Navigating Changes and Embracing New Challenges with Sirinda Glasgow | Episode 001 Part 2

Episode Summary:
In the second part of the Career Downloads interview with Sirinda Glasgow, she delves deeper into her career journey, sharing pivotal moments and decisions that shaped her path. Sirinda discusses her return to MGM Resorts, the challenges of outsourcing, and how she navigated these transitions. She also touches on her move to Dell, transitioning from a hands-on technical role to a Sales Engineer position, and the new set of challenges and learning experiences that came with it.

Guest: Sirinda Glasgow

Key Topics:

– Transitioning back to a familiar environment.
– Outsourcing Dynamics and the impact of outsourcing local operations.
– Moving from a customer role to a sales and advisory position.
– Family and Work-Life Balance: Managing a demanding career while raising three children.
– The evolution of server technology and virtualization.
– Career Advice and Insights: Adapting to new roles and responsibilities.
– The importance of continuous learning and staying current with industry trends.

Memorable Quotes:

“I needed to make the decision whether I was going to stay and be part of this opening where a lot of things are changing or make my exit.”

“Whatever career you go into, at a certain point, you become responsible for that business. You’re on call whether you think you’re on call or not.”

Tune in to gain insights from Sirinda’s rich experience and learn how to navigate career changes, embrace new challenges, and find a balance between professional and personal life.

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Manuel: Hi. I’m Manny Martinez. Are you looking to level up your career? Then welcome to Career Downloads. Each episode I’m going to hit the refresh button with different guests and dive deep into the journeys of these inspiring professionals. I’ll unpack their educational paths, explore their job histories, and discover the strategies they use to navigate the ever-evolving job landscape. So whether you’re just starting your journey or you’re really looking to make a more strategic move, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights and actionable advice from the diverse minds in the industry. So plug in, download the knowledge, and join me on Career Downloads.

Sirinda: As they got close to opening, coming out of bankruptcy, the folks that came in were going to make a lot of changes. And it’s about a year out from opening. Either I make a decision and they had me on a contract and the contract came up. So I needed to make the decision whether I was going to stay and be part of this opening where a lot of things are changing. It makes me a little nervous, right? And a whole new team. Or is this the time that I make my exit? Because everything’s changing, they don’t necessarily need me at this point, right? Like I’ve delivered all this way. And now if you’re not going to kind of implement what we’ve already done.

Manuel: If you’re not going to utilize me the way that I was brought out to do.

Sirinda: Do I need to stay? And MGM resorts asked me to come back. So I went back.

Manuel: And when the MGM, was it the same person, a different person?

Sirinda: Some, same. There are a lot of people that were there for a long time. And so I knew a lot of the people when I went back, it was kind of like going home.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: And the only bad thing is, is I get back. I’m super happy. System Engineering role. And they started outsourcing. [Laughter] So I got to be a part of like that whole outsource planning. Like what does that look like? What is a RACI? Who’s responsible?

Manuel: So when you say outsourcing, they were looking to outsource all the internal like everything or portions of it? Like what?

Sirinda: It was supposed to, so they had outsourced one portion previously and now they were going to outsource more. More of the like infrastructure pieces, right? So they brought in some different companies, evaluated about five, narrowed it down and then picked one outsource provider. And so once I turned over a lot of my stuff, so I worked a lot with the Linux/Unix guy, he was actually from Ireland. So they’re scattered. They’re a big global company, which the only problem and challenge there is you had all Las Vegas people, if you had to take down the casinos and multiple casinos running on a central system. Now, like over the years, we had come to a point where you want to take advantage of those like players club systems where multiple casinos are all connected to the same back end systems, right? So if you need to take that down, you’re affecting multiple properties. So you’re going to do it on the middle of the week at the slowest possible time for those casinos in the middle of the night. And you have somebody taking down the front end, right? So the Help Desk could coordinate with the users. You’re going to take down those front end of the application, then you’re going to take down that middle tier, then you have your application, your database, and then the storage, the RS/6000. There was an RS/6000 that was part of like what we would be taking down. That was maybe a team of five people that had to coordinate and bring that down and bring it all back up within a very short window. Now, that storage guy might be in California, the AIX person’s in Dallas, the database people are in India, the Linux/UNIX guy is in Ireland, like you’re spread all over. So now, you can just imagine it’s kind of a challenge to take it up and down as fast as we were able to. And that’s the stuff that gets missed when you’re kind of outsourcing that you’re not accounting for, like how well, how efficient some of the people that were here, that were local to Las Vegas, had become very good at being able to do what they did and understand the business. To this day, outsourced companies will sometimes say, well, let’s take that down on the weekend. No, this is Las Vegas. We’re not taking anything down on the weekend, right?

Manuel: And that’s kind of going back to what you said before, right? Most businesses, nine to five, Monday through Friday. So the casinos are very unique in that aspect, right? They’re 24 by seven. You say the slowest time, but they’re still people, right? They’re still people eating or playing the slot machines or their operations are still going. So they don’t just say, hey, we’re going to close the doors for a little bit, come back in the morning.

Sirinda: Which is really cool about if we get there within, if we have enough time to keep going, but to what we do today, to make sure that we’re able to keep things up, that we’re using some new technologies, microservices, that you can just take down a little piece of the application instead of the whole thing. Because you just heard me talk about taking down this whole monolithic architecture, even if you have high availability or disaster recovery built in, if you need to do some kind of maintenance that requires you to take down the application or the

Manuel: Database.

Sirinda: Yeah, it’s painful.

Manuel: All right. So then.

Sirinda: So I went back for the outsourcing. Finished everything I was supposed to do, just like I’ve talked about before, finished my project. And I think they were talking about putting me over the Desktop Engineers, which that was the farthest from anything I had really done. So I guess I could have looked at it as a new challenge. Well, early in my career, I installed terminals and point of sale equipment. But while we were in a few meetings, the Dell Sales Engineer had gotten promoted. And he said, Sindy, I’d like to recommend you for my job. And I was very surprised when he said that. And I said, you know, I don’t think I can do that. I have three kids. I can’t travel. He said, you’re going to cover Nevada and Arizona. Sindy, that’s like a day trip, not even 45 minutes up to Reno.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: Quick trip down to Phoenix and back. You’d be home at night every time. He said, you can do it. And I’m like, huh, let me think about it. And I remember calling my brother and saying, if anything were to happen, that a flight’s delayed, that I get stuck, you know, would you guys be there to help back me up? Because I’m going to need somebody for the kids.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: And they were a little bit older by then. Not old enough to be home alone, though.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: And at the time too, like when they were in middle school is when my kids, I asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. And they almost in unison, it was the scariest moment, looked at me and said, not what you do. I was like, I like what I do. They said, you’re on call all the time, mom. So this is right after the Bellagio Easter, three days out. I was on call a lot for a little while. So Dell gave me the opportunity to dial that back. If I had stayed at MGM, even with outsourcing, ultimately, even those executives there on believe me, that’s the one thing I try to impart on my kids. Whatever career you go into, at a certain point, you become responsible for that business. You’re on call whether you think you’re on call or not. Right.

Manuel: It may not say, hey, on call ours, but you’re part of that.

Sirinda: You’ll be called in. Yeah. Look at doctors, they’re on call. There’s lots of comparisons I could do. But even when my on call went away, there were times and like at Qualcomm, well, no, I did have on call there. There were times when I didn’t have a lot of on call, but you would still get called.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: If they knew or needed somebody, you would get a call.

Manuel: So when you said that they didn’t want to do what you do, was it because of, they saw the times that you just had to kind of drop and go?

Sirinda: I think so.

Manuel: And even though that you had the flexibility to attend a lot of these other events, right? Like during the day, like, hey.

Sirinda: I don’t think they realize that.

Manuel: Got it.

Sirinda: That not every parent could do all those events, right? You’re a kid, you just expect that.

Manuel: That mom’s going to be there.

Sirinda: And they would nominate me for, she’s going to run the harvest festival. She’s going to come do student lunches. And I was like, whoa, I can’t do all of that. But, you know, they would just think that mom could do that. I was a girl scout leader, a boy scout leader. I did as much as I could, but that on call, you know, you’re a kid and you’re expecting to be somewhere or go somewhere. And there are a couple other things too. Well, this wasn’t the on call portion though. Like I took that job at Dell. I remember my daughter being in tumbling and all the other moms kind of chatting about homecoming and who’s going with who and talking about like the kids events. And I was kind of towards the back with my laptop, getting in all my notes from my meetings. So they do know that I’ve always like worked a little more. And um, but that’s how they’ve been able to play the sports they did for me to pay for tuition for them.

Manuel: Right. Do all the activities, everything that they were just, oh, mom takes care of it. Well, this is how she takes care of it.

Sirinda: Yep. And now I can proudly say all three of my kids are in technology. All three of them.

Manuel: So they slowly realized it.

Sirinda: Yeah, they went from no, no, we’re never going to do that. Now they’re all in technology.

Manuel: Yeah. That’s cool.

Sirinda: Yeah. But so, so yeah, so uh, went back to MGM Resorts left went to Dell and that’s when I left the customer side. And I’ve kind of been on the other side of the business. I always felt like once I got here, I realized I could help more customers more than just the one or two customers that were within the own bit, the business I was part of now externally, I can help more.

Manuel: And when you said, okay, obviously when you say the other side of it, right? So just to kind of clarify, you used to do one more of the hands on work, managing the environments and

Sirinda: Being the customer.

Manuel: Being the customer. So now at this point, you’re going in and you’re going to become now, obviously the sales partner or the sales vendor when you told them, Hey, let me think about that. What are some of the things that you thought of at that process, right? What did you think? Because you always mentioned in the prior roles, I’m always looking for that next challenge, right? Hey, I want to do this. This sounds interesting. What is it about that Sales Engineer position that really caught your attention and made you even consider it to begin with, let alone, apply and you know, try and take that role on?

Sirinda: I got to be part of Dell at such a cool time because they were coming out with servers that were becoming more and more dense, blade technology, they had those quarter height blades and explaining to customers how to take care of that like data center sprawl. How are we going to do more with less footprint and virtualization was a big part of it too. So think about it as I remember my CIO at MGM Resorts, always talking about Moore’s Law and how compute just exponentially keeps getting faster, more powerful and that same application is running on a server that only needed a little bit of memory and a little bit of CPU. You can’t even buy a server that has that small of a footprint anymore. So here buying a server and utilizing a portion of it. So now the ability to virtualize and put multiple workloads on a server and then to now make those servers even smaller, think of all the compute you’re able to put in a data center and actually even when I was at Qualcomm we had blade technology, HP quarter height blades, not Dell and we were having issues with the amount of power to the rack. So we couldn’t even populate the whole rack because we didn’t have enough power for that particular rack. And so and by the way I had such great data center experience there because they have the cleanest most professional like redundant power, color-coded cables, everything just so dialed in in their data centers.

Manuel: No big rats nest that you can hang from. [Laughter]

Sirinda: No, but this was a new challenge, right? That now we’re trying to fit this amount of density into this rack that we had provided power for and now we’re putting way more draw than what would typically have been in there. So that was an interesting time. But yeah, being at Dell and talking to customers, helping them with those kind of problems and then also understanding their business challenge. And a lot of times that it’s funny, you think that certain verticals, they do have some unique challenges but there’s a lot that’s very similar. So things like keeping the business up and running and having that resiliency and making sure security is top of mind, all those things are kind of across all industries.

Manuel: Got it. And so in that sales role, so now you’re not doing hands-on is was there any kind of preparation that you had to do ahead of time to kind of get there and understand, right? Because that’s, you know, while the other ones were more of a challenge, you’re still doing hands-on, you have experience in all these different, you know, hey, I’ve got UNIX, hey, I’ve done a little bit of desktop, I’ve been done a lot of this. Now you’re going into like a Sales Engineer role while you have the technical expertise to really know that, hey, this is how servers work, this is how, you know, here’s the benefits, here’s why you should do it this way. The position is different. You’re no longer hands-on, now you’re customer facing. So what were, what were some of the challenges that you face there? Because now you’re, hey, you’re the expert, right? You’re coming to me by asking you something, you need to be the expert. So what did you do there?

Sirinda: I’ll say some of the things that were challenged. I had never been in a situation where there might be a little bit of hesitance to believe because you’re a salesperson or you’re part of the sales team. You’re just trying to sell me something. And I’m like, no, no, this is really how if I were here, I would help you. Like if I were your employee, this is what I would be recommending as well. But there’s still that reluctance because there’s so many companies calling on all the businesses that there’s that little bit of reluctance, I think, sometimes to believe that you don’t have maybe an ulterior motive, which is to sell, which I guess rightfully so, that they’re going to think that. But it was a little bit of a challenge because you get worried, am I going to lose my technical experience? Because I’m not hands-on as much anymore. There were some times that you had ability to use labs, you know, you could install virtual technology on your desktop device or your laptop. But when you say not hands-on, I will recall, and I did have this experience from working for my dad, that I had salespeople, they would order in like seed equipment. So we would get a couple customers that would get the latest technology servers. Dell was very good about when I was a customer at Cosmo, I had some seed equipment. I had servers that were brand new technology, we were supposed to evaluate them, decide if we wanted more, and they would get delivered to us. There was one when I worked for Dell that was blade technology that would fit under your desk. And it was a couple blades and shared storage. It’s called the Vertex. And they got a seed one in, and we sent it to one customer for a period of time. And then the salesperson, she told me, you now need to take it over to this customer, this customer. And I’ve racked servers before, it’s not like I can’t lift equipment and stuff, I carried three kids around, I’m fairly strong, but those were heavy and like a chassis full of equipment.

Manuel: They’re dense.

Sirinda: So I would have to unrack everything, take the power supplies out, like get it down to where it would be light enough for me to be able to bring in. And I brought it to several of the big businesses here in town. One of the casinos that has multiple properties all over the US, they bought them for all their remote properties, actually. I had a defense contractor customer up in Reno that I brought it to, power company, like I brought it all over, and they were able to evaluate it. But normally, Dell would have it shipped to each customer separately, but she was only allowed like one seed. And so she wanted everybody to be able to experience it. So I helped bring it and I helped set it up. And then I would sit behind them and help walk them through setting it up. So even though I wasn’t hands on, I still had the experience of going to the screens, making sure it was configured correctly. And yeah.

Manuel: So that one seed you were moving from property to property?

Sirinda: Yes.

Manuel: So racking it, helping them set it up, and then like tearing it down.

Sirinda: It came in like a big footlocker. I still probably, if I went back, I have pictures of it because it would sit in my living room. This huge footlocker that was all padded and it had the Dell gear in it. And there was no way I was able to move that big footlocker. And so yeah, I would literally take it apart. I would call ahead, make sure they had a cart or something. I could bring it in on, bring it on to property, put it together, and then sit with the Engineer and help them get it up and running. So yeah. So I did do a little bit of hands on, but it was far and few between. It was more kind of presenting the technology, educating. But I found that I kind of liked to do that as well. Because once you’ve, I think in any career, once we learn to be, you know, proficient at what we do, it’s time to pass it down and pass it on to the people that are coming behind us. And when you think of it in terms of customers, you know, they’re not always younger than me, but often. And so I’m helping share knowledge and hopefully helping them be successful with whatever they choose to do. Yeah.

Manuel: So, and I’m going to kind of summarize in kind of the last couple of jobs. So I know at the beginning, there was a lot of doubt, like they’d see you and they’re like, hey, do you really know what you’re doing? Now you’ve established this network. You obviously have a reputation of being someone who knows how to do the job, who’s very good at what they do. Obviously, you’re friendly, right? Because people want to work with you and they’re pulling you in. Now, when you’re getting in and you’re going to the sales role, what are some of those, what are some of the skills that you’ve learned and are you still coming into that? Are you still having some of those same experiences, right? Are you still getting that doubt as you’re moving on or is it now you’re dealing with people that obviously know you and now that’s not as much of an issue?

Sirinda: One thing I learned about the different sales companies I work for, a lot of them have reorgs. And with that, and to me, it’s a little bit unfortunate, but with that comes getting reassigned to customers. So at one point at Dell, I had 80 customers between Arizona and up here in Vegas and Reno. Then I was just enterprise, so I had maybe 13 customers. The 13 customers, you can really get to know them and be part of them. When you have 80, it’s a little tough. So it’s a different type of a relationship. So learning the differences between those and trying to earn their trust, make sure that they don’t know me. So you can’t rely on the fact that, oh, people know me and will trust me. I have to earn it and I have to hopefully be successful in communicating that to them. Communication is one thing that, so in any career, there are pieces you need to kind of keep an eye on what you’re good at, what you’re not good at. At one point in time, when I worked at MGM Resorts and I was at my desk working on my project all the time, our Exchange Admin, who was one of my dearest friends, we’re still very good friends, she’s retired now, convinced me to take Toastmasters. And we did it over at New York, New York with a bunch of the folks that worked there. I was dreadful. I would get up and speak when I was in high school, like most school spirit. I’d get up and I’d talk in front of the assemblies and stuff. I’d worked in my cube so long. Not only was I nervous, I had a lot of ums and ahs that I wasn’t even hearing. It was horrible. By the end of the year, I did get most improved. A lot of people get different awards, but I at least improved. I was proud of that. But to be able to go over to sales, think about it. You’re a person that’s working on the customer side. You’re not accustomed to being speaking in front of an audience, kind of a PowerPoint type of a scenario where you’re standing and speaking. But when I, and I’m skipping, I think maybe one or so, but when I went from Dell and made it over to VMware, that was the interview. They sent me a PowerPoint ahead of the interview and I’m in a conference room with other salespeople and the person who’s hiring me and his boss and I have to explain their technology to them through a PowerPoint that they said I was free to change it, make any tweaks, and literally with a clicker to advance the slides and standing in front of the room, they may have given me the opportunity to sit if I wanted, but stood up and went through their VMC on AWS presentation. And so came a far cry from that person who had to go to Toastmasters because I had become so, you lose practice.

Manuel: Yeah. I mean, if you don’t do it often, and was there any particular reason that she decided that was it just, hey, let’s do something and or was there a reason behind joining Toastmasters outside?

Sirinda: Susan convinced, she said it would be fun and we both benefit from it and she, like me, we spent a lot of time at our desk handling problems and stuff and not really getting out.

Manuel: And so it wasn’t like, hey, we’re starting to speak more. Hey, we’re trying to do, there was no, at that time, there was no end goal. It was just like, hey, we’re going to get out and get to talk to people. Yeah. But looking back, I should have identified that I had kind of lost some skills there that I had gotten a little, they say that happens with animals, right? Like if you don’t get out, if you have a horse and you don’t walk him and get him out running for a while, he wants to just stay in the stall.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: Same thing with your cube. [Laughter]

Manuel: You’re like, I’m going to sit here. This is comfortable.

Sirinda: I’m going to stay on my cube and work and not talk to anybody.

Manuel: So it’s funny because now this is kind of the first one. And I think we’ve talked about this before, or maybe, maybe we didn’t, or maybe you don’t remember, but that position that you talked about at VMware, where you’re doing that presentation, we were actually both interviewing for that same position at the same time.

Sirinda: Yeah. We found out afterwards, right?

Manuel: And just in conversation. So what was that experience of going through? And I’m assuming when you did the Dell sales role, that was not a similar interview process.

Sirinda: Oh no. No, I would say the Dell one felt a little bit more like the Qualcomm one, where I was super nervous, had to go down to actually, actually my boss, and I only had him for a short time because the reorgs and stuff, he moved on to like global accounts. And he’s still with Dell this day. He’s been there a long time. Something about Dell, and they like to stay at Westin’s. So I didn’t even know where the Westin was here in Las Vegas. It’s not as big and flashy as some of our other properties. And I met him there at the Starbucks, but I had to do some like video interviews, then meet him in person. And I met him at the Westin, and he hired me. So it was a little different than the Qualcomm one. But I will say, if you remember, I said that the salesperson told me I wouldn’t have to travel very much. There’s a lot of education. I had to go to Texas a lot for Dell. So those in those cases, like I did have challenge, who’s going to help watch the kids? What am I going to do with the kids? While I’m in Texas. Do I take them with me? But yeah, I did travel a little more than I thought I was going to have to. So always like when they tell you it’s going to be whatever percent travel, maybe buffer.

Manuel: Maybe bump it up a couple, you know, 10, 20%. Yeah.

Sirinda: But the VMware one, so I had wanted to work at VMware like as I was leaving Dell.

Manuel: And if I remember correctly, and I did a little bit of research at some point in there, and it might have been before. So did you, you said you don’t remember if you went from Dell to VMware? Or at one point Trend Micro was in there somewhere.

Sirinda: Yeah. No, I do remember. So I was at Dell. Remember, I said they kept having reorgs. They had a voluntary separation. I’m like, what does that mean? I’m going to volunteer to leave my job. I’ve never heard of that. Now I had been through some layoffs, the outsourcing at MGM. They had had some other small layoffs before. And like always ended up being one of the ones that stayed. Now I’ve seen good and bad. Like I’ve seen people that had to leave and turn around and find great jobs, right here in the same valley. I always say, always be careful because you could end up either calling on them as a customer or you may end up going to work for, you know,

Manuel: For them, right?

Sirinda: The software provider for the casino. And like.

Manuel: Somebody that was your manager maybe now become your employer or vice versa.

Sirinda: It seems like a big city, but it seems like a small city too. Like you and I both run into a lot of people we know. So I really struggled with should I stay? Should I go? What happens if I stay and they didn’t have enough people take the voluntary separation? Then, you know, I just get laid off with no package because they were offering a package if you took the voluntary separation. And I’m like, you know, and I’ve had so many boss changes and I don’t know where this is going. I’m really nervous that they’re going to make me travel more.

Manuel: A lot of uncertainty.

Manuel: Yeah, there was a lot. And I had wanted to work for VMware for a long time. You kind of work with them as a partner when you’re at Dell. And so they had a TAM role open and I had applied for it and they really wanted me, but they only hired the TAM when the customer signs a contract. So they made it sound like the customer’s going to sign the contract. So I took the voluntary separation thinking I had something tentatively lined up because I’ve never not worked.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: Well, I took the voluntary separation. I’ll never forget. It was Valentine’s Day and VMware let me know that that TAM role was now going to be end of the year, three months out because the customer wasn’t going to be able to sign. And by the way, a customer was probably one of my old places like MGM. They weren’t telling me who the customer was, but it was a casino here in town. So I’m like, oh no, I can’t not work for that long. What am I going to do? It’s the first time ever I didn’t have work. I had surgery on my foot because I had broke my toe and so I had that fixed. And so I really couldn’t interview for a few weeks because I had that big boot on my leg. Right. And I didn’t want to hobble into an interview, but I kept looking with the voluntary separation. They gave you some career counseling. So I attended a couple of those classes and I got a little nervous because I was not finding anything right away. And I’m like, I’ve never not worked. What am I going to do?

Manuel: And I’ve got three kids.

Sirinda: And somebody at Dell that I used to work with, not as close as other people that I’d worked with just knew of each other.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: He was a Storage Specialist down in Arizona. He was hired to run the district office for SHI out of Tempe, Arizona. Okay. He said, I need a Vegas person for SHI. I need a seller to cover enterprise and mid-market and you’d be perfect. I’m like, I’m not a seller. I’m not an account manager. I’m technical. It doesn’t sound like a fit.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: He said, well, do you have anything else yet? And I’m like, no, he goes, you should give it a try. And I’m like, well, my dad was a salesperson. He always said I was suited for that. Right.

Manuel: Your dad did?

Sirinda: Yeah. He always encouraged me. He said, you’re so good at customer service. You should go into sales. I think the customer service side I’m good at. I don’t know so much about the closing. I’m just not, I’m not good. Like, if you tell me, oh, I need a couple more months before I’m going to make a decision, I’ll probably be like, okay, well, let me know. I think the average salesperson would be like, no, let me explain to you why you should make that decision.

Manuel: Right. Right. Like, hey, let’s do this.

Sirinda: Watch them. So they’re much better at it. But yeah, so I went to SHI for a little while. And they give you incentive to stay because they know, like I’m making a certain salary as an Engineer, salespeople are usually smaller salary, bigger commission potential. Right. And in the beginning, you’re not going to have the commission, right? So they give you a little bit to get started. So I started doing that. And what really worked out is they had one Engineer to share amongst all their Arizona sellers, which I want to say there were five or six, and then me in Las Vegas. So he stretched a little thin and he’s trying to cover them and me. I didn’t need an Engineer. I can do some of this myself. So right out of the gate, at the same time, Dell had had that voluntary separation. I sold a whole bunch of Dell because I had already been doing that.

Manuel: It’s what you do.

Sirinda: So now I’m just a partner with Dell and I was able to sell some big contracts here. The problem we ran into, gaming license. And with our gaming regs and the ones throughout the U.S., they need you to be licensed to be a gaming vendor.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: And so I went from having a lot of potential possibility to running into all these roadblocks. And because they’re privately owned, well, even when Michael Dell was privately owned, he’d sell through partners because they don’t have the same gaming license.

Manuel: Right. And that became a real struggle and hard for me to stay. Again, loved everybody I worked with, loved my bosses.

Manuel: Starting to get familiar with the role.

Sirinda: Yeah. So after that, I’m working at SHI just like, how am I going to make this work? This is so hard. I’m running into the end of that guaranteed, like now you’re going to be all commissioned. I have kids. I’m a family to take care of. How am I going to do that? And that’s when somebody from Trend Micro saw me on LinkedIn. So now, like it wasn’t even somebody I knew, asked me if I’d be interested in applying. And at first I was like, so funny when I say this, because when I was at Trend Micro, every customer gave me the same kind of feedback. I was like, aren’t they like an antivirus company from like, I think I had a laptop at Best Buy. I don’t want to work for an AV company.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: Well, then the person who hired me, he’s at AWS now, by the way. So I’ve talked to him since I’ve, because I’m at AWS now with you too now. But he started talking to me about everything they were doing with cloud, with AWS, all the innovation, the tipping point acquisition, so the IPS IDS, like all their security technology. And he must be a good salesperson because he really got me very excited about it. And the more I talked to them, the more interested I was, and I was coming from SHI as a salesperson, they hired me as a salesperson.

Manuel: Wow.

Sirinda: Covering Nevada. Oh, well, and this was the clincher. They said, Sindy, if you’re to come over, we need you to cover Nevada and Hawaii. I was like, Hawaii? Really? How often am I going to go to Hawaii? And so that’s what I did for them for a few years.

Manuel: Right.

Sirinda: And I loved it. And I want to say I was having more success in Hawaii than I was actually here in my own backyard. But think about it, these companies, when they buy software like that, they sign three years, sometimes five year deals, your timing has to be right. I want to say some of those salespeople are very good at what they do. They know when to be there at the right time. They know we did have some success. I did bring some customers to our executive briefing in Texas. Again, another Texas. So SHI, Dell, Trend Micro, all Texas-based companies. So I spent a lot of time back and forth to Texas. Trend Micro was the most amazing place. All three of my kids did internships at Trend Micro all the same summer, the three of them. My film major daughter, she did more of kind of a concierge internship. My middle daughter, she did a little bit more of a marketing type of a role, but still needed to learn the products and everything about security. And then my son did a TippingPoint. So he was in Austin while the girls were in Dallas. And I drove them all out there and found places that was a big struggle to find like a short-term place for them to rent. So typically those internships are offered more to local people. I got them from my kids. And then my son, they were so happy with them, they asked him to come back the next year for an internship. And I mean, I can’t say enough good things. I loved working for Trend Micro. They did bring in, again, another reorg. I lost Hawaii and I picked up Tucson.

Manuel: Big change.

Sirinda: Yeah. And again, it’s one of those roles that it’s very heavily commission-based. And I just had not worked that way for a lot of years. And as an Engineer, there’s just security. This is my salary. This is what I made. And when you’re a sole provider for family,

Manuel: It’s a lot of pressure.

Sirinda: It’s a lot of pressure. And so I was kind of feeling that stress and losing those customers in Hawaii. And lo and behold, that VMware position came up. And that’s the position I had always wanted was to work at VMware. So I went and did the interview, not even sure that I would get it. And that is the only interview that I did the presentation. And I wasn’t even to my car yet. I literally walked downstairs and out the front door and my cell phone rings. And it was my then new boss. And he said, we’re going to offer you the position. I’ll be calling you in just a little bit or by tomorrow.

Manuel: Yeah.

Sirinda: So that fast. And that’s never happened. And again, I loved working there. I was so excited. And I’d worked on VMware. And now I get to be technical again. Like, phew. [Laughter] Back to what I used to do. And still sales, right, on the sales side, but more…

Manuel: More on the technical portion of it, right? So you’re not really the one, and for those that may not be aware, so it’s not really a… So it is a sales role, but you’re there really to help answer technical questions, help them understand the technology. You are that gap. And one of the things that people may not realize, and I know you, so I know that you’re really good at this, is you can go and speak very technically to the people that are doing the day-to-day work, but then also explain that at a high level to a CIO, a CTO who they may know what the technology is, but they don’t really care. How is this going to help me, my business? Why should I do this?

Sirinda: And that’s like a hard thing to develop. People need to think about that when you’re in technology. You need to know your audience and not go into the weeds if the people in the audience aren’t… You’re going to lose them. And to that point, I spoke to fourth and fifth graders last week on cloud computing and AI, artificial intelligence, and they’re fourth and fifth graders. And I’m like, the whole time, is this going to be too technical? This is a pretty technical topic. How do I make it relevant at that age group? It’s hard.

Manuel: And how did you do that? How did you develop that skill? Because obviously, I know you’re amazing, but I can’t imagine you just walked in and you’re like, oh, I’m going to be able to speak at this high level.

Sirinda: I think from the years of being so customer facing, so definitely anybody who’s starting an IT that don’t look past the ability to be that Desktop Tech, that person that’s out there in front of the customer, because you’re going to have such a range of customers. I remember going to the auto parts store with my big AT&T cell phone. I sit on the counter and I’m installing equipment and the guy starts talking to me about his PC at home and the challenge he’s having. And it’s super easy thing to solve, but not easy for him. So you have to figure out how do I explain that to him, get my work done, get in and out of there, be friendly, all of those things at once. And the more you do it and practice it, you become better at it. And so being customer facing. So a lot of, I don’t know, even talking to my kids, they want to start in an IT role that’s a little higher. They’ve gone to college and they want to start. There’s a lot to be said for kind of working your way up through the ranks and understanding what that end user is experiencing and how do you help them and how important it is. You know, when you’re making technology changes on the back end that are going to impact them, I did work at one property where they decided for security’s sake, like security, we need to keep ourselves secure, but not to the point where we can’t use the technology.[Laughter] So during a property opening, too, they decided that if a device was unplugged from the network for over a certain period of time, they’d lock that network port. Okay, well, let me introduce you to sales and catering. They have laptops, they take their laptop, they go call on the customers that they’re selling to, they’re gone for several hours, sometimes maybe a day or two, because they’re trying to bring in convention business. They come back, very busy, plug into the network, their port’s locked. And now you just told them that you have four days to get that port re-enabled. Is that your SLA on that? I’m like, that is not a workable model. And you don’t know that unless you know the customer. So I want to say, I guess it’s a little off topic of how do you bring the conversation up and down, but I think you’d need to be able to read people too. You can see in their face if you’re losing them. And I’m guilty of it. I’ll start going into the weeds and talking about technology and then I see their eyes glaze over. I’m like, okay, Sindy dial it back.

Manuel: Like you’ve gone too far.

Sirinda: And on the sales side, you have to have that skill.

Manuel: So it’s something you just kind of picked up along the way, obviously.

Sirinda: Between the two, being that customer facing person, having to sell to folks, sometimes it’s the opposite. I’ve sold to groups of people that, the MGM guys I used to work with, a vendor would come in and they would kind of try to play stump the chump. Like here’s the Sales Engineer. They’re going to try to show they’re smarter than the Sales Engineer. So they’d ask really hard questions. Again, I don’t know to what means, like what does that help solve? But more often than not, those are businesses that just really need your help. And so they really need you to be able to explain, make it simple. They’re not in the technology business. They’re a casino or they sell plants. They’re a nursery or they’re a title company. Like they might have a few technology people, but they’re not investing in an army of technology. They’re not going to know the technology the way somewhere from VMware or Dell or AWS is going to know it.

Manuel: Exactly. Oh, interesting. All right. So now you’re at VMware for a while.

Sirinda: It was just a little while. So I was only there a year. I loved it, but a couple of things. While I was there, I had worked at Trend Micro and been super happy. And I’m at VMware and I have my customers. They had made some changes where they shrunk the number of customers each team would have. So I only had five customers. I will say maybe that’s a theme. I’m used to a certain pace and being busy. When that slows down, I think I kind of tend to get nervous. Like, am I busy enough? Am I going to be able to stay here? Are they going to give me a voluntary separation? [Laughter] I don’t know what’s going on. And while I was there, Trend Micro had an opening and I went back to Trend Micro for a year, but it was the best year because I did a little bit of channel work. So I bridged the, I wasn’t, it wasn’t a sales role.

Manuel: Oh, okay. That’s what I was going to ask. What type of role?

Sirinda: I became the Cloud Specialist for the West, helping manage that AWS alliance relationship,helping sellers bring their deals through AWS Marketplace, talking about, so I had spent the three years as kind of a technical salesperson. Again, not necessarily needing my Engineer, although I had, I had the most, he’s retired now. I go visit him every once in a while. Engineer when I was at Trend Micro. But he would even say, sometimes we’d go to a meeting together and Zappos, they said, Phil, this is the only time I’ve ever been in a meeting where the sales person talks more than the Engineer. He’s like, I know, I’ll interrupt if I need to because I would get up and whiteboard and talk about the solution. So maybe over talk, I guess, but, but Phil and I just had that perfect cadence and we got along. So I had some technical depth at Trend and understood the product. So now I left and I come back and there’s a big push to have a stronger alliance with AWS because they had their cloud security platform. And so, so I guess by then I had picked up enough skills to help the sales people understand bringing their deals to the Marketplace, working with the AWS team on our alliance, explaining our products to the AWS sellers, just trying to build that momentum. And a little bit of non-technical skill that I had, which was planning events, planning, like just engaging with the community. We sponsored a lot of local security groups like ISSA. I just got very involved in being that kind of security champion here locally. And I love doing that. And again, I want to say the times that I’ve left, it’s been a reorg that changed everything and you feel like, should I stay through this change? Or should I move on through this change? Like, do we call like what I just finished complete now? And maybe there’s not an opportunity for me to stay necessarily or this new opportunity is not exactly what I had originally signed up for. And the AWS job is another one where someone just reached out to me.

Manuel: So then the AWS job, that’s going from Trend to AWS. So that was kind of that last transition.

Sirinda: So then I was at Trend after VMware and AWS reached out to me and it was just a recruiter found me. And I remember in the interview.

Manuel: And this recruiter found you how?

Sirinda: Just LinkedIn. So keep your resume up to date on LinkedIn, keep your profile professional. So I do have people reach out to me a lot that I just, I politely say no, no, thank you. But this was AWS and I was working a lot with them and just the ability to keep learning and building. And to me, that sounded like the ultimate place that I wanted to work. And so when they reached out, I’m like, of course, I’m in the interview. And that one I did prep for, the recruiter sends you a lot of information about AWS. So they’re very helpful. And then again, just gathered as much information as I could to prep for the interview. Super nervous going into it. And it’s four hours on one day.

Manuel: And it’s multiple interviews, right?

Sirinda: It’s multiple interviews. And funny enough, the one person who’s like the lead, the calm, the Bar Raiser at AWS that interviewed me, I eventually came under his org, but now we’ve kind of re-orged again a little bit. But in any case, I remember him saying, huh, funny, you speak just like one of us, like you’re already over here. But it was because of Trend. I worked with so many great ISV partner managers and talked about Marketplace and talked about how we were going to work together and how we needed to secure S3, containers, Well Architected Framework, cloud posture management, all the things that Trend was doing with AWS. I was talking about that every day. So it just kind of went with what we talked about. Now, there were questions they asked me, they ask a lot of, tell me a story when. So what was hard is I had been in sales for a while and I feel like they were looking for more technical responses. So I asked, well, the recruiter said, don’t go too far back. But there were a couple of times during the interview that I actually asked, I said, well, the experience I have that I’d like to share with you for that scenario is about four years old or five years old. Is it okay if I share that? And they said, sure, of course. So I was able to kind of slide back and forth because my career had changed a little bit. I will say, you know, I’m glad I did the sales for a little bit. I mean, everybody kind of reaches that point where they maybe want to do a little bit of a career change. So I tried sales. Yeah, I.

Manuel: Don’t know that you’d go back. But obviously, I mean, there’s a lot of good skills that you learned from it, right? So building trust, understanding how to make connections with people, speaking at different levels, which is something that, again, it’s beneficial at any role at some point.

Sirinda: Yeah. It’s just that closing that still mystifies. [Laughter]

Manuel: How do I get a person to sign on this contract?

Sirinda: I’m just not good at that. I have a very good friend from college and she’s very good at that in her career, totally different career. She sells spirits. But she’s very good at, you need 20 bottles of this. You need 30 bottles. She’s very good at it. Yeah. I’m always, yeah, mystified by that.

Manuel: So you went through that whole process and obviously you landed the role at AWS. And now what are some of the things that you’re picking up there as you’ve gotten into now your final, and I don’t want to say your final career, but your final career up to this point? Do you know there’s been a couple of times now that I’m like, I get somewhere and I’m like, you know what, this is where I’m, this is the last move I’m going to make. And I’m going to stay, which definitely I’ve said that while I’m here at AWS. And I don’t see any reason why I would want to leave, but I will say the toughest thing at AWS is time management. Technology moves so fast, and it feels like it’s moving faster all the time. It’s always been, but I don’t think I felt it as much as I feel it here. So certainly over time, I’ve picked up new technologies and.

Manuel: But it’s been a more gradual process.

Sirinda: Yeah. Now it feels like it’s happening so fast, especially like all the new AI announcements and all the possibilities, like how do you keep up. You just really have to be good about priorities, prioritization, managing your time. I, I will tell you, and this is for anybody that goes into career, you need to make a decision sometimes. Do I want to grow more technically? Do I want to be like a Principal Architect, or TAM, or whatever role I’m in? Do I want to be at my top technically? Or do I want to move into more of a management and leadership role?

Manuel: Okay.

Sirinda: You have to be willing and ready to give up some of those technical skills because you’re now going to be more people focused. I love working with people. And I’ve been faced with that once or twice where I was kind of being pushed more towards the managerial role. I feel like going in that sales offshoot was a little bit like that for me. You weren’t a people manager, you were account manager. So you’re kind of managing people through your customers and relationships. Having kids and managing family is kind of the similar skill set to managing people. So remember when I said someone gave me that analogy once, if you’re doing something very like I’m studying all the time, have a physical outlet as the opposite. I kind of feel like I have my technical outlet and then my more social skills are family, friends. It feels like a good balance. And I love learning. I mean, that is one thing I think is a trait that’s really important for people in our careers is you’re going to be a student forever because you’re keeping up with technology and you just need to keep growing. Yeah. I’ve just not been ready to give that up to be a manager, if that makes sense.

Manuel: No, it totally does because I’ve hit that same crossroads and like you mentioned. And have you seen as you’ve kind of moved up, because it sounds like you’ve not only moved around, but you’ve moved up at the same time. You’re kind of doing this, one of the things I try to explain to people is it’s not a ladder. You’re not climbing a ladder in a special role in a tech career. Like, hey, everybody’s like, you’re climbing the ladder. You’re not really, right? You’re jumping.

Sirinda: It’s almost like those around about slides and you are climbing up because it’s a little bit tough.

Manuel: It’s a little tough, but then sometimes like you’re jumping around to different technical areas, right? And a lot of people, well, it’s still IT. It is, but it’s very different in the responsibilities, the things that you have to learn as you’ve come across. And I know we’re getting close to wrapping up here. You mentioned constantly learning and that’s what’s helped you in your career. Have you seen people and at these different roles where the exact opposite has been the case, right? Where you’re just, hey, it’s, they’re not willing to learn and they’re kind of stuck in that same role. Would you say that the reason they’ve been there for so long is for that reason is they’re not?

Sirinda: I’ve seen that previously.

Manuel: Okay.

Sirinda: I mean, my experience now within the group that I’m in and even the customers I work with, it seems like there’s a lot of eagerness to keep up with technology. But along the way, there were people that would become the expert at something. And maybe this is part of what’s driven me to make some of the decisions I made. They would become the expert at a proprietary system. For example, maybe I’m the AS400 expert, or I’m the Tandem expert, or I’m the Oki Data printer expert.

Manuel: Pick your technology.

Sirinda: You need to have a vision. Same as we build resiliency and redundancy into our systems, do that with your job. You don’t know that they could go out of business. Basic Four that what I started on went out of business. Make sure that you’re covered in terms of if technology pivots away from what you’re the expert at, be ready to be the expert at something else. A lot of times technology is the same in what we learn and how we get to where we’re going. Don’t just become all about that one thing because I think, yeah, you could end up putting yourself in a place that’s hard to come back to.

Manuel: Yeah, but it’s the skills that you learn along the way that are really what’s beneficial. Technology can change, but it’s everything around that that’s really beneficial.

Sirinda: Yeah, like running a service or a job on a Tandem is similar to how you would do it, how on Windows or Unix or some other flavor. It shouldn’t be that hard to pick up a couple others. The CIO at MGM Resorts used to come by my desk and say, Sindy, how are we going to get rid of all these Unix boxes? They’re like, oh no, I was a young girl then too. I was like, I better learn Windows if that’s his plan to get rid of the Unix boxes. But then I would kind of also get that look on my face. We don’t have to reboot mine every week. [Laughter] The Unix boxes are a little more stable. Of course with your CIO, you’re not going to have that fight, but I would continue to work on what I was working, but make sure I learned the other stuff as well to make sure I was kind of covered.

Manuel: That’s awesome.

Sirinda: Just the one last thing I want to say, so I did share a little bit about that person I worked with at Cosmo. He’s my daughter’s boss now, so I have two kids that are cybersecurity. My son and my middle daughter is actually working for the person that I worked with at Cosmo. Then my youngest daughter, the film major, she got an internship with an AV company and she’s pulled cables and installed equipment. It’s not the same technology, but very similar. So those three that said that they don’t want to do what I want to do.

Manuel: Here, they are full circle.

Sirinda: They’re doing the same stuff. So yeah, so if you, I don’t know.

Manuel: Never say never, right? Yeah, exactly.

Manuel: Well, again, I want to thank you for coming on and telling me about your career. Awesome stories and I wish we could keep going, but it’s been a pleasure.

Sirinda: Yeah, it’s been a pleasure working with you like two places now. So hopefully we both retire from where we’re at eventually.

Manuel: That would be amazing.

Sirinda: Yeah.

Manuel: All right. Well, thank you.

Sirinda: Thank you. Bye.