Join me at my presentation at the Tampa Java User Group next Thursday, August 10th at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center!
Here’s my one-sentence description of my talk:
I’ll talk about taking on odds like these…
…and interview techniques like these…
…and building this…
…while learning this…
…and answering this important question:
It’s happening at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center (ECC) in Tampa on Thursday, August 10th! Find out more and register here.
On Tuesday, July 25th at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, Tampa Bay Techies held their “Breaking into Tech” event that featured a panel of successful and interesting local techies sharing their advice and experience for people who want to get into the technology industry.
It was standing room only at the event, and it looks like a lot of people here in Tampa Bay are looking to break into tech or like me, want to enable their fellow techies land a job in our exciting field.
The session opened with founder Samantha Ramos talking about Tampa Bay Techies, which has only been around a few months but has already made a considerable positive impact on the Tampa Bay tech community.
They are:
In the short amount of time they’ve been around, they’ve put together all sorts of events from presentations and panel sessions (including this one) to study groups (their next one is on Saturday, August 19th at Joffrey’s Coffee in Midtown) to volunteering to social meetups.
Samantha’s intro was followed by some quick talks by the sponsors:
The event wouldn’t have been possible without them —thanks so much for your sponsorship!
The panel comprised an impressive group with a wide array of experiences in different areas of the local tech industry, listed in alphabetical order by surname:
They were moderated by Christine Chinapoo.
Here are my (admittedly incomplete) notes from the panel session.
What specific skills and technologies have been most valuable in your career, and how did you acquire or develop them?
Jeff:
Steve:
Suzanne:
Ashley:
Jason:
Austin:
[Editor’s note: Somehow, I managed not to write this question down — if you remember what it was, email me, message me on my LinkedIn profile, or let me know in the comments!]
Suzanne:
Ashley:
Jason:
Austin:
Jeff:
Steve:
How do you see the industry evolving over the next five years?
Austin:
Jason:
Ashley:
Suzanne:
Steve:
Jeff:
How did your early career choices lead you to where you are now?
Jeff:
Steve:
Suzanne:
Ashley:
Jason:
Austin:
The panel ended with a Q&A session — here are my notes summarizing the responses:
The panel was followed by the informal networking session, which gave attendees a chance to catch up with old friends and acquaintances and make some new ones. It was great catching up with folks I know, and meeting some people whom I’d never met before.
Tampa Bay Techies is holding their Breaking Into Tech panel on Tuesday, July 25th from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center. If you want to enter the technology industry and need some insight, advice, tips, and tricks, you’ll want to register for this event!
Last night (Wednesday, June 21), Tampa Devs held a meetup at Embarc Collective with a great topic: Selling Yourself: The Art of Interviewing. They brought in some domain experts, who are also friends of this blog: Pitisci & Associates’ Craig Darrell, Brian Dodd, and Stephen Rideout, who were there to show us how to land a job.
Craig gave the presentation, which was eagerly absorbed by the audience, a lot of whom were first-time attendees of a Tampa Devs meetup. This was a crowd that was ready for their first or next job, and they had questions aplenty. Luckily for them, Craig, Brian, and Stever were there to answer them, and it looks like they had even more questions to answer after Craig’s talk.
I ended up deep in very enjoyable conversations with all sorts of people, and ended up talking about all sorts of things from AI ethics and Timnit Gebru, to C++ programming and the Deadly Diamond of Death, how I got into developer relations, and my proposed talk for how computers work “under the hood,” complete with a little assembly programming primer.
(And yes, I did a couple of accordion numbers.)
I’ll close this article with photos of Craig’s slides. Tap on them to view them at a larger size:
Attention techies with a social media presence or looking to build one: THIS is what you post shortly after a very public, somewhat embarrassing setback. No bitterness, no recriminations, no finger-pointing — but clever self-deprecation.
In case you need context, the person behind the tweet is Esther Crawford, whom you might know from this tweet:
She’s one of the “Twitter 1.0” people who worked hard to get into Elon Musk’s good graces, which I wrote about in an earlier post, titled Lessons from the “sleeping bag director” at Twitter who just got laid off.
And in case you don’t know what the meme’s about, it’s made of stills from the TV series The Last of Us, and it features Joel, one of the protagonists, having panic attacks.
Another good trick: answer what looks like a bad-faith question in a straightforward way, as if it were a good-faith question. Thomas Maxwell responded to Esther’s tweet with a question about sleeping bags, as shown above.
It was probably a good-faith question, judging from Maxwell’s Twitter timeline, but put yourself in Esther Crawford’s shoes. She’s probably still processing her very public layoff and dealing with slings and arrows from critics. In her position — and even as an observer — Maxwell’s question could easily be seen as a bad-faith barb.
Crawford did the right thing: she answered it as if it were a legitimate, good-faith question. This has a double-advantage:
Rapid7 and High Tech Connect are teaming up to have a tech fest in Rapid7’s new office starting at 5:15 p.m.! If you’re looking for work, you’ll want to check this out, as there’ll be networking, an open resume review and Rapid7 hiring update and overview. Find out more and register here!
High Tech Connect is a meetup group whose goal is to facilitate connections in the Tampa Bay technology community. They do this by holding monthly “Tech Fests,” which include a number of companies, including a not-for-profit, a start-up, and 3 or 4 for-profit businesses.
It’s a great way to catch up with your friends in the tech community, make new friends, and find out what’s going on here in “The Other Bay Area.”
Here’s a true story about an opportunity that started at High Tech Connect: In the summer of 2019, I was looking for work and decided to attend the July High Tech Connect event. I ran into my friend Tracy Ingram at the gathering, and we got to talking. A little bit into the conversation, I asked Tracy “Hey, do you want to go on StartupBus this year?”
He said yes. We went on StartupBus, formed a team (pictured above), made it to the finals, and were the first runner-up. I parleyed that into a mobile development job at Lilypad, and then later, into my current job as a Senior Developer Advocate at Okta.
Long story short: it pays to go to events like High Tech Connect!
Rapid7 are a security company, and as a reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard of their pentesting tool, Metasploit, their digital forensics and incident response tool, Velociraptor, or their threat intelligence tool, Threat Command.
For starters, they’re showing off their new office space in Channelside, located between the Florida Aquarium and the Channelside Bay Plaza.
It’s also a recruiting party. Rapid7 is hiring! You can see the list of current jobs here, and here’s a list of future roles currently not on their site:
Finally, it’s a networking event. That’s why I’ll be there!
You may remember this tweet from a little less than four months ago:
The tweeter of that viral post and sleeper in the photo is Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at Twitter — or at least she was. This weekend, she and at least 50 other employees were laid off.
She was recently the subject of an article in the Financial Times on January 24th (barely over a month ago) titled The rise of Esther Crawford in Elon Musk’s ‘hardcore’ Twitter. It tells the story of how she managed to become one of the few pre-Musk employees to parley their way into becoming one of “Space Karen’s” trusted lieutenants and in charge of several initiatives to make the company profitable, including Twitter Blue.
Her “sleeping bag” tweet raised a lot of eyebrows, including this short, yet spot-on response from Grady Booch, one of the patron saints of software development (and object-oriented programming in particular):
Crawford followed up with a multiple-tweet response:
[1] Since some people are losing their minds I’ll explain: doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc). I have teammates around the world who are putting in the effort to bring something new to life so it’s important to me to show up for them & keep the team unblocked.
[2] I work with amazingly talented & ambitious people here at Twitter and this is not a normal moment in time. We are less than 1wk into a massive business & cultural transition. People are giving it their all across all functions: product, design, eng, legal, finance, marketing, etc
[3] We are #OneTeam and we use the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWork to show it, which is why I retweeted with #SleepWhereYouWork — a cheeky nod to fellow Tweeps. We’ve been in the midst of a crazy public acquisition for months but we keep going & I’m so proud of our strength & resilience.
[4] I love my family and I’m grateful they understand that there are times where I need to go into overdrive to grind and push in order to deliver. Building new things at Twitter’s scale is very hard to do. I’m lucky to be doing this work alongside some of the best people in tech. 💙
And it was great to see this follow-up from her supportive husband. I’m a firm believer that a marriage is a team, and kudos to Bob Cowherd for this tweet:
I have nothing but respect for Crawford’s drive, determination, and willingness to put in “crunch time.” I have nothing but praise for Cowherd’s supportiveness. Having worked for similarly careless, callous, and capricious bosses — they just didn’t come up from apartheid emerald money — I believe that Crawford’s intense dedication was wasted on Elon Musk.
My recommendation to any Twitter employee back in November was to leave, as I said in my November 7 post (5 days after Crawford’s “sleeping bag” tweet), Advice to laid-off Twitter employees being asked to come back. It even ends with the “sleeping bag” photo and this line:
If you can afford not to, don’t go back. You’re being asked to go back to Hell.
Some people on Twitter were more blunt — and in hindsight, prescient:
I’ve had more than a few conversations — often over drinks, so these are backed by in vino veritas — where someone says that loyalty to a company is a sucker’s game. I think the truth is a little more nuanced than that.
A certain degree of loyalty to an employer who has earned it is actually a good thing. You’re more likely to be happy at work, and that’s important, as you’re that’s how you’re going to spend half your waking life from Monday through Friday. With this kind of loyalty comes two-way trust, and as Steven Covey puts it: Without trust, we don’t truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.
I like and trust the company I work for and the team I work on. In fact, looking at the teams I’ve worked with in the past decade, the current one is my favorite. I like my manager, my manager’s co-managers, my “skip-level” manager, and the various C-level people, most of whom I’ve had the chance to meet (and even play accordion for). They have my loyalty — within reason — because I know that I also have their reciprocal loyalty — also within reason.
It’s clear to me that the organization isn’t a family. It’s a publicly-owned corporation that operates in the present-day economy. My relationship with the company is pleasant, cordial, and thanks to its culture, convivial, but I know it’s also transactional. Implicit in the employment contract between me and the company is the understanding that the basis of our relationship is that I give them my time and effort and they give me money.
Even with co-workers, managers, and C-level execs who I feel conduct themselves with decency and honor, my loyalty — which is considerable; I have Auth0 stickers on my accordion — is given with reasonable limits.
I would not extend that same loyalty to less decent, less honorable people. And I would most certainly not extend that loyalty to a vaingloriously venal weasel like Elon Musk.
While I am not in possession of the magic glasses that lets me see people’s true intentions, I’ve seen shit. And from the moment that Musk walked into Twitter HQ with a sink for comedic effect, Crawford has been doing exactly what one should do to get into the good graces of a petty, vengeful narcissist (who views most people as NPCs) that just spent billions on a criticism factory.
Consider this bit from the Financial Times piece:
When Musk first came to the San Francisco headquarters just before the deal closed, Crawford introduced herself in the Perch, Twitter’s on-site coffee shop, and secured a one-on-one meeting to discuss her ideas around payments and creators, according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.
And that “sleeping bag” photo? In the well-lit conference room? That’s somehow pristine clean even though everyone was in crunch mode? That ain’t no candid shot.
Also consider that Crawford grew up in a cult. In that kind of environment, you probably learn a couple of tricks on how to handle leaders who think they are the spokespeople for a higher power, or worse still, think they are that higher power.
Lest you think that I’m engaging in hyperbole by calling Elon Musk a narcissist, remember that he was so incensed that his Super Bowl tweet got only 9 million impressions compared to Joe Biden’s nearly 29 million that a “high urgency” message to @here on Twitter’s Slack was made to “any people who can make dashboards and write software” at 2:36 a.m. on the morning after the game. And let’s not forget that at a meeting to discuss the “lack of engagement” with his tweets, an engineer was fired for suggesting that public interest in Elon’s tweets had peaked and was now dropping.
I have worked at places whose mission I believed in, but whose management I did not. I believe that Crawford’s was a similar situation. And I took a similar approach, all the while readying not just Plan B, but the additional Plans C through G.
Many people are going to dunk on Crawford for the next couple of days. Some of them will be from the Elon Musk fan club, who will say that she simply failed to deliver. Others will be Musk detractors, who will say that it’s what you get for working an egomaniacal autocrat.
Many of them will be the sort whose tendencies are to punish women for the sin of being ambitious. Keep that in mind.
Even if the purpose of this post was to dunk on Esther Crawford — and it isn’t — I would still be “punching up.”
Crawford came to Twitter by way of acquisition. Twitter bought the video chat startup she founded, Squad, in late 2020. While the amount wasn’t disclosed, a look at Twitter acquisitions shows that they haven’t bought any company for less than double-digit millions. She has a great resume, she can always point to that profile in Financial Times, and she’ll likely be featured in a “What Next?” piece in some other tech or business publication very soon. She can even trade on the story that she worked with tech’s biggest jackass.
Simply put: Crawford will most likely be fine.
This article is not really about her, nor is it for her. It is, most likely, for you, especially if you don’t have a six- or seven-figure cushion to fall back on when the going gets brutal at work.
In my opinion, the lessons to take away are: