Dewan: 0:00

We had a Toastmasters club within the IBM office I worked at it was IBM Canada Markham Lab and what Toastmasters does is it creates a very welcoming environment for you to practice public speaking, where you pick a topic and there's also a goal, like starting with 10 speeches you do, or 10 talks you do, and then your peers would give you feedback feedback like how many times you're doing um, so there's an um counter. Toastmasters creates that environment where you're not scared to talk because everyone else is learning with you and it's not judgmental at all.

William: 0:47

Welcome back to another show. I'm your host, william, coming to you with a somber heart, actually, with heavy rain clouds over my head. Why? Why, you ask. Well, in a twist that has left many of us reaching for the tissue box, canada has officially bested the United States in the Four Nations Face-Off Championship. Yes, my friends, many, many tears were shed, many dreams were just dashed, and somewhere in Canada there's a Canadian goalie by the name of Jordan Bennington who is probably still celebrating right now. I don't cry over sports, though, so I didn't reach for the tissue box. I'm an adult. What about you, yvonne? Did you cry last night after the loss?

Eyvonne: 1:37

I was so, if you can't tell, by my surroundings, for those of you that are on the list thing, I'm business traveling, so leading that glamorous life. So I was in the rare occasion of my entire team all in one place having dinner, and so it was on TV, but I do have to say that it was not at the top of my field of vision. And then when somebody pointed it out I was like, well, that's what we get for talking mean to the Canadians. So it was hard to feel too bad. I love our Canadian friends to the north, so yay for them.

William: 2:14

I do too, and I do like their national anthem. I do like the Canadian national anthem, by the way, and I like the US national anthem too. I think they're both great. I wouldn't boo either of them, just for the record. So joining us today is diwan ahmed. Um, how are you doing today, after your country captured that incredible victory last night, doing?

Dewan: 2:36

well doing well. It's a friday, a lot of reasons to celebrate and I give you a heads up that I might overwhelm with you a lot of sorry, um, following the event, um, but yeah, it's cold, it's snowy, it's perfectly Canadian, right here?

William: 2:53

when you, when you say snowing, I feel like back. You know, in Kentucky, here we have had so much snow and ice lately like it's probably been the most snowy winter that I've seen in Kentucky and probably like what Yvonne like the last 10 years.

Eyvonne: 3:09

Yeah, it's, it's been a bit and, um, like I said, I've been business traveling this week and a couple of weeks ago, and both weeks I have been in a warm, sunny part of the state and, um, my, my, my dear husband has been at home with kids who have been out of school for the entire week. So after I get off my red eye in the morning, I'm going to have to be nice to the household.

William: 3:35

I thought you would just walk in the house and go right to sleep. Well, I love you. Good night.

Eyvonne: 3:40

That may be the nicest thing I could do for them, frankly.

William: 3:45

Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us today, Duan. So you have a pretty awesome, I think, journey and you work for an awesome company, and your journey originally started in mechanical electrical engineering.

Dewan: 4:02

Yes, one of the real engineer, the.

William: 4:03

Yes, one of the real engineerings yes, the real one, that you have to go to school for right. Imagine that you use a hard hat to do the jobs exactly certifications and all the you know, yeah, but you know, somehow you found yourself in tech, though, and I think your was your first tech company ibm officially yes. Found yourself in tech, though, and I think it was your first tech company IBM Officially yes, okay, so how did you move from electrical engineering to tech? Just out of curiosity? I think that's a cool move.

Dewan: 4:40

Yeah, yeah, it was out of necessity actually. So I did my Bachelor's of Engineering in Bangladesh and I was trying to pick a major, which is like you get your career but you also do some good for the world Fossil fuels diminishing and solar and wind all those do good for the planet. And then, once I moved to Canada in 2011, I realized that not a lot of industries care about renewable energy. Well, in Asia and Europe that's a much higher number of jobs and prospects and investments. But then here I was just struggling to find is there any like solar engineer jobs? There's like technician jobs, but not research level or professional renewable energy engineering jobs. There's like technician jobs, but not research level or professional renewable energy engineering jobs. And also, I had to go back to school just like a same immigrant story all over.

Dewan: 5:33

And then when I was at Ryerson there was I joined IEEE Ryerson. One thing I was trying to do is create as much network as possible to see if we know someone in the industry, and one of my friend's friend was working at IBM that time. So I was taking my Java course I think there are like two courses in electrical engineering for computer science and I happened to be okay with Java. And then he said, hey, we're looking for someone who's good at Java. I said, of course I'm not going to get the job, but it doesn't hurt to apply, so let me apply. And then I got a call. Um I think I took a taxi, uh, reached to the ibm office like three hours before the interview. Um, everything went well, and then that I never came out of that wonderful tech carrier.

William: 6:24

Love it. That's awesome. And you so, starting at IBM, you're basically kind of like pure software developer, software engineer, but even then you made another kind of pivot. Is that where you found your true passion of CICD, automation Kubernetes, kind of like infrastructure and managing infrastructure? Is that correct?

Dewan: 6:53

That also came out of necessity. So for four years I was focusing on Java and back-end development, some cloud also, that's abstract. So then what happened was I was moved to a different team at ibm and every time I was trying to say I'm a back-end developer, the, the partner or whoever was the, the lead in the whole business unit, was saying here's our full stack developer. If there's one thing that I absolutely don't get, that is front-end development. Like you asked me to do JavaScript, I get totally blank.

Dewan: 7:28

So then I realized that if it goes like that, I'll soon be out of job. Like I have to find some specialty. What can I do? So then I started watching. Somehow some of the KubeCon videos started floating on my YouTube and I said okay, this sounds okay, like it's not front-end, so that's a good thing, but it also seems to be in demand and every time you say DevOps, people's eyes seem to like light up. So then I started learning, like Docker, kubernetes, openshift, and one thing I did was every time I learned something, I published a content, I wrote an article and before I realized, within my few teams at IBM, I was the OpenShift expert and that's where I kind of found my de-DevOps expert. Probably I scratched the surface of DevOps, but I was labeled as the DevOps expert within those teams.

Eyvonne: 8:28

Well, and one of the trends that I've noticed as well is that when you're actively learning, that's a great time to really start creating content, because, if you think about it, the market for beginner content is always larger than the market for deep, deep expertise content, just because there are fewer people that have reached that level, and so it's a great way to build a brand, to build a community with people in your similar career stage or technical journey or technical journey, and it's really a way to establish yourself and demonstrate, if not total competence, a desire and willing to learn and grow, which, in this industry, is really more important than what you've actually mastered technically, because it's always changing. So I think a lot of people sit back and go well, I don't know enough to to create educational content, but actually at the beginning is the best place to start yeah, you got a good following by, so you were early on in the content scene of on with.

William: 9:43

uh, yeah, you knowvonne had a podcast, basically the Network Collective that she founded with a few others, and it was pretty early maybe not early early podcast days, but it was when podcasts were really starting to get popular and mainstream. Just out of curiosity, yvonne did that help you with like your brand recognition as a person, like kind of put you on the map help you with, like your brand recognition as a person, like kind of put you on the map.

Eyvonne: 10:07

Well, honestly, I think, looking back on it in the moment, I didn't realize how much it was helping. Like I still meet people years later who recognize me from that podcast and I had no idea. So I think that's. The other thing is like when you're creating content, you don't really it's. It's when you speak at a conference, you have a sense of how many people in the room or how many people are listening.

Eyvonne: 10:29

When you're creating content, putting it on the internet, you don't really get a sense and you may be like well, you know, only a hundred people saw that, but if you were standing in front of a room full of a hundred people speaking, that would feel significant, and so I think, like for me, that's that's one thing I wish I would have understood better is, um, the impact that was having in ways that I didn't see. Um, and and I think you know, for those of us that are creating content, it's good to remember that and just keep that in our mind that it feels like a slog sometimes, um, but it's, it's good to keep going.

William: 11:09

Yeah, and so another. So another thing I read on on your, your blog. The one was you, uh, you joined Toastmasters club to build up your chops for public speaking. And for those not familiar, uh, with Toastmasters, um, would you, you mindastmasters, would you mind? You know just kind of, you know going through what the value is and you know, maybe, why you needed it at the time.

Dewan: 11:35

Yeah, yeah for sure. So fortunately, we had a Toastmasters club within the IBM office I worked at it was IBM Canada Markham Lab and what Toastmasters does is it creates a very welcoming environment for you to practice public speaking, where you pick a topic and there's also a goal, like starting with like 10 speeches you do or 10 talks you do, and then your peers would give you feedback. Feedback like how many times you're doing um so there's an um counter and how you start your speech and how you use the three-point rule. I keep realizing that you can't see my fingers like I did the thumbs up, but it's out of the mic. So Toastmasters creates that environment where you're not scared to talk because everyone else is learning with you. You're not scared to talk because everyone else is learning with you, and it's not judgmental at all. So feedback is a gift. Basically, that's what we kept saying at Toastmasters.

Eyvonne: 12:32

Well, and I'm coming off of an event this week where there have been opportunities for folks to step into roles where they can speak and in a friendly environment.

Eyvonne: 12:43

But we were kind of debriefing afterwards and part of public speaking is you just got to get in the reps. You've got to get in the habit of saying things out loud that always sound different when they come out of your mouth than they sound in your head. And there is a physical thing that happens in your body when you stand in front of a group of people that impacts your breathing and you may get a little sweaty and all of those things, and that's just something you got to learn to manage and you learn to manage it. Friendly environment to do that and get some of those reps. That way, when you show up in a public place, you know, in front of maybe an audience that isn't as friendly, you've got enough experience to manage all those things, because I think sometimes people are very afraid of it, but I mean it's just a thing that you have to practice Totally agree, I totally agree with that.

William: 13:44

one have to practice. Totally agree, I totally agree with that. One Go ahead, alman.

Dewan: 13:48

Yeah, like it doesn't matter if you're starting your career or you have been doing public speaking for 20, 30 years.

Dewan: 13:56

I've heard a couple of times where you have these internal speaking groups at some companies and then, let's say, some tech executive who have been talking for 20 years, when they're welcomed at these, these practice speaking, they said no, I don't need to speak, like I've been doing talks for 20 years. I wouldn't say that's a very smart approach because, regardless of how many years you have been doing it, there's always something you can improve. And when, when leadership starts that trend that even we need practice, we need to get out there and make ourselves vulnerable and be open to feedback, I think that sets a fantastic trend. So that's something I have seen both at my current company and IBM, where leadership is always open to feedback. They are there to improve. So, whether it's public speaking, whether it's writing blog, they are there to to improve. So, whether it's public speaking, whether it's writing blog, they reach out to like almost anyone if they need help. That hey, like I'm doing a talk or I'm trying to do this, these slides, can I get a feedback?

William: 14:57

I love that. That's so good because it's just yeah, even if you've been doing it so long. One thing I've noticed is like, uh, times change, people change and like what is what is valuable and like the way that you present yourself also change. You know changes over time. Like one thing I've noticed in particular is like even at these big big tech conferences or big things, you know big speaking slots, lots of people like injecting like a little bit of like light-hearted comedy, like not taking it so seriously, not being so rigid and so processional from beginning to end. Um is really important these days where it didn't used to be that way, because you, you really have to. You want to find a way to engage your audience and keep their attention. Well, what better way to keep the attention of an audience is, you know, by teaching them something, providing value but also making it entertaining, light-hearted, maybe a little comedy, you know, throw little jokes in there.

Eyvonne: 15:58

You know it doesn't have to be unprofessional but doesn't have to be so rigid, as well and and that's a skill in and of itself right, Finding the right level of humor without taking it too far, without being offensive, and be slightly self-deprecating, without being over the top right. There's a sweet spot there and a lot of that. It just takes practice. It's just practice, like everything else.

Dewan: 16:30

Also, our audience have changed a lot with millennials, gen Zs, the way you present a concept. So I routinely use memes on my slides, gifs or GIFs, however you say it. So before maybe, if you look at 15 or 20 years before, like the slides were very monotonous, like there's text, probably some pictures. This is a slide you just presented, but now it has become an art that where are the memes? Like, if you have a slide without some nice memes, then something is missing.

Eyvonne: 17:04

Well, and you can spice up a very boring topic. I had a team member ask him to do a presentation on an internal process that he's particularly good at. That I was like, well, I would love for the team to adopt his approach. And he did that right. He put together a slide deck and he interspersed some memes and threw in some lighthearted humor. And it also makes it easier to absorb the content right when you add a little humor and keep people engaged. So, yeah, it's pretty valuable.

William: 17:38

Yeah. So this whole thing in and of itself has made me jump to new heights to engage. I wonder if I can share my screen on here. This is going on YouTube, so if you're listening in, you're not going to be able to see this unless you go to the YouTube and watch. But I've gone to like drastic efforts to make things a little more entertaining. Let me see if I can. It's not going to let me share my whole screen, but basically what I did is I took.

William: 18:07

So I was asked to give a talk on Microsoft Azure and I knew the bunch that was going to be there. I was like, okay, I've got to spice this up somehow. What can I do? So what I did was I basically did a like Snoop Dogg was in the news at the time. You know the rapper, and he was at the Olympics. He was at all these things doing all these commercials and I was like, okay, I'm gonna throw a Snoop Dogg in there and it was like the Snoop Dogg block party.

William: 18:33

So it started off with like, okay, an Azure V net. You know it was Snoop Dogg's neighborhood and then when you get into that neighborhood, you have these subnets and the subnets are different houses in the neighborhood and you know. But then Snoop Dogg doesn't just want to stay in his own neighborhood, he wants to go to another neighborhood where the other parties are going on. So how did he connect from this neighborhood to that neighborhood? And okay, the highway is one type of construct and the backroads are another type of construct.

William: 19:00

And so I wrote you know, I did this whole thing and it was maybe like one of the most success and I I didn't know how that was going to land. I was like, okay, I'm definitely taking this way too far, like I'm having way too much fun with this, but people absolutely loved it. They thought it was great. I've had a few people actually reach out and ask for the slides or if I could like record and put it on the internet, and I'm like, uh, I don't know if I want to put myself in a big pit.

Eyvonne: 19:25

So props to bringing in the cultural references. Now you need to do one for GCP, just saying.

William: 19:32

That's not a bad idea. Yeah, there we go.

Dewan: 19:35

You're a gifted storyteller, william, because when you're saying that I could visualize like the neighborhood and then, walking across, I could see like some barbecue happening and then now you're gonna go to the different neighborhood, so you are.

Eyvonne: 19:48

If you can throw in some clips of snoop dog in the olympics, especially the equestrian events, like you, get bonus points well, I'd actually.

William: 19:55

so I took pictures of snoop dog and I removed the background and like put them in like a data center and put them in all these places in the slides so people could visualize it. And maybe, yeah, it was. There's so many cool tools out there to you know. It used to be like you had to like know photoshop really well to do some removing background, simple things like that, and now you have tools like canva. It makes it so easy. In like a minute you can remove a background, use AI upscaling to make the image better quality, just fill in pixels that weren't there with the image. It's pretty wild, yeah.

William: 20:37

But anyhow, I think the next place that we wanted to go with this we kind of talked about was and again, you're a gifted writer, you've written a lot and you've given a lot of presentations, so I was reading a lot in your blog. But one thing that you hit on was something I think is it's one of those things where a lot of folks keep the truth inside but they say something different. So you basically make the statement and sort of debunk the whole statement of OK, job titles don't matter and you share an alternate viewpoint here that like, basically, once, once you reach like a certain pay threshold, you get that pay. You know that you really want to find happiness and joy and value in working for the company. And then you do want the right title and you want stability and you do want the chain of command, like the management, to recognize that hey, you're doing a good job and we're happy with the work you're doing. It's reciprocal, you know. Do you want to expand on that, if you don't mind?

Dewan: 21:54

typical, you know. Do you want to expand on that if you don't mind? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm typically very open with what I think and what I write and it comes from my own experience and it might be wrong, I might be right and people have different perspectives. So all I want to do is put my perspective out there and probably other people can also feel the connection.

Dewan: 22:12

So when I came to Canada, I had to go back to school, like redo the entire engineering school, like imagine trying to like spend four years for, say, finishing your bachelor's. I had to finish that in six because I was working three part-time jobs. I did 32 months of internship at IBM, most of it because I had to pay my bills, because I was a mature student. So when I started my first full-time career at IBM, I was eight years behind compared to my age. So I had a challenge that I'm eight years behind. Now I have to catch up. So I have to run that much faster to be at the same level. Of course, there's all this LinkedIn saying that age doesn't matter and whatnot, but I know it matters for me. So that's why I had to run faster and when I'm running faster, I'm working harder. I need to see what are the metrics of success. Of course, pay is important. You have to pay your bills.

Dewan: 23:18

Titles also matter because title says that the work I'm doing is getting recognized and it's like a game You're going to the next level of the game, so next level of your career. It's like a game You're going to the next level of the game, so next level of your career. So without the title, I don't see what I'm working towards or where I am compared to my peers who didn't have to go behind eight years. So I think that's why titles matter. And oftentimes you'll see people who say titles don't matter. They come from a privileged place, let's say a CEO, or let's say a distinguished engineer. Of course it doesn't matter for them because they don't need the title. Even if you see, like on Zoom or Riverside, I have my title there. It's not to brag or boast, it's because it really matters to me. I worked really hard, just like a lot of other people did. So that's why I'm very transparent to say that titles do matter.

Eyvonne: 24:11

There's a. So I'm if folks don't know, I'm a fan of rom-coms and Victorian movies, like that era of drama, and there's a line in this movie I think it's in the Gilded Age, is the show that it's in and there are these aristocratic ladies having a conversation and one of them says well, you know, money isn't everything. And the only person in the room that is, you know, less wealthy in the group is like, well, unless you don't have any, you know. And so that's that's what you're saying about titles as well, is it's easy to have achieved a certain degree of professional success and name recognition and then think, well, titles don't really matter. But as you're trying to establish yourself, or if you're looking for mobility to be between jobs, it can really matter.

Eyvonne: 25:03

And I think it's really important for us to be honest with ourselves about what we want and what we want to accomplish with our career and what it's going to take for us to get there. If you're in a place where you know you, really it's most important to you to feel like you're making a contribution. Well, that means you're going to be willing to be more flexible on salary and maybe more flexible on title. But if you want to get to a next level, then that title is going to really matter because it's imbued with a certain degree of capability and meaning that matters to people who may not know you, and so a lot of it is just self-awareness and where you want to go and knowing what matters to you. So there's not one right or wrong answer. It is important to know the answer for you, or you're not going to get where you want to go.

William: 26:00

Yeah, and if you're applying for a job, I mean, what is the first thing they're going to do? They're going to look at your past experience. Were you a senior engineer? Ok, you're. You're applying for a principal engineer engineer Okay, you're. You're applying for a principal engineer? Well, we don't want to hire a junior engineer or just a analyst or something they they want someone that is either a principal engineer or it's just an absolute rock star. Is you know somewhere close and skill set? Well, they're going to look at your resume. They're going to look back at your LinkedIn profile and all the places you've been and all those things you were talking about earlier.

William: 26:32

Your public contributions. Can you write well? Can you communicate well? Are you well-spoken? Do you understand? You know? All those things are really important on top of, obviously, doing the job and being able to write the code and, you know, get the work done. But it's not just one thing. I think these days that gets you that job. It's many things. It's, honestly, it's a combination of who you know too. Do you have someone within the company that can advocate for you and maybe get you that help, get at least an interview or get you a phone call, because even that's hard. These days.

William: 27:08

Actually speaking of that, you that's something you help folks with a lot, right, you help refine and give feedback on resumes, so they can kind of get ahead of that.

Dewan: 27:20

Yeah, that's something. Probably like 10 years ago I stopped all my social media and I thought I'm only going to spend time on LinkedIn. And then I started building my network there and then I also thought that if I start putting like seeds, probably that will grow into a nice tree and be beneficial for both me and someone else. So I just say, okay, how about I check someone's resume? I check someone's resume and then slowly, slowly, people started sending me their resumes and what I do is in my evenings and weekends I block off some time and then I review that.

Dewan: 28:00

My resume review is very simple. You connect with me on LinkedIn, you share your PDF resume. I do both anonymous and public resume reviews. If it's a public review, it gets a wide view. Other people are seeing it. If you don't want that, you say you take your name out from your resume, like make it anonymized, and I do an anonymous review. I think I've done close to 1,200 resume reviews over the last 10 years. This is completely pro bono. I don't take a dime. It's trying to help someone, but also a bit selfish from my end because I know if I help someone now when I need help and I didn't say if I need help, when I need help, because all of us at some point of our career will need some help then I have that extra person to reach out to. So that's a bit selfish on my end.

William: 28:48

I'm trying to help out as many people as I can because I know someday I'll need to reach out to some people reviewed because I I've reviewed I mean, I don't, I've reviewed like maybe 15 resumes in the past year and a half or something. I've helped some folks, maybe more, I don't know. More or less. Uh, and it's not reviewing a resume, isn't it? Just okay you once over it and done it takes a little bit of time, um, it's something that you know. That's, that's awesome of you to give, give back your time in that way.

Dewan: 29:32

It takes like 45 minutes because I do a pretty deep review. So I check out their GitHub, I check out their projects, pinned projects, non-pinned projects If it has a readme, if it doesn't, because most of them are like software developers. So I give feedback as if I was the hiring manager. I check their LinkedIn, so not just the resume, the things that come within the resume projects, because now people think that I can just upload my resume to ChatGPT and then it does a pretty good job. It does give you a review, but a year or two years before someone, especially a lot of people who worked at a company for 10 years and they forgot how to even write their resume or how to even like apply for a job, like that thing completely was blank. So I think all of us can take maybe 15 minutes out of our time and help someone you never know. You might need that help later on.

Eyvonne: 30:33

And getting a job is a skill that may not be aligned directly with the skills required to do the job, and I think you know yes, you know our general AI tooling is going to be able to give you some good feedback on.

Eyvonne: 30:52

You know how to write your resume, but the more ubiquitous those tools become, the more resumes are all going to start looking alike. I mean, they already do Right, and so you've got to find ways to differentiate yourself. Differentiate yourself, and it can be really helpful to have somebody look at your resume as a neutral third party and tell you what they see, because a lot of times you will telegraph things in your resume that you don't realize that you're saying, and to have somebody from the outside just take a look at that and say, hmm, I see this, this is what I see, is this what you intend to communicate or does this align to the kind of job that you're looking for? It can be incredibly helpful, because I don't think any of us see ourselves objectively. Now we can talk about whether some people see themselves more positively than they should and others see themselves more negatively than they should, but they, you know we don't see ourselves as somebody. You know that we don't know, so I think that could be really helpful.

Dewan: 31:58

Totally, totally. And I'll mention some of the patterns I've observed when reviewing resumes. Some people who are not, let's say, originally from North America, they put their entire life history in their resume. They have their passport number, their parents' names. In one resume I found blood group. So those are something, yes, the blood group as well. So those are the things that, when it comes to me, I can say please don't make these things public. The other common trends I've seen is putting Microsoft Office on their resume under skills. You're working in tech. Knowing Microsoft Office is not considered a skill. Also, putting Linux just as a keyword. I know Linux. I said what do you know about Linux? When you put Linux on a resume, it's expected that you know Linux in an administrative capacity, not once you logged into a Linux computer. So those are the things that, if your listeners are listening, check your resume if you have, especially if you have blood group on there. Please, please, don't keep it there.

William: 33:08

Wow, wow, yeah, that's intense, yeah it.

William: 33:12

Yeah.

William: 33:12

It's funny too because, like lately I've seen this, so it went from like it used to be what it, what is like acceptable to put on your resume, what is not, and when you had humans viewing it all the time, that was one thing, but now you have a lot of ai that's doing a lot of filtering of a lot of the noise and I think some things it does a good job with and some things it doesn't, and I think it makes it actually harder to get hired these days, from what I hear from the recruiters I talked to, because, um, ai is basically looking for specific things and what you have is folks that know that and they're gaming the system and they're updating their resume based on, like they'll take the job description, filter it through a GP, doing, you know, putting exactly what their skills are prescriptively on their resume.

William: 34:21

So that's an interesting time right now is how to how to gain the AI without being disingenuous or dishonest while at the same time disingenuous or dishonest, while at the same time, yeah, I, I don't know with a you know and and people approach it differently.

Eyvonne: 34:40

For for me, like resumes especially if you're working in an organization that has a formal hr screening department you know, really your resume is there to get you past that at the you know and to get you to an interview. And a lot of times I will review, just give a resume, a high level overview, but I really want to have a conversation with the person. Right, I want to see do they, especially, you know, in in roles where you're hiring people that are going to be customer facing, the most important thing, yeah, they've got to have the technical skills. They've also got to be able to carry a conversation. They've got to you know, they've got to be able to relate with you as a human being, because ultimately, that's what a lot of you know technical marketing and technical selling is. And so you, you also, like, have to think about it from the perspective of all the different stages that happen in hiring. One is like can can you get through the screening? Can you get past the HR person that that may not understand the technical work? And really they're doing a lot of pattern matching and keyword alignment, and then, if you're fortunate, you'll get an interview, and a lot of people don't think about that process and all the different stakeholders in that process and how to meet their needs to get through it.

Eyvonne: 36:09

One of the things I will say, though, is and I gave this advice to somebody who reached out to me in the last week or two asking you know, thinking about growing in their career and what's next, and you just cannot understate, you cannot overstate, the importance of networking and knowing people in the industry, and you do that, like what you're talking about, through LinkedIn. You do that through conferences and events. You do that through talking to the people you work with in parallel organizations, parallel organizations, and, um, that, that word of mouth, recommendation or referral is, is still, and, and I think will always be incredibly important, because we all have to filter somehow, and if you know a great person who recommends somebody who they say is a great person, that um, that, that that puts them at the top of the heap, just by default. There's no guarantee, but at least it gets you seen, and, in this world, being seen is 75% of the battle.

William: 37:23

Yeah, especially with the saturation of software developers, DevOps practitioners so many folks are coming out of college now. I mean, when I started working in tech, not everybody in the planet wanted to work in tech. I was a smaller group of people, but it's just grown and it's grown and it's grown and it's grown.

William: 37:43

Like I have cousins and second cousins and friends, and everybody seems to. I think there's this thing of like okay, you know, tech is one of those jobs where I don't have to. You know, I'm not going out and fixing plumbing every day, or I'm not going out to these remote locations or driving a truck or having to be on the go all the time, or, you know, I could potentially have the option to work from home and it gives me a better work-life balance and the pay is also not terrible. So that's, there's a lot of saturation in the market right now. There's just a lot of folks to go around and in some disciplines there's a need for jobs. It's hard to find skilled folks, but in other disciplines there's a lot of good folks going around and there's just not enough jobs. So, yeah, supply-demand 101. So another thing you make a strong case for which I thought was you know, it kind of hit home for me as well, because I'm so you're a developer advocate, I'm kind of like a tech evangelist, so we kind of do the same thing, kind of different. I really don't know what the difference is at the end of the day between these two things.

William: 38:53

But uh, you, you make this this strong case that, um, you know, as far as brand is concerned like when you're putting on that harness io zip up that you have on like your personal brand is actually attached to the company brand then you know you, you're going and you're advocating for this product and that means you really have to love and believe in the product. Because if you didn't, and if the product was not a good product and you you got a lot of folks to use it and then it just wasn't good for them, then you tank your reputation and that means you can't continue being a good advocate of technology in general and for the companies you work for in the future, because your reputation can and will take hits. But I think that's a really good like the way that you, um spelled that out. I was just like yeah, yeah, this, you said that perfectly. You want to. You want to talk about that a little bit why that's important.

Dewan: 39:52

Yeah, I think so. We're not in the business of selling shoes. If it was that simple, we'd just say, hey, look at these nice shoes, it's bendable, it's waterproof, and then just wear a shoe, okay, next day. Hey, now, look at this hike boot or trail boot. We're in the business of selling very complex technical products and we first have to use that complex technical products to explain that, why it does the job and why it's beneficial to a group of people developers who can very easily sense if someone is lying. Just because of the complexity of things you can't fake. And also you mentioned about your authenticity, your reputation, there are specific technologies which I don't believe in. I don't want to name those technologies, but I won't work in those technologies just because it won't be genuine.

Dewan: 40:47

I believe in the products that we're offering. Like I've used actually Harness CICD before. I took on my role as part of the interview and it seemed this is fantastic, this is much easier than Jenkins or this gives me so many ways of advanced deployment for Kubernetes. Yes, I do see myself advocating for that and I think this is important. A lot of companies. They confuse developer advocates with influencers. I can keep going on that, so I don't need to start on that. But you have to be technical in order to advocate for a technical product. That's a heel I'm willing to die on. So that's why I feel that you, you have to be authentic in what you evangelize, if you use the role you have.

Eyvonne: 41:44

Well, and I think the thing that you have to do as a technical person showing up representing a company in the marketplace is that you have to bring some kind of value to the community. Either you have to educate them on a thing that they didn't know about, you have to be helping them solve their problems. You have to provide some sort of meaningful information or a perspective that's going to help them, and you can do that lots of different ways. You can do that being deeply technical. You can do that showing up as a learner. You can do that saying hey, here are the big picture things that I've seen in my world that may be helpful to you, that may give you a window into how the industry works that brings value to people.

Eyvonne: 42:34

And the tension that a lot of technical marketing folks face is how do I represent my company well and also show up authentically to my community? And sometimes those things are intention and, frankly, if they're never intention, you're failing one side or the other, and part of the job is to stand in that gap and to speak in both directions in ways that represent the other side, and it's super important and that's how you it's in those moments when you actually grow in credibility, even if you feel like either your company or the community is against you, depending on how it's going in the moment.

Dewan: 43:24

That's such an important point you mentioned A lot of times we confuse that if we talk about our product, are we going to be all like he's trying to sell, or he or she's trying to sell something. It's not. Someone's there is facing a problem and then you're there to help solve. I love my sales colleagues, like they help pay my bills. But developer advocates are a bit different. When we go out there we're not trying to sell, so in that way, someone in the audience, they don't have that pressure that oh like they're there just so that they can pitch their product or sell their product. We are there as, as yvonne mentioned, that we are genuinely trying to help, whether it's using an oss tool, whether it's using a product, but it should help you at the end.

William: 44:15

if it doesn't, we are both wasting our time yeah, I think some one thing I've seen a lot lately is I mean, there's certain companies out there that will see someone with like a ton of followers and they're kind of a maybe like a micro influencer of some sort. They've just made content, they've built a big following and they'll hire them, or try to hire them, and then basically say, okay, you're only gonna basically talk about our product strategy. Now you go out and just talk about us only and use that platform. That's why we hired you. We kind of bought you for your influence and you can't you know, we don't like it.

William: 44:50

When you talk about other stuff, you know you need to cut that out and that might have like a very short-term gain, extremely short-term but that person will end up becoming what is referred to in all the circles I see as a vendor shill and that's their life and they will start losing credibility and then they'll start losing that audience that they worked so hard to build.

Eyvonne: 45:14

And then the value of their personal brand declines, which means their value to the people that hired them declined, and they've created this negative cycle as opposed to, you know, giving people a voice and letting them show up as their authentic selves. And look, there have to be boundaries, like you know, like it's fine to be, like, hey, we really don't want you commenting on politics and being super vocal on certain very hot button issues. You know, if you're going to be a brand advocate, at the same time, if we fell short somewhere, like it's, we have to own it.

William: 45:55

right, I kind of interrupted you, william, sorry no, you, yeah, I mean that's perfect and like it's just such an I mean we I was talking to someone a few months ago that it was kind of fell into this category where they went to work somewhere and the basically the, the product marketing folks were basically like, okay, we're gonna write what you say. Now they literally wanted to write this person's like, give them a script for everything that they produced personally and professionally on all their social media platforms. And they were like, no, I'm not doing that, this is not what I signed up for. And yeah, I mean I guess that kind of shows because I've seen a lot of different product teams out there and you know product management isn't easy.

William: 46:44

You know you're, you're ultimately gauge like the success of the product team is, you know, making sure that you're building something that is useful to the population, and then you can find a way to get that market fit, to make it sticky, to get those new features used, to get traction. So you're, you know you want to do everything that you can possibly do to make that happen. But at the same time, you don't want to do like to me that the whole like, oh, hire an influencer and make them say X, y and Z, that's, first of all, it's a shortcut, because it's not about the product at all. You're just looking for a short term win, yeah. And second of all, I mean I don't think that ever is going to end well usually. I mean maybe sometimes it does, but yeah, yeah that's sorry.

Eyvonne: 47:26

Go ahead, yvonne. Oh, I was just going to say at the end of the day, most of our systems run on trust. You know, and you have to have trust with the individual like developer, advocate, technical marketer, and their company Like the company, has to trust that they're gonna show up well. And your responsibility in there is to show up well and to use, like, some wisdom and discretion but also be yourself. But ultimately, what you're also trying to build is trust between yourself and a community and a brand and a community, and I think we don't talk enough about that. You know the economy of trust, that we have to have to get things done. So now, duan, go ahead.

Dewan: 48:08

Totally agree with both of what you said. I think a lot of times and we have, like developer advocates, have been guilty of that is we say we only will talk about the pure open source version. If I even mention about my product or my company, I'll be doomed. That's one extreme. The other extreme is like only talking about product features and thinking about how I can convert all the meetup attendees into paying customers. The ideal balance is somewhere in the middle. At the end, harness is paying my bills, so I have to think that what I'm doing, how it's adding value to harness. Now, of course, it doesn't have to be short-term gain, whereas I'm just trying to scan badges and make them paying customers. This is a long-term gain where people who have never heard about the company if I go out there with this hoodie, now they hear about this. So this is brand awareness. The other thing is I have to genuinely provide value. Without that, they don't have sort of choices like, whether it's devops tools, cic tools, everything has 10 different choices yeah, such a good point there.

William: 49:15

Yeah, so like, basically, what you said was hey, imagine that it is a good thing to have a balance, to not go extreme one way and not go extreme in the other way. Imagine that having a balance would be, could be valuable in both directions.

Eyvonne: 49:30

You mean we're not going to swing the pendulum from one side to as hard as we can to the other?

William: 49:36

Hopefully not. Not everybody on this call anyway.

Eyvonne: 49:41

That's right.

William: 49:42

So I guess the last thing I know we're kind of getting, we're kind of going a little long here. At one point I said that we were going to try and make these 30 minutes, which is just too hard. But you're a DevOps Days organizer, halifax, yeah, halifax. So how did that start and how's it going?

Dewan: 50:04

So after pandemic or right at the middle of pandemic, I moved from Toronto to Moncton, new Brunswick so this is Atlantic Canada for provinces and I tried to find meetups. There was absolutely no tech meetups, no tech events, but there were people like working in tech, mostly like remote jobs and then one of the other developer advocate. She was also in Halifax and we started talking that why don't we set something up here? So we had a few options whether to start something from scratch or whether to bring something which is already well-recognized, well-reputed. So DevOps Days was an easy choice. Like they have the whole setup done, from websites to branding and everything.

Dewan: 50:49

So we reached out and they are fantastic people Like, if you're thinking about like starting a DevOps Days, like I haven't seen a more friendly bunch of people than the maintainers and the core team of DevOps Days. So I reached out and last year was the first year and whoever has hosted conferences or events, you can imagine how the first year is. But thankfully we're able to pull it off and we're planning DevOps Days Halifax 2025. So if you're looking to promote your brand to more than a few thousand tech professionals in Atlantic Canada, halifaxdevorg. We'll also publish about our CFP beautiful Atlantic Canada during summer. So more information on the website.

William: 51:37

Awesome, yeah, you heard it here first folks, and I'll definitely plug that in the show notes as well with any other links here. So, yeah, thank you. I just want to thank you so much for being so just free with your time. You know, we've kind of recorded pretty long here. Really appreciate the time. And for folks that don't know you, where can they find you online? You said LinkedIn.

Dewan: 52:03

You're not on the other social platforms at this point I have a profile on x slash Twitter, but I'm just a mere observer there. So, devanahamedcom, that's my blog. All the links are there. Linkedin is where I live. Basically, I spend most of my waking hours there. So, yeah, that's probably the best place to find me.