Life & Career

“Hey. I just got out of a meeting with Lewis.” I groaned inwardly. Lewis was my boss’s boss, and while Lewis was a fantastic human being, meetings with him were usually in the context of projects. Big ones. I put on a fake smile to mask creeping despair. “Oh? How did that go?”

Marketing words are not for you, the engineer. The dog whistle is blowing at a frequency your ears are not attuned to. These words are meant to entice folks with purchasing authority. Your boss. Or his boss. Or her boss.

You’ve got a niche blog where you write as a deeply technical expert in a IT field such as cloud, networking, storage, development, or security. Your audience is made up of fellow nerds in similar orbits. You’ve been writing for years, and have developed a faithful audience who reads most of your stuff. After all this time, a real-deal vendor appears, wanting to place a sponsored blog post on your hallowed site. Now what?

A list of career-related maxims easy to consume, but challenging to apply.

After a several minutes of answering her scripted questions, I lost it. I unloaded on this kid. I was yelling over the speakerphone at her. In an open office. With my boss standing next to me. In front of my co-workers and the junior network engineer I was mentoring, all of whom had either also been there all night or come in early to help with testing. In front of everyone else, I just leveled this poor JTAC girl.

I prefer to hire a person who first tries to figure things out. While I want neither a cowboy nor science experiments making their way into production, I do want a motivated individual who will research difficult technical challenges and grow as a result. As that person grows stronger, their team grows stronger as well.