CareerOps with Jill Jubinski and Peter Burkholder

Bridget: [00:00:00] I’m making the, the GitHub resume is bullshit face.

Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.

Bridget: I’m your co-host, Bridget Kromhout, @bridgetkromhout on Twitter.

Trevor: And I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter. Arrested DevOps is brought to you by 10th Magnitude, a company that figures if you’re listening to this podcast, you must be pretty cool. 10th Magnitude empowers businesses to better collaborate across teams and achieve IT transformation using cloud. They enable customers to innovate, automate, and accelerate by leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure. You can find out more at arresteddevops.com/tenthmagnitude.

Matty: This episode is also brought to you by Hired. Hired is a platform for top developer jobs, and they love DevOps people. Developers get an average of 5 to 10 offers on the platform, all with just one application. You’ll get job offers and salary and equity upfront before you interview, so you don’t have to waste your time interviewing for jobs that you might not want. And they work with over 4,000 companies, from startups to large public companies. They have employers from 15 major tech hubs in North America, Europe, and Asia. Hired has full-time and contract opportunities, and it’s totally free for candidates looking for jobs. Arrested DevOps listeners get double the $2,000 bonus, so that’s $4,000, I guess, if you’re not good at math, just for signing up at arresteddevops.com/hired. So, oh no, you’ve been laid off or you’ve lost your sweet gig in some way. We’re talking to a couple of returning guests on how to bounce back after a layoff or some other unexpected career shift.

Bridget: [00:01:51] Yeah, and so one of these guests is Jill, Jill Jobs, or Jill Jablinski, is that how I say it, Jill?

Jill: Yep, Jablinski, you’re good.

Bridget: Excellent. I just think of you as Jill Jobs or hug dispenser, you know. But she has legit squad goals, and one might even call her the Taylor Swift of DevOps, more on that later. And she’s super good at escaping rooms, possibly in Portland. But yeah, Jill, you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jill: Yep. So hi all, and thank you for having me back. Last time I was on here, I was living in New York, and now I’m living in Seattle. So I just— cross-country kind of stuff going on. But right now I am working at IBM. My title is kind of in flux, but basically Technical Community Evangelist is kind of what we’re calling it, but I was brought on to build teams. So there is a recruitment piece to it for sure, but also from a community perspective, understand who’s doing what in the industry, what industry trends are happening, and create an overall genuine and caring experience for all candidates and hiring managers to be brought onto my teams.

Matty: [00:03:09] We also have Peter Burkholder joining us, and actually, this episode was suggested by Peter. Peter, you want to tell us a little bit about yourself for returning listeners and what kind of motivated this conversation?

Peter: Yeah, thanks, Matt. I’ve made a long and circuitous journey into DevOps. I’m formally trained as a geophysicist and went from running lab networks to doing security for a research lab to web engineering, and finally in DevOps. And the, you know, the continuing thread through all these moves has been trying to think experimentally about how I approach my work, making decisions based on data, and then also realizing what we do is a profession. And thanks a lot to USENIX and LISA conferences for waking me up to that. But I did get laid off back at the end of April. And I’ll just go ahead and say that I got laid off from Chef because people who went, you know, who look me up will find that. But I’ve been talking to a lot of their experiences, people’s experiences about getting laid off. So anything I say does not necessarily reflect necessarily my personal experience. Um, it may either be mine or someone else’s, just wanted to throw that caveat in there. But as I was, uh, going out, uh, finding my next gig, I realized that it’s been a long time since there’s been a major reset in the tech industry. And if you take seriously some of the rumblings that people in venture capital are talking about, that there may be a bit of a tech bubble that may burst, and there may be more people out there thinking, wow, I thought I was pretty secure in what I was doing. That turned out not to be the case. Um, what should I have done? So, you know, let’s talk about some tactics about what to do now, about how to future-proof your career. And what do I do now?

Matty: [00:05:00] So if we kind of, uh, take a look at some of the things that we might want to start with is, uh, so the first thing that I would think about is, and I know we want to go back and talk a little bit about how you can prepare for this, but let’s say it happened, right? So you’ve just, you’ve been laid off or, you know, let go for one reason or another. What is job one? What is the first thing? And, and I think specifically around, um, for me, one of the, the first steps has to do with mental and emotional wellness, right? Because, uh, so in my, my experience, it’s happened to me a couple of times. Uh, once was a little more, I knew it was coming where it was based upon an acquisition. And so it was one of those like, okay, so here’s the situation. You know, we are a giant company. We have acquired your company and 90% of the people were laying you off with a nice sweet package. And a couple of you ops folks, uh, we need you to stick around and turn off the lights. And by the way, if you don’t agree to stick around and turn off the lights, you’re not eligible for anything. But if you stick around, you can get a nice package. Another situation was very much caught by surprise where, you know, my position was eliminated and I didn’t know it was coming. And I think about the emotional reaction to having something, especially when it’s a job that you really love. What are some of the things that we can do when this happens to us to get our mental and emotional state in good order so we make smart decisions?

Peter: [00:06:23] Right. And then I think there also needs to be a little bit of thought of what just happens in the— if it is a surprise, what happens in the first 24 hours? I mean, one of those, despite all the movies that show people shaking their fists and declaiming, well, you can’t fire me. I quit. Frankly, the people you’re talking to may not be having any fun in what they’re doing. Secondly, you might very well need them down the road. So there’s really nothing to be gained from being a drama queen or a jerk. Um, secondly, um, don’t waste any time filing for unemployment. Unemployment insurance isn’t much, but it’s something. And if you wait a week, then that’s a week of benefits that you miss. And third, uh, if you get a separation package, discuss it with a lawyer.

Matty: I think that’s a really— that last point is really key. And that’s something that I, I didn’t do, um, in my, in one of my cases where I was just very much caught— the case where I was caught by surprise, you know, it was one of those things where, My my boss at the time said, “Hey, I need to have a meeting with you,” and I was like, “Okay, whatever.” We go in the meeting, and sitting as I walk in the room, sitting there is a director of HR, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Why is why is he here?” And just and so what the thing that can happen, and I think to to Peter’s point, is you’ve got a lot of emotions going on, and the package might sound pretty good, right? I sit there, and I they said, “This is what we’re going to do for you, but we need you to sign this.” right now where you’d not be, you know, and it’s kind of over. And I was like, okay, that sounds reasonable. And then after the fact, looked at it a little bit more and talked to some folks and realized it wasn’t maybe what it should have been. Uh, what, what’s your, uh, take on this, Jill?

Jill: [00:08:06] Yeah, I mean, this is definitely not a fun scenario for anyone, and Peter talked to this a little bit. Um, I think that HR in general gets a pretty bad rap for being like cold and kind of against the people. Uh, I know that there are bad case scenarios of this, but in general, I think that HR does care about humans. They just have to, you know, abide by some legal compliance and regulations a lot of times, which gives them a bad rap. Um, but like I said, like Peter said, in this scenario, I think that it’s not going to be an evil person doing this to you. So have a genuine, like, heart-to-heart convo if you can about it. So A lot of times, like, I know there’s numbers and all that kind of stuff involved, which you have to deal with, and lawyers. But one, you, you want to be a human and not kind of burn that bridge, because down the road you don’t know where they could help you out. And also, they may be willing to help you out now. I know a lot of people who have been laid off, um, for one reason or another. You know, things happen, and it’s business, unfortunately. Uh, but their boss and HR and/or others are willing to help, you know, navigate their networks to help find you your next gig. So I think that’s an important conversation to have as well. Say, you know, take it in. It’s a, it’s a very difficult thing. I’ve never personally been through it. I feel very fortunate that I have not. Um, but I, you know, speaking with people of all tenures, uh, in the industry, it tends to happen to people at some point in their career. So just be kind of prepared for it. Uh, as much as you can, but to make sure that you’re utilizing the relationships that you’ve built while you’re at the company to help ensure there’s some stability in the next move.

Bridget: [00:09:49] Yeah, I think that that’s really key because the fact that, like, in reality, companies come, companies go, jobs come, jobs go, but we have a pretty small industry. You’re probably going to keep interacting, if not working with the same people again and again and again. And so keeping and maintaining and building on those relationships, no matter what’s going on with your current gig, is, I think, a great idea.

Matty: I want to follow up and say, you know, burning bridges never helps. And whether it’s— and one thing that I witnessed at one gig I was at is when folks would leave voluntarily, a lot of them love to leave in a very scorched earth way, right? Because of course your new gig seems like it’s amazing and you can’t possibly think that you’d ever want to work anywhere else. And the couple of things that I came to realize was one, One, you can, you know, I think what happens is in that exit interview, people think, here’s my opportunity to tell the company everything that’s wrong with them, right? What it is, but how much of that are they going to actually listen to? Probably not much, right? First of all, most of the things that you’ve identified as being wrong, they probably already know and have decided not to do something about or not. It’s not going to help anything. And then secondly, even though you may think, okay, so I’m never going to work for Matt again, Right. And that’s quite possible. People, again, it’s a very small community, especially within when you think about within a geo area or something like that. So let’s say, you know, Trevor worked for me at, you know, bigcompany.com or whatever he worked at. We worked together at 10th, let’s say, cause we sort of did. So then down the road, Trevor’s looking for another job. They look Trevor up on LinkedIn. They say, oh, Trevor worked at 10th Magnitude. How do I know 10th Magnitude?

Trevor: [00:11:29] Oh yeah.

Matty: Matt worked there. And what do they do? They reach out to me and say, hey, what about this Trevor joker? And I say, he’s a fool. He was a jerk. Don’t hire him. And that absolutely will happen. Um, and, and again, it’s just like, it doesn’t benefit to burn those bridges. It feels really good. You want to do it. I still have a desire to do that with some people in my past. And I’ve found that it’s just, it doesn’t, it’s not positive. I made a comment once on Social Network not too long ago about how Leaving one job was the best thing that ever happened to me. And thank goodness that I don’t work for a short-sighted individual anymore or something like that. And one of my friends said, what does a good business do for you to be antagonistic about it? All you’re doing is you look like a jerk. Doesn’t help anybody.

Jill: So yeah, I can’t remember. I mean, I might be calling this the wrong thing, but, um, basically like the recency effect, that psychology that, you know, no matter how much good you do in the past, the last thing you do is the thing that, uh, is, what people are going to remember about you. Um, so don’t make it, don’t make it a bad thing if you can, if you can avoid it at all.

Matty: [00:12:39] What are some things that in that 24, when we’re thinking about our emotional state too, about— because it’s, it’s, it’s very hard not to take this stuff personally, right? And I, I think it might be good to think of some things that you can do to get yourself leveled because you really need to take, you know— so, so Peter talked about some very tactical things you need to do in those 24 hours, but I also think about the things that you don’t need to do right away and you might need 24, 48 hours, some kind of cooling period for yourself so that you don’t do things like scorch the earth, right? Um, I would think like one of the things, and I’d like to hear what other people think, would be don’t talk to anybody about the specifics of your layoff maybe within the first 48. Just say, hey, I’m still processing that. You know, if someone wants to know, cause people want to know, everyone’s nosy, right? So Trevor gets laid off from Tenth, and the first thing that’s gonna happen, he’s gonna post on Facebook to say he doesn’t work there anymore, and he’s gonna get 55 million DMs saying, yo, what happened? And I don’t know, to me it thinks like it would be the— it’s hard because on one hand you want to be able to process it with your friends and like maybe vent a little bit, but think about like what you need to like, maybe for public stuff, give yourself a really big cooling off period.

Peter: [00:13:58] Oh, big props to that. Yeah. I mean, aside from filing for unemployment and making sure that anything you’re, you’re signing is going to be, um, you know, all square with your future, there’s probably nothing you have to do in the first 48, 96 hours that isn’t going to help you more than it could potentially hurt you if you get it wrong.

Matty: I guess the thing to think about is do your, do your venting and your processing offline, right? You know, uh, I, you know, go home to your significant other, your family, your dog, your attack kitten or whatever, and say all the terrible terrible, awful things that you’re feeling about your previous employer because it’s, you’re taking it very personally, but do it all in a very non-recorded, non-public way, I would think. Yeah.

Jill: Yeah. There’s, there’s definitely something cathartic about being able to vent. It’s just finding the right people to vent to, having that, that circle of trust, whether it’s, and it should be small, mind you, whether it’s inside of tech, outside of tech, you know, those significant others or friends and family that, you know, 100% that you can trust. To not go beyond that. That’s super important. That’s not just for layoffs, that’s for anything.

Bridget: [00:15:08] I mean, I kind of operate under the assumption that anything I type into the internet or say into a Hangout on Air is going down on my permanent record. So like, I just don’t put things like that there.

Trevor: That’s one reason why I’m always cautious about tweeting in general. It’s like, am I gonna look back at a tweet in like a year and a half and think, why did I bother saying that?

Bridget: I mean, just in terms of like being negative about people or organizations, I always try to think of, is this kind? Is it necessary? Is it fair?

Peter: Um, one other thing before we talk about the first 24 hours or 12 hours, is that situation where you’re asked to sign something then and there, or it goes away. Is that for real? Is that legal? I mean, no one here should offer legal advice, but I don’t think, I don’t think anyone can ask you to sign anything without the opportunity to talk to legal counsel. Matt said earlier he’s in a situation where he’s expected to sign something on short notice. We will not discuss that in depth on this episode, but we will— or I will update the show notes with some resources so you know now if you’re in that situation whether you are actually obliged to sign something or not, or it goes away. This is not legal advice. It is simply providing resources in the show notes.

Jill: [00:16:26] Yes, from an HR law perspective, there is nothing that states that you have to sign then and there. And I’m not just making that up. I actually know a fair amount about HR law, but again, not legal advice.

Matty: Right, right, right. And this, I think, goes a little bit into an idea of what Peter had mentioned in kind of our notes about what are you doing for a rainy day? Because a lot of this stuff, you know, you don’t want to think about what’s going to happen if this happens. We don’t like to think about this now because we have, you know, you’re maybe in a position like, hey, I’ve got a job I like. I can’t possibly imagine this happening. It’s, it’s kind of like a prenup, right? Like you don’t want to think about a prenup right when you’re in the process of maybe getting married because it’s really a negative way to think. But in the time, in the moment, you want to be prepared. So What, what are some of the things that, that people can do now, as Peter said, that are prepping for that rainy day?

Jill: One of the things that’s helped most in, in my career, not from a perspective of me ever being laid off, but just from finding new jobs, is not being— don’t close yourself off in a box of that particular company or those particular people. Keep your network as large as you can, you know, work on projects on the side or just like go to meetups. Just keep, keep talking with people throughout the industry so that when if whatever happens that you need to look elsewhere, that you have already have those connections. You’re not building those connections from that jumping point.

Bridget: [00:17:58] The part where people tell you to network and you’re like, that sounds like Toastmasters and handing out business cards and terrible— like, it really isn’t. It’s just get to know people in your industry because not just because there may come a time that that’s useful to you, but you may be useful to them too. Like Hey, your company is trying to hire people with exactly their skills, and you actually know those people. This is a win for everyone.

Peter: Talking about networks, it is an old adage that you should build up every— use every network that’s available to you when you’re on the job hunt. So on a lark, I thought, I have nothing to lose from this. I stood up in my community choir where I sing bass and said that I was on the job hunt and then sent out a follow-up email with specifically what I do, what I’m looking for. And one of my altos has a husband who works at AT&T. 18F, and he’s like, oh my gosh, we’re looking for someone with those skills. So, um, uh, it really is true that you never quite know what connections might come to fruition. So, um, you know, be, be out there in your community.

Bridget: [00:19:01] You should definitely go work for 18F. They’re awesome.

Peter: Oh, I’m accepting to like today. I would be doing this right now, except, uh, I was at the time of this, uh, whole podcast, uh, off by an hour. So, yeah, that’s my news. But back to what you do when you’re preparing for the rainy day, Nathan Harvey has his old talk on Quit Your Job, and it did inspire me to think about applying for another job once a year, whether you actually think you want another job or not. There are a lot of benefits that come from it. One is that it obliges you to update your CV. 2, you get to learn about another company or organization out there in the industry. And 3rd, it can be really gratifying to step back, look at what you’re doing, assess how your skills stand in the industry, and say, dang, I’m pretty good, and I actually like where I am. And if you find the grass actually is greener on the other side of the fence, then you get to change jobs, and that’s good too.

Bridget: [00:20:02] I mean, I’ve heard that advice. And like, I actually philosophically vehemently disagree with it, specifically because I’ve been the hiring manager who loved the candidate and extended an offer, and no, they were just actually practice interviewing. Whoops. And I’m like, I spent so much of my time and my social capital at work to get you and like get the offer that would have gotten you, and like wasted a whole bunch of my people’s time bringing engineers in to talk to you, and like, this was all a game to you? Like, I really don’t like that. What I would say is just be out there, be in public, give a conference talk. Like, there are things you can do to make sure that you’re staying, uh, aware of what’s going on out in the industry and engaged without being false. I mean, other than if you wanted to say, hey, I’d love to do a practice interview with you, I’d love to do a mock interview, like, that’s cool. But if you’re not sincerely willing to take a reasonable offer, I think it’s disingenuous at best to interview someplace.

Matty: That last part I think is the key, and I don’t think it’s completely contrary to what Peter was saying, which is that I do think you have to be serious, that if it is the right fit, that you’ll take it, right? You’re not doing this just to practice, because I think if you look at it, part of it is to do that, that soul search and say, is this the right thing? It’s not just because I want to go see what you’re doing. It’s like, okay, this gig that you have, Bridget, sounds pretty rad. I’m going to go through this. And the thing that may happen at the end is, okay, it actually wasn’t. You may still have loved me, but I didn’t love your job. And that’s okay. I think that’s better than just saying, okay, I’m going to just randomly pick someplace where I can practice interviewing. Those, I think, are two different things, but I can see how the latter could be interpreted by the Nathan Harvey advice, which is the, okay, I’m just going to do this once a year as my career maintenance, I think you should really look at that. And, um, like you said, if you’re not genuinely interested, if you wouldn’t accept if it was right, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t do it.

Jill: [00:22:00] Yeah, it’s hard from a recruitment and hiring manager perspective because it’s a really thin line. There’s a lot of people out there who will interview just to get a better offer, to get an offer so that they can go back to their current company and get more money. And so they are disingenuous and that makes those who might be doing it for the right reasons, but it doesn’t end up working out for one reason or another, just look bad too. So again, full circle back to the burning bridges thing, hiring managers and recruiters don’t forget people. So just be cautious of that.

Peter: And to make clear, I’m not the jerk in this group. I think I’ve always done it in the guides. It’s like, Yeah, that looks kind of interesting. I wasn’t looking, but I’m happy to get more information about this position. Here’s my updated CV. Yes, honesty is always the best policy, so, uh, let’s— we can roll with that.

Jill: Oh yeah, no, it’s, it’s interesting because even as a recruiter, I’m kind of torn about it because I think interviewing is really hard. And I mean, I’m on one side of the fence always, and when I have to actually interview myself and haven’t done it in a long time, I get really nervous. It’s weird and awkward. And, um, so I can, I can understand the desire to practice that, um, but it just has to be done with the right intent. And I don’t think anyone thinks you’re a jerk, Peter, so you’re fine.

Matty: [00:23:23] Uh, there’s a couple other things. So it’s like, so we’re going through that. We talked about working on, on your network, and, and I really liked, you know, Bridget’s point about, you know, you don’t want to just leverage your network when you need them. Um, I think that’s a, that’s a big key because I’ve definitely run into that where I’ve had the folks who, who reach out to me when they need something and it was kind of like, where were you when we were just chatting before? So I think it’s, those are genuine connections and genuine connections are what are going to help you. Um, kind of a funny thing and I don’t really have the back because I realized this just sort of looking is like, so our good, our good friend of the show Charity Majors has apparently decided she’s like a matchmaker for people looking for jobs lately. She’s been posting about it on Twitter and Facebook. But it’s like one of those things where if you’re— like, let’s say someone like Charity was like, oh, well, I actually am looking, you know, people are asking me for folks to do X, Y, and Z. And if you just come out of the woodwork and you’re the first time you’re talking to someone like that and you say, oh, what about me? They’d be like, who the hell are you? You know? And I encounter this a lot too when there’s, you know, jobs are posted at Chef and I’m always getting people saying like, oh, So I see that there’s, you know, an opening for a product manager. I do product management. How do I get you as a referral? And if you’re someone that I know well, then I’m going to say, sure, great. And I’m going to probably do things like say, let me know when you apply. And I know who the hiring manager is. And I’m going to actually send them a specific message saying, hey, Peter is super awesome. Please take a look at his resume specifically. But if you’re just some rando that I know on Twitter and we’ve never engaged, I might just say, sure, throw my name down when you submit, because I wouldn’t mind having referral bonus, but I’m not going to put— because having somebody be a referral for you is really, you’re vouching for them, right? Like, it’s kind of like Donnie Brasco. It’s like, I speak for you, right? He’s a friend of mine. And if I were to refer somebody into an organization and they’re terrible, that reflects really badly on me in some ways, more on me than on the candidate themselves.

Trevor: [00:25:25] So, so now, now, now I’m like second-guessing in my head about all the times I’ve like reached out to folks in the different Slack channels for, you know, for help. But, you know, it’s not, you know, it’s not that I don’t care about how their day is, but I feel like I would be interrupting them in a nonproductive way for them, for me to be like, hey, like I’m randomly messaging you on Slack to say just how, hi, how’s your day? Like if I ran into them in public, you know, sure. I would be all like, you know, casual conversation all day. But like, where’s the—

Peter: like, I don’t—

Trevor: now I’m like second-guessing in my head that I’m just bothering people again.

Matty: I don’t think it’s about like that you’re like pals and you, you know, talk about GIFs all day with each other. And you may, but even then, that’s also not going to help me understand if you’re someone that I actually— that will tell me that I think you’re funny and you’re friendly. This is still not helping me say I want to put my name on the line to say you would be a good candidate. So it’s just, I guess, kind of usual open source rules apply, right? Like, be helpful in the community. Do you think that’s what drives the network too? And it’s, it’s, I guess this kind of leverages into another thought about like how you can build your unofficial resume with things like GitHub and open source projects and stuff like that. I think that can be a little challenging for folks because a lot of stuff they may work on is behind the firewall stuff. That they can’t do. So I’d like to maybe, like, lean into that a little bit of what are your thoughts on this? Like, Bridget’s making a face, so I want to know what—

Bridget: [00:26:56] I’m making the GitHub resume is bullshit face because some people have other hobbies or have families or have a desire to not work 23 hours a day. And so if you’re selecting candidates based on whether or not they have the copious free time to contribute to open source in their spare time when their company doesn’t pay them to, you’re selecting candidates out of a limited and more privileged pool. So, I pretty much hate the GitHub resume entirely. Not to say that open source isn’t a great thing. It’s a great thing for a candidate to have on their resume, and it’s a great thing if an organization like, say, 18F is paying people to write open source software, or even Pivotal pays a lot of people to write open source software, IBM too. I mean, but I would not ever say, like, let’s use this as a filter for candidates, because it’s like, oh, that’s… Terrible.

Peter: On the opposite side, it would be kind of weird at this point not to have a GitHub presence because it would seem even if you aren’t allowed to contribute to open source, perhaps in your free time you would be saying, I am so frustrated by this particular issue, can I get some help? You know, even if you don’t have time to get paid, it seems like— correct me if I’m wrong— but not to have some presence would seem like you’re being a little passive and 2016.

Trevor: [00:28:16] I mean, I would say that’s probably the go-to place to look for that, but that’s, you know, you, you maybe, you may have side projects, but maybe that’s, you know, you don’t put them on GitHub.

Matty: You’re, you know, your organization isn’t using Git as a tool.

Trevor: It’s not what you’re familiar with. There may be other things that you’re working on, but I mean, at that point you should have, you know, some evidence of that.

Jill: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely times where there’s not going to be evidence. Uh, one, I mean, I’m fully supportive of what Bridget has had to say about, uh, I like when people have lives outside of work because I think that fulfills you as a human, uh, and that’s a huge necessity. But also, I’ve come across a lot of people that I’ve hired, and one in particular, um, who I won’t name, but he worked for the, the federal government and he was not allowed to write anything publicly. And he’s probably one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met in my entire life, uh, and he’s amazing, uh, and We had to really, like, sell— I hired him to Rackspace, he doesn’t work there anymore, but we really had to sell him to hiring managers because he didn’t have a presence outside of his resume because he physically could not. And so, I think that that’s just a great example. I mean, I’m sure there’s many more of not being, you know, having an open source presence, but still being very passionate about open source and software or whatever in general.

Matty: [00:29:40] I think this, this goes a little bit too, and I want to kind of clarify, I am certainly not a fan of, oh, well, you have to have a GitHub presence and I’m going to look you up on GitHub. And if you don’t got shit there, then F off, right? No, I was thinking about when we’re talking about how you can prepare for the rainy day, what are the things you might be able to do both from being able to show your work, if you will, but also back to that collaboration, that networking, you can build a network through projects you enjoy. Right? Same thing, if there’s someone that you’ve— you’re working on some open source project, again, this may not be the complete thing, but maybe just in part of the community around the tool that you use. If you’re known as being someone who helps out in Hangouts or is on a mailing list for Chef, or you do do some bug fixes or documentation fixes or something like that on an open source tool, all those people, they now start to know you because you’re collaborating with them. That’s a way of networking besides And I think that’s not Toastmasters networking. That’s actual, like, here, my money’s where my mouth is. I’m an actual part of this community. And I, I know plenty of folks who are super good, who are just like what, what Bridget said, say, hey, you know what, I hit 5 o’clock, I’m done, because what I want to do in my free time is be with my family. And that’s great. You can still be part of a community without it being your entire thing. And I think a lot of us on this show right now are people who find fulfillment in our communities. So we go above and beyond, and we, we might have a little bit of a disparate dial on— our optics are a little off on that. But I had a coworker that Trevor and I have worked with in the past who was an amazing engineer, and he did contribute to open source because it was appropriate for his job. But he was like, I don’t go to meetups, I don’t go to conferences, that’s not what I want to do. And You just need to think about how you can leverage those things. They’re an additional thing you might be able to do as a network, I guess, is what I was getting to. I certainly don’t think you have to be an open source person to be able to have a job in this day and age. Have some way that you can show— either show your work, but also just doing those things help prepare you for that rainy day.

Trevor: [00:31:54] I think too, some, you know, and I’ve never been laid off yet, but, you know, one thing, even though I don’t always have, I rarely actually have time to write things for open source, but when I’m working with code, I do kind of keep a little list of the things that I would love to fix when I get the chance and, you know, kind of get it. This is probably getting ahead in the conversation, but, you know, probably something, you know, once you’ve kind of settled yourself out, you know, while you’re looking for the next thing, maybe go and start working on some of those things that are in your personal backlog.

Peter: So since I’ve been thinking about this, I’m going to just tick off some of the things that I think are possibly valuable to do in networking. We’ve already discussed GitHub. So I think we all agree if you want to have a presence in open source communities and you’re allowed to be on GitHub, it would probably benefit you to make sure you have a GitHub account, and if you’re inspired to open issues, that’s probably a good thing for you. Meetups. Even if you’re shy, go to some meetups. You don’t have to say anything. Just being there, being on the list, just saying, you know, introducing yourself, that is something that people will remember later on, that they have a connection with you when you’re looking for work. Twitter’s not everyone’s thing, but even if you’re on there just listening to other people and get on from time to time, when you actually do need to send out that tweet saying, hey, I’m looking for work, some people may have already followed you back, and that would be good. And then of course, the elephant in the room is LinkedIn. I think I hate LinkedIn, but I go on there and update things. Uh, something I found myself looking at though is more than the references that people get is the references that people write, because it tells me that someone I’m looking at actually cares enough about other people. In Adam Grant’s, uh, nomenclature is a giver or a matcher and not just a taker.

Bridget: [00:33:59] Totally agreed about LinkedIn. Like it bugs me and I don’t really use it except I log in like once a quarter to like answer messages and accept requests. But I’ve been told, and I think it was maybe it was even Matt who was telling me, that there’s a huge value for other people for them to be able to see, um, your network, for them to easily be able to tell who do you know, so, so that they can say, hey, I see you know this person at this org, can you talk to them?

Jill: Yeah, that’s, that’s the majority of the stuff that I’m using LinkedIn for these days. I rarely message people on it unless it’s like the only way I could ever get ahold of them. And I mean, I actually can’t remember the last time I did that, but I get on all the time to see who is connected to who. I like looking at people’s recommendations as well, and ones that they give, I like reading those, just seeing their network. And a lot of times if people do update it, they’ll put like, you know, blogs they write or videos that they’re in or things like that. So it’s a good way to get like a full scope of someone, uh, in one place. And so if I can’t find it there, I’ll, I’ll look elsewhere. But if, if it’s already in a package, like, I’m gonna go there first to check it out before I have to use too much other time kind of poking around.

Matty: [00:35:18] So one of the things that, uh, we had in our, our list too was, was thinking about, for again, prepping, what’s the likelihood that, that you might get the axe, right? And I think we talked about 2 different times, you know, actually both times it was generally a giant surprise. To me. And you kind of— I mean, one day, it was based on an acquisition. I remember specifically coming in, and we had an employee stock program. So I just happened to randomly pull up our stock ticker because I had just done a purchase. And I was like, oh my god, my stock tripled in value. What happened? And of course, on CNN, there’s all the lists of, oh, Heller Financial acquired by GE Capital, and blah, blah, blah. And so we’re all, I remember a whole bunch of us, you know, kind of gathering in someone’s office, trying to figure out what was going on because no one had told us anything. And we had, uh, one coworker of ours who was infamous for coming into work around 11 o’clock. And we’re standing there kind of stunned with each other. And there’s this, you know, kind of pregnant pause. And one of our coworkers says, you know, this person is probably sleeping right now. And we’re kind of saying, you know, so when you think about it, it could come out of nowhere. So, what are some of the things to think about when you’re prepping for knowing that everyone is potentially at risk for this? I know, Peter, you mentioned something to the effect of, can you explain how you add value to an organization?

Trevor: [00:36:46] Yeah.

Peter: I mean, one of the filter questions as to whether you’re at risk or not is, are you employed? Yes? Then you’re at risk, is essentially what it comes down to. You never can quite guess what’s going on either inside or outside your company to some extent, but you should be prepared to know how you add value to an organization, either by adding to the top line, by bringing in revenue, or by saving money on the bottom line or making things more efficient. If you don’t know how to explain that, that should be a cause for concern. And I do want to differentiate between valuable and indispensable. ’Cause some people think that they’ve made themselves indispensable ’cause they have to be the person who, ’cause they’re the only person who knows those database table indexes or how the deploy works. And frankly, if you think you’re indispensable and can’t be laid off, you are likely wrong.

Jill: I mean, I think it’s kind of those same feels whenever you choose to leave a company too. And everybody has these, it doesn’t matter if you’re like super confident or not, or, you know, self-important or whatnot. Like when you leave, you think, stuff’s kind of gonna go wrong after I leave. Like, how are they gonna do this without me? There’s just like a little tinge of that in everybody. And then like half a day after you left, the company is running fully fine without you. And because that’s just life. So you have to, you have to think of that too, like the realistic view where if you, even if you think you’re indispensable, like it’s especially the larger the company that you work at, it’s, it’s just a part of life and you do have to be prepared for anything that can happen.

Peter: [00:38:27] Other thoughts on, uh, identifying job risk?

Trevor: I mean, I suppose I technically narrowly escaped a layoff because I was kind of paying attention to the, the, hey, no business has closed in 6 months. Um, like just, you know, being aware of what’s going on at your company can maybe, you know, unless it’s a surprise, like in Matt’s case where there was, you know, an acquisition that was learned by a stock ticker, You know, if you can, if you’re in a small enough organization where you can keep your ear to the ground and understand what, you know, what’s happening at the higher levels, you can kind of be ready for the— see the writing on the wall, so to speak.

Jill: Yeah, I think it becomes more difficult the larger the company that you’re at. And obviously, as I mentioned, I’m at IBM, so a huge company, and we just like layoffs, unfortunately, are kind of a part of life at that large of a company. And so at that level, then it becomes difficult to know where, when, why, how that, that things would happen. So, you know, it’s important to, to realize that. Now I’m, now I’m scared. Thanks, Jill.

Matty: [00:39:38] That’s kind of— so we’ve talked about, you know, what’s the likelihood. We’ve talked about what can you do to prep for a rainy day. We talked a little bit about what to do in the beginning, but let’s, let’s think a little bit about the bouncing back. So you’ve done your, your pre-work, maybe Right? We kind of said some of this stuff, but how, how do you actually bounce back? Right? So we talked about having a network in place in advance, about having stuff you can show to people about, you know, when it actually happens, talk to a lawyer. So now it’s after that first 48 to 96 hours, and now you’re ready to start leveraging this stuff. What are some of the things that you can do?

Peter: Well, first you need to get the, word out that you’re— well, I shouldn’t say first, but one of the things is getting the word out that you are looking for work to the people in your network. I just saw that in the last couple of weeks, Mike Fiedler and Annie Hedgepeth, like, just had some really succinct tweets saying what it is they’re doing, what they’re, they’re looking for. So yeah, that, that’s one network to use. I’ve seen that some people advise on LinkedIn. To not say looking for work, but just to change your top-line description to what it is you do. DevOps, continuous delivery, SecOps, something like that. And I’m not quite sure what the reasoning is between looking for work or looking for new opportunities versus just saying what it is you’re looking for. It’s a little awkward because Um, I think there is a sense of some shame in our society when you don’t have a job to just be out there and saying, I don’t have a job. But if you’re not saying you’re looking for work, you’re not going to find it.

Bridget: [00:41:27] I also think that like the shame or stigma around like, I don’t have a job right now.

Matty: Oh no.

Bridget: I mean, yeah, of course it sucks. It sucks to lose your job. It sucks to get laid off. Like I’ve been laid off twice and it wasn’t awesome. It was kind of a surprise. Um, in one case, in the other case, it was like after an acquisition and it was pretty clear that that’s the direction things were But just saying like, hey, I’m looking for, you know, a change, I’m looking for something new, it— I feel like that’s something that I’ve at least seen a lot of people on Twitter be really supportive of. And that’s what I want to see continue. Like, I don’t want to— we all look for something new for different reasons. And it’s not usually because, like, you’re a terrible employee. And that’s why— I mean, that’s not the reason.

Matty: So Jill, this is, you know, you’re definitely our resident expert on on, on this area, not, you know, for your own thing, but because, hey, that’s your job, right? So what are, what are the things, again, when we’re looking, when we’re trying, you know, um, you know, so Peter mentioned that, that folks are saying, okay, change your LinkedIn in this way. How do we, when we’re coming back, make ourselves more attractive to potential employers, if you will?

Jill: [00:42:34] Yeah, and so the downside is that there is a stigma around being out there and looking for, for a job. And what, what that comes from is that the industry is, is booming. And I would say specifically in the engineer space, and I’ve seen recruiters and heard conversations from hiring managers, um, that say like, oh, this person doesn’t have a job. Like, we want people who are highly sought after. So if this person isn’t employed, then they must not be highly sought after. Which I’m not saying that that’s the right way to think of it. I’m just kind of telling it like I’ve seen it in some scenarios. So I understand the trepidation of not wanting to put like, hey, I’m looking for work on your, on your LinkedIn. So I would be reluctant to put that on there. I would say that this is a time where it’s important to have made connections with any recruiters if you know any. Like, I know that recruiters get a bad rap, but there’s definitely like some good ones out there. Um, so it, you know, to, to continue those relationships if you have any. I have people reach out to me all the time saying like, hey, either I’m looking for work or my friend or my friend of friend is looking for a job. Do you have anything at insert company that I’m at at the moment? Or do you know anyone in your network that would be open to this kind of role? So it’s, it’s utilizing those relationships too. But yeah, from, uh, from a personal brand of yourself as a currently unemployed person, Uh, it’s, it’s a difficult, it’s a difficult struggle to, for how to brand yourself.

Bridget: [00:44:11] Well, I think what, what we were just saying about like the area you work in or the work, the kind of work you do is a good thing to focus on because I mean, and I know people who have left positions because they just needed to take some time. And that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to do, you know, hashtag ops life anymore or whatever. So I also love that everyone’s reaching out to you and they’re asking for a friend. It’s like, are they really asking?

Matty: Yeah.

Peter: And that could be a whole nother episode of how is it you break into this career if you’re new, or if you’re someone who stepped away for a few years for family reasons or, or whatever, as opposed to the layoff. But I won’t go down that particular rabbit hole at this point.

Matty: It’s, uh, it’s definitely That’s, that’s a really good idea for follow-up because I can think of several examples of where that was a factor, you know, and, and just to put in perspective, I guess, to maybe hammer home the, the importance of that networking was I had, I’ve had 2 times where I’ve been hiring for a role and I’ve reached out to people that I’ve worked with in the past who I thought were amazing, who I thought were overqualified to do the job. And basically we’re like, hey, Johnny, do you know anybody who’s looking? And then get the response saying, Well, I don’t really know that thing you’re talking about. Would you take a chance on me? And then I trip over myself to try to hire the person because I’m like, are you kidding? Yes, you’re hired already. I’ll teach you in a week. You’re fine. And so, but again, that only happened because of knowing somebody. It’s not like, ’cause we’re drinking buddies and we’re pals and I’m hooking them up. It’s ’cause I knew that in both cases, these were exceptional engineers who I was like, I don’t really care that you don’t know Chef or you don’t know Azure, but I know you’re super smart. And you’ll know more than I do in a week, right? And then vice versa.

Trevor: [00:46:00] If I ever find myself in the same situation, I’ll make the same decision.

Matty: And vice versa. I had a bit of a challenge when I was laid off one of the times where I kind of looked at it and said, okay, I’d already been kind of done with doing what I was doing, but I wasn’t actually quite ready to be able to move into the DevOps stuff as much as I thought I was ready. The industry thought differently. Uh, and it’s, it’s interesting to think about what you, when you’re, again, when you’re prepping for that rainy day, I guess, or when you’re looking in your first 96, take a look at what your package is, look at what your unemployment is and figure out what’s your realistic guideline for fun employment, right? If you say like, okay, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. Cause that was my thing. I was like, I am such a highly desired candidate. I can take 6 weeks and just fuck around and whatever. And, you know, everybody will want me. And then, you know, that time came up and everyone was like, yeah, about you being amazing, not so much. So I think that goes a little bit into Peter’s advice from before about being able to understand your actual— where your skills are, what’s— so you’re not scrambling at the end, right? Like, kind of know what you think you can and want to do and how how you’re going to set that up. Um, a couple other things I was thinking about when we were talking about spreading the word. Anytime you ask somebody to signal boost for you, in my experience, the easier you make it for them, the better, right? So like going to someone and saying, yo, I’m out of work, can you help me find a job? That is like, okay, you’ve just given me a whole bunch of work to do. So I need to really like you to take on a bunch of extra work. But if you come to me and say— and maybe this is a thing, maybe this sounds like— and this goes a little bit when I think about our personal brand episode, which is probably a good listen if you’re in this situation to think about building that brand. A lot of people, anything that smacks of marketing turns people off sometimes. But I think about if I were to be out of work and saying, OK, I want to go to my Twitter network and ask the people I care about or that I respect, Bridget or, you know, someone like that. Instead of going to Bridget and just saying, can you just tweet to your followers and tell them I’m looking for work? If I said, here’s a couple example tweets, maybe you could send this, and it says, hey, Matt Stratton’s looking for a job and he totally knows chef, you know, and is in Chicago. Does anybody know somebody? All that Bridget has to do is copy-paste that and she’s done.

Bridget: [00:48:31] Or give me something to retweet or something to retweet or whatever, right?

Matty: Um, although I will say something interesting in my mind, and I want to know what people think about, is I would sort of— because I see what I, um, what I see come across my Twitter stream or my Facebook feed with people signal boosting friends. And I definitely pay a lot more attention when I see, for example, I have a, like, Bill Weiss at Puppet. Like, he’s lately, he’s got some friends who are looking for work and he’ll post on Facebook and Twitter and specifically post it instead of just sharing or retweeting. And I look at that more than a retweet because I’m like, that’s to me feels more of an endorsement, even if they— even if you just copy pasted what I sent you to say.

Bridget: So I actually, I just want there to be a tweet so that I can quote tweet and say something about the person. And then like, you know, then that takes me out of being a named pipe and makes it possible for the person to kind of see and look at everything about you directly. Like what I don’t have time to sign up for is acting as, you know, the go between. Like, that’s the thing I’m not going to do. Like, I don’t have a lot of time for that. But if you have something that’s like already exists and is succinct and that I can point people to, then I will do that.

Peter: [00:49:46] One site that I found useful recently is called themuse.com, uh, specifically for 2 things. They have like a list of 200 action verbs to use in your resume. Um, the other one is a, uh, post called Help Me Find a Job: Emails to Send in Your Network. And it was pretty much just a template I could use where I listed what it is I do and all the different potential job titles that could apply to me, DevOps, continuous delivery, what else? What are the other things we do? I forget. And then the other one is just like list places that would be ideal to work at. And that was the thing where my friend, the Alto, was able to see that I mentioned 18F and these potential jobs, and it made the connection. So, I will post that in the show notes, but I would recommend those 2 resources.

Jill: Yeah, I was going to say that, as I mentioned earlier, I have people who reach out to me a fair amount. And some— so if you’re of my close network, of course I want to do whatever I can to help you out. But there has to be a limit. And this is with everyone’s network where if you’re further and further away, I can’t spend you know, an hour every day helping, helping random people. I have a full-time job as well. Um, so I had someone reach out to me, like they heard me on a podcast or something a couple of weeks ago, and they just like— actually, this is kind of funny— Colt reached out to me on LinkedIn and they were like, hey, I need career advice, can you help? And there was like no context or anything. I wasn’t connected with this person. This was just like someone who was connecting and that was the message. And so like, that’s a little bit airy and I can’t spend a ton of time there. Where I had someone else who reached out who knew there was like a connection between us, and this was on Twitter. And she was like, hey, I know so-and-so. I was looking at your career site. There’s like 2 jobs that I’m interested in. Do you have any connections to those? Here’s my resume. Like giving me the full kind of docket. And then I was more than happy to help kind of connect her to the right people. Because again, you, you served it up to me like on a platter and made it easy for me. So, you know, I’m— that you just have to keep that in mind when you’re reaching out to your network as well, because most people have jobs, lives outside of jobs. We all want to help each other, but it becomes, you know, a lot for people too.

Matty: [00:52:12] Yeah, I think to your point, right, anything you can do that— when you want something from someone, adding work to their plate is the surest way to not have it be done. And that just even goes back to advice I’ve always given people about when they want something from their boss, right? I want this to be like, I get the best results from a manager if I go to them and just say this thing, yes or no. But if it’s something that means they have to now think about the thing that I want, you know, I mean, so it’s like coming to and say, and here’s all the background, here’s all the evidence, whatever, versus the, oh great, now I have to go research this thing you want a decision about. Well, then I’m probably just going to say no because I really don’t need more work. I mean, vice versa, right? If you’re Or similarly, you want a favor, you want someone to help you. Hey, to be honest, you’re the one that doesn’t have a job. You’ve got time. You should do the leverage on that. What are a couple other things that I see? Peter, you had made a note in your notes about using a password manager. I’m interested to know how that’s relevant. It’s a very good piece of advice, and longtime friend of the show Ben Hughes would love that you’re talking about it. How is that relevant?

Peter: [00:53:21] I just realized when I was last time, when I was going through this recent job change, that it’s like, I didn’t know any of the passwords that mattered because they’re all in the password manager. So I could just like delete them all. And then, you know, worse, you know, if you’re part of a large layoff and someone takes action against the company, you have a much better position of plausible deniability. It’s like all those passwords are in my password safe. I deleted them all. I have a timestamp of it. And it’s off your hands, as well as all the other ancillary benefits that come with a password manager. It was just something that I happen to think also fit into this context.

Bridget: This is the part where I say #OpsLife. I really hope that people do a credential roll when employees leave.

Matty: I can’t tell you how many— one of my gigs, how many times it was just changing the core most powerful administrator password that was known was too hard. And it was just like, uh, we, we specifically were fortunate in that my entire time of, of managing the team there, we actually didn’t lose anybody because there was, and there was one time where we had, had, had a guy who actually quit and then he decided to come back later in the day, which was nice. And I did have a little sigh of relief where I went, oh, thank God, because this was going to be so much work to change that password. I’m really glad you came back.

Peter: [00:54:44] I mean, Bridget, you’re absolutely right, but those of us in ops are just going to end up with our fingers in a lot of things that aren’t easily changeable. All these various AWS keys and other just crap floating around out there that not knowing those passwords protects me as much as it protects my former employer.

Bridget: I mean, yes, except that, of course, corner case ops life here. I’m just going, except that it’s not really that hard to dump a plaintext version of your password safe before you like delete everything. So you know what I’m saying? Like, I don’t think—

Matty: not legal advice.

Bridget: Yeah, not legal advice. And I wouldn’t believe if this were something somebody wanted to look at your timestamps for deletion, I don’t think they would believe that you didn’t dump a plaintext version. So I’m not sure it would protect anybody as much as we would hope.

Peter: You’re right. Anyhow, my conscience is clear, right? That’s why I know I don’t have them.

Bridget: So you have a really good point about a related topic though, which is like, it was, um, having stuff in a password manager meant that it was a lot easier to figure out which stuff— oh, Trello or whatever— that I had attached to, um, a work email address that I needed to change. So that, like, all of those SaaS things that, um, you know, can get messy, especially if you signed in with Google but you signed in with your work Google Apps account. Like, it’s having a password manager makes untangling all that stuff way easier.

Peter: [00:56:15] That too.

Matty: I would make another little bit of rainy day suggestion, which is if you ever purchase software that you buy yourself but aren’t reimbursed, don’t tie your work email as the license. Uh, as someone who’s just recently rebuilt their laptop and I had software that was super old that I just, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know how I’d gotten a license on it before somehow, but I was like, damn, it’s still tied to an apartments.com email address. And I know this is, my, you know, my thing, but I have no way to reset the license. And it was like, fine, here’s $30 again.

Peter: Yeah. Back, back to things you can do now. And if you’re— if you work on open source software and your employer lets you make contributions under your own email instead of your work email, do that. Because I had all my beautiful GitHub contributions disappear from that green, green bar, my last change, um, on, on GitHub, all the green dots. Um, You know, it, it wasn’t a big deal. I was kind of disappointed to see all that, all that green on my chart go away.

Matty: [00:57:16] That’s a really good bit of it. And I’ve run into that a little bit, not with GitHub, but with— this is just a general thing, and we probably think about this as a follow-up conversation, but it’s the world of SaaS and personal tools that you also like to use for work. Merging becomes really hard, and I’m specifically looking at you, Trello. Because Trello doesn’t understand that you could have more than one account on their app, right? And you have to sign in and sign out into the other account. Well, of course, like, Chef doesn’t want me— doesn’t want to put my Gmail account as the Trello account to access Chef stuff, but I’m not gonna use my Chef account to get to like the DevOps Days Trello boards. And what it ends up doing, and especially then when you’re someone who’s like, I use really hard passwords and 2-factor auth everywhere I can and everything, logging in and out of apps is not amazing. So if anybody at Trello is listening to this show, please fix that because you’re making me not use your tool as much as I want to.

Bridget: [00:58:16] So I got 2 words for you: Chrome profiles.

Matty: No, that’s fine except for this. I want to use the Trello app on my phone. I know that I do Chrome profiles. I live in Chrome profiles. That’s fine as long as I’m on my computer, right? I want to use an app. There’s an app. By the way, dude, you’ll notice there’s an ADO sticker on my phone.

Bridget: Do you have— is that the, the die-cut one?

Matty: This is the new one.

Bridget: I don’t have one of those yet, but I gave away almost all of the ones that you sent me at various conferences recently because I keep running into ADO fans.

Matty: So, um, so by the way, that, that was a thing I want to remember, is you can actually buy your own ADO stickers direct from Sticker Mule now. And I will, in the end, I will tell you how to do that. So talk amongst yourselves while I look up the URL.

Peter: Okay, I’m going to— one other thing about when you’re on the market is that you need to take care of yourself. I think we already mentioned that it can be a sense of some shame attached to it because, as Julie pointed out, there is a bit of a stigma attached to looking for work when you’re not looking for work. So take care of yourself, meditate, exercise, ease what Eat well, whatever it takes. Go see a movie some afternoon because it’s like, hey, I’m not working this afternoon. Go see a movie. If there is another crash like in 2000 or 2007 and you find yourself unemployed for a long period, in addition to doing open-source contributions, get out and do real work. In 2001, when I was moving from Seattle to Denver in the midst of the huge tech crunch. I had a long period of unemployment, and going to do Habitat for Humanity house building was amazing because I was with other people. At the end of the day, hot damn, I put on a roof or installed some drains, and it was just a great, great break from the essentially 9-to-5 job— 9-to-5 drudge of job hunting.

Bridget: [01:00:15] Definitely. And it sounds like— I mean, Jill probably has some insight into this too, but it sounds like there are a lot of ways you can keep making sure that you’re participating and visible in the community, whether or not you’re doing it in the course of a specific job. What would you recommend for people in that situation, Jill?

Jill: Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, well, first of all, I want to say I really like what Peter said about getting out there and just doing things. I think that, and this is a large passion of mine, that People forget that there is life and world outside of tech. We get really, really wrapped up in it. And I love seeing when people— I think, like, I can feel myself smiling even more now just thinking about it, which is a lot of smile. But, you know, doing things outside of tech and finding other things that make you happy and make you fulfilled, it’s really cool. And there’s a lot of rad shit out there, I promise. But, you know, finding communities elsewhere, like, Peter said, that he ended up finding, you know, a job through, through a different connection. And, you know, just staying active however you can is super important. Just building community, building friendships inside and outside of tech that make you feel confident and, you know, fulfilled is what I would say.

Trevor: [01:01:35] Awesome.

Matty: This episode has been great, and we’re, as usual, over on time. So, let’s move into our checkouts. We’re going to have a bunch of them because we’ve got lots of people. So, for those of you new to the show, checkouts are where our guests recommend something cool they want you to check out. It could be a book, a beer, a tool, a website. So, Jill, what do you have for our listeners today?

Jill: So, today, I wanted to promote a new website that I found. It’s called— well, I didn’t find it. Someone showed it to me. UsesThis. And basically it’s like short interviews with people from all different areas. There are some chefs, like actual chefs, no offense, not like people who work at Chef. There’s technology people, there’s teachers, all sorts of things. And it just talks about what they use on their day-to-day setup, like to do work. So you get a lot of different perspective on hardware and software and people’s takes on that. And what their dream setup would be. And it’s, it’s really addictive, and there’s tons of backlog of it, and they shoot out a couple of weeks, so you’ll find yourself like deep in the, in the trenches.

Matty: [01:02:44] That’s cool. Peter, what do you got?

Peter: Uh, before job interviews, I read, uh, Dr. Seuss’s tongue twister book Fox in Socks because it makes me feel as though whatever they throw at me, even if I don’t know the answer to the question, I can answer it without, uh, tripping over my own tongue. Um, another old book in this area is, um, if you find it on a bargain bookshelf someplace, is Chad Fowler’s My Job Went to India and All I Got Was This Lousy Book. Uh, some good career advice, particularly to our point earlier, even though your job does end at 5, you do have to think about what happens when that job disappears. And you actually have some responsibility to do continuing career development on your own time. And then, since I was confused about the time that this was happening, I can’t remember what my own cool things are, so I asked my son and he said, oh, check out Infinite Jukebox, which will take any song that you upload, analyze the beat and melody structure, and then jump to another place in that same song between a bridge or a refrain, so it just keeps on playing forever in a slightly different pattern. Every time.

Jill: [01:03:56] Cool.

Matty: Bridget?

Bridget: Well, since I don’t feel like Peter said enough about it, I just have to tell everyone that they have to check out 18F. And, um, not just, uh, you know, Google 18F, whatever, but you can actually go to github.com/18f and you can see the work that they’re doing with our tax dollars. Um, if you’re paying US taxes, uh, they’re doing amazing work all out in the open. Things like compliance masonry, which is to say, if you need 4,000 pages worth of, you know, FedRAMP and FISMA and God only knows what in order to put an app out there for government, they’re putting YAML together with all— I know YAML, whatever, but they’re putting YAML together with all of the, like, detail of how they’re making sure to be compliant with something. And that way, if anyone else from government wants to use it, they can see diffs and they can build on it and just like in general put applications out there that have stood on the shoulders of what everyone else is doing as opposed to wasting a lot of time reinventing. And this is totally not a Cloud Foundry plug though, because the compliance masonry stuff that they’re doing is kind of orthogonal to that. They are using the open source tech that I do tech advocacy for at Pivotal. They’re not paying us, they’re just using open source, which is awesome. And basically everyone should just be looking at 18F all the time because they’re great. I’m like bouncing, I’m so excited.

Peter: [01:05:25] I’m so excited too. Thanks, you said that much better than I could have.

Bridget: And then I guess 2 other things I would tell people to check out are I was just at Monitorama, which is an awesome conference, and Jill gave a really good Ignite or like lightning talk, I guess, at Monitorama. And so I will have a link in the show notes. Like they aren’t, I don’t think the talks are carved up in posted as individual talks yet, but it was good enough that I totally went and found the livestream and bookmarked the exact place on YouTube so you can go right to her talk. Yeah, you should definitely check that out. Her Ignite was basically all about Taylor Swift and also being in tech and being yourself. I don’t know, am I explaining that right, Jill?

Jill: Yeah, that’s a great job. Thank you very much for that.

Bridget: Yeah, so everyone should watch that. And also, like, the third thing is, I didn’t really talk about it a lot while we were doing the episode, but I was thinking the whole time that making sure that you have a decent record of the stuff that you’ve done in the world, whether or not it’s on GitHub, because not everything is on GitHub or suitable to GitHub necessarily. Disclaimer, this is a plug for, like, the way I do my own website, which is actually GitHub Pages, so it is on GitHub. But, Like, if you speak at a meetup, or you speak at a conference, or you write a guest blog post for somewhere, or you appear on a podcast— yes, this one— like, you should make a record of the fact you did that and make a link to that artifact that exists in the world. You know, post your slides, or put a link to the podcast episode that you’re on when they get the page up, or, you know, anything like that. And have all of that on a website that’s branded with your name, and that way you easily show people. Like, it’s great, you know, for your Google ability. And also, like, when somebody says, well, we would love to have you speak, what, what would you want to speak about? You can just give them a link to like yourname.com/speaking, and it has like everything that you’ve been doing. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of everything, but just those couple of things that you’ve done that you really want to show people. It’s— I think it’s really important because no one else is going to do this for you, to like curate the content that you’re producing. And make sure it’s available in an easily digestible format.

Matty: [01:07:40] I completely stole that from Bridget, like, as doing. Now, I am— if you were to go to my website and look at my /speaking, it’s like a year out of date because it’s a bunch of work to do. I’ll post in the show notes, I gave an Ignite at DevOps Days Detroit last year that shamelessly— well, not shamelessly, I actually give Bridget credit— but talk about that that’s a really great idea. So you may get some ideas from from that. So I only have one checkout. It’s a little topical since we just had the season finale of Game of Thrones recently, but it’s called Arrested Westeros. So it’s at arrestedwesteros.com, and what they do is take screenshots from Game of Thrones and layer Arrested Development quotes over it, and it’s super funny. So arrestedwesteros.com. Check it out. Take us home, Trevor.

Trevor: Well, so mine’s— I also only have one. There’s a really awesome Doom E1M1 cover. If you’re not familiar with the game, that’s the first level of the original game. It was a really epic soundtrack. They did a really cool cover of it for the release of the new Doom game, which is also coincidentally a lot of fun.

Matty: [01:08:53] Awesome. If you’d like to dig a little deeper into some of the things we discussed today, the Library of Congress does not recommend, because they’ve never heard of us, these past episodes, arresteddevops.com/personal-brand and arresteddevops.com/career-devops. Talk about some upcoming community and event stuff. If you have an upcoming conference you’d like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/confs. CONF, and I will try to remember to put it into our show notes in upcoming episodes. But a couple things to know: any upcoming DevOps Days, give a try to use the code ADO2016. It should get you 20% off. DevOps Days Minneapolis is July 20th through 21st. Go hang out with Bridget, and I don’t know who else. Not me, unfortunately.

Bridget: Oh yeah, so we’re like, sadly We’re almost sold out, so we’re probably closing registration, but next week, so possibly before people even get a chance to hear this episode. I guess it depends on how fast we are at editing.

Matty: [01:09:55] That’s true. Do you guys livestream?

Bridget: We will have a livestream.

Matty: Okay, so watch the livestream. I will be doing that. DevOps Days Chicago is August 30th and 31st, and one of our speakers is going to be Jill. So we haven’t published our schedule yet, but by the time this is released, we should have an And if not, at least you know that Jill will be speaking. We’re super excited about that. We’ve got a couple upcoming CFPs. New York closes July 15th, which is like next week, but this should be up by then. Singapore closes August 15th. Detroit, August 31st. Baltimore is a new city this year. Is Nashville new this year?

Bridget: Nashville is new this year.

Matty: I noticed I have a friend in Nashville, and so I was like, I wonder if there’s a demo Ops Days near you, and then I looked and there is. So that’s—

Bridget: yep, they’re spinning one up too. It’s really exciting. Yeah, go to devopsdays.org and you can see all of the cities, current, past, present, future.

Matty: And if anything doesn’t work, you can just blame me on the site because there’s things broken I need to fix. Uh, if you’d like to order up some Arrested DevOps stickers to make your laptop awesome, go to arresteddevops.com/stickers. And, uh, yeah, and I know that works. I just created that link during this episode. And if you want to help support ADO even more, if you go to patreon.com/arresteddevops, you can set yourself up for some cool Patreon-only rewards, and that’s fun. So cool. So yeah, remember we have a newsletter, arresteddevops.com/bananastand. It’s the best way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps.

Bridget: [01:11:33] Thanks to our sponsors. Please be sure to visit them at arresteddevops.com/10thmagnitude and arresteddevops.com/hired.

Trevor: We’d also appreciate it if you’d visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store. We’d love to know what you thought of the episode. Please leave us comments at arresteddevops.com/career-ops. And thanks, Jill and Peter, for joining us tonight. I’m ad-libbing this because it’s usually in the script and I just now realized it isn’t, but I know I usually say it right around now. So thank you.

Peter: My pleasure. It was great hanging out with you all.

Jill: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Matty: Cool. We’re on Twitter @ArrestedDevOps and other social networks on some type of Arrested DevOps format. So find us or something. Let us know if you have ideas for a future episode like Peter did, and he was on the show. Awesome. I’m Matt at Matt Stratton.

Bridget: I’m Bridget at Bridget Krumhut.

Trevor: And I’m Trevor at Trevor G. Hess. We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.