Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking.

Hello, Tom.

How are you?

Hi, Russ.

I'm doing really well.

How about yourself?

Fine.

Whiteboard looks pretty full.

Kids have been busy.

Yep.

Yep.

That one's a schedule.

We just started school and our oldest oldest just started middle school.

So we're all figuring out how to balance the kids in different schools for the first time.

So pretty fun.

Okay.

Cool.

And the plants doing okay?

Plant's thriving.

Yep.

Right there.

Yes.

Rick Graziani came on the show just to see the plant.

Yep.

That's pretty funny.

We talk about the plant more than we do anything else.

Does it have a name?

Oh, good question.

It doesn't.

What do you think its name should be, Alexis?

I mean, Tom Junior is the obvious one, but Tom Junior.

There we go.

Or Tom, I'd be thinking Tom Thumb.

Well, maybe we'll have a naming contest out here on the hedge.

Best name wins and I'll name the plant that.

Oh my goodness.

I'll have to put that on LinkedIn or something.

Take a poll.

Take a poll.

So hello, Alexis.

For anybody who is interested, that is Alexis who is in the background there.

Not in the background.

She's just talking.

She is our guest for this episode of The Hedge.

And we wanna talk about advocating for yourself, being a self advocate in the network engineering world.

How is that different than being a network a self advocate in any other world?

Because we're supposed to be technical, first of all.

And second of all, because most technical people, most engineers don't like people very much, and they don't like advocating for themselves.

They like to, like, sit in a corner like I do, where, you know, just leave me alone and let me do my stuff.

Quit making me do all this paperwork.

It's a great cartoon I saw once of two people sitting across the desk from each other, and apparently, one of them was the manager.

They were doing a review, and the person was saying on the other back on the other side of the desk, the person being reviewed said, what do you mean develop my soft skills?

I went into computers so I wouldn't have to know anything about people.

That just captures the whole I think, and I think that's a sentient that's echoed.

Right?

Even among some of the more vocal people that you've seen on the Internet, But dealing with computers is easier than dealing with people.

Right?

Because those computers tell them tell you tell computers do what you tell them to most of the time.

Right?

For better or worse.

Yeah.

And for the as long as you pass them the right debug flag, they'll also tell you what they're thinking.

Right?

There's no debug flag on people.

I I don't know.

It sounds like a good idea.

I should put one on my wife.

Turn on the debug thing on the back and She should put one on you.

Could she handle it?

I don't know.

That would be pretty funny.

So what is so so Alexis, when we talk about advocating for yourself, what what does that mean to you?

What is, like, maybe someone's listening and thinking what does that even mean?

Like, am I my own lawyer?

What is this?

Yeah.

I think it's a really important topic and, you know, the number one thing when I talk about this that I want people to take away is that no one is going to be a better advocate for you than yourself.

Because a lot of times we come into college and we get our first jobs and maybe we're assigned a mentor or we're given a boss or there's a senior engineer that we're tied to and we kind of assume that, well, if we work really hard, people are gonna notice and we're gonna go rewarded for it.

And this mentor or buddy or boss or coach or peer, whoever it is, is gonna be the one that's speaking up for you.

And that's not always the case.

Right?

I I've had it personally happen to me.

I've heard about it happening to friends.

Because at the end of the day, you might go and work really, really hard on something and you're grinding away.

You're really putting your all into it, but no one is coming to peek over your shoulder and check your work.

That might have happened in college, right, or even in elementary school where there was participation trophies being given out and things were, you know, incentivized by grading systems or, you know, gold stars.

But in corporate America, in the real world, once you graduate, it's not necessarily the case.

Yeah.

In fact, I think it's very, very common that people don't really pay attention to what you're doing unless you tell them.

And I I do this all the time.

I will sit here and I will write up 20 pages of documentation on some really cool idea, and then two weeks later, somebody will say to me, whatever, like, did you ever think about that?

I'm like, there's 20 pages of documents right here.

Did you did you read what I wrote?

Yeah.

Did you read what I wrote?

Which by the way is is not always good because a lot of people I hate to tell you this, but a lot of people are functionally illiterate in the tech world.

That's a sad thing.

But either way, yeah, and I don't really say anything to anybody.

I just wrote it up.

That was an idea.

And then, you know, I just let it sit there because why?

Who am I gonna tell?

That's most of the time what I feel like.

Is who am I gonna tell?

My manager?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know how good that's gonna be.

He's just gonna say, well, he's just gonna say, well, why are you working on that one?

Should we be working on this thing over here or whatever it is?

And so that's kind of an issue in our world that people don't.

Like I said, Alexis, you know, we're only advocate for real most of the time.

Well, and especially especially when we're thinking about post COVID.

I mean, we're all sitting in in our home offices right now.

It's even harder to do that.

When you're not physically in the office, you don't have a coworker that's stopping by your cubicle to go, Oh, what what's that you're writing Russ?

That looks really interesting.

Yeah.

Like you're really focused.

What are you doing?

Right?

It's even more important to bring that element into advocating for your work and being able to articulate what you've done and the impact that you've made.

It's not just the work, which for a lot of engineers, or especially people who are more introverted, which a lot of engineers are, that's hard because speaking up is uncomfortable and it is almost work on top of the work.

Yep.

It is.

It is.

What are so so what are the what are the practical opportunities to advocate for yourself?

Like, the obvious one is the annual performance review or whatever.

But that's really formal.

There are many others.

What, what do you Alexis, what do you think?

What are the opportunities that come up where you can advocate for yourself?

Well, I would start first with the relationship you have with your manager, and it really depends on what type of manager you have.

Some managers wanna have a really personal relationship with you.

Some managers want to be very involved in your work or what you're doing or how you're managing your time.

Some it's much more transactional.

Did you did you do your tasks this week?

I'll see you next week.

And that's it.

And for me advocacy, you can do the checklist of your week to week tasks, read your KPIs, or your bug reports, or whatever else you're working on.

But are you able to have a deeper conversation with them about your six month or twelve month or three year goals?

Maybe you don't even know what those are, but as your manager, career development is technically part of their job.

And, if they're not proactively having those discussions with you, it's up to you to take control of that conversation and bring it up to them.

So, hi, Mr.

Manager.

I have been in this role for three months now.

I feel like I've really gotten to know the team.

I've gotten my feet wet.

I kind of understand where I fit in at this company, and I wanna understand how I can make a deeper impact.

Personally, I am a junior network engineer.

I'm, you know, a level one.

In the next year to two years, I would like to be a level two.

Do you think that's feasible?

And if so, what do I have to do in order to accomplish that?

And kind of setting the stage early for the roadmap of where you wanna go versus what happens with a lot of people is they will work for a year and a half to two years and hit all their checklists, hit their KPIs, you know, do their tasks.

And then after two years they go, well, why haven't I been promoted?

Right?

So it really is taking control of that conversation aspect.

Now is it up to your manager to bring it up to you or you to bring it up to them?

It could be either.

I think in a perfect world, your manager is the one that's taking control of their team's career development, but we don't always see that happen.

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, you will sometimes not always not not all that common, but it does happen.

When your manager prefers someone else over you, and you end up having to be an advocate outside your team, not to your manager because your manager is actually blocking you from being from being effective.

And so you have to learn how to move around that and not necessarily just skip level, but also, like, you work with other people on other teams.

Let them know what you're working on.

Talk to them.

Help them.

And then the then then the goodness spins around, and it becomes difficult to push you down in a sense after a while.

It's always possible.

There are some managers who are just they just they take wrong they take you get on their wrong side in the first three months, and it just doesn't matter what forget it.

Yeah.

They never forget it.

I've been there too, Russ.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I think I think you I think you need to be mobile in your organization regardless of what your manager style is.

Even if your manager is like your cheerleader and your best friend, I think you still need to go out to other teams because the opportunities don't always come up in your team.

The other thing is, I mean, if you're really good, if you're someone that your manager is gonna wanna keep you, and sometime your manager is keeping sometimes your manager keeping you is not aligned with your interest in your career as good as the manager might be.

And so I I think what you're saying, Russ, is I think is universally true.

You get around and see other people, and then when those other opportunities come up, then the thing I like about that is it puts you in the driver's seat.

You're not waiting for your manager, like Alexis saying, you're not waiting for your manager to make good things happen for you.

And you're also conversely not I I don't think for me, I'm less emotionally affected.

If my manager's a bad one, like, I'm I'm less emotionally effective up if if I'm already going to talk to other people.

Like, okay.

Well, he's not gonna help me, but there's all these other people that will.

And and it's good.

I can still have a good relationship with this bad manager, and and I don't know.

I think it helps.

Well, and I think your point to expanding your network, maybe you're in a really large company where you do have multiple departments that you can do your networking with.

You can also network outside of your company.

The industry is so huge.

There's no reason to say you can't have a mentor or an advocate outside.

I mean, even especially now, traveling with Megaport, I see the same people at conferences all the time.

Right?

Every three months, I run-in the same group of people, whether it's at a Nanog or a Cisco Live or at, you know, XYZ event.

I've ran into the same people on different continents.

It's just I'm like, you're here too?

This is crazy.

And you start to build those relationships.

And if something happens or if you really do need some advice, they might have a different take on it just based on their experience.

Yeah.

In fact, I worked in a team once at Cisco was really one of the better teams, one of the best teams I worked at in Cisco, where we never met in person because we lived all over the world.

But we all saw each other at the IETF three times a year.

Mhmm.

And so the we had team dinners at the IETF because it was the only time we physically saw each other.

It's like, that's crazy, but that's but it worked really, really well.

Now another thing I often wonder about is picking your projects.

So we tend to go along, and my manager says, work on this.

I've I don't I've seen lots of times where people have done that, and then that entire team gets laid off working on that project.

And just because you or, the project gets squashed.

And all of a sudden, you come to the end of the year and you have nothing that you can say, I finished this this year, because some external person squashed your project.

And you worked diligently and really hard for a lot of hours and a lot of time trying to figure out how to make something work, and they just toss it.

And that's that's another, I think what do you think of that, Alexis, as far as advocacy?

Yeah.

I think it's tough, and especially watching something that you worked on, you know, get tossed away like that.

But I think it goes back to being really intentional with the areas that you wanna grow in and what you want to work on.

So maybe you have your assigned project that you need to work on because that is where you are assigned delegated hours are going towards.

Say it's a network upgrade, but you want to grow grow glow you want to grow more into cloud or AI because you realize that's coming down the line and there's another adjacent team that that's not your project, but can you help out?

Can you shadow?

Can you have someone on that team mentor you and get you involved so you can still acquire those skills and add it to your resume without taking ownership.

Now would it be a stretch?

Would you be working extra hours?

Maybe.

But at least you have a legitimate project that's not just a lab and some random dashboard.

Right?

Something I've heard in, conversations before, especially when I was, more junior, people would say, wait a minute.

How did you get how did you get that project?

Like, kinda like, I'm ahead of you in line.

How could how did you get that project?

And and the answer was usually, and I don't think I would say this to them, but the answer was, well, I just went and started doing it.

Like, all of you are waiting for someone else to give you permission to do something interesting.

And sometimes, like, that's I mean, I would say a lot of times, you you don't wait for permission.

You go do good stuff.

And all those people that are that are quietly waiting and hoping that their manager will give them something cool to do, they're gonna keep waiting, and you're gonna be able to do the thing that is that is engaging to you.

Yeah.

And I well, to that point, yes.

As long as it fits in your time, you know, you do wanna be cognizant of your being paid and brought on the team to do this job, and you do have your assigned things now to do.

This is where this is where, like, working for large companies is helpful because large companies have no idea what their employees are doing for the most part.

And as long as you can deliver on the things that like you said, Alexis, as long as like, you you can't fall behind on the things that you're expected to do.

But I I have I have seldom worked for a company that was actually using me to my full potential.

It was it's been, like, 50% utilization at best.

And so there's there's plenty of time.

And I don't know.

Maybe I'm weird.

But, like, I think there's plenty of time to go and involve yourself.

And but sometimes, it does mean that you need to do some stuff in the evening.

Sometimes, you know, and and it depends.

If it engaged you, that's not a big deal.

Or reach out and do some networking.

I, you know, I don't know that I've met a senior engineer yet that has been like, no.

I don't want a mentee.

I don't want anyone to shadow me.

Please leave me alone.

Right?

More often than not, when you talk to older engineers and you're like, hey.

That sounds really cool.

How did you learn that?

What are you doing?

Would you bring me along with you?

It's just especially if it's a Zoom call, it's just an extra person on Zoom.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But I'll also say this that much more space.

If you if you're in a company where they discourage you from doing stuff on the side, because there are some companies that will say, oh, you shouldn't be working on that.

You have this that you need to be working on.

If you're in that kind of a company, find the door.

Yep.

Or if you're working for someone like that.

Right?

Because, again, ideally, in an ideal world, your manager supports your interests and wants you to grow in areas that you are interested in growing in.

And if it's an area that benefits you and benefits the company, and you're checking all the boxes for your standard job, you should be able to go and pursue things you're interested in and want to grow towards.

And if you're being discouraged from doing that, like you said, Russ, I think it's a pretty clear sign that you should start looking other places.

Yeah.

There's there's another avenue too to take, which is not just so we're we've been talking a little bit about going and working on things that are sort of in progress that you think are cool.

Another thing that's that I found really helpful is to find something that and this this depends a lot on the culture of your organization, but find something that needs to be done and do the work to advocate for the for that capability or whatever it is and figure out how to start getting it done and then and get the right people to sign off.

It's a ton of work.

It's a ton of overhead because you gotta go sometimes you gotta go loosen up purse strings.

But I've been amazed at how much I can do just as a single engineer.

Mhmm.

Hey.

Our infrastructure needs this.

And you look at it, and it's millions of dollars of CapEx over five years.

And you're like, how in the world is one engineer ever gonna make that happen?

I've seen it happen.

I've made it happen before.

Like, you can you if you if you can have the right relationships and talk to the right people and be in the right place at the right time, you can go and propose something.

And once you do that, there's so much CapEx tied up in it.

That's your job.

That's no one's gonna because you're the expert on that project.

And, like, I think there's more opportunities for that than we think.

It's just that we don't wanna do the nontechnical stuff that that has to happen in order to to to build that opportunity.

Well, because think about, like, how many different steps you just outlined in order to bring something like that over the line.

You need to recognize find the problem, recognize the problem, propose it to your lead, your management, whoever it is, Engage however many vendors maybe you're running a proposal process so now you're scoping a solution between three different vendors.

You're working with the VAR or whatever partner you have in your organization to implement that and you're involved in the whole life cycle all the way through installation and management.

Now, you didn't just learn the techno like, the technical skills to get that implemented.

Think about, like, the internal sales skills, the proposal skills, the communication skills.

It's the full stack.

So And then when you're finished, you have the full stack.

I just I think you can I think you can jump into something like this without that much risk?

Like, you can you can and no doubt, you will try.

And there have been times when I've tried, and halfway through, they're like, no.

No.

You know what?

Stop this.

This is not this is not what we need.

Let's just work on something.

Like, okay.

But but the 50% of it that I did get through, I learned a ton of stuff.

And I was and and never you can do it alone.

Never can you, like, you cannot work on procurement as a network engineer.

And you don't want to.

Right?

You don't you you cannot work on on, talking with circuits people and negotiating with service providers.

Ugh, why would you want to?

Like, no.

No.

You go make friends with the person that does and and that kind of thing.

And I don't know.

I I feel like it's easier than we think it will be.

I think we look at something like that, we're like, too much work.

But, I don't know.

Not always.

It's not always as bad as it it is.

Most of that's gonna depend on culture, honestly, and how the culture of the company is.

Because in some companies, you're still facing this idea of no mind, mind, mind.

Right?

So you've got to find ways of getting around that and friendship, building the connections as you talk about Alexis, that's a big way of getting around the mind.

Yeah.

Well, because people start to people start to see you as an alley, and Yeah.

It's a big thing.

Russ, I know you were customer facing once upon a time.

Tom, I'm sure you were at some point as well.

But people if people like you and trust you and they know what you're about and they know what you're doing and they know what you're after they're more likely to include you or to say yes.

I was trying to avoid I've got a couple notes up here on the side since we're talking about advocacy from a presentation I did a couple a couple times, but to bring up like personal branding for a second your brand, your reputation, a lot of times when this gets brought up online people think it's about what you're posting on LinkedIn or what your profile is or whatnot.

Right?

But, especially in a corporate setting, it's just what people think of you.

How are you showing up to calls?

Are you always five minutes late?

Do you always look disheveled?

Do you always have terrible lighting?

Is your virtual background popping in and out?

When you come to the office do you look prepared?

Do you look half asleep?

Do you always carry in the same coffee cup?

Or you're always wearing a baseball cap?

Right?

When you speak in meetings, you know, how formal are you?

All of those different pieces that form people's impressions of you or what they remember of you like all of that those in person elements also contribute to your brand, and that has nothing to do with what you're posting online.

Yep.

And for instance, a very common one we have in the engineering world is you're sitting in a meeting and somebody says, we need to put a layer two VPN over here.

We need to do what dot one queue.

And five different people will jump in.

And it's like, no.

No.

No.

No.

We should do no.

We should do that.

No.

We should do this.

And all of a sudden, like, it becomes a brawl or it becomes one person just flat out trying to dominate the meeting by constantly sniping at everyone else's answers or what they're doing.

It's like there's some degree to which your personal brand is also, you know what you're doing, I let you go do it.

I trust you.

And when you trust them, they're gonna trust you.

Right?

There's like a bidirectional trust thing here.

Yeah.

So, Alexis, when you talk about being customer facing, one thing that I did at Cisco was probably the one of the most fun things I ever did, there's other things as well, was on the deployment architecture team, I went to customers and I said, where does your network hurt?

Right?

Where does your network hurt?

They would tell me.

Trust me.

They would tell me.

Right?

And then I could say, well, let's figure out how do we design around that.

And in the meantime, they're giving me features and products that I then take back to the company and say I've seen five customers this week say it hurts here.

We need to do something about that problem.

We've gotta stop customers from hurting there.

And so that was an absolutely fantastic job because I could build trust on both sides of the aisle.

So that was that was probably Yeah.

Internally, and that was one of the best jobs of being a a solutions engineer.

Right?

Because you could help the customers, but you also get to advocate for them internally.

Yeah.

Whether that's like, with tack, or a good product, depending on the day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, tack was always just a big fire, constant fire.

The only thing fun about global escalation was no matter how bad the network was, it wasn't getting any worse.

You always walk out with a cape in global escalation because there's no place to go but up.

So, yes.

So I think the advocacy thing though is partially to putting yourself in that position.

Like, you may not have a customer facing role.

There is not well, I shouldn't say this.

There shouldn't be any sales engineers who care if you're on the back line someplace if you join a customer call, especially if you're in a in a technology company.

Right?

Okay.

If you work for a grocery store, maybe you don't wanna join the customer calls.

But if you work for a tech company, you should try to weasel your way into getting on the customer calls and hearing what they say.

Yeah.

Or just asking questions.

Yeah.

Just asking questions.

Experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, as far as to circle back to, like, advocating for yourself in your career development sessions, I think it goes back to, like, having a windsheet, making sure that every we talked about, personal branding a little bit so what people think of you, how people think of you, and all little interactions add up.

So, when you show up to a meeting are you prepared?

When you have your one on one with your manager do you walk in with an agenda?

And you know what you did this week?

Or when they say, hey, Alexis, how was your week?

And you go, and they're like, what did you work on?

And you go, let me check my calendar.

Or, can you look at the list of things that you checked off immediately and go well I did this, I did this, I did this, I did this.

I had a really good call with Russ and Tom, and I learned a lot in this area it was really interesting because this do you have something to show or present?

Instead of, well, it was another week.

How's yours?

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Oh, definitely.

Definitely.

Definitely true.

And even if you can talk about the things you've learned.

Now, this looks different for late career people than it does for early career people, by the way.

This is something like, when you've been doing this for thirty years, people say, what do you wanna be in five years?

I don't I don't even know the answer.

Like, I have no idea what you're asking me.

What new technologies would you like to learn?

I I don't know.

Like, I've been doing this for thirty years.

I don't I don't know.

I don't want I don't want any new technologies.

Yeah.

Well, I think the answer there is to say, you know, I I'd like to be mentoring people or whatever the case might be.

Although you have to be careful about being a people manager too.

I was a people manager once in my life, and I regretted it every day from the day I stopped from the day I started until the day I stopped.

Simply just aren't cut out to be people managers.

So be very careful about saying, I wanna be a vice president.

Yeah.

I know.

How about you just, like, really think about that before you make those kinds of goals?

Well and I think that's hard too because for and not for, but in a lot of organizations, the path up, once you're looking at the ladder, management seems like the only option.

Right?

When there really are more technical options, especially at larger companies where you could be, what's it called, like a field CTO or, like a senior architect where you're an architect over other architects, where you get pulled in for the big problems or the really hard ones, and you're not necessarily managing people, you're mentoring people, you're still a senior or an individual contributor, but other people rely on you for help versus you are responsible for a team.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, some particularly if you're if you're interested in that kind of thing, go to a vendor.

Go to a vendor, go to a, I don't know, go to a cloud company, something like that.

Because those companies have senior level technology people don't think that you're gonna become a senior level technology people person working for a retail store for the most part, because those positions, they just don't exist.

They just they're just not there.

And so Well, and a good way to find that out, again, is to do more networking with senior engineers on your team or talk to your manager.

Yeah.

And say, you know, my goal is to be a distinguished architect.

I saw someone on LinkedIn that had that title, and it sounded really cool.

And I see what they do.

And their job looks awesome.

And I think that's what I want to be at the pinnacle of my career.

How can I get there?

And your manager should be honest and be like, hey, we don't have that one.

You might wanna look for else.

But is there experience we can give you here to help you grow in that direction?

Yeah.

Yep.

I actually held that title once, Alexis.

Really?

Yeah.

Cisco.

That was that was my title as distinguished architect.

And then I went to work for all sorts of other companies that don't have that position.

And that's yeah.

It's kind of an odd thing.

But yeah.

So yeah.

I think advocating for yourself.

I think the whole idea of a personal brand, like you said, it's not just what you post on LinkedIn.

It's not just what you write in blog posts, although I think being publicly visible, even if nobody reads it is still important.

And people struggle with that concept.

Why should I wrote blog posts if only five people are gonna read them?

Because you should?

I think about it, I think about it kind of like a online portfolio.

So if you think about it, like, if I was going to look for a new hair salon, or I want to try a new restaurant, or I need to go to a mechanic, the first thing that I do is I either type in Google or I pull up Yelp, and I read reviews, and I look at photos, and I look at videos, and I I see what other experiences people have had with that business before I even decide to make a call for an appointment or walk in the door to check it out myself.

And your online presence or your online portfolio, your resume, your LinkedIn, whatever it is if you have a website, a blog site, it's your work, your business.

Just like Yelp, the hair salon, right?

Your digital presence is your portfolio of your work.

And like you said Russ, there's a ton of different ways you can showcase that outside of your resume that are searchable, whether that's through LinkedIn, whether that's through Google, whether that's through YouTube, whether it's through GitHub when you're posting content on any of those platforms, they come up in search results.

So, recruiters can find you and you might get your help.

You might get yourself exposed to opportunities that you're not even aware of.

Yep.

Absolutely.

I think there's also a ton of kind of on the personal branding concept still, there's a ton of value.

Like, you mentioned Alexis, like, are you always the guy that wears a hat?

And I'm wearing a hat right now.

And I I happen to wear I happen to just in our stand up meetings, I happen to wear a hat.

It's just what I do.

I don't I don't know.

It's just a habit that I have.

I'm a remote worker and so it's fine.

But, but the thing is, there's other things that that can be part of you that are just just what you do.

And and arguably, you know, what you wear, you know, that's an that's a great example of something really visible.

It's easy.

But, like, how you how you show up, meaning, when when someone asks you for help, how do you respond?

Is it based on how much that person can do for you?

Or is it based on what your what your values are?

Is it, like, are you always very straight up with them and very, like, to the point?

And and maybe that's you and that's what you have to be, but be that way with everybody.

Or maybe you're, like, really kind or maybe you're just, like, really, you know, you're someone that no matter what, someone can ask you questions and and they know that you're not gonna come down on them for, oh, why didn't you already know that or whatever.

Like, whatever it is, that the way that like, that to me, it doesn't and usually, that's almost 90% I would say more than 90% of the time.

That's when you're operating with your peers.

And it it might it might feel like, well, that's not gonna get me anywhere.

But in my career, it absolutely has gotten me places.

Because first of all, it puts me in the habit of being the person that I wanna be all the time.

And then when when people people want to work with you, and then when you go to do these extracurricular things, people are like, oh, yeah.

That guy's cool.

That girl's cool.

Like, yeah.

Yeah.

I wanna like, to me, that is as far as personal brand.

I know them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I like them, and that would be yeah.

I'll I'll do some extra some extra stuff too because I like working with them.

That is worth, I think, a lot of effort to Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Who who you wanna be the person that when you go to a conference, people want to go to lunch and dinner with you at work.

That's that's what you want to be.

Because because that's how you're gonna meet people and that's what you're gonna get, you know, you're gonna sorry to cut you off for us.

Go ahead.

I was gonna say, Tom, it's repeated.

It's not just you can't just be nice to one person or on one call or only on Tuesdays.

If you wear a hat every Tuesday no one's gonna remember it.

But, if you wear it on your daily stand up every day of the week and one day you don't wear your hat, the team's gonna be like, Tom, you good?

What happened today?

Even, you know, Russ, earlier we were talking about, good good managers that can tell when something's off.

Right?

Yeah.

You show up positive at work every single day and then one day you have a bad day and your energy is just way off or, you know, you make a nasty comment or you snap and someone's like, woah, that's not like you at all.

What's going on?' Right?

Those are the actions you want to cultivate because people have an overly positive experience with you.

So, when one thing happens that negative, when one thing happens that is negative, they're like, 'Woah, you good?

Yep, definitely true.

And don't make it all.

You know, you've said you've kind of said this, both of you kind of said this.

Don't make it about the transaction.

Make it about the person.

Transactional really all relationships are to some degree transactional, but no relationship should ever be purely transactional.

And the less transactional that it is to me, the more of a real relationship it is.

It's never about what I can give or take.

It's about the person.

And we don't do that very well in our industry, unfortunately.

It's just a sad well, if I get to know you, will you co author a book with me?

Will you do this?

Will you do that?

Will you give me content?

Like no.

That that's true, but there's huge opportunity in that.

It is really easy to stand out among network engineers.

Like, most of them are gonna be crusty.

They're gonna be, what do you want?

And I'm I'm I'm so scarred by my awful pain that I feel in my job that everybody is just my enemy.

Like, there's a ton of network engineers that do that.

And so it's pretty easy to stand out and just be not that.

Yeah.

And you will be remembered because everything around you is not that.

Yep.

And also if you get in, in with the community, I to put a generic term on it, the community or the technical community, most people who contribute or write or create content, we all kind of know each other and help each other and so if one person's working on something and you need something, people are more willing to help you because there is that give and take.

And also you feel like you know each other through reading each other's works or blogs or videos or whatever it is.

Yep, absolutely.

Okay, well I think this horse is dead.

I was gonna say Russ, I do, I do have a hard stop in ten minutes, but It's fine.

While we're on the subject of community, if we want to talk a little bit about Oh, sure.

Go right ahead.

Is that okay?

Yeah, go right ahead.

I didn't know if you were okay with me.

No, I'm always fine.

It's fine.

So Russ and I are both speaking, on an event that is going to be held in late October.

So I don't think I ever introduced myself, actually.

But I'm a technical evangelist at a a company called Megaport.

And what Megaport is really good at is connecting data centers to the cloud.

It's kind of what we became known for.

And I joined Megaport in October as a technical evangelist, and I came from Cisco.

So, my whole background was networking.

And, when I came over to Megaport it was all cloud this, cloud that, hybrid multi, cloud everything.

And so, I was a little bit out of my element I had a lot of learning to do and when I did my initial scoping of things I wanted to work on I noticed that there was a lot of resources to learn cloud, there was a lot of resources to learn networking, but there wasn't a lot in between.

And, increasingly what we're seeing with a lot of our customers, with even my customers at Cisco, is that network engineers are being told that now you're managing these cloud connections because they are network connections into the cloud.

And, you've either never done it before, you don't have experience, you don't know if you're doing it correctly, but you got to figure it out and there's not a lot of resources online.

And so, my brainchild, when I came to Megaport was to hold this big virtual event with all of our partners whether that's VARs, cloud providers, you know senior engineers in our network to come and host an event to help all engineers at any technical level be better at connecting into the cloud.

So, it is a free event for the community, there are there actually isn't a standard megaport demo included.

We wanted it to be completely vendor agnostic.

We've got people from all of the cloud providers, all of the big data center operators.

We've got people like Russ coming to present as well, and it's gonna be a really great time.

If y'all would like to come, it's gonna be great.

Yeah, I think it'll be awesome.

So great.

Okay.

So Alexis, where can people get in touch with you?

I don't know if you have a blog or anything.

But where can people get in touch with you if they want to or follow you or whatever the case is?

I don't have a blog.

But if you look me up, I'm on LinkedIn, Alexis Berthoff, or Instagram or TikTok at digital dot b y t e.

Okay.

Cool.

And Tom, go ahead and say it.

LinkedIn.

Alright.

We'll see.

We got it.

We got past that.

Also, we should since we started this, we we should keep keep this going.

Who let's name the plant.

If you wanna name the plant, you can find me on LinkedIn or Russ.

And if you have a cool name, then we will name the plant your name.

Man, I should've put my name That's just weird.

You should.

You should you should you should make a suggestions and and, you know, see where it goes.

Alright.

Cool.

Alright.

I'm Russ White.

You can find me here at the hedge.

You can find rule11.tech.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

On x, every now and then, not a ton, but I do log in from time to time.

Most time, once a week when I publish a new hedge, that's when I actually log in.

And so we know that we live in an attention driven economy, and we thank you for spending time with us and giving us your attention.

And we hope that you had a lot of fun going all the way to the bitter end of this poor podcast, and we will catch you next time.