JD's Journal
Having roamed this planet for six decades, and after 47 years of full-time employment in a smorgasbord of roles and locations, I'm sharing the gems I've gathered plus the wisdom of other remarkable leaders and innovators who I've encountered along the way. I don't have a clear destination yet, but based on my historical experience, it's certain to be a dynamic and unpredictable adventure. Welcome aboard!
JD's Journal
Vic Rose: Strategic Career Moves, Cloud Migration, and Life Harmony
Tune in to the latest episode of JD's Journal as I sit down with Vic Rose, an AI Cloud Engineer and founder at EngCloud, to explore his fascinating career journey from Amazon to Microsoft. Vic shares transformative experiences from his graduate school days, particularly a game theory class that reshaped his approach to collaboration and decision-making.
Listen as Vic takes us through his roles in intelligence and cybersecurity with the US Coast Guard, and how these experiences influenced his professional development. You'll learn about EngCloud's innovative approach to cloud migration, focusing on cost-efficiency and scalability, and discover the synergies between his work at Amazon and Microsoft. Vic's personal anecdotes, like his narrative review process at Amazon, provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at the contrasting cultures of these tech giants, highlighting Amazon's rapid decision-making versus Microsoft's more methodical approach.
Don't miss the compelling discussion on balancing work with personal well-being and relationships. Vic offers practical tips for maintaining mental health, such as taking midday breaks and setting boundaries, while also emphasizing the importance of a strong support network and a blame-free environment. The episode wraps up with reflections on the influence of Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist," and the significance of humility, curiosity, and giving back.
Vic shares his favourite quote "Every man I meet is someway superior, in that I learn of him” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Hi folk and welcome to the JDs Journal podcast where, every couple of weeks, my guests and I share some of our lives, journey, our successes, our, the valuable lessons that we've learned on the way and the resources that we've gathered that have allowed us to survive, prosper and thrive. The opinions and perspectives shared on JD's Journal should be taken and applied with your own good judgment. Episodes of the podcast are largely unscripted and unedited. I'll do my best to keep things on topic, but you can expect some occasional glitches and a little meandering along the way. I hope, if nothing else, you find that entertaining. To the JD's Journal podcast. Always great to have you here Today.
Speaker 1:My guest is Vic Rose. Vic Rose is based in Sacramento, California. He's an AI cloud engineer and a founder at Microsoft, responsible for the deployment of the Azure mainstream cloud services for all the new regions. He's all about standing up the critical applications and services that Microsoft customers rely on for their production workloads. Vic has worked at Microsoft and at Amazon and our experiences are kind of reversed. I started at Microsoft and now I'm at Amazon. He was at Amazon, now he's at Microsoft, so it's going to be interesting to talk about our experiences on both sides of the fence there, but this is Vic and I'd like to throw to you now. Vic, Did I introduce you appropriately or is there something that you'd like to add or change in the introduction?
Speaker 2:I just gave no that's great, and thanks for having me, John. Really appreciate the time here. It's great to reconnect. You know it's been a few years since we've had a chance to sit face to face, you know, with COVID and switching companies. So thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Great to have you here. Look, really, really pleased to have you here. I'm excited about exploring your journey and kind of comparing notes as we go along the way. So now that I've introduced you in terms of what your role is, I'd like to kind of peel the onion a little bit and explore what is your purpose when you think about your reason for being on this planet and what people are going to think about in terms of your legacy. What is that, Vic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really want to have positive experiences with people that leave them laughing, smiling, you know, reflecting on, you know, I had a really good time right and, and the point of that really is to help inspire people, right, you leave a positive message, a positive experience that just gives them just a little extra gas in the tank at the end of every experience, right, uh, we want to fill people's cup I love that and I think you, we, you and I, are aligned very much on that.
Speaker 1:I think we get great joy and strength and energy from that experience. But I'm really curious, you know, was there? Was there an event or was there a time in your life when that became clear to you? Was there an epiphany at some point where you kind of realized that this is a purpose for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when I was in graduate school, I had some really good professors and leaders who, just you know, took these very complex ideas, very intense mathematical classes in game theory, and they really boiled it down to it's not about how good you are right, it's about how much you understand, how willing and hard to work, and what do you take away from this that's actually going to impact your day to day, not just get through an exam right, and it really was about you know, bettering yourself as a person, you know, in this instance, through higher education coursework. But I felt like that was really important because a lot of times we go through school or education for checking the box, get a qualification, and that's really. That was an impactful time for me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So, game theory, I'm really curious. Is there a scenario that comes to mind when you say that, are you visualizing an experience you had when you're going through that?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. So I was at a graduate university in LA and I remember I took this game theory class as part of I was doing an economics master's of political science and game theory is a part of it because that's part of formal modeling, when you want to forecast and build models out. And man, I was not equipped. I was a geometry high school kid who got a dean's stats in college and just did not put energy in that field and I really needed that pep talk. And then it really changed the way I thought about decision-making, how people approach situations, how do you leverage friendships and alliances and how.
Speaker 2:That course was about political economy and governments, right, but we can always take that back to hey, how do we reach across the table and work with a partner in these, you know, end-to-end programs or these cross-functional things that are challenging from an engineering or delivery perspective, because we have both of us within a game and you know you can take those principles of math and really think about what do we have in common? Right, and that's really what game theory was is how do we play each other together or against each other? Right, for an outcome.
Speaker 1:That's incredibly interesting and I think what resonates with me, or maybe the thing that strikes me in that, is that I think for many of us that realization comes much later in life. You know, many of us, I think, sit on our careers very focused on results and outcomes and the data and the process and it's all quite, you know, clinical if you like, from that perspective, in terms of achieving results, and I think the kind of social awareness and the kind of community awareness that you're talking about there around connection and interaction, so forth. Again, for many of us I think it comes later on, much later on. So I think it sounds like this was a really great head start for you in terms of setting those expectations. Am I right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the education was great, right, but it really was those life lessons that got boiled down to here's how it impacts you as a person and it really taught me how to think like it really taught me how to think as a person. So when I started my career, I felt like I had, you know, decades lead start because these professors were seasoned professionals, they had been living life for a long time, they had had their accolades and successes and they really had those lessons that they gave to us students. And if you're open minded and willing to listen, I mean it was like gold nuggets everywhere, right, you could just take all the treasures with you right In your heart and your soul.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome, and it sounds like you're very much using all those lessons still today in a very current way Fantastic. So, look, I do want to explore your journey. I want to kind of dig into that more deeply, but before we do again, you called out the fact that you are a founder when I asked you for a bio, and I'm kind of aware of the fact that many of our listeners may not know what is a founder?
Speaker 1:What is the relevance of that? Clearly, you're not Bill Gates or you're not Jeff Bezos, so we talk about founder. What is that, Vic?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know, my experience is in cloud right, I was on the infrastructure side, I'm on the services side. I've had sort of this front row seat to what a customer goes through. Right, what does a new region mean? What does a service mean? What does it mean to onboard? Why is it so hard to figure out what things cost when I migrate to the cloud? Right, why does it take two years to do a full migration? Right? I've seen this sort of end-to-end picture of the customer experience.
Speaker 2:I thought you know I've got a big network of folks across the board at the clouds, there, the clouds. There's tons of resources out there and vendors and providers, like you know, a lot of companies don't need Accenture, deloitte, microsoft, you know support system to migrate simple workloads to N365 or get on AWS to start some basic VMs. There's a lot of opportunity in that small to medium sized space where they just need some help getting started and I'm like that is something I can do at a much more cost efficient manner. Right, because I don't have to hire 100 people and go raise seed money. Right, I can leverage my network, I can hire vendors, I can hire employees and do this at a very much smaller scale because I don't need to spend every day just trying to get this to grow. I can just help companies get a little joy out of it, make sure they're successful and I can keep this going long-term. It's not going to take me away from my full-time job as a principal here.
Speaker 1:Gosh, I really like that a lot and, at the risk of being a little geeky, I think one of the things that the cloud has done that really excites me, in fact, is it's bringing services and capabilities to small businesses, even mom and pop businesses, that were typically only available to large enterprises.
Speaker 1:And while I believe that's very true, I think it's true of the industry in general. I think you've landed on something that's fascinating to me. I think many companies are limited in being able to embrace those things because they're overwhelmed by the amount of information that's out there and because of the perceptions of what it's going to take. You know, do I need an Accenture or do I need somebody else to come in and do this for me, versus I can embrace those services myself? So I really like the notion of being able to be there at the beginning of the journey for a small medium business and helping them kind of overcome that perception and identify those resources that kind of can enable them to make small movements in the right direction. Kind of. I guess I envisage, as you describe, that kind of chipping away and kind of building that confidence with small investments up front, reaping the benefit of that and then building on. That Is my perception right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, you know, we don't. You know. Is my perception right there? Yeah, exactly, you know, we don't. You know. Engcloud as a company isn't here to do a full lift and shift. Re-architect, create new enterprise software, sell you new software. It's really about hey, let's get your data migrated to a standard Azure data lake or a PostgreSQL, right. Let's get some VMs started, right. Let's just get your basic processes more cost-efficient than a closet full of racks and networking gear that you're calling an IT guy to come fix every two months or adds a capacity Like let's just scale that and make it, you know, very automated so you don't have to worry about scaling problems. Then later you can tackle the next problem on your list.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just heard EC2, but you know it's okay Either way.
Speaker 2:which way the cloud it is.
Speaker 1:All right, so thank you for that.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate that now, as I said, I do want to dig into your journey.
Speaker 1:So I wondered if you could kind of share a little bit of you know where you, where you kind of started and and the the weaving way that you've gotten through, uh, amazon now to be the position you're at microsoft what. What's the journey been like for you, vic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it kind of went back. I went to graduate school, like I said, studying econometrics and then really in the forecasting conflict, political economy side of things, I was in the military as a reservist so I had a security clearance. So I kind of saw a path. Early on back in my early 20s I was like, hey, if I do this, I can go to the intelligence community, cause I really thought I wanted to work at the CIA. That was like my real goal as a high schooler. So I wanted to work at the CIA. So I went to the, I moved to DC, I worked for the intelligence community as a contractor, leveraging those skills.
Speaker 2:But you know it's a secure facility. You can't bring an Apple watch in, you can't bring a cell phone. And I had about three years the newly married guy I was, like you know, being in the office seven to seven. You know, five days a week is kind of tough. And then Amazon called right and there's a job posting and I filled my resume and I was hired to do a data center forecasting for the long range planning team. Learned a lot, you know it was nice because it's a good fit on the skill set and you know the industry right. We have surges of capacity, we got a late buying decisions right, so that kind of all fit a forecasting mode well.
Speaker 2:And then internally at Amazon there was a role for some new region planning stuff and at the time I was like I don't know what this is, except capacity is a part of it. I know how our systems and tools and who the TPMs are, so I can leverage some relationships there. And that, john, that's where Unite got introduced actually was Local Zones Together. There was a lot of work we put into that across security, staffing, planning, new site development. You know it was a I mean, it's a heck of a three years man.
Speaker 2:It was a long run and a lot of hours and eventually, you know, I had my first child, or my only child right now, and you and I was like Amazon's been great. But I was ready for a different type of challenge. So I came over to Microsoft and now I'm on the software side as a launch TPM for 60 mainstream services, everything from advanced batching, vms to data factories to advanced storage solutions. So I make sure when a new region comes live that customers are getting those services as fast as possible and reducing cycle times. But yeah, it's been a weird journey to go from forecasting intelligence to Amazon and new products to now Microsoft and AI regions and it's a standard regions there's everything out there.
Speaker 1:Very cool and lots of synergy, I think, in terms of our journey as well. Certainly I spent some time doing the Azure Capacity Planning in the APJC region or the AP region as we were moving there. Very interesting experience from my background as well. I'm a security professional. These days I kind of shock myself when I say that I've been in this role for three years. But with that in mind, you know I can't help being curious about your time in intelligence and with the US Coast Guard, including. I don't want you to breach any confidentiality boundaries or whatever, but can you share some more about that role and kind of how the experiences that you gained through that are relevant to you today?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the Coast Guard you know I was working in Los Angeles as a reservist just doing like counter drug interdiction basic, you know Coast Guard rules and responsibilities on the open waters. And then we had that the great, you know hack in 2014,. Right for the DoD systems, and I think a lot of service members remember our social security numbers being hacked, right. I think that came out in the Wall Street Journal. And so the Coast Guard said, hey, we need some people to migrate workloads out of these you know random servers really all over the place into a centralized library. And so they got me to DC first and I spent a few months on orders there and from there, you know, it became am I here, got a little bit of tech experience, got a few months under my belt, I've got a master's, I got a clearance. Let's try and do something right.
Speaker 2:So I went to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers and I was working at the deployer operations in the IC and that was a really great group of people, everybody from tech support to the guys who are, you know, taking care of business, right, and a lot of camaraderie, a lot of folks who really believe that you know, we're doing the best we can for global security and peace and supporting our warfighters overseas. But it's a real commodity group. Very smart professionals you can pick them out of a haystack for who you think would be in this group, right. You got chemists all the way to engineers right doing this stuff because all the roles are needed. So it was a really good experience. But, like I said, the community, the lifestyle, the hours, just you know, I wanted something a little bit different. After tasting it I was like maybe I'm cut out for a corporate world.
Speaker 1:Got it, Got it. So, on that journey, I mean, what can you think of any significant hurdles that you faced beyond the hours, beyond the work life harmony, I guess, but any significant hurdles that you that you faced and and you know the approaches that you took to overcome them?
Speaker 2:It was actually pretty set in stone, right, you got on the metro, then you got on the bus, then you walked in the doors, then you got back on the bus, got on the metro, went home. Right, it was pretty simple. I actually think transitioning to the public sector world, and the speed and pace at which Amazon moved, was the hardest thing I had ever faced. I don't think and I tell people this to this day, nothing can prepare you for the amount of information, acronyms, autonomy and authority that you are immediately given the day you swipe that badge. And it is incredibly scary because you don't quite realize the impact your decisions make day to day and the risk that programs take, because you might just not know enough early on to see around the corner. Right, the downstream impacts and that's always one of those things that goes back to.
Speaker 2:That networking and working together is you can't see these things as a new person, and so there's a lot of ambiguity, a lot of lack of knowledge, a lot of. It's a big hockey stick of growth and learning, and the network and the people you work with are the best asset to growth. Right, they're the ones who will look out for you, help you not make a wrong turn and advocate for you when you do need help. Right, it's always someone across the table in a different org who's going to say you know what, plus one of that. I actually have a concern here as well. That's where I think the most partnership happens is when you know folks align and realize there's risk there, when you're brave enough to bring it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you make a couple of points there that I want to kind of double down on. So first of all, I concur with you completely. I don't care what kind of profession that you've been in or what qualifications you've got. There is nothing that prepares you for the Amazon experience and the velocity in this organization. I love it. It was kind of one of the things that triggered me to move over. It's kind of that top of the roller coaster thing with your hands in the air. You know experience, no question about it. There's a velocity here that is quite remarkable. We even have a principle internally around high velocity decision making which is all about the velocity of movement as an organization that we don't get into analysis, paralysis, et cetera, et cetera. We move forward quickly with the best information we have at the time.
Speaker 1:But I think the other thing that, for me, is a survival thing is that the network that you talked about, I think knowing, and it's not just an Amazon thing. I think, in general, the strength of any professional is the wisdom and the experience and the support that you can gather from the folks around you, and so I certainly have found, at Microsoft and at Amazon, that gathering that network of experts and supporters and critics as well, people who can call you out when you need to be called out, is absolutely vital to survival. I think the other thing that is not unique to Amazon but I think is one of the strengths of this organization is that there is an expectation that you will fail. There is an expectation that you will make bad decisions, but it's not a blame culture. It's a culture where the failure is part of the process, part of the learning process, and I've talked in previous podcast episodes about the correction of errors process, which I actually love because it is a blame-free process that focuses on what were the symptoms, what were the attributes that resulted in the failure, and then how do we turn that into a process improvement without putting names in the document?
Speaker 1:I like that. Do we turn that into a process improvement without putting names in the document. I like that a lot. Was there anything else? I mean? So that's my view. I think it correlates what you just said, but is there anything else that stands out for you that either correlates with or challenges that?
Speaker 2:No, I think you're 100% spot on. There needs to be a way to fail fast, correct an error and take a learning from it. I think a lot of organizations are actually missing this. Even at Microsoft, we have RCAs, but the velocity of things happening is actually one of our constraints, where we're not having enough time to spend enough time to do enough of those across the board for all the things that we're doing, and so that's one thing I'd like to see more of on our side is how do we get a more rigorous, get an external party, just like you have?
Speaker 2:You know, you know the five whys. Right, like, get someone outside who wasn't a part of it to come do the drill down. Right, because that objective set of eyes can get a lot of clarity a lot faster than you know if you are at the table making decisions, or a part of it. Right, because then there's some bias for how do we couch this? How do we make sure we don't do this again? Right, for the most part, but 100%, velocity is important. It's amazing Amazon is still doing it like it's day one all these years later. Right, it's a really incredible organization.
Speaker 1:It is weird, I have to say. Coming in as an outsider, it is weird to see an organization at this scale that still looks like a 20-person startup when you think about operationally. I don't know how they sustain it either, but it is very interesting. Without competitively comparing the organizations, because that's not the intention of the podcast, but when you think about the two cultures, what do you see as the most significant differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to akin it to like two-size boats in the water. Amazon acts like it is a small 20-foot boat with two 480 outboard engines. Right, just spinning, doing everything cool in the lake. Right, microsoft feels more like a battleship, right, if it's going to take a decision, you know there's a lot of moving pieces, there's a lot of mass and a turn that 180, right is a slow process. The benefit of both Amazon, the quick response, the velocity, the quick turns and decision making means that you will spend time doing things that are changed through a non two way, you know, non one way, toward decision. Right, like, we'll make this decision but we can change it to four or five others if we decide to. And that happens quite often, right, it happens daily or weekly sometimes, depending on the scale of the decision you're making.
Speaker 2:Microsoft is very deliberative in what it wants to do. It has many reviews. It has a lot of VPs overview. It's CVPs review. We make decisions as orgs and then it will start to make incremental process over time. But the benefit is the stability in that decision and that it's going to happen. It will just happen in the due course of when it can happen. Right, they're not slower. They're just more deliberate about their investments. And, just like you guys, we have. We have our own system that is not OP1, op2, but our own style, and the same thing happens. There are filings, there are asks, there are commitments. There are filings, there are asks, there are commitments. There are things that get delivered, there are things that get delayed, and so we all have to live within the constraints of what we can actually deliver. Right, you can't always throw bodies of problems. Sometimes dates don't get hit and we have to live with the realities.
Speaker 1:Thinking about your journey. I mean it's been a pretty fantastic journey and lots of diversity in terms of experiences and growth and so forth. But if you went back, you know, to that period when you were graduating from college and kind of beginning your career, if you knew what you knew today, what would you be telling you? I mean, what's the conversation you'd be having with yourself back then that you think would make a market difference?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my advice to people who are coming out of college or graduate school right, starting their career right, or even early career professionals, is take the risk right. Do the thing that is more risky, that is more challenging, that will push your limits. You won't have a more exhilarating time in your life than trying new things that you could fail at right, and I don't think failure needs to be something that is you should be afraid of right. Failure is just learning opportunities and it's experience Right. And the second thing is it ties to that is. You know, I hear a lot about five year plans Right, or create your five year goal, and to me, I have never understood that, fundamentally understand it. But in reality I always tell people think of 18 month windows until you have a real set family, you have a home, you're settled right. When you're in that early phase of life out of school, 18 months is enough time to get a certificate. It's enough time to start a family. It's enough time to buy a new car. It's enough time to move across the country right. It's enough time to plan and execute in the same window.
Speaker 2:And I think if more people sort of thought of life in these smaller pieces like a marathon, like sections of a marathon in a race. You would find the process so much happier. But I think what is passed down, you know society, is have a plan, start a career, move up in management, retire right. And that just isn't the reality for anyone anymore. You know it hasn't been since COVID. It hasn't been since the recession in 08. It hasn't been since 2001. You know the terrorist attacks like we have to think in more fungible terms about our careers and lives, because we'll have more joy that way and we'll be able to make changes quickly and adapt.
Speaker 1:So we need to move from waterfall life management to agile. That's what I'm hearing right, absolutely, and that is how I think about it and I think you're spot on.
Speaker 1:I think that we really haven't cast off the original industrial era mindset that says that I'm going to start a career and I'm going to work in that career until I retire, which is kind of crazy today, because the reality is we're in a gig economy. You're probably going to have five careers in any decade or five roles in any, because the reality is we're in a gig economy. You're probably going to have, you know, five careers in any decade or five roles in any decade. And there is a lot of change and thank goodness there's so much change and diversity of what you can do today. So I'm 100% with you. I also think five-year plans are at the heart of depression. To be honest with you, if I look at anything that I wrote down, that was a five-year plan. I probably failed at it and I'm critiquing myself based on that. So I love the idea of chunking things down into short bursts or sprints. Think about it that way.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I just think it gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to change. You don't have to fail. Right your five-year plan. You freedom to change. You don't have to fail. Ride your five-year plan. You can shift. Shift your focus. Don't want to do investment banking anymore, want to have work in a corporate life? I don't do corporate. I want to start my own business. I don't want to do that. I want to start a podcast and drive Uber Eats Awesome. Those are all great choices, depending on what you would like to achieve, and I think we just need more space for that, for folks to explore it.
Speaker 1:I think that's great wisdom. I really do so. You talked about taking risks. Is there a particularly memorable risk that springs to mind when you think about that?
Speaker 2:that you took. Yeah, so I went to DC in October 2015. That's when I took my military orders to go help with the servers. I was engaged at the time. I had a job at the county in Southern California. I had a job at the county in Southern California, I was planning to get married in June and I basically left with nothing. You know, lived in housing for three months and I was like I gotta find a job. Like it really was. I gotta get married, I gotta provide, I gotta pay off student loans and I gotta buy a car because my truck had just died. It was a 93 Chevy S10 and that thing was kaput. So I basically left with nothing.
Speaker 2:It was just taking the metro and walking around DC and I found that it was a really hard time but it was really inspiring to be in a major metro. I just came out of the masters and I was trying to get right to the CIA, so I was inspired to be there. But I think those sacrifices and those, you know, saving penny pinching right, you're not eating out your tuna sandwiches are the favorite meal of the week. Penny pinching right, you're not eating out your tuna sandwiches are the favorite meal of the week, living leanly and taking risks, but having something to look forward to, right Like for me was being married, having my own apartment. That means different things for different people, right, but just having sort of that sacrifice and hard toil but that goal at the end, that's what really carried me and I think every hard season in life, as long as we have something to hold on to and we're flexible, it can totally be done and it's worth it.
Speaker 1:Did you have a contingency plan or did this risk have to work?
Speaker 2:It basically had to work or I was going to go back to Southern California and find a plan B, but I was pretty set on not going back, right?
Speaker 1:Now I had a hunch that this was a risk that had to work. It sounded like it was that situation. When you think about that risk, what were the things that you took into consideration? What was the thinking that you did that gave you the confidence to move forward with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So, like I said, I had a master's, so I feel like, all right, I'm a pretty educated individual if I have little experience outside of the military. I had the security clearance. I'm like, all right, that's got to give me something worth right, like, even if I and I'll be honest, the first job I got I was a data processor for the intelligence community, where I straight up sat at a desk and moved information up and down security levels for eight hours a day and there was not a more boring job on the planet than sitting there at a desk because you gotta be at the desk, right, you're paid hourly.
Speaker 2:But you know, for me I just did the math. I'm like the probability that this will give me a job, the education will come in handy that I'll be able to afford, you know something, not in downtown but around downtown, you know provide a basic housing allowance. I'm like we could I could figure this out Right, I just got to take time. So I did that and I just applied for every job that I could on. I think back in the day was indeedcom was a big job application system and, yeah, just apply for everything.
Speaker 1:So again, I'm going to kind of recap what you just said there, because I think it kind of resonates with me as well. I've made a number of career movements and decisions, on the personal level as well, which were, I feel like were pretty risky as well, but I think what I've learned over the years is that we underestimate completely the transferable skills and experience that we've got and the value of those, and I think what I'm hearing from you is that is that you knew that you had your qualifications, you knew you had your experiences. If this didn't work out exactly the way that you'd planned it to work out, you had plenty to fall back on in terms of being somebody of potentially high value to another employer or another scenario. Am I right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd always figured that if you were willing to have, have you know, skills and knowledge to look the part, to act, the part to be, the thing that they needed at the time was the most important thing. Right, that's really just interviewing and presenting. Well, it's just those. It's those soft skills, uh, that are getting missed today by a lot of folks. Right, it's that interpersonal, like I would why would I mind seeing you at a happy hour, kind of thing. Right, like you're a gracious person to be around, be around, and I think that goes a long way in life.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah, people want to work with you, no question about it. Yeah, no, that's good, that's good experience. Is there somebody in your life, or have there been folks over the years that you have been inspired by or that you've modeled in terms of what you've tried to be or how you've tried to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's this cliche, but my father's always been sort of my number one. You know he's a warrant officer. He's been in nearly 30 years in the Coast Guard. So I grew up on the West Coast. You know, small boat station, small boat station. He's rescued dozens of lives. You know maybe hundreds, I don't even know nowadays but now he's a lead operator for, like, international search and rescue planning response. You know.
Speaker 2:So when there's something going on related to the water, I mean he's on a plane and he's helping out, um, but he's also probably one of the kindest, smartest people that I know. Um, he wouldn't not do anything for anyone who needs help genuinely um, but he's incredibly smart. You know he's one of those guys on jeopardy. He put on television every night my house was Angels, baseball and then Jeopardy and I mean he would score $20,000 in a game. You know this guy was great, and so just to see that combination of compassion, intelligence and selflessness in a person. You know, I'm not there, I don't know if I'll ever reach that level, but I try to, you know, copy the little bit that I can from what I grew up with.
Speaker 1:Try to, you know, copy the little bit that I can from what I grew up with, and is there any specifically profound guidance that he's given you over the years that you hang on to today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean his whole, you know ethos has been be incredibly giving work hard, and I think hard work and being kind are the two biggest things. Right, because that work ethic, you know, that's something intangible, that's something that you can do, regardless of your abilities. Passion, skill like the ability to show up to work a little extra harder, to spend a little more time digging deep for those extra hours. Going to the batting practices a little early, staying late, studying right, helping your friends out study so they can succeed right. That, you know, drive for excellence or just bettering yourself, is so invaluable.
Speaker 1:Well, and there's something else in what you just said that I think resonates as well. We know from endless studies, in fact, there are both cognitive and physiological benefits of giving back. It's incredibly powerful. In fact, some of the studies have shown the long-lasting impact that giving and supporting and providing to others gives, and so, consciously or unconsciously, that's probably a strength in both your father and yourself in terms of how you operate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. He was always the father who was picking up other kids from practices or picking them up to go to school, to make sure everyone got there safe and on time and were enabled to do their best work. So I think for me that was a lesson every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. What a great model Now. That's fantastic. Thanks for sharing. So, over the years, has there been a particularly humorous or embarrassing event that's occurred with regard to your career?
Speaker 2:You know, I have this one story. We were both at Amazon at the time and we had an issue in one of our regions with network capacity, right. So I think we were doing some rehaul of some data center and basically we were super short, right Read in the capacity, had no room, and you know it was like going to happen in days and no one had called it out and this it was going to be like a four month constraint, like real bad for customers. So as a, you know, as an L6, as a senior PM, I wrote a six pager on how we got here, what the forecast looks like. You know, how many rocks can we land, what could the rework? You know all the things that we could do on the ground to get, you know, 10% better, right, but we're still in the shortfall.
Speaker 2:And I remember a member of the SVP, you know was in the meeting and so it's probably like 10 directors and a few PMs, you know, scattered on the side chairs against the wall. And you know, I remember the SVP. He reads the doc, he gets up, he just walks out of the room like it's wrong to sit there, like, oh, like, like he just left, uh, and so we sit there, for you know, it feels like an eternity, probably, you know five, eight minutes. He comes back as he sits down, he goes well, we're expletive, and then that's how the meeting kicks off.
Speaker 2:Uh, and, and the funny thing about that that meeting is, I've never seen so many accomplished, intelligent, well-dressed men sweat so many bullets in an air-conditioned room, 25 feet in the air in Seattle. You know, 25 stories in the air in Seattle. Right, it was just a man. I had never seen the level of stress and I think at that moment that's sort of my first kind of year at amazon I was like, oh, like, if you're gonna, you know, put something down and take some ownership of it and bring into a leisure of you, like, people will listen, uh, but it'll also cause decisions and reactions, that. But I just remember sitting there being like, oh man, I I probably shouldn't have written this, maybe someone else should have, I can I can so picture this scene, have been in similar meetings.
Speaker 1:So for the listeners, amazon has a I wouldn't say unique, but a specific way of making decisions and looking at proposals.
Speaker 1:And it's what we call a narrative fashion. So we don't do PowerPoint presentations, we don't do stand-up presentations. If you need to make a proposal or flag an issue or communicate information to leadership that's going to support the business direction, you write a narrative, and a narrative can be a one-pager, a two-pager, up to six pages, no more than six pages with an appendix. I've seen them with 15-page appendices, but anyway. And then you typically pre-COVID. You'd get into a room and you'd sit around the table and there'd be silence. So people read through the narrative and wrote with their red pen all over the narrative and so forth, and then 20 minutes, half an hour into the meeting, then conversation would start and you'd go through the feedback or the questions and so forth.
Speaker 1:These days, more often than not, those things are done virtually. I have to say that, probably like Vic was just describing my first narrative reads that I was writing were horrifying. Those meetings were quite scary to go into. I love that process now. I'm absolutely a huge fan of the narrative process now. It ensures that all the information that's required to make the decision is typically there and accessible and you don't have to stand. And accessible and you don't have to stand, and it's particularly good when you're dealing with people who have English as a second language, because they can take the time to write and translate and get it to a point where it's ready and then the paper speaks for itself mostly and then it's about answering questions. But I can sort of Vic, I can sort of visualize that scenario and what went through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're imagining, right, we've all and these docs, right, they go through reviews and reviews of the leaders, right? So everyone's sort of teed up ready to go in this meeting so that the decision maker in the room can absorb, react, make a decision and we leave. But you imagine you spend two weeks writing this doc and then it's just total failure, sweat, stress, questions everywhere. It was just man. It felt like an adult circus. It was like holy moly. What have we done?
Speaker 1:Well, I hope the outcome was the right outcome in the end, Vic.
Speaker 2:It worked. It worked out all right, but, man, it was a learning experience, you know Always is always is All right.
Speaker 1:So I've got just a few questions to go through now, and these are standard questions that I ask in every podcast episode. The first one is you know, if you could only have one book that you could read for the rest of your life which is a really tough thing, right what book would that be and why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would probably read the Alchemist over and over again. It's a relatively short book by Paulo Coelho. It's about a sheep farmer in Andalusia and he goes on a journey. He has visions. He meets a wizard. He has to sell crystals to make some money. He gets to the pyramids to seek out this vision right and at the end of it it turns out that the treasure was right where he was all along, right the beginning of the story. I don't want to give it away, but it's an amazing, sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an amazing fantasy of you know having a vision, taking risks, traveling across the world, you know, meeting strange new people, going to new places, new people going to new places and then really coming back to some of the core things that we all you know as a humanity, right and generic stories have a love of. You know, a simple life, someone who loves you, a warm home, and I think that's just a wonderful story because it always takes me back to sort of when I first read it in like sixth grade. I think it's just one of the stories that really stuck with me, along with Lord of the Rings, right. But I think that purpose-finding joy in the book as a young shepherd, right Always sort of stuck with me as a young man because I was like that would be so cool and you know I found my own little pieces of that throughout life here and there, having a family moving across the country. You know I've got my little treasures I found along the way, so it's not totally unrealistic.
Speaker 1:It's just not magicians. That's good. I was about to ask you how does this parallel with your life? But you answered that question for me, so I can see why this book resonates so much with you. I have not read this book, but I'm now. I'm going to.
Speaker 2:I have to, so thank you for sure read and it's great for a flight and it's just inspiring. It's a feel-good story and it makes you be like about what a great writer you know and it's really kind of like a steinbe right. So it's very simple, very easy to read. So you get that like Hemingway, steinbeck you know Steinbeck very condensed. You know clear language, which is nice.
Speaker 1:Nice, all right, well, I will include a link to the book in the notes from this session, folks. So if you want to take a look at that, by all means, it sounds like one to check out. The next question I've got for you is that you know, we all, hopefully we find some hacks or some habits that have had an impact on us in terms of our effectiveness or our well-being or so forth. Is there a ritual or a hack or a habit that's had a significant impact for you?
Speaker 2:You know, I'm at a point where I need to start doing more about my daily life. I work from home and I have a toddler, so a lot of my days are get up, make breakfast, you know. So unfortunately, I'm not like one of these Dave Goggins who has like a 5 am workout, you know. Run three miles, do a cold plunge, you know, and then do a three-hour lift. You know, my days are mostly get up, make breakfast, make sure we're fed, start my workday. But make breakfast, make sure we're fed, start my work day.
Speaker 2:But my favorite thing to do, which is my sanity in the middle of the day, is I try to take an hour for lunch from 12 to 1. And I try to do like one of three things. I try to go for a walk with the family. You know, if the weather's nice we just go for a walk around the neighborhood, ride our bikes, just to get and breathe some fresh air together. During the summer months we've enjoyed swimming in the pool with my son and that's been number one has been. It's just great to have a nice cold iced tea. Go swim together for 40 minutes and just enjoy time together.
Speaker 2:And the third thing is is a new one that I've I've started with as part of a health is a hot yoga. I've never, never did yoga before, but I joined a class for, like you know, four weeks. It's a really, really excellent stimulant. It's incredibly hard and embarrassing, for sure. So do not walk into that thinking you're in great shape because I go to the gym, I work out occasionally, but, man, you will never be humbled so quickly than a hot yoga studio, and you know what? It's added to the list of humbling experiences that are wonderful for the soul.
Speaker 1:I have other friends who do hot yoga and the thought of it scares the hell out of me. One of these days I'll take the plunge, I'm sure, but it frightens the life out of me. I love the walking thing. I've talked in previous podcast episodes about the fact that I've adopted walking meetings, in fact, so I can actually be out there and still be productive, and so forth. I'm curious do you block that hour in your calendar? Is that a place that you put a boundary? I do yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know, with the speed of AI and launches and deliverables, right, Things creep early in the morning and oftentimes I'll be online after I put my son to sleep and my wife is ready for the night. I'll get back online at 10, 30 or 11 and get some work done and prep, you know. So we've all lived that life. But I do block that.
Speaker 2:12 to 1 is sort of the time that, unless there's an emergency, I really need to unplug, refresh my mind, get on my office, get some fresh air, bond with the family right, Because I think those touch points are really important throughout the day and I do much better with them because they help me relieve stress, but they also help the family make sure that they feel like I'm still engaged, I'm still part of it. I'm not totally checked out, Because you know when you're working from home, even during COVID right, your family's experiences. When you come out of the office, I mean, they're just taking the brunt of whatever you are bringing into the room, into their environment, because you only have the bio break time, the seven minutes to get a coffee and I'm back in it, and I've really found that to not be helpful, and so I'm trying to actively find ways to get more steps in more positive touch points, because you know the family's what's there at the end of the day, every day.
Speaker 1:No, look, I really like the fact that you block it. And for those that have listened to Julian Sequeira's podcast episode on my podcast, those that have listened to Julian Sequeira's podcast episode on my podcast, julian was very hardcore. He has a period in the morning that he blocks out. He has bedtime for the kids that he blocks out and he has a middle of the day area that he blocks out and he's not negotiable on that. I wish I had the same rigor, but I love to hear when people do that. I do think, particularly in this always connected life that we live today, where we do work all hours of the day, it's important to put those boundaries in and actually make them official, uh, boundaries. So again, vick, I think that's a really great thing to do. Do you do email before you get out of bed? Do?
Speaker 2:email yeah uh, I don't do email, no, I uh, I need to get up. I need like my 10 minutes of warm the engine get my mind going right, sort of process. But I do sort of a preload things before I go to bed. I do go through my email calendar. I do sort of front load myself on when I wake up here, like the 10 topics that are going to be top of mind that I have to take care of, so sort of. When I wake up I have my coffee. I've already like preloaded the things that I need to execute with. So if I do get a random call or the escalation comes in, I'm like all right, I've already thought about this, I've already made a decision on how we're going to approach this. So there's a little bit of work that goes in a night. But I think, at the velocity of things and the technical challenges, it's just due diligence at this point right, it's just how we're effective as leaders.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's really smart. I only ask that question about email because that's my, that's my sin is I do email before I get out of bed. It's tragic, it's really sad. All right, let's move on to something else. Well, I keep embarrassing myself. I want to ask kind of two contrary questions here.
Speaker 2:The first one is you know when you need your super strength. When you've got to invoke your superpower, what's your rocket fuel? How do you do that? What is the thing that you do to get you ready for the hard stuff? Yeah, I mean, so Meister Powers is, you know, really focused on delivering timelines right, like I can. As long as I know who to call, I can find opportunities to optimize, reduce dependencies, find workaround solutions, right Like I really get a brainstorming and getting things down on paper. But to do that it really takes heads down time and I had to actually preload folks like, hey, I'm going to go be heads down and I also let my partners know I'm going to be working on this on this day. So if you get random pings, I'm just letting you know. I'm doing this for a purpose, because I've got a deadline I'm working towards right, so it's making sure they're on board with the timing of it and they're going to be in the office and available. And two, alerting my team. I'm going to try not be available to be heads down on this.
Speaker 2:I can only do it for a day or two at a time. Really sustain it, because it does take, you know, 100% of your mind and capacity. And at those days, you know, you basically don't eat lunch or you just pack something light. And I had to come to the office here in Sacramento and do that, because that was me. Our office here is mostly for local folks in California and I'm, you know, work from home, so I don't know too many folks here. So it's actually good for me because I can just get a room, get heads down and just not be bothered by the day. But I said it's, it's not sustainable for folks. So you've really got to, I've got to save it for why I'm really going to be in the high churn, high burn market. And then I got to take a break after.
Speaker 1:So I heard two things there. One of them was to create the environment of focus, so to take away the noise and accept the expectations with folks that you're going to be in that kind of focused zone. And the other one was to get the resources that you need primed and ready to be available for you when you need them. So if there's subject matter experts or whatever that you think you're going to call on, pre-warn them that I'm probably I may be reaching out to you and if I do, I need you to give this priority. Have I did?
Speaker 2:I summarize that right yeah, yeah, because I mean and this is the lesson I learned at amazon right? Uh, people aren't speed bumps. And in the, you know the charter of deliver, get stuff done. Uh, we can treat people't speed bumps and in the, you know the charter of deliver, get stuff done. Uh, we can treat people like speed bumps, right, like they're just a small obstacle that I've got to get through. Uh, and that's exactly the wrong lesson, and I think a lot of junior folks, um, coming into the workforce, can feel that way like feel the impact of being a speed bump. Uh, they can treat people like speed bumps. They don't realize the impact it has on their brand and their persona.
Speaker 2:But that's really part of the takeaway that networking and environment and the folks around you is we all do this at some point. Right, for the need of the business and for speed. But there has to be time for reflection and bonding outside of that to say, hey, I'm going to pre-warm you, it's going to happen, I won't make it last very long and I'm super sorry. And let's bond in person, let's grab a coffee, let's keep the relationship intact Awesome.
Speaker 1:No, that makes a ton of sense. It makes a lot of sense, actually. So let's reverse this, let's turn this around. What's your kryptonite? You know what's the thing that takes the energy out of you?
Speaker 2:Or what's the thing that you find demotivating? How do you manage it, man, as a TPM? We're all about projects and management and status updates, but there is nothing more to my chicken than standard system or process logging and documenting. I mean maintaining systems and large organizational emails. Dude, that drains me to no one's belief. And you know, I like having forums, I like having end to ends, I like documenting things. But it's like all right time for the monthly sync. It's like oh oh, time for the biweekly email. It's like oh man, it was like four and a half hours crafting the sentence why. You know, I like Vanguard, I like moving fast, I like getting stuff done and logging off. That is sort of the keep the lights on. It's important, necessary work and some people really thrive and having repeatable exercises and for me it just it drains me because it's just like there's so much more I could be doing with my time than this specific task.
Speaker 1:So what's your strategy? Is it like me, where you procrastinate and push it off and do everything else you want to do? Or do you attack it first to get it out of the way, kind of eat the pill and move on? What's your strategy?
Speaker 2:I do both. I can procrastinate a couple of days, but then by the midweek I got to just get up a little early, you know, because I will let the tasks of the day overcoming be like, wow, I had a long day. I can't manage, can't possibly get to that now. So I'll basically procrastinate a day or two and I'm like all right, you had enough. It's in the back of your mind, just start it now. So I wait a couple of days and I bite the pill, I mix, I combine them.
Speaker 1:You just described my approach to expense reporting, but that that's a different conversation. I do the same thing. Yeah, don't tell my wife. All right, this is my last question, vic, and it's a. It's a. You have a choice here Either to share a quote, a famous quote that has had a resounding impact on you, is memorable for you, or your very worst dad joke.
Speaker 2:I'll go with a quote, and this actually goes back to MySpace, I think.
Speaker 2:When we all had MySpaces we put a little jingle in our profile right.
Speaker 2:We had a little quote about us there and the second quote I posted the first one was just a bio quote, right, and the second one I put a quote and I think it's every man I meet is superior in some way In that I learn of him, learn of him, and it's rough world almost in.
Speaker 2:And I love the quote because it really kind of brought the humility Like you can be really good at something or quite a few things, or a jack of all trades, but everyone you meet is going to have strengths, knowledge, nuances, intricacies that you don't know anything about or you know very little and that you can take away. So, even if you have a sour relationship or a tough relationship and this goes personal work anywhere, right Everyone is really good at something that you don't know anything about, and so, if nothing else, take that away because that's still something you can learn from somebody. And that's what I used to try to humble myself, you know, because I can be a hard charger and I had to slow myself down too right. So that's one of the quotes that I use to help bring myself down and take the time to listen. Gosh.
Speaker 1:I love that. And I love that because I think it's very true in all organizations, but particularly large organizations, that we work with people. We come across people where it's easy to think that person's useless or an idiot, or how the hell did they get here, or whatever. And the reality is, you know as well as I do, you don't get a role at Microsoft or at Amazon if you haven't got strengths, if you haven't got talent you bring to the table. And so I think it reminds us to be curious, to not make that kind of two-dimensional judgment about a person, but to be curious and interested in terms of, well, what is the attribute? What are the attributes, the strengths that they bring to the table, because clearly they must exist. So I think it's a great quote and a great reminder.
Speaker 2:Thanks, yeah, I love it. I mean, learn to be curious. That's a great leadership principle again, right, learn to be curious. But that really is a focal point for what people should adopt in their daily lives. Right, all of us should learn to be curious daily lives right.
Speaker 1:All of us should learn to be curious. That should never end Right Totally. And again you'll hear curiosity come up as a theme in the podcast consistently. It's something I've loved. I think when you see behaviors or attitudes in people that don't resonate with you at all, you can take one of two approaches you can think it's stupid or dismiss it, or you can again. You can peel the onion and ask questions to learn and be curious, and you know what? You might be wrong, your judgment might be completely flawed. You might actually learn something. So I think that's really smart Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Well, vic, this has been awesome. It's been great to reconnect with you after so long. It's certainly great to hear about your journey. I think you've lent you've lended us or given us some gems in terms of your wisdom and experience. I appreciate that. I will make sure that your contact details are there in terms of your LinkedIn profile so folks know who you are if they want to reach out to you. But it's been a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your life's journey with us and your experience with us.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Thank you, john, for the time share your life's journey with us and your experience with us. Absolutely. Thank you, john, for the time. Again, great to reconnect and I look forward to more podcasts coming from you, because they've been wonderful so far.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks. Have a great day, thank you.
