Nerd Journey Podcast John White | Nick Korte

Welcome to episode 227 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of a discussion with Scott Egbert, detailing his career shift from engineering to finance, the difference between accounting and finance, the role of business school, a career progression goal of being a business unit CFO, and how we can better communicate with finance.

Original Recording Date: 03-13-2023

Topics – Meet Scott Egbert, An Interest in Finance, Changing Everything at Once, Balance Your Ambition, An Executive Goal, Think Like an Owner, Career as a Profit and Loss Statement, Understanding and Communicating with Finance



* Mentioned in the intro



* A special thanks to Leanne Elliott of the Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture Podcast for connecting us with Scott. The podcast is hosted by a business psychologist and a business owner, and they have excellent guests and discussions. We highly recommend checking out their show!







4:21 – Meet Scott Egbert



* Scott Egbert is a leadership coach focusing on career development and transition. Scott helps people who are dissatisfied with their career find joy, and there are a number of examples of this we can discuss.

* According to LinkedIn, Scott began years ago by studying aerospace engineering.

* When Scott was in high school he wanted to be a fighter pilot, but he had glasses. At the time you needed 20/20 vision to be a fighter pilot.



* Scott tells us today he gets a little motion sick riding the teacups at Disneyland and feels like being a pilot would have never worked out.

* There was really no backup plan, so Scott needed help from a high school guidance counselor. Because he was good at math and science the counselor encouraged him to pursue engineering. Scott never questioned this suggestion.

* With an interest in aviation and an interest in space from a young age Scott thought aerospace engineering was the way to go. Though he would not be able to be a pilot, this would allow Scott to participate in this field in some other way.







6:13 – An Interest in Finance



* After studying aerospace engineering and being an engineer for about 4 years, Scott eventually chose to get a MBA.

* Scott tells us he tends to get bored easily and after some experience as an engineer, he found the scope was very narrow. After speaking with peers at other companies who confirmed the narrow scope, he found some of his peers really loved that aspect. Scott, on the other hand, was looking for more variety in his work.

* Scott was working for an electric utility company, and they were looking to acquire a few power plants. As an engineer Scott was pulled into the process to look at the specs of some of the plants.

* Scott found this process of acquiring other companies quite fascinating, and he started asking a number of questions. Others who could tell he was very interested in these types of scenarios encouraged him to go to business school so he could work on these types of things more frequently.



* Scott went to business school over a 4-year period to get a MBA while he was working full time.

Welcome to episode 226 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 3 of an interview with John Nicholson with a focus on ways to negotiate offers, some food for thought on different company benefits, levels of risk as it relates to startups, and numerous tips on personal finance.

Original Recording Date: 02-02-2023

John Nicholson is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect at VMware and co-host of the Virtually Speaking Podcast. If you missed the first parts of our discussion with John, check out Episode 224 and Episode 225.

Topics – Negotiating Offers, The Purple Squirrel and more Company Benefits, Personal Finance

3:00 – Negotiating Offers



* When negotiating an offer and health insurance for example is more expensive than your current company, can you ask for the company to pay more for your insurance instead of offering more salary pay? In other words, does it come from a different bucket on the back end?



* John N feels like health insurance options have to be pretty flat across the board (i.e. standardized for everyone).

* 401K matches have to be flat as well. The company / companies will get into trouble if only the executives or "highly compensated individuals" are using the full match.



* Additionally, the IRS has strict rules on fringe benefits.





* John’s blog post even talks about hotels. What kind of hotels would the company put you up in if you need to travel? Is it Motel 6 only, or would a nicer Marriott be ok?

* Consider any and all differences when you’re in the negotiation phase, and come into it by stating you’re taking the position of really wanting things to work out. Is the percentage of variable compensation negotiable (i.e. bonus or commission)?



* If not, is there room in there to raise the base salary? You may or may not be coming in at the top of a salary band (which could be good or bad).

* John N mentions raises are generally distributed heavier for people at the bottom of a pay band and lighter for those at the top.

* If you’re at the top of the salary band and cannot adjust bonus / commission percentages advantageously, ask about the RSU bucket and if it can be increased (i.e. you want to enjoy the risk with the company).

* John N has seen some startups allow designing your own compensation package to a certain extent. John provides the example of a married couple he knows in the San Francisco Bay area with one spouse seeking to always work for a well-known established company (being able to live within their means off the base salary) and the other spouse working at different startups structuring the base salary is low and the number of stock options is high (i.e. once the startup hits a successful exit the person can retire). This is a strategy.

* Each person has a different risk tolerance level.

Welcome to episode 225 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of an interview with John Nicholson with a focus on compensation. We’ll talk through stocks as compensation, how resumes might highlight expensive skills in a manager’s eyes, and how good managers look at employee compensation.

Original Recording Date: 02-02-2023

John Nicholson is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect at VMware and co-host of the Virtually Speaking Podcast. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with John, check out Episode 224.

Topics – Compensation, Org Charts as Tools, Stocks as Compensation

3:35 – Compensation



* This blog John Nicholson wrote about points of consideration before taking a job offer was a jumping off point for much of our discussions.

* It’s probably best not to start with talk of numbers unless a recruiter asks you.



* Listen to John N’s strategy for dealing with random recruitment direct messages on LinkedIn. He mentions this has helped him avoid a lot of conversations but also that this blunt approach sometimes gets a recruiter to keep you in mind for something down the road (i.e. level sets on what you want).

* If you’re interviewing with a hiring manager / other members of a hiring team (not the recruiter), John N recommends not leading with numbers.





* If you’re working for a large technology company, you can do your own homework and get an idea for what the salary range might be.



* Check out levels.fyi – it’s a bunch of compensation specialists and former HR personnel who have experience with FAANG companies that have done salary surveys and reverse engineered pay bands.

* They (levels.fyi) also have details on stock benefits like RSUs (restricted stock units) and how vesting works for this type of compensation. If you get $250K in stocks but won’t see it until year 3, that’s a big deal!

* The above is different than Glassdoor, which usually only talks about base and variable components of compensation.

* Much of the above is covered in John N’s blog post if you want to learn more, but the idea is to consider all elements of overall compensation for a position.

* What is the bonus structure for the company, by how much are people usually hitting their bonus targets, and how often do bonuses get paid? It’s helpful to have people in your network who work for the company in question and will be able to tell you. If people tell you they haven’t hit the bonus in a number of cycles, it would likely not be contributing to compensation by much (if any).

* Start with the bigger numbers, but don’t overlook smaller things like ESPP (employee stock purchase plans). It’s a little bit of a roulette game, but you can earn some extra money by participating.





* Should we ask a recruiter how the benefits have changed over the last 6-12 months because of the economy?

Welcome to episode 224 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of an interview with John Nicholson, talking through the role of a tech marketer and how to progress into that role. We also discuss some of the points in John’s blog on considerations before accepting a job offer (which includes considerations during the interview process).

Original Recording Date: 02-02-2023

Topics – The Tech Marketing Role, Consideration Points before Accepting a Job Offer, Interview Questions and the Vibe Check

3:06 – The Tech Marketing Role



* John Nicholson is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect at Vmware and co-host of the Virtually Speaking Podcast.



* Technical marketers can work with customers, product managers (PMs), and product marketing.

* In John’s role, technical marketing sits within a business unit (or product team). A lot of what technical marketers do is produce content and then get the content out there.

* Some organizations put this group within an office of the CTO, within a special evangelist group, or elsewhere.

* Often you see tech marketing personnel on stage at conferences or producing videos, for example. John tells us roughly 80% of the work is behind the scenes working to support the next product launch – collecting information, training sales engineers, building enablement for partners, conducting workshops, etc. There is a lot that is very visible but much that is hidden.

* Nick says John N is part of the team who creates all kinds of pretty pictures and diagrams people love, right?



* John says yes. They create PowerPoint slide decks for consumption and even things like interactive infographics (one example being the vSAN infographic).

* The team is constantly evaluating what people click on and what closes deals, speaking with sales engineers, customers, etc.

* The vSAN Design Guide, for example, can be a challenge to maintain due to its length. But when you look at the traffic statistics, many people look at it.

* John tells us there are long form content options that they team maintain as well as shorter, byte size content like 2-minute videos / demos or even a quick GIF.





* You have to like writing to do tech marketing. Perhaps you like blogging and communicating. You don’t have to be the world’s most gifted speaker but cannot be afraid / paralyzed to go and present to audiences of 150 people or more.

* John likes to say people get into tech marketing because they are already doing it. This role recruits heavily from solution engineers or customers who were already presenting at conferences and blogging.

* John N mentions he knows John White from a presentation they did together probably 10 years ago at Spiceworld on storage virtualization.



* Nick was in the audience for that presentation and says it was excellent! He remembers each John sharing a couple of slides and speaking for probably 5-10 minutes on each slide.





* If you’re interested in pursuing this path, go speak at a VMware User Group (VMUG) or a local a href="http://www.

Welcome to episode 223 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we discuss John’s initial observations of the first 8-9 weeks as a first time sales engineering manager.

Original Recording Date: 05-04-2023

Topics – Episode Context, A Manager’s Onboarding, Overhead for Meetings, Attachment to the Team, One Step Removed, Tactical Differences, Closing Thoughts

1:11 – Episode Context



* In Episode 220 we talked about John losing his job as part of the Google Cloud reduction in force in early 2023.

* In Episode 221, John shared the story of deciding what his next move would be and getting hired as a Sales Engineering Manager at Nutanix.

* In Episode 222 we took a deeper look into John’s interview process and how he approached conversations with people at different organizational levels.

* This week John will share his impressions of being a first time manager. It’s like an audio log of the first several weeks on the job that he can go back and reference / reflect upon later.

* As of this recording John is in the middle of week 9 as a sales engineering manager at Nutanix. John says it’s been a whirlwind, very exciting, and filled with a lot of information.



2:14 – A Manager’s Onboarding



* Onboarding as a manager was essentially no different than onboarding as an individual contributor.

* Nutanix had a first day / first week schedule for John with training.



* John was in the sales engineering training with a number of individual contributor sales engineers. This consisted of learning about the Nutanix software stack and gaining hands on experience in tinkering with the technology inside lab environments.

* Previous to this John understood the products conceptually but had not been able to use them. John could, as a first time user, see that product teams had worked really hard on making the technology easy to use.





* John said there was also a pilot of a new multi-week manager program that started around week 5.



* Members of the program meet once per week with homework in between sessions. There is a great deal of coaching on the job of being a manager and how it is different than being a technical lead, for example.



* John confirmed he’s been doing the homework, so don’t worry, listeners.





* John said there was a conversation in this class that mimicked almost exactly the one about an operating manual for the self from Episode 217 with guest Kristen Carder.



* The tool shared in John’s classes was very similar to the tool shared in the above episode. The idea is to share what you’re good at, how you communicate effectively, when you run into challenges, etc. John and his classmates were encouraged to fill it out and share it with their teams. Then, he encouraged them to have team members do that for themselves.

Welcome to episode 222 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we probe deeper into the hiring process John went through at Nutanix, discussing the end-to-end process, how John prepared, what he experienced, and the advice he would give to others going through a similar situation.

Original Recording Date: 04-29-2023

Topics – Discussion Context and the Hiring Process, Working for a Former Manager, Compensation and Offer, Taking Notes in Interviews, Meeting the Team, Interviews with Upper Management, Plan for Success, Advice for Others on Manager Interviews, A Good Process

1:12 – Discussion Context and the Hiring Process



* In Episode 220 we talked about John losing his job as part of the Google Cloud reduction in force in early 2023. In Episode 221, John shared the story of deciding what his next move would be and getting hired as a Sales Engineering Manager at Nutanix. The intent of this week is to dive deeper on the interview process John went through at Nutanix and see how it lines up with the advice from our career foundation series recently and the episodes on interviewing:



* Episode 205 – Revisiting the Foundations of Job Interviews, Part 1

* Episode 206 – Revisiting the Foundations of Job Interviews, Part 2





* John tells us the structure of the hiring process was well established from the first informational call.



* For more on what an informational is, check out Episode 169 with guest Mike Wood in which he details what informationals with Microsoft were like.

* The hiring manager (a sales engineering director at Nutanix, and former manager of John’s at a different company) had reached out to John. When they had a discussion, it covered what the open position for sales engineering manager would look like and what the interview process would be like if John was interested.

* Once John understood the interview process, he felt pretty good about it.

* John says it’s important to try and figure out in these early conversations if you’re walking into a disaster or if you’re walking into something for which you are not qualified.



* This would be a first time manager position for John, and he was sensitive to the latter situation.

* John generally trusts the people in his network not to bring him into a bad situation.

* People in your network usually reach out to you because they have a problem to solve, and that’s not something they generally want to do if they are on their way out / in the process of leaving.

* One should always ask questions about the opportunity to ensure the situation is a good one.









* There were two things going on in that first call.



* John wanted to know what the opportunity was and if it was a good fit for him.

* The hiring manager was trying to figure out if John was inte...