization and say like, you know what, even though I wouldn't have said

this out loud five years ago, 10 years ago, now I'm prepared to say it out loud. And it's like, that's something that I enjoy because again, you wrap up a lot of your sort of psyche in like, oh, well, here's what makes me happy. And again, I referred to, you know, the people with brain worms on LinkedIn, right. Where they say like, if I just hustle hard enough, it will bring me joy. Right. Because that's what I've tied up a lot of my, you know, a lot of my sort of, uh, brand or psyche, even to myself in. Right. A lot of people are really unhappy.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that. Right. Um, but, uh, getting to a point where you where you you know it's not something that you're going to be able to just sort of say oh right i've come to the realization that i really enjoy helping people and teaching and that is something that brings me joy couldn't have done that myself couldn't have figured it out myself needed to really sit down and work through and do all of these kinds do all of that sort of, um, introspection in a, in a slightly more structured way. Right. Um, and yeah, there's no harm in sort of sitting

down and saying, what are the things I hate least? Let me do more of those things. It's, it's advice I've given the people many times. It's just like, what do you like about this job? Okay. Change your job. So that's more so your job. Right. And that's precipitated people sort of like big example I'll give is like people who come and say like, I really like running projects, I don't really so much enjoy coding anymore, I really like pulling people together and, and, and, um, making it projects are working smoothly and on time and people are

happier with them, like, have you considered the possibility that you might be a program manager? Right. They were like, you know, when I engineer and I'm like, you can be both, you know, and, and, and that's again, coming to that realization is often something you don't, you can't or can't easily do by yourself. And so for you to come to that realization, was that the career break that you took like before this? Or, and like, how can someone like,

right, like introspection you mentioned, like, does that mean like literally blocking out like, you know, like a week of vacation by trying to really like, like, how does, how do I go about doing? You're asking the mysteries of the universe here. Honestly, in my particular case, it was therapy.

Not to put you fine on the roof, but it was a lot of it is down to really going out of your way a little bit and going out of your comfort zone a little bit to recognize that it's like are you happy with the status quo and if you're not do something right

you know and that's that's what it comes down to right it's like if you're happy with the status quo go at it right going and finding a coach and mentor because you heard of a podcast that that can really accelerate your career is probably a shitty idea right it can't like it might but for the most but for the most part like if you're going into it with the attitude of like let me really unlock career secrets here i'm gonna i'm gonna do that so that i can more effectively post on linkedin about how i've unlocked career secrets um but like if you're doing it for a, like, I'm not quite sure where I want to go and I'm not quite sure how to do it. I know it's in there somewhere, but you know, I need a little help, um, getting it out. That's where coaching is at.

That's that's what coaching is about. The mentoring part is a lot more um practical as in like you know i'm not quite sure what a manager is supposed to do and i don't have anyone here who was going to sit me down and tell me so can i come and ask you a bunch of questions or can we go through something something more structured that's more so mentoring oh no this is super helpful so thanks for thanks for sharing all this uh we've been we've been talking about mentees i had a question for mentors here so in this case if someone comes to you asking question that you can answer or you can help someone figure out like how to be a manager for a first-time manager for example i think those are the easier ones but there are cases when you end up with

a mentee who we have been helping for a while and then goes on for six months and after that you have a recurring meeting on the calendar but you don't have much to talk about and mentors at that point want to kind of say hey maybe this is it's best we don't continue this on a recurring basis but you know what just let's do this ad hoc or reach out if you have a question and i know people feel uncomfortable about doing that. I would feel uncomfortable. I've felt discomfort in doing that myself. I'm curious, what are good ways you've known that people can use to kind of do this? Yeah. The way I specifically approached, and certainly the way I do it, is I'll have my same rule zero than i

have for performance manager which is no surprises and so when i when i take on somebody as a client um i'll send them my what's this called the coaching agreement like and it's not even a legal document it's just a like here's how we set out the thing right and so it's still it's stuff like you know if one of us doesn't show up here's what happens right and one of the things in there is that like um if you're the the client you can stop anytime right there's no commitment there's no sort of like we'll continue going i generally start off with like four sessions as sort of a minimum like we're up to speed with each other and we know what we're going and generally they're monthly. Um, and after that, if you want to keep going then by all means,

but I will like, you know, I won't turn around and say, Hey, probably don't need to be meeting monthly and just say it like that. Like just be like, my aim is to get to a point where we have a good enough relationship that i can just have the conversation like you just said it to me right it's not a formal thing it's not a like let me have this remedial managerie conversation with you like if i turn around to somebody and say like hey do you feel like we need to be meeting monthly because like we're generally emailing back and forth anyway right or do you want to just maybe do a talk, you know, over the next six months, whatever it is, because generally, again, down to brass tacks, generally after those

initial four sessions, things get cheaper. So, um, it'll be like, and in some cases they will say, yeah, I want to keep on meeting monthly for a while. And at all times, I'm like, this is you, it's just like, if you want to keep on doing it, but if we ever get to a point where we're just kind of looking at each other and having a chat, I'm like, do you know what I could be? Because again, I have a limited capacity to do this as well. So I, I, I don't think that I could do coaching and mentoring eight hours a day, five days a week, I would go literally insane.

So there is a capacity there for me to be able to take on only a certain number of clients. And if I have like eight clients and four of them are like, I just have a chat with somebody once a month and I get paid the same amount. At some point I go, yeah, do you know what? I'll never say that loud to somebody like this,

but I'm like, I could be using this time to work constructively with somebody who needs me more. So that's kind of how it is. There's never a push in any particular direction. And for the most part, again, the dynamic has changed a little bit if somebody is paying you. But it's down to like, okay, they're happy to keep paying me. In some ways, that's good. But also at a certain point, I tend not to try and get too attached.

They're not Pokemon. I don't get to keep them and say, these are my slides, so I'll keep them forever if I could. At a certain point, it's like, we've done all we can for the mileage, and if you want to come back in six months, and we can have another couple of chats,

then by all means. But yeah, and again, there's momentum there and there's changed people. And as we've discovered, people

don't enjoy change. So you do want to force the issue at some point, yeah. That's good advice. Okay, so

we, about an hour back, we said there are two things you're doing now. One of them was coaching. At least I would like to spend some time. I know I want to be mindful of your time.

So the second part was consulting. Can you tell us more about what you're doing there? I'm just getting into consulting at the moment one of the big things that I worked with, worked on at Google and tended to work on less so since I've been there is what I'll put under the umbrella of busy teams and so this is related to

there's a chapter in the SRE books that I wrote, which is around dealing with interrupts. And that's a sort of a part of this, right, is that coming into a team that's using its time, inefficiently is the wrong word, but like using human effort in an inefficient way where we could be using computers and robots and etc instead um and there's a lot of chat in the industry at the moment to pardon the expression about how jennifer of ai is going to replace all of us right and so without getting too far into that as a conversation right one of the things that i will um, I guess, and say is that a lot of the toil that humans on teams, be they SRE teams or support teams or IT teams help you with, is not technically sourced. by just organizationally how things work, right? Or the organization's attitude to risk or to new technologies or to whatever it is, right? You know, and so in even my short time,

you know, working on this thus far, right? And actually, even at Google, again, you know, you were talking to Todd and, you know, he said Google hasn't everything figured out. Google hasn't everything figured out. You run into pockets of, a human needs to do this thing because a robot can't. Right?

Which is generally nonsense, right? And it's generally sourced by people who are afraid that, you know, if you lose the human touch, then you will result in worse outcomes. I don't buy into a lot of that. In a lot of cases,

there are a lot of teams out there, at least the careers worth of teams for many people that are doing a lot of toil and they don't need to. And so, you know, much as, and again, I like to help,

and part of that is working with these teams to take sort of a more data-driven approach to how they're spending their time and how they're respecting their time. And this applies to SRE teams, what I was doing for a long time, where, you know, dual team transformational leadership

where you go from, you know, a team that is, I believe one team had their own little logo, which was a rock with eyes staring at a dashboard. Team was rocked with eyes staring at dashboards. And when they saw something that they didn't like about the dashboard, they'd make a shrieking noise and then an adult would show up. And that's a genuine model for teams in operations and in production and in IT of many, many large

companies around the world still. And it's nonsense. Because, again, yes, technology has taken over a lot of that, but the thing is, there's a huge difference between somebody in a tiny startup somewhere has developed an LLM that

can give you an acceptable CSAT score if you just fire your entire support team and plug it into your website and everything is fine. But we're a generation away between that being true if you want to and people wanting to. And we want to move towards that. We want to move away from humans being busy with machine work. But in a lot of cases, it's a case of being a little more data-driven

about how you spend your time, and a little more like there's no silver bullet to it. Sometimes you just want to be like, hey, 50% of your ops team's time is wasted. Here are the stats and figures. And so I can work on that a little bit. And the other part is like, hey, your team doesn't respect itself, right? Your team is doing low quality work and they love it, right? That kind of thing, right? Where I can make recommendations and I can move teams through particular things and I can

talk to leads of teams and do all that. It's a bunch of what I got to do in some sense and have a bit of a reputation for doing that for better or for worse at Google and beyond. And again, it's something I miss doing, right? Something I enjoy doing, something I get a lot out of. It sparks joy. You know, when I see teams whose time was being wasted and in a sense, they didn't realize their time was being wasted going from that to being like,

oh, now I'm doing useful engineering work and the robots are doing work in the background. This is war, right? And that's amazing. I love that. So that's some of what I'm,

the other part of what I'm doing at the moment, right? And again, if you only pay attention to LinkedIn, if you only pay attention

to tech news, you can imagine that like somebody will be showing up to shove you out of your chair any minute now because

now they're just going to take over your job. But anyone with an answer sense knows that's

mostly nonsense. But even on top of that, like most of the time, you know, when people are doing shitty work that, you know, a robot could do, it's not because it's impossible to automate away. It's because somebody somewhere has decided that we're not going to, or somebody somewhere doesn't understand that if you build a system in a certain way, there will always come demanding more blood from people right um and so it's true everywhere it's still true

with google i can tell you that much um and it's still written basically everywhere that um produces production systems is that so little effort is put into having it so that there's always the crutch of like, oh, then it's just page. Right. And I was like,

okay, are you going to transfer that page? Person designing the system? Of course not. Yeah. So there's a lot of

work to be done there and it's something I care a lot about. So that was the, that was the other part of the, the checkboxes for something

I want to be spending most of my time on. I think we can spend

probably an entire episode talking more about busy teams, which is fair at this point.

I have one question about consulting in general. I think there might be other

people in a position similar to yours, not necessarily same domain but they've spent uh majority of their career developing expertise in a domain and at this

point they're also questioning introspecting rather like what do what do i want to do and they might come to this conclusion that hey i've developed this expertise that i was known for during a full-time job over different companies and now want to help others. How did you think about structuring consulting? And when I say structuring, what I mean is defining an area where you say like, this is what I'm going to do. In your case, like helping busy teams. How do you put out the word in this case? Because I think it, I don't know if it comes naturally to everyone, might seem odd, maybe not, not depends on the person and then how do you go about like even structuring the the financial aspect of things like how do you decide the the cost of whoever comes as a client

in this case like what are ways to think about this um this is a tough one because again i'm not an expert on this i'm brand new to it you know i'm just sort of a that's a neophyte and again i have probably the same concerns that you might have if you were getting into this right it's like am i charging and also am i charging too much because if you if you put out a rate and say hey i'm charging this much and somebody comes straight back and says yes certainly you're like shit um so you know there should be coming back questioning that so um in so in some ways again i kind of get the cheat and that's like i'm going to be trying this for a while right and if it doesn't it's going to pay the bills because my bills are modest

so i get to cheat in that sense um but But it's more so on top of that. And one thing you mentioned around like getting to a level of expertise in a particular area and doing that and et cetera. Like I'm not going to be using a ton of my expertise in how SRE is done particularly. Because again, that's my background, right? You can get this horrible thinking feeling

in the pit of your stomach, and I know I've gotten it over the last six months or so, where it's like, I spent a long time building up this sort of expertise and this reputation as being sort of an expert in this area. Would it be a waste if I didn't use that knowledge? I mean, that's one way to think about it, right? Wouldn't it be a waste, right?

To an extent, it kind of is. But again, the other part of it is that what do you like doing? What do I like doing? Helping teams that are in trouble. I like sense rather than nonsense when it comes to humans versus computers doing jobs.

Right? And in a a way a lot of the the kind of the answers to the what makes you happy questions are put in very simple terms right i like helping people not having not have their time wasted on nonsense that computers could be doing right and that's again, how do you formulate that into a business plan and get people to pay you actual money to buy some digital? Again, again, I get the cheat. I have a

reputation. I have the ability to go on LinkedIn. Like, I haven't done that, but I wanted to. I have the ability to go on LinkedIn and say, hey, I want to do this. Somebody please give me a job. There's no easy way and no silver bullet. It's just like going out to your network and saying like, again, going to your sort of personal board of directors and saying like, Hey, I'm thinking of doing this.

Can you look over my business plan? Can you look over my little website that I've made? Does it sound like nonsense to you? Um, do you think this is something that people would pay for? And in general, I've had people come back and say, yes, yes, of course. What, why are we even having this conversation? Because again, I'm my own worst enemy and people generally are their own worst enemy when it comes to really pushing the boat out there. Right. Um, so that's it. It's like, I don't have specific advice on how to go and get people to pay you to do the things you enjoy it's just like have it so that the things you you know again the the way to approach it is

like narrow it down to the things you actually enjoy doing for their sake yeah and then see if you can figure out how to market that and how to specialize into that and say, okay, here's something. And again, if I go out and say, hey, do you have a busy team? Is that team wasting its time doing work that computers could be doing? Here's my background and qualifications I can help in doing this at a fairly high level. Do you think there's a lot of teams out there that are in that situation? Of course there are, right? But then you have to narrow it down to people who are prepared to trust somebody to come in

and that they're not actually bullshitting them, right? It's tough out there at the moment because there's a lot of people who have just been laid off who are saying, I should be a consultant. So there's a little bit of tragedy of the commons going on at the moment with that. But yeah, it's something that you do need to be able to sort of sink a ton of time and energy and effort into like just testing the waters and testing the sort of market for what you're trying to do.

Makes sense. Well, Dave, thank you so much for sharing all this with us. There are many more questions you would love to get

into, but like busy teams is just one part of it, but probably another time. And we hope you do come back on the podcast

another time. And before we let you go, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners? No, that's the worst thing

to push out of something at the very end of a podcast. Usually it's like, do you have any pluggables? He wasn't me. He was Rana. Just for the record, he wasn't me.

I didn't ask the question. No, no, no. You can totally say no. You can say no, nothing, and that's totally okay. I'm going to plug the books of a couple of friends that I got from my own websites because why not um two two books i find myself recommending a lot uh both technical and non-technical that you should think about you

should read service level objectives by alex hidalgo um it is a very good book about service level objectives and you should read uh the staff engineers past by my good friend, Tony Riley, who, um, which is an excellent book on transitioning from typing it to computer to speaking into computer and it kind of that's all good. Um, it's, it's the worst part without you asking me about my coaching practice. Cause I'm not taking new clients at the moment, but I will be at some point in the new year, uh, you can go to strategic hopes.co. Um, that's my coaching practice because I'm not taking new clients at the moment, but I will be at some point in the new year. You can go to strategichopes.co.

That's my coaching practice. And it's a really bad time to be telling you about my consulting practice because I'm starting a contract next week, so I'm not going to be available for a little while. But my consulting practice is at coservant.systems.

So yeah, that's my plugables. Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that and thanks for coming on the show, Dave. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, Dave. Hey, thank you so much

for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.