Job Search Update
So, for most of my life, when it came to work, I generally knew about jobs because of someone I knew. I mean, most people find jobs that way. On rare occasions, when friends and acquaintances don’t know of any new jobs and I had to “cold call” to find work, I fell into a new position.
When Broadcom RIF’d me, I spent most of my time on either Bluesky or LinkedIn. I would get involved in political discussions on Bluesky or get inspired on LinkedIn to learn something new (the list of things I want to learn has mutated and multiplied incredibly). However, the challenge with social media is that the world is seen through very narrow blinders.
Social media was meant to open discussion. It has done the exact opposite. They have become little tribes of yelling who has the most followers with the best (or, rather, believed to be best) AI-generated memes. The idea of having deep conversations where you can learn something new about someone or something else seems to have evaporated from the global society.
It is exhausting to navigate through all the influencers, marketing/PR types, and trolls that inhabit these locales. To make it worse, you must discern who is a real person versus a generative AI bot. And so, not surprisingly, I got a bit exhausted during this time.
But as I said, sometimes I fall into a job. That is precisely what happened. I lucked out when I saw a post for an Education Engineer on LinkedIn at a small start-up. Now, most jobs ask you to upload a resume, a cover letter and then join their job site, filling in 20 pages of information that you had on your resume. And then you hear nothing from them. Not this company.
I uploaded my resume, sans cover letter, and a brief video on why I wanted to work there. Just even the novelty of the application process got me excited again. I was impressed. I knew that even if I never got the job, the experience had excited my creative side in a way that hadn’t been excited before. Interestingly, I heard back the next day and realized I didn’t have to worry. I ended up starting on my 55th birthday, and I’m now coming up on three and a half months employed there.
New Learning Experiences
This new role, Education Engineer, was a bit of a departure from my instructor career. It is still a form of education. I spent much of my day playing with the product, researching a setting, and then writing about what I learned. It is all remote and has a very supportive team. Part of this feeling is due to Spectro Cloud’s early start-up days. I’m hopeful that it will continue this current mental state as it grows and matures.
In this short time, I’ve learned a lot. In fact, I’ve picked up so much knowledge that I don’t know where to start. I’ve had to learn about the main product, Palette. This isn’t a surprising part. I’d almost say that it’s like a vCenter but for Kubernetes and pretty much any cloud. It was all the other things that I didn’t expect.
- GitHub\
git(and how to use both effectively) - Markdown language
- Kubernetes (more in-depth than what I had learned when doing Tanzu)
- basic shell scripting (I know, I know.. this I should have learned years ago!)
- Terraform
GitHub is known as the place for open-source software development. And that’s how I saw it. I quickly learned that it could be used for so much more. I would not have expected to use it to track documentation changes, but it does make sense. And learning how to use it effectively, without messing up too much (think divergent branches). Once I got my process down for git itself and understood how branches and commits work, the rest became straightforward.
When it came to the Markdown language, I was surprised how easy it was to pick up. For those not familiar with Markdown, you can check out this wiki on it and a quick reference here. Learning this gave me a bit of déjà vu of when I first taught myself HTML back in the mid-90s. In fact, I’ve gotten so comfortable with using it, I have to remember that Word, Bluesky (I think) and a few others don’t use Markdown.
And when it comes to Kubernetes (or, rather, containers), it feels like I’ve been heading to this technology. In the 1990s, I quit a job at an environmental consulting firm to learn about IT administration (it was NT4 but still). This eventually led me to VMware and containers. And most of that was done as an instructor.
Tied with Kubernetes was Terraform. I could see how a whole infrastructure could be created with a small collection of files. And more importantly, this could be used over and over again, as many times as needed. Terraform is often what is defined as Infrastructure-as-Code (or IaC). The structure of the files is pretty straightforward and easy to create once you understand the structure.
The last bit of “new” was shell programming (or, really, any programming). I’ve often lamented that I’m not a programmer and that I don’t have the logic for it. This may be a leftover experience from my early life experiences with math. While I eschew using AI as much as possible, this has been one of the areas where it has been constructive. Rather than plodding and poking at trying to create a script or trying to understand a of code, AI (specifically, ChatGPT) has been helpful. And while I consider myself decent at understanding code when I navigate through lines of it, AI helps me understand it better.
And some old experiences
One of the things I loved about VMware (that is, the pre-Broadcom version) was that people were often hired (particularly in the early days) on their ability to fit within a team. Technical knowledge would come with time. I always thought that VMware was a bit of a unicorn in the corporate world to have this kind of attitude towards employees. And I’ve always believed that trust and empathy were two things that help employees become better innovators and better teammates.
When you let employees do what they need to, they can excel at what you expect. Sometimes, they even surprise you further by innovating on their own because they feel safe and supported in doing so. What I’m discovering at Spectro Cloud is that feeling again.
So, now what?
As I settle into my role, I plan to share more here about things that might benefit others, whether those are code snippets, new features, or just random thoughts. I never expected to be in this kind of role, but then again, I also never imagined I would become a corporate instructor. Either way, I expect that I will have even more to learn in the future. And hopefully, I can pass that on to others.
So, this leads me to a question for you, dear reader: what do you want to learn today?
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