Tech Journey Continues with Manuel Martinez | Episode 009

Career Downloads: Manuel Martinez’s Tech Journey Continues

In this episode of Career Downloads, we dive back into the fascinating career of our host, Manuel Martinez, as he shares the second half of his tech journey. Get ready for an engaging ride through the ups and downs of his professional life, packed with valuable lessons and insider tips!

Key Points:

1. From Server Manager to Value-Added Reseller (VAR)
2. Mastering automation and orchestration
3. The journey to VMware certifications
4. Multiple attempts to join VMware – persistence pays off!
5. Leveling up presentation skills for executive audiences
6. Transitioning to AWS and embracing cloud technologies

Highlights:

• Manuel’s hilarious garage office setup during COVID-19 lockdowns
• The importance of asking qualifying questions in client meetings
• How to negotiate salary and prepare for interviews at big tech companies

Career Lessons:

• Embrace continuous learning and upskilling
• Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks, including pay cuts for growth opportunities
• Develop both technical and soft skills for career advancement
• Network and leverage connections for new opportunities
• Master the art of negotiation for better compensation

What’s Next:

Stay tuned for future episodes where Manuel will share more insights from his tech career and bring on exciting guests to share their stories!

🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share your thoughts on this episode. Your feedback helps us bring you more valuable content!

#CareerDownloads #TechCareers #ITJourney #CloudComputing #VMware #AWS #CareerAdvice #PodcastNotes

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Career Downloads. Unfortunately, you’re still stuck with having to learn about me and my career and kind of how I navigated. So we’re going to go on through and continue on with the second half of my career and come with some of the things I learned along the way, things I wish I would have known sooner, things I might have done differently. I do have other guests lined up, so those recordings are coming up. So again, we’ll get back to kind of refreshing and bringing on a different guest for all the new episodes.

So when we kind of left off on the last one, I was working at the college as a Server Manager and decided that at that point I really didn’t want to continue to go down the management route and it might be a good idea for me to start and I started looking at other opportunities. So one of the contacts that I made there while at the college was a friend of mine by the name of Chance. So he’s come up in another episode and one of the things is during our conversation of working together at the college, we had talked about wanting to do more architecture level type of work, you know, being able to do a lot of the implementations from the get-go. So that was something that was really fun and interesting. I’ve done a lot of migrations, done a lot of configuring current environments and kind of getting them up to speed. That was fun and challenging, but I really liked going through and setting up new environments.

So he had reached out to me. He had left a while back and went over to a VAR, which is a value-added reseller. So they resold equipment, you know, a lot of Cisco gear. They were big NetApp, VMware, and Cisco UCS shop. And you know, he thought that I might be a good fit. So he had gone over, was doing a lot of networking for new companies and asked if it was something that I’d be interested in, you know, based on conversation that we had had while working together. And it was something that really piqued my interest, right? They were looking for somebody here in the Las Vegas area to do more on the server infrastructure side. So I decided to go through and, you know, put in an application and see what came about of that.

So that was really fun. Apart from just the interview process was a little bit different. So the company was based out of St. Louis. They had just opened up an office here in Las Vegas. And again, we re looking to kind of grow that from a lot of the clientele here they had was, was in the gaming industry. So they would fly down often. So when I was scheduling my interview, it was always in person. We went through and there were a couple of interviews where I had gone through and met with different people. So it was repeated, not really a panel, but multiple people interviewing just to kind of, you know, make sure I was a good fit. I did talk to a recruiter. And as part of that, I did the very technical interview. And then once the technical interview was done, we went over and afterwards I had met up with them and we’d go out to dinner.

And I still, even though it wasn’t part of the official interview, it was still part of an interview process, right? They were really looking to get to know me now. They understood and were able to get a good understanding of what my technical skills were, what I was looking to accomplish, what I had done in the past. And now it looked like more of a personality type interview. You know, we talked about family, things that we’d like to do, hobbies. They were really looking to get to know me as a person, which was very different, right? I was usually used to having just a technical interview, you leave and you’re done. So it was multiple interviews, again, based on the fact that they were out here and as different people would fly into the Vegas office to kind of help, you know, so I might have an interview one week.

It might be a couple of days later, I might have an interview with somebody else. It might be a week or two afterwards. So it was a little bit longer interview process, definitely very enjoyable, enjoyed everybody I worked with there. And that was, I would say from that point on is really when I started to become a little bit more selective about the types of roles that I was getting into, you know, before it was just like, well, that looks fun. This looks fun. I really started to kind of have a game plan.

So I came in as an engineer doing a lot of new installations. I did come in occasionally and would do the pre-sales. So I was more of a post sales role. So once the hardware had been sold to the customer, I came in to do the installation, maybe some training for the staff on, you know, how to use this, you know, all the new setup, it might be new to them or it might be something where they’re just doing a refresh. So they’re familiar with the system itself, but maybe it’s just doing a newer version, right? So kind of walking them through that. And most of my deployments, again, some of them were here local in Vegas, I did get to travel a lot. So that was a lot of fun being able to go through and routinely be able to travel for work. So I got to see a number of different cities and most of these jobs were probably for about a week.

You know, they were usually week long deployments. So in that week, so in that five days, my job was to rack and stack the all the equipment and in most cases, it was probably a NetApp storage along with Cisco UCS hardware for the compute and then throwing VMware on top. So you know, setting up all the network connectivity, making sure that everything was able to communicate out to the network and that was doing a lot of installations, you know, setting up the storage, then setting up the servers, then throwing VMware on top of that. And then eventually once I got it all up and running connected to the network with the IPs and names that the customer had provided to me, then, you know, as if there was enough time left over, then that time was spent training staff, you know, making sure that, hey, this is, they were aware of names, IPs so that they could log into their environment and, you know, making sure they’re connected. They had the ability to go through and continue the management, right? Because once I left, they could reach out, but all of this was billable hours, right? Unless it was something that was not communicated, if I didn’t have my documentation lined up. And it was a lot of fun.

But at the same time, it got very boring and very repetitive. While it’s different environments, like the rack and the stacking, at some point, I got tired of just doing a lot of the click next, next, next, that just wasn’t enjoyable, right? And it took a lot of time. So during, I would say my downtime, the time when I wasn’t actually at a customer’s location, I took that time and I had mentioned it before, but what I did is I ended up buying some hardware and built my own home lab.

And this was done for a couple different reasons. One with the VAR, the way that my salary works is I was on a base, right? There’s no commission, but I did have to sign a contract. So again, they would pay for a lot of my training to kind of upskill, which is another selling point for me to go through and kind of take this role. But there was a two-year commitment. If I were to leave within that two years, any money that was spent on me to get any type of training, any expenses that were incurred as part of my education would have to be paid back. Obviously, it would be prorated. So if I left within one year, half of that money would have to be give back. If it was later on, maybe I’d made a year and a half, then we’re talking about only 25%. So again, it was very prorated.

So I ended up buying hardware to kind of learn and prepare and be able to study for the certifications. But then the other use case that I found was being able to upskill myself in a lot of the automation and orchestration. So instead of me having to set up a NetApp storage array and have to click Next, Next, Next, once it’s connected and cabled, and I was able to go through and get console access from my laptop, I started to figure out what are the commands? Once do I have to be consoled in and just do the bare minimum to give it an IP? But once it’s on the network, there were command-lined interfaces that you could use from there. There was also PowerShell commandlets.

So eventually what I did is I slowly set up an emulator in my lab environment and figured out what are the commands to configure the storage, to set up the networking, to create LUNs, to start doing some of this masking. And it was time-consuming, but it was definitely worth it in the long run because I started with the storage, then eventually worked my way to the Cisco UCS and then started to also do the VMware side of it, do a lot of PowerCLI.

On the Cisco UCS side, I wasn’t doing as much from the command line, so what was nice is you could configure the environment so I could set up the names, IPs in that emulator, export that out, and it’s just an XML file. So when I got to the customer side, I could import it and it would do all the configuration. It would take a little while to do reboots, but again, I was trying to minimize the amount of time that I had to spend there doing a lot of configuration, and I was able to spend more time doing a lot of the training and knowledge transfer for the customer.

So when I first started, let’s say it would take maybe three days, four days, depending on if I ran into any issues to go through and do the configuration, so that usually would only leave maybe a day, day and a half to do knowledge transfer. With the automation, I slowly started to cut that down. So instead of the customer only having one day, two days, eventually I got to the point where they were getting almost three and a half days of knowledge transfer, and it also gave me additional time in case I ran into issues. Over fails, no installation is always going to be smooth and run 100% perfect every time.

So that was really a turning point where I started to, not only did I enjoy the technology, but I was like, man, if I can find ways to make this faster, be able to do a lot of my work with just having to really just get key information from a customer, right? Hey, give me the names you want to sign it, the IP addresses I could pop it into my scripts or into some variables, click run, and then just let it do its thing. So that was game changing for me as far as the types of roles that I was able to kind of work towards moving forward.

So definitely if you’re looking to, you know, I would say it’s hard to automate an environment, hard to automate or orchestrate a lot of processes if you don’t know the manual steps first. So definitely go through first and figure out what the manual steps are, document that process. Then once you have that done, then you know what you have to do in order to go through and script that all out. So it’s definitely something I recommend, right? The faster you can do something, the less error prone it is that you might actually, you know, click the wrong option as you’re doing an installation and not have to start over again.

So I did that for a while and at what point we’re kind of, the work kind of started to slow down. There wasn’t as much new business. It still gave me a time to go through and continue to get all my certifications, upskill, kind of bring up my salary and then at one point they started to ask us since we were local to see if we could, you know, drum up any additional business. So I started reaching out to contacts and I reached out to, you know, while I was a server manager, one of the people that I was managing there had actually moved on and worked for a travel company and he had worked his way up and he was now the manager. So I reached out to him looking to try and get business for this VAR that I was working for.

And as part of explaining kind of what I did, a lot of the automation, how I was able to really, not only upskill myself, but one of the things I was looking to do was just improve, standardize and they weren’t looking, they already had a VAR that they worked with. I was trying to see if I could get in for some additional, you know, work, maybe some of the smaller projects that they had going on and eventually he kind of recruited me and told me that they were, he actually had a need for me, right? He, you know, we worked before together. He enjoyed working for me when I was his manager and wanted to know if I would be interested in kind of working under him. And that role was going to be as a virtualization engineer.

So my role was primarily to just take care of the VMware infrastructure. There was going to be some of the storage and obviously the Cisco UCS. And this is probably one of the first times where, so this is probably one of the first times where I would say that the scale of the environment that I would be managing was a lot bigger. And when I say a lot bigger, I think at most some of the environments that I was managing was probably somewhere between 10 to 15 ESXi hosts. And here, trying to remember the exact number, but at some point between three different locations, and this is just in the main data centers, we had, you know, some small satellite offices with small hosts, but the main ones, I would say that there was probably somewhere close to like a hundred give or take ESXi hosts.

So it was a lot bigger scale, a lot of different clusters. And it was a challenge not only to kind of get it all standardized, but one of the goals was to be able to automate this environment. What’s kind of hard to automate if there’s no standard practices. And I really had free reign to do whatever is needed or whatever I wanted to do in that environment. So again, I started picking up PowerShell, I, one of my coworkers there, so he was a, you know, I thought I had pretty good PowerShell skills. He had even way more. So his name was Tzvi. He came from the Microsoft side, so he was on the Windows side. But anything PowerShell related, you know, a lot of times I was just taking scripts and trying to reverse engineer what somebody else had written and try to retrofit them to what I was trying to do.

And he really started to introduce me to a couple books. I would spend time with him really trying to go through and build my scripts from scratch. So that was a lot of learning, kind of relearning my processes. So I had kind of skipped ahead. So you know, I mentioned before really having that base knowledge, I didn’t establish that when I was doing PowerShell. I really kind of jumped ahead, hey, I’ll find these scripts and I’ll just kind of reverse engineer. I’ll figure out what it is, get it to work for my environment. But when I was testing a lot of this, there were parts that I just, I didn’t understand. So really he kind of brought me back and said, hey, you know, here’s the base modules. There was a book, I think it was a PowerShell and a month of lunches. So really just kind of going through and breaking it down. And that was, while it was a step back, it really did help me kind of accelerate my PowerShell knowledge and learning. So that was a good reminder that you shouldn’t jump ahead too far, right? Really make sure you have that base foundational knowledge.

So spent quite, I spent a couple of years there, really kind of honing those skills. One of the things I also learned there is I was writing these scripts to configure, for example, we’ll say an ESX host, and they were well over, well over a thousand lines. So I had it do everything all in this one script. One of the things I quickly learned is if you make a change, something breaks, now you’ve got to go through all hundred lines and try and figure out what else is affected. Another coworker of mine had taken an automation course and one of the things, one of the concepts they talked about in there was trying to break up scripts into reusable parts.

And one of the things is then you would go through and you would have your, you know, your master script that would call all of these little individual pieces. So for example, if I’m going to set the host name on an ESX host, what this would, what I would do is create a script, it would be small, that would take an input of a name, then take that name, go out to, you know, the IP address of the ESXi host and set the host name and return that back as a variable, right? So that’s, that’s all it did.

Then let’s say maybe I wanted to set the NTP or the network time protocol settings on it. Same thing. Just that piece of code that did that. And then what you would do is you would have your master script that would call all these individual functions. Hey, you know, you would input your files, your variables and say, hey, here’s host names that I want to apply, here’s IP addresses. Everything else is pretty standard, right? It should be going to the same NTP settings. The DNS name should be the same. Our DHCP servers, if you were using that for some of these hosts.

So anything that was a standard within the environment was already set, right? It was in a variable. Then you would just in your master script say, hey, at this point, run the host name module, and it would go out, grab that module, come back, return that information, store it and then go down to the next piece. So that way, if you made a change to the host name script, you’re only affecting that. And if it’s because when you’re running just that piece, you would just just that one piece, that one function work correctly, then you were good to go. It didn’t affect anything else. And then in your master script, all you’re doing is you’re calling that back. You’re just making sure that whatever information is returning back as a variable works and you’re able to use that for the rest of the script.

So again, just kind of building on that knowledge that I had gained, just trying to make it better and more efficient. And then at some point, you know, the work environment there had changed. And I started looking to really move out again, wanting to continue or find another role that would allow me to do a lot of that automation, orchestration. I found it enjoyable. I really liked the process of taking an existing process or steps that had to be done and putting them in the script and just making it that much faster and easier. I have talked about this in another episode, so I really participated a lot in a user group.

So in the VMUG, so it’s the VMware user group. And I made a lot of good contacts there. So one of them, one of the individuals that would attend, you know, we just start talking about what we do at work, different skills that we had acquired, kind of got to know me a lot of a lot of what I would do. And at what point, at one point, when I was doing my job search, I saw a posting and it was actually posted in the VMUG forum that they were looking for an engineer to work for an infrastructure as a service, so an IaaS company that was doing virtualization on Apple hardware. So that was new and interesting.

So I reached out to this individual, you know, said, Hey, I don’t know if you remember me. We met at a couple of times at some of the local VMUGs, you know, I saw your job posting you know, I’m just calling to find out and see if you can give me a little bit more information. So we exchanged contact, started talking to him just trying to get a little bit more understanding of kind of what the what the role was for. So, you know, in our conversations, I had an idea of what they were doing, just not the scale or, you know, we didn’t go into too much detail. So once, you know, after talking to him, I decided to put in an application and left to go through and take that role.

Now as I was going through, so one of the things that I had to do is I did have to take a pay cut. And it was probably, I don’t want to say it was a significant, I want to say it might have been like a $15,000 pay cut. And you know, while that’s not ideal, I thought that one, just trying to get out of my current situation is one of those things I would just I would deal with. I figured the opportunity sounded enticing enough that I would be able to do a lot of new things really continue to grow my skill set. So again, similar to when I was doing the PowerShell learning, I figured, you know what, I’m okay to take this, this pay cut kind of take a step back, knowing that it would potentially lead to hopefully upscaling or getting a promotion there within that company, you know, getting a raises to eventually get to at least where I was at before, or at least be able to continue to build my resume so that at some point, I can then move on to get to the salary I was or potentially even more than more than what I was making, you know, prior to taking the pay cut. And I did end up taking that role.

There was a lot of learning. So it was very interesting understanding kind of what they were doing. So they were basically installing vCenter server in an environment. So it was a managed environment. And it was kind of a nested vCenter. So you had your month one main vCenter where you would deploy a vCenter server underneath to then manage, depending on the customer, if they signed up to do, you know, maybe they only wanted two ESX hosts, or maybe they want, you know, anywhere to, you know, hundreds of these. It was a lot of big name companies, a lot of small individuals who were really just looking to maximize the amount of hardware on there, doing a lot of development for their applications, either for iPhone app development, or they were also doing a lot of Mac OS application development.

So that’s primarily what the people that were signing up to do this, to use this IaaS company were doing. Then once I kind of understood what they were doing, how everything was working, my goal there was really to help them automate a lot of these processes. So because some of the larger customers were putting in very big orders, and we’re talking about, you know, anywhere from, you know, I mentioned, it could be a couple ESX hosts all the way up to maybe 100, 150 at a time. So this was a pretty time consuming process, because if you think about it, now you have to install ESXi on each one of these individual hosts.

Then once you’ve got them all connected, there’s configurations that you have to do on the network switches, and then eventually be able to get all those hosts connected back into the vCenter. You know, if they were deploying a new cluster environment, so even though it might be the same customer, they might want to separate this, it might be for a different development team, could be for a different project. So they were really trying to separate the different hardware and the VMs that would be running on top of this. So it was a very tedious process.

So there was some automation around the deployment of the vCenters. So there was another engineer that was doing a lot of that deployment. But one of the things that I really saw was just the inefficiency around having to have people go around, once the network switches are connected, you’re having to then go and plug in this Apple hardware, plug in a keyboard, monitor, and mouse, just to go next, next, next, and do an installation. So I took it upon myself to say, you know what, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and there’s always a better way.

So I figured out how to do an ESXi installation from a boot from a USB drive. So then what we would do, what the end goal was, was to be able to take this USB drive, because that’s where we would do the installation of ESXi, install it on the USB drive, pop it into the hardware, and when it powered on, it would go through and boot into the USB, do continue to do its installation and configuration, and that would alleviate a lot of the times that technicians were going through and spending setting up a new environment. Because now all they have to do is rack and stack it, power it on, and walk away. So there was labels on the front that would say what the host name was, and obviously there’s references, documentation on back in the office that would say, okay, this host is connected in this rack.

It was very methodical in the way that they had done it. So you knew based on rack, slot, what piece of hardware was there, what name it should have, what IP address, who it belonged to, so that was a good learning process in making sure that in an environment like that, documentation is key, really knowing and understanding where everything is that it’s labeled correctly, because if it’s not, that could cause problems. So again, it made it easier for the technicians to just kind of go through, rack on all these this hardware and pop it in. So the way I had done it is, you know, I ended up getting a USB hub. I was able to plug in anywhere from like five to 10 USB drives. And in my PowerShell script, I would go through, do some imaging where it would go through. It was actually a pretty, pretty cool little process.

So there was certain approved versions of ESXi that were allowed to be installed. Based on those installed versions, a customer could go through and then request what version that they wanted installed. So based on the request, I would look and say, hey, they wanted to install this version of ESXi. The script would prompt for a lot of that information. You know, what’s the customer name? What’s the environment? What’s the naming structure that we want to start at? Is this starting at one? Are we continuing off and starting at 50, at 20? Eventually, I ended up having it go through and use a CSV file to get a lot of these names. It would get that information, mount the ISO for that particular version, that image. It would mount it, copy over all the files to the USB drive, edit the configuration file to have the appropriate name, IP address, things that were related and necessary to do the installation of ESX, and have it ready so that it would go through and actually finish that configuration on first boot.

So it would go through, you’d start the script, and once it was done, I had to make a little audible noise and a pop-up on the screen saying the installation is done. If you want to continue, pop in the next drives, and that’s what I would do. So if the hub had like five, I could then pull out those five USB drives, you know, I would throw labels on them, pop in the next five, and then say continue on. And then it would continue on, or if I said that was it, at that point it would cease to continue on with the installation of the next set of USB drives, or stop, and then we were done.

And again, take those labels, we would pop them into the appropriate servers, and when it powered on after the technicians racked and stacked them where they needed to be, it would just go through its entire boot process, and then remotely we were able to go through and connect to them, eventually worked with the other engineer to as part of the vCenter process, it would go through the best course of action was to wait for all the ESX hosts to be completed. So again, using that same CSV file that I used to create all the boot drives, I would use that one to then go through and do an automation process to start checking and pinging and make sure that each one of those servers would go up. So it would go through each one and verify that it was connected, or sorry, that it was up configured and able to be connected to. If there are any there were weren’t, it would reply and give me that information, we could then go send out a technician and find out what the problem was with the boot, did it just not power on correctly, do we maybe have a bad USB drive, whatever it might be. And that was the process that I used for that.

Then once that was up and running, then we would kick off the vCenter install. So he was able to kick off his installation and then go through again use that same CSV or even after the fact and we had a separate script that once the vCenter was up and running, I could go through and say, okay, now connect all of these ESX hosts and here’s the additional configuration that we want to do base apart from just the base host name DNS and IP address. So that was a lot of fun, a lot of work, a lot of errors that were coming out, but it really did speed up and automate the process. So as I was going through picking up a lot of those skills, one of the things that I had done and decided to do is I really had upskilled myself a lot in VMware, had gained a number of certifications.

So I had, I think the first one I had gotten was my VMware Certified Professional or my VCP in version four. By this time, I think we were close to like six, seven, maybe, maybe even seven might have been out. But again, I had certified in four, five, six, and in version five and six, I had decided to get my VMware Certified Advanced Professional or my VCAP certifications, both there. There’s two different ones. There’s the design and the deploy. And I really had aspirations to then go and get the highest level certification they had, which is the VMware Certified Design Expert or the VCDX.

So even before I was there at that IaaS company, I had applied probably by that time, maybe four different occasions, maybe three or four different occasions to work at VMware, right? I figured I’ve got all the skills, I’ve got all this knowledge. Why not work for the company that builds all this? That was really something that I would say if there’s somewhere that you really want to work and you’re wondering, or you’re trying to figure out what the process is, I would say go through and apply. Really don’t limit yourself. If it’s something you really want to work, I applied for probably, like I said, four different types of roles.

One was to be part of their professional services, right? Doing something similar that what I had done at working for the VAR for that value-added reseller was going through and customers would come up and contact VMware and say that they were purchasing specific software, right? Maybe hey, they want vCenter and ESXi or they were doing NSX or vCenter. Whatever the solution could be. I would be one of those engineers that would go out either on-site or it could even be remotely to go through and do a lot of that configuration. I figured the skill sets that I already have might be, again, a chance for maybe a little bit more travel.

While I did really well in the interviews, I ended up getting past the interview, got a verbal offer. One of the things that I learned, especially in these larger companies, is there’s a lot of moving parts. They were looking to hire, I don’t remember the number, but I think it was something like 30 different people at this time. I was applying for a specific segment within that professional services. I got out of my interview, I was flown down to Texas, did my interviews there for like a day or two. It was a panel interview, did really well and before I would left and I was getting ready to fly back home, I was notified that I had received, that I did really well, they wanted to make me an offer and that a recruiter would be reaching out. This was the end of the week.

They would be reaching out to me the following, at the beginning of the next week, to put together a written offer based on what we had discussed over the phone. Well, the following week came, didn’t hear anything, so after a couple of days I reached out to them. There was a lot of back and forth saying, hey, there was delays, just be patient, it was coming, it was coming. After a couple of weeks it turns out there was some reshuffling that was done and the position that I had applied for, that role got moved over to the government segment and it was with clearance. One of the reasons they couldn’t just move me over and I couldn’t just kind of move with that role was it required clearance, which I didn’t have. Unfortunately, that didn’t end up happening.

Again at one of the other prior roles I had applied to be a technical account manager for VMware. Similar thing happened, I did well, had interviewed and the job never came to be. With at least there at VMware one of the technical account manager roles, a customer has to sign up and purchase a TAM or technical account manager and then you would get assigned to that customer. They had a couple of customers that were supposed to be kind of in the works and it just never really happened. They didn’t get enough customers to sign up or it wasn’t a big enough customer to where that job fell through.

Then there was another time where I signed up to be a marketing architect or a marketing engineer. There are a number of people that worked there that were pretty active on social media. One of them on Twitter had posted about this position, it required travel, you would be doing a lot of marketing and also giving talks on upgrading environments. I thought, oh, I’ve done some environment upgrades, one of the things I decided to go through and reach out to this person individually, send a direct message and eventually kind of went back and forth to kind of learn a little bit more and decided to go through and put in the application.

That was a learning process, so I did a lot of preparation. Unfortunately, I did preparation for the wrong versions. One of the things that I should have done is I should have asked some more questions, so that’s kind of a learning opportunity if you have that kind of contact or that type of a relationship with somebody to understand and be able to ask questions about the role, try and get as much information and be as detailed as you can. That would have been a really good opportunity for me to be able to ask, okay, I understand this is marketing, I understand we’re walking, we have to have the knowledge about upgrades. What versions are we upgrading to and from?

At this time, I want to say 6.5, 6.7 was out, so I was doing a lot of the upgrades from 6.0 to 6.5, or 6.5 to even a 6.7, I think that was barely coming out, but I believe the majority was 6.0 to 6.5, so I thought, man, I’m going to go through and I’m going to deploy a vCenter and ESX host in my lab environment. I’m going to deploy them at version 6.0, and I’m going to go through the process of going to 6.5, so I really know and I really understand what that process is like, felt really prepared.

I got flown into Palo Alto to be at the headquarters of VMware and really got to see the campus and if I thought that I really wanted to work there before, I would say after being there on site, I mean, that definitely put it in my mind that this is a place where I really want to work and I’m going to find a way to make sure that I’m there. I went through my interview process, did really well on a lot of parts, but the part that I failed on is a lot of what they were looking for and a lot of the whiteboarding and a lot of the information was the upgrade process from 5.0 and 5.5 to 6.0. So even though 6.5 was out, turns out there were a lot of customers that are still running on older versions. So they really wanted you to be knowledgeable on those older versions and really help and guide customers to get to that latest version, but they weren’t going from 6.0 to 6.5. They were going all the way from either 5.0 or 5.5.

So again, that I would say that that is a big failure on my part is not knowing and understanding all the requirements for that role. It was good learning opportunity. Again, I say it was a failure, but I did learn a lot from it. I learned how to better prepare and ask those questions ahead of time or even during the interview process. So that’s a mistake that I never made moving forward. So when I would reach out to somebody and ask questions about the role, specific parts, I made sure to try and get as specific as possible and make sure that I understand exactly what they’re looking for, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with asking those questions and trying to get that information. So I didn’t get the role. I did see the person that went in there that got it, and that’s when I kind of became aware of a lot of those processes and understanding that. So now fast forward, here I am at this IaaS company.

I had prior to that also applied to be a sales engineer on the public sector side, or sorry, in the private sector, and I went through, interviewed very well, made it to the final rounds and didn’t end up getting the position. But again, just having that personality talking, asking good questions, leaving a good impression with the hiring manager. At some point, they reached out to me and so did another sales engineer who had actually vacated another role. It just so happened they both had reached out at the same time to let me know that there was another sales engineer role coming up in the Las Vegas area, but this was going to be on the public sector side. They thought that I had done really well, just the other candidate was just a little bit better than I was. So that’s why they decided to move forward there.

But based on, you know, I had done that they would put in a good word for me to apply for this role and kind of recommend me for the sales engineer role on the public sector side. So again, knowing this is somewhere I want to work, I said yes and started again, prepare and just really understand more of, it was probably a good situation for me in knowing the hiring manager who was going to kind of recommend me. I was able to go and ask them for feedback. And the feedback I asked was where are areas, I didn’t approach it as to why didn’t I get the job or, you know, what did I do wrong, but really asked what areas during that interview process could I improve on, right, what would help me do better so that I can hopefully land this role, this new role that I’m being recommended for.

So the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway that I remember was I was getting a little too technical in my presentation. So really it came down when I got to the final round was that I was in a room with a lot of executives. So even though I was speaking at a high level, there were times where I would get asked a technical question and just went too deep where they felt that I should have kind of been able to manage that meeting a little bit better to be able to maybe answer it or ask some additional questions, but eventually kind of go through and say, hey, we can have a technical deep dive later on or let’s have a follow up, but making sure that when I have a lot of executives, you are C level type individuals, even though it’s a role play is making sure I keep it high level and not get too technical or too into the weeds because I’m going to lose those key decision makers.

So that’s something I worked on and started doing a couple mock interviews and as a matter of fact, the sales engineer that was leaving, I went through and kind of did some mock interviews with him and started asking questions, hey, if I get this type of question or I’m in this type of scenario, I was thinking I would handle it like this. What do you think? Yes. That would work. No. I’ve noticed that this is kind of more of the realm or the area that you should be kind of talking to or talking about.

He did give me a boost of confidence and one of the things that he mentioned to me was the technical skill was there. He was like, I have no doubt that you have the technical skill, you have the ability to answer the questions. It was really more on working on the presentations, making sure that I’m addressing these concerns and managing the meetings at the right level based on who my audience is. So that’s something I started to work on and continue to work on now, just making sure that my speaking skills, I’m speaking at the right level, understanding how to make analogies. If there is a technical concept that I have to talk about or describe, how do I do it in a way to where I’m not going to lose that person and make sure that they are understanding the value or the benefit of what we are proposing and why it’s the right solution for their business.

Eventually, I did really well in the interview, ended up getting that role and worked there for quite a few years, I’d say almost three years and it was the experience that I was looking for. I would say the only difference was compared to the last role is it was working from home, so here at home as opposed to working at the main office in California. But I did, I developed a lot of skills there that I, while I thought I was good at giving presentations and doing a lot of those types of activities, I did learn a lot especially from the account manager that I was paired up with for the state of Nevada, so we covered all public sector here in Nevada.

In those first couple meetings, one of the things that I had asked for and that he provided was giving me feedback after meetings, hey, we were kind of debrief on our way out. This is kind of right before COVID, so we were still doing a lot of in-person meetings and we would get feedback, hey, what do you think went well with this, what feeling did you get from the customer, and then I would get feedback on was I doing my job to the best of my ability, is it what kind of he expected. And a lot of the feedback he gave me was making sure that, and it’s something that happens when you come from a technical background, is when someone asks a question is I was pretty quick to jump and give an answer. So one of the things that he guided me on was when someone asks a question, don’t just be quick and give an answer, ask qualifying questions, really make sure that you understand what they’re asking, why they’re asking what they’re asking. Because that question and why you may answer it may not be the right answer, it could be that there’s a bigger problem that they’re trying to solve and this is just a piece of it, or you might give the answer, but it’s the wrong answer for that situation, right. I’m not managing that environment, I don’t have that big picture.

So really making sure that I’m listening to doing a better job of listening to what they’re saying, trying to pick up on pain points and ask questions. So in those types of scenarios, even though you have a lot of knowledge and a lot of information, you should be doing more asking than telling, right, and it sounds weird, but the reason is is you want to make sure that when you do provide an answer, when you are providing some sort of piece of information that you have all the pieces to make sure you’re giving the right answer for the right situation. And that’s something I worked on and continue to work on.

And not only within roles there, but even just outside, it’s a good skill that I feel is, it’s a practical skill that you can use everywhere, you know, just in conversation. Someone’s asking you something, don’t be so quick to just give an answer or provide, you know, your feedback is just listen, right, really listen. Ask a couple questions, you know, just be curious and really understand and want to help. So that was a big thing moving forward.

And like I said, I worked there for a little while, did that through the COVID timeframe. So that was, it was interesting, but one of the nice things is VMware had a lot of software and solutions to be able to just kind of switch over and we were already doing a lot of stuff remotely from home.

But a quick funny story is when we started doing a lot of the COVID and taking meetings, you know, everybody’s at home, my kids are doing school from home as well. And place where I was living at the time didn’t really have an extra office or an extra bedroom where I could take meetings with customers where, you know, my kids who are trying to listen to their teachers talk at the same time, you know, you wouldn’t get that feedback. So there were a couple of times where I was taking meetings in my garage. So there’s actually a pretty funny picture somewhere that my wife came in and took where I’m, you know, in my garage, you know, one of those deep freezers in there, got my laptop set up there, I’ve got a chair, and I think I don’t remember what I had tried to put like in the background and, you know, just kind of cover up the fact that, you know, my car is back there parked in the garage, and you know, and it’s just me sitting there with some headphones on, you know, taking this meeting in the garage.

So again, just a funny little side story there, you know, but eventually at some point, you know, I had done a lot of VMware, you know, again, working at my dream company in, you know, what I felt was a pretty amazing role, learned a lot, and felt like I had gotten to the point where I wasn’t really expanding my knowledge on the technical side, right? A lot of the soft skills, I was developing those, I was getting better, I was really working at present, my presentations, and really, I got very good at understanding customers’ pain points and really trying to help them solve problems and find solutions to them for business cases, right?

Not just, hey, here’s your technical problem, here’s the technical fix, but what does the business try to do? What is the business trying to accomplish? And how can I help them with the software solutions that I had? Now, I’ll tell you that there wasn’t always a solution that we had, you know, and you have to be able to know that sometimes your product isn’t the right answer. A lot of times it is, but there are times where it’s not. So again, going through this and understanding that, you know, I wasn’t really being challenged much decided at that point that I wanted to start kind of picking up cloud, developing that cloud skill set, right?

So Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform or GCP, these are all things that I was aware of and had a base understanding of kind of what they were and how it worked, but had never really used any of those in my, you know, in any place that I had worked. And eventually I moved over and ended up getting a job at AWS Amazon Web Services. So I had enough technical knowledge of the role that I was working, that I ended up applying for and getting there was a technical account manager. So again, using a lot of the soft skills that I had developed over the course of my career, especially in my last role, and also going through and just having that base foundational knowledge. While I may not understand every configuration or every option on how to deploy a lot of solutions in the cloud, one of the things that they really looked for was, do you know how the core concepts work, right?

Are you familiar with storage? And I said I was, well, what’s my level of knowledge for that, and then being able to explain it. So, you know, I was getting a lot of technical questions, and some of these were very basic. You know, like if I said, you know, yeah, I’m very familiar with storage, do you know what RAID is? Yes, you know, I know what RAID is. Can you explain what the different RAID types are? You know, RAID 0 versus RAID 1 versus RAID 5, 6, 10, being able to explain those. When would you use those? What are the use cases? You know, what’s the redundancy? What’s the speed differences? Really being able to talk at that level for an application, right? Do I know how a load balancer works? So really understanding those concepts really helped move forward. And then eventually, I ended up learning the AWS technology, right?

I mean, they have all the resources available to their employees to be able to go through. And plus, I was doing a lot of that learning on my own as well to make sure that I up-skilled and gain that knowledge. And that’s something that I would say, especially going into those type of roles now when you’re going into a lot of these bigger, well-known companies. A lot of times, there’s a lot of resources out there available to you. You know, there’s things like LinkedIn, you can reach out to other people. The company’s big enough, chances are, if you’ve developed a good or big enough network, you might be able to know someone that works there or know someone who knows someone who might work there so they can give you, be able to answer some questions for you. So you can go through and ask your questions about the role, about the culture, the company, just anything that you can get ahead of time, any preparation, hey, what’s the interview process like? Plus, there’s a lot of content that’s publicly available, right? Making sure that you understand.

And it’s definitely something that I would look at is knowing how to not only prepare yourself and be able to answer the questions, but let’s say you do land the role, making sure that you know how to negotiate. Do you understand what the salary range is for that position? Do you know that some of these bigger companies, they come in at different levels, like what did you interview at? Oh, you’re applying for this level position. That’s what this range is. Can you negotiate the salary to make sure that you are maximizing the compensation that you’re getting when you first get in? Because it’s not always a guarantee that you’re going to be able to get raises or get promotions. You should be working hard to be able to do that, but just again, making sure that you are negotiating correctly.

That’s one of the things I reached out to a friend of mine. He didn’t work necessarily there, but one of the things that I had talked to him because he was working for, he works currently for a big company. And just understanding how did he negotiate? He provided me resources. Hey, have you looked at these sites that kind of give you the ranges based on the level that you are applying for or that what you interview at? So again, definitely do a lot of your homework. It’s not like it was before. I mean, there’s so much information about roles. You can reach out to people. Hopefully you find someone that’s willing to go through and provide information about that role or even just, even if you’re not working at a bigger company, definitely make sure that you practice or find some way to understand how to negotiate.

That’s something that we focus so much on the technical side that I know it’s come up a couple of times with the soft skills. But the other thing is knowing how to negotiate, understanding your worth and your value based on the skill set that you provide and that you’re bringing to the table. So really making sure that you’re prepared for that aspect of moving into a role as well. So that’s currently where I’m at.

There’s still a number of items that I would like to cover. But at this point, I think it’s a good place to end my career, at least kind of where I’m at now and at some point, I’ll fill in as I’m talking to other guests and I’ll fill in additional pieces of my career and who knows, maybe as time progresses on, we can go through and I can give updates as far as kind of where I’m at, what I’m doing and provide more detail of something that’s of interest.

So with that, I want to thank you for taking the time to go ahead and watch and listen. Again, if you could do me a favor and watch, subscribe, do reviews, give us comments. Let me know what you are or aren’t liking, what you’d like to see more of so that I’m providing value to you, the listener, to get the most out of the time that you’re spending with me. So with that, thank you for plugging in and downloading the knowledge and we’ll see you on the next episode.