Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
Are you a technology professional unsatisfied with your current role? Looking for a resource to help understand changing job functions, changing organizations, or gaining recognition and progression? The Nerd Journey podcast helps explore alternative roles, increase job satisfaction, and accelerate career progression. Each week, we uncover patterns of technical career progression by dissecting careers of guests and discussing different job roles they’ve held, or discussing relevant career topics. We’ve interviewed people in IT operations, sales engineering, technical marketing, product management, people management, network engineering, cybersecurity, software development, entrepreneurs, and more. We also discuss improving job satisfaction and accelerating career growth. We are John White and Nick Korte, two technologists with experience in IT operations and sales engineering who started this podcast in 2018. We release on Tuesdays, and can be found at https://nerd-journey.com.
Episodes
Being a utility player in the sports world is one thing, but what does a utility player look like in the tech industry? Erin O’Quinn, our guest this week in episode 330, says it takes a willingness to learn, approaching what you learn as something that can help you later, and a willingness to advocate for yourself.
Erin is currently a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech comp...
How should we be managing our careers during times of uncertainty? News of layoffs and economic uncertainty induces paralyzing fear and anxiety in many of us. What can we really control in the midst of it all, if anything?
This week in episode 329, we’ll talk through a 5-pillar framework with actionable steps you can take now to be more proactive in your career even when it’s a difficult job ...
Your manager has a preoccupation, but do you know what it is? The answer reveals a clue about their focus and the culture this manager will foster.
Join us in episode 328 as Joseph Griffiths shares advice for making 1-1s with your manager and skip-level manager more productive, guidance for the aspiring managers listening, and observations from managing both technical and sales teams. We look...
How well do your personal and professional life align to your passion areas? For returning guest Joseph Griffiths, seeking mentorship helped uncover his core passions (service, honesty, faith, and growth) and fueled the decision to pursue people management.
This week in Episode 327, Joseph details his transition from solutions architect to business solution strategist and why he sought mentor...
If you had something to share, what would you say, and how would you say it? Daniel Lemire asked himself the same question in the process of creating AI Mistakes. As it turns out, AI Mistakes isn’t just a platform for learning in public. It’s something Daniel must be doing. Want to know why?
After completing the vision board and gaining more perspective on the layoff event that would change h...
What happens when there is too much change at once after making a job change? Daniel Lemire had learned the principles of DevOps and combined it with his experience as an infrastructure architect to advocate for the adoption of new technologies and processes within a large enterprise. But when Daniel changed roles to focus on innovation and became a senior manager at the same time, there were...
When you’re missing a specific experience in your career, how do you get it? Daniel Lemire was missing experience in a large enterprise to pair with the things he learned from pursuing a graduate degree. Join us this week in episode 324 to hear the story of what happened when Daniel got that experience that provided the missing context to apply what he learned.
Throughout this discussion, you...
If your career was a product, what would the current release notes say? Just as product managers launch a minimum viable product (MVP) and enhance it based on customer feedback, Daniel Lemire unknowingly began building his career this way starting in high school.
This week in episode 323 you’ll hear about Daniel’s early aspirations to be a pilot in the Air Force and the phone call that forced...
Why do you think women leave careers in technology? Sometimes they are bullied, but sometimes it’s the loneliness.
This week in episode 322, Kellyn Gorman shares the story of what moved her to start Women in Tech programs in the technical community, the lessons she learned from the Microsoft community, and what it was like returning to the Oracle community after an absence. You’ll hear about ...
How do we determine if a manager is the right fit based on our personality, values, and the way our brain works? Kellyn Gorman diligently investigates a potential manager before taking a job. As someone with autism and ADHD, having a supportive boss is critical to her success.
This week in episode 321 we’ll explore how Kellyn got into both the Oracle and Microsoft communities and the reasons ...
What if your strategy at work was to take on the problems no one else will? For Kellyn Gorman, this is a strategy that suits the way she works and learns best. Kellyn is a multi-platform database professional with 25 years of experience in our industry, and she’s also known as DBAKevlar.
This week in episode 320 you’ll hear what it was like to grow up in a perfectionist home as a child with a...
If you think the job of a manager is to serve their team, think again. This week in episode 319 Richard Russell returns to make the distinction between how to manage well and the specific job of a people manager. As part of our discussion, Richard shares his transition into people management and how he later determined it wasn’t the right fit, his decision to pursue consulting, and the way he...
Have you ever felt a work task was boring or a waste of time? It might be because you didn’t understand why you were asked to do it in the first place. Richard Russell, our guest this week in episode 318, struggled with this in his early role as a programmer. All he wanted was to understand more about the business problem his work was intended to solve. In that role, however, Richard never go...
Cruise ship captains rely on the expertise of a local harbor pilot to safely dock the ship at a port. What if we as the captains of our careers sought the expertise of a harbor pilot to help us navigate a potential employer and their processes? Not sure how to find one?
This week in episode 317 we explore this analogy of the captain, the harbor pilot, and how the collaboration between them ma...
How prepared are you for a career emergency like losing a job? Disaster recovery plans for your career, just like troubleshooting, start with good documentation of technical and business accomplishments.
David Klee returns in episode 316 to share the prep work required for building and testing a disaster recovery plan for our careers. You’ll learn how to use David’s technique of looking in th...
Can writing documentation beef up your troubleshooting skills?
This week in episode 315 David Klee returns to explore the connection between effective troubleshooting and documentation. We’ll discuss appropriate levels of detail for documentation and explore it as a skill building exercise. Listen closely to hear why good documentation can make all the difference in a regulatory compliance a...
Does the ADHD brain experience stress differently in situations like being laid off, for example? According to Skye Waterson, ADHD coach and our guest in episode 314, stress actually has the potential to hit you harder after a crisis.
In this discussion, Skye shares practical tips for setting achievable goals as a job seeker or an entrepreneur and the importance of taking a long-term view thr...
Are push notifications directing your day? While useful in some ways, push notifications can also become a huge distraction, especially for the ADHD brain. This week in episode 313 we’re joined by Skye Waterson, a former academic turned business owner and ADHD coach, to discuss practical strategies for staying focused in your work.
Since dopamine levels affect our motivation, we might need to...
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