from engineer to product and how to get into tech w/adam murray who is a sr. product manager at cloudflare

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to, to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Okay. All right. I'm Adam Murray. I am currently a senior product manager at CloudFlare, working on our workers platform, specifically focused on developer productivity.

We want to reduce any friction points that developers might have with using workers, and I can get into what workers is later. But yeah, so beyond that, I am a dad. I've got six kids. So believe it or not, which is kind of crazy. Those kids, I don't know. You guys, I got one, two and a half year old. And it seems like six. Yeah, so my oldest is 15 and my youngest is one. So I mean, you know, like, I've got, if there's a kid at a stage of development, like I've got the kid. That's awesome. Well, you're now my go-to for all parenting resources.

That's good, though. Well, I've been, we've been married for 17 years. We've lived overseas together before. like we were expats for a few years over in Western Asia and stuff. And so we've just kind of, we've kind of been all around. Um, but I have a long history with engineering and really working with across the software development cycle. I mean, I just, I started doing it, uh, I don't know, maybe 13, 14 years ago. Um, kind of got into a by accident. I actually have an undergrad in culture anthropology, which is kind of weird. Um, and linguistics. Okay. It's studying, studying cultures and studying like why people do what they do.

Um, and how culture affects that. So it's actually really, I love it. But linguistics is one of my minors. And I don't know, 14 years ago, I had a friend that said, hey, I need a website. Have you ever built one of those or anything? And I had never done it. But I've just always been somebody that's not afraid to break things and not afraid to at least try. Like give it a shot. And so I remember just jumping in. And the first time I opened up notepad and my old Safari, like whatever the old white laptops were. And I was just hooked. I just started typing in HTML and just like, oh my gosh, I can see this thing in Safari.

And then I started typing in like, oh, I can make it green and red. And this is your application just took off. And so that's how I got into software development. And since then, I've done engineering. I've been an engineering manager. I've done site reliability. I've done every kind of product. So yeah, so I've done everything. So I want to ask, so first off, isn't cloud flare like the thing that runs the internet? That's what I've heard. You know, that's what cloud flare does. People ask me what I do and I do. I say I build the internet. Okay. I really like that analogy. I tell people like, I think of it in terms of Legos, right?

So I get to build the Legos and I get to hand them to people and let them build the cool like castles or build the skyscrapers or whatever it may be. And so yeah, so so workers is really cool workers actually is its own runtime And so you you give us the code you give us your code and it runs on the cloud flares edge network And so our edge we have about 200 networks in about 275 cities And we brag that we're about 50 milliseconds from about 95% of the world's population. So I mean that's crazy It's incredibly fast. Yeah, and just I mean the the amount of of data that we're that's coming through cloud flare I think it's something like 20 to 30% of of the of the of the worlds like of the internet request that actually come to Cloudflare in some way or others.

So yeah, it's the scale of what what cloudflare is. It's just a real having what you're trying to solve is on another level. Yeah. So so let's dive in for the first domain topic. So one of the questions that one of the reasons why we got reconnected was because I had somebody my network go, hey, who's made a transition from software to product? And then of course I tweeted and you slid in my DMs. So I want to ask what got you into product? Well, let's start there. What got you into product? Or what made you go down that route? Yeah, it's a really funny story, actually.

I was, it was the first, one of the first startups I worked at here in Nashville is the entertainment industry. We had a little house like in Berryhill and we built websites for musicians. Like we worked with Sony Music and Universal and, and it was a handful of us that were, have been doing that. And we had built this custom, It was a product. It was the first product I'd ever worked with. We built this custom Drupal installation, and you could push a button and have 80% of the website spun up. I mean, that's Merch Store, Fan Club, like all of it, just with the touch of a button.

It was so cool. And all I needed to be was themed and designed. And so that was my first kind of experience working with a product. Well, I left that company because I got a recruiter reached out to me and said, hey, I got this healthcare gig that I think you'd really like. Now, that was my first experience with a recruiter. They didn't know who I was. They didn't know what I like. I can tell you corporate healthcare is not the gig for me. Okay. I can just tell you. So about a couple of months after, about that, that's not even on my resume. A couple of months in that gig, I was like, I gotta get out of here.

I cannot keep doing this. And so, you know, no problem for anybody that works in that industry, if that's for you. Sure. Please like that's the same. Yeah, exactly. It just wasn't for me. And I also worked, like at the company, I was the only web developer. So no one else spoke my language. Like everybody else was big data, everybody else was. So it was a very like kind of a lonely environment and we'll sit up. And so I reached out to my friend at the old company and I said, Hey, I really, I need to get my job back. Like I need to come back early.

I kind of missed what I was doing. And so he said, Well, we don't have your old job because it's already been hired out. But how about you come back as a product manager? And I was like product manager, like, what is that? And like, any good dev, he said, well, Google it, right? Like, I'm not telling you what it is. So I went on, I went on a Google about a product manager was And I found out Google has tons of resources on that. And so I started reading it and realizing this is really exciting to me. This is what I want to do.

It's more in terms of instead of just doing the tasks, it's like figuring out why we're building what we're building and leading the team to figure out and what order are we delivering these things. And so for me, that just activated a part of my brain that I really hadn't thought about a whole lot before. And so I ended up coming back, working on product, implementing a lot of like agile stuff, which is just kind of, you know, been something that's really resonated a lot with me as an engineer developing incremental changes, you know, for the users. And so we implemented, um, you know, those kind of agile methodologies.

We got roadmaps. We provided visibility to the, to the CEO and the C suite. We had like quarterly planings where we do, it was a small company like 2025 people, you know, and so like all of that for me was really exciting, but I also at the same time, I didn't want to lose my ability as an engineer. And that kind of scared me. Sure. And so because I just said I always had this mentality of like technology moves so fast, if you stop for six months, you're almost obsolete, you know, in a way. I know. And so that always scared me. And so as a result, I kind of just drift it back into engineering.

And I did that for, I would say, like that was probably how many years ago was that? six or seven years, maybe even longer from where I am now. And so that and I got back into engineering and stuff. And I love it. Like I love doing side projects and all that stuff. But, but, uh, but when the opportunity came to actually do product again, a cloud flare, I just, I was like, this is something, and I had started kind of thinking about that before I applied at cloud flare, but it was again, knowing that that's something that's always been, um, you know, like really exciting to me.

Yeah. What's some tips for folks who want to get in or maybe want to move to product that are on the engineering side or maybe just some things to keep in mind. Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things, that's a really good question. Like three things to consider before jumping into product if you're an engineer currently. You know what I would write, so it's Cypress, and my last gig, I kind of worked all three. I kind of said I had the magic cheat code. Like I was an IC developer on the projects, and I was also the engineering manager, and I was the product manager on a smaller team.

And so I got to decide what we built, and then actually build it, which is a lot of fun. So I think I would recommend, if you have a side project or you have something like that, to kind of flex those product muscles a little bit on maybe on something on the side, or something that you have, that's for me was really useful in actually creating some, or having an open source project that I worked with, open source has been fantastic in my career to that end and knowing the different pieces of it and working with the community because at the end of the day as a product manager, I work so much with our customers and not just like all sorts of paying customers all the way from enterprise all the way down.

I work with people that are thinking about becoming customers, I'm constantly in our Discord. I'm constantly like talking on Twitter, like you're saying, like so, and all those places and as an engineer, you don't always think through that, especially if you're like an internal, you know, engineer working at a company. So that open source, you know, kind of stepping out a little bit and putting yourself in front of the community is I'd say is a huge, huge win. What would you say that, would you say that product, if you're wanting to kind of get out of the lines of code and maybe wanna see the bigger picture And that's something that's, you want to see how everything works.

Is that, would that maybe be a good indicator to move down this route? Cause that's what it sounds like. It sounds like, it's not all, I'm not going to speak in blank statements. Yeah. But for the most part, if you're an engineer, you're relatively heads down. But I feel like product you get, you, you, you kind of lift your vision from like in the code to what else is going on. Yeah. One of the things, you know, that, um, that I had done to an evidence care, I think was a really good, um, and not, not just an evidence care. that was evidence carry out chance to your site reliability engineering.

And what I did there was I kind of sat in between the business and product and engineering. And I heard the businesses problems that they were running into. And then I knew where engineering was and I was able to kind of, I was able to build some processes and things like that to ease both sides. And I think as product, I think I hear the lot like product is kind of like this glue position. And part of that is, is because it's constantly collaborating among all the different departments. Right. I mean, you should, you know, we say, like, I think somebody said the other day, like, PM stands for like plenty of meetings.

And I have like, I heard that. Oh my goodness, I have so many meetings. But it's, but they're not pointless meetings, which I guess you can also say PM is pointless meetings. But they're not all pointless. They're actually really useful because I'm meeting with all different departments and I'm meeting with all different teams, trying to like align my team. And that's why I kind of, I met with one of, you know, when I first joined Cloudflare, I was really quick to do one-on-ones with each and every one of my, of my, you know, on my team members. Right. You know, having that engineering background, I know the importance of those one-on-ones in that like FaceTime, even though like we're in the code a lot, like the FaceTime, at the end of the day, like I tell people, software is people, right?

Right. So, um, having that important one-on-one time to say like, I understand what my role is here. My role is not to say how it gets done, but my role is to say like why it gets done. And that's my role as our PM is to help our team understand, like why are we building what we're building? And like where do we want to go in the long term with that? And I think, you know, that's something that I've had to step back as a, as a form, as an engineer, I say, I don't want to say form a engineer because I'm still an engineer, I still build lots of stuff.

Sure. But I've had to step back from my team specifically and like, I'm say, hey, I'm not going to review your PR. Like I'm just not, like, can I review your PR? Absolutely. Sure. Will I do that? Is that my job? No. you know, kind of my job's different now, you know, I had to step back. That's one, I guess danger of kind of coming from the IC world. And having to like step back and be willing to do that. What? So let's kind of let's pivot a little bit. And for everybody who turned in, it's great to see y'all, you know, ton of people, Martha, JC, Stephanie, Yolanda, Eli, and I mean, it's great to see you.

So let's talk even further out, right? Getting into tech. I mean, it's something that you and I have chatted with afterwards. And it's something that I'm really trying to get loud about. I kind of go through seasons of trends of what I'm loud about. And this is one of the things that I'm going to talk a lot about more is that you don't always have to be a developer to get into tech, right? There's a ton of other areas. And for you, I think you've held every position, but a recruiter. So, so, so, I mean, what, what are your thoughts? What are some words of encouragement to people who maybe are sitting and watching this at home being like, you know, I've submitted 500 applications as a software developer.

Well, that's your first problem. But, you know, I can't, you know, or kids listen, there, there's some junior devs I've helped that can't, that just don't have the chops again to development. Do you talk about other areas within tech that they could look at? Yeah. We talked about this before but I think that like a lot of times I have new you know new developers or people that are kind of starting to think through their career know go come to me and they'll say hey I want to get into development and that is such a large term So I kind of I kind of stop them and I say well what part of development and usually it's like I don't even know where to be like what does that even mean you know like cuz they just whatever it is They've had in their head, you know, that's just that's what they're thinking about and so yeah I think there's so many things you can get into into into development It's not or into really I say development but software development that isn't necessarily like the engineering itself You know you can get into again.

You can get a product management There's like program management. There's project management. There's like there's marketing like there's just there's so many There's what's that sales? Yes, it's like kind of the cloud DevOps side site reliability Yeah, there's like there's customer success. There's QA. There's lots of other paths Hey, bear just got a new job. So bear shout out you former guest of the show. He just landed a new job. So congrats buddy. But yeah, QA tester. I placed a lot of junior devs and QA roles. QA tester roles. Yeah. Another one that we see, like, I think is, you know, the customer success engineers or that kind of, that kind of like is another path for that because you're, you're learning to talk to those engineers and you're learning to talk to the customers, you learn to see what their pain points are and usually take that to engineering.

engineering and so you're kind of seeing all the connection pieces as well. And I was great. Yeah. Like I didn't know what a business. So I'm going to be honest with you. If, if, if I was in college and somebody taught me what a business analyst was, I probably would have gone business analyst because business analyst, I feel like it's like techy, but not techy and you get to work with people. Yeah. They're business analysts. The other one that we were, that I work heavily with is like, as like a UX product design, like UI design, like that. I mean, like that's invaluable to what I do, right?

Like, I like, because I can have ideas and stuff all day long, but like having the validation out there to actually see, to run these experiments and to see how things go. Like, I think those are all like, there's just, there's so much out there. And it's part of it is being willing to explore, being willing to try things out. That's what, like I said earlier, like one of the things, I've never been afraid to break things. And it's something that's probably why, like one, I've never been afraid to break things. And two, I'm really good at googling things. And I think these are two of the things have helped me most in my career.

That's a quote right there. It's just and most people don't do that though. Like I look at you and again like the older generation I think about my father-in-law or like others they're really like they're afraid to touch a printer. They're afraid to touch a computer because they might break it and you just you know you I'm going to I remember the first thing I'll be honest the first thing I broke I remember the first day I ever worked from home I killed Brad Paisley's website like I killed it like I I literally white screen it down. Oh, that's serious. Like I just, and it's a first day working from home.

So like it's not like a, you know, working from home is a common thing. And I just remember thinking like, there's a white screen of death on Brad Paisley's main production website. Like I'm going to diamond fire, you know? And we brought it back, but, but you know, you can let those things make your break your career too, right? And you say, well, I'm not touching anything else. I'm not gonna, you just can't, you can't do that. Right. Yeah. And then Eli comes in here going into support slash success an org is a great way to start working in tech. Yeah, and also too, I'm gonna say this, being a recruiter, I mean, listen, if you, I've talked with, and this is gonna leave me my next question, I've talked with a lot of developers that are a little bit more senior in their career are starting to come to me, and they go, hey, how do I become a recruiter?

And I think, I will tell you this, being a recruiter is wonderful, but you got a lot of people, And you also like, yeah, you just got to love people. If you don't love people, then it's going to be really hard. It's going to be hard. But it's a great way to get an ecosystem because I could hang out with guys like Adam all time. Man's management is the same way. I mean, I tell people that there's just a difference between like I see a management, you know, and if you're not really that people aspect of it is just as crucial. It is 100%. I don't want to be the manager until they're the manager.

And a bear it would anybody knows a Brad Paisley. I'll tell you this. There's a lot of people. His dad does. I can tell you that from experience. Would you say dad does? Damn. That's great. So I want to come and get into a topic that this is another kind of theme that I'm getting into. And I talk about a lot about there's only so much money. There's only so many titles. At the end of the day, you have to love what you do, but know what you want to do. And I think, because I've had conversations with a lot of people. They're like, I'm at the point of my career where I've become disenfranchised with my job.

Do I need to change careers entirely? I don't really know what I do. I feel like there's more out there. As somebody who's kind of, again, held a lot of roles within tech, what would your advice be to those people who are kind of just feel like they're stuck and they don't know what to do? I think the thing that's been most important is that you kind of at the core, you keep the core, whether that's in tech or whatever it is, you keep that core thing, the core, things can change around it. My job titles have changed around it. The core of it, I know about software development, the core of it, I know about tech.

Some days, honestly, it's just a job. Even if it's the best job in the world, and even if it has the best benefits, and those things are all helpful and they're all good, but the end of the day, it's a job, you know? And I think we've all seen that, especially with layoffs and other things recently, like you've got to keep that appropriate, you know, mindset, but like where is it that you're heading? And for me, I want to be somebody who has a mastery of this specific space and whatever that means, sometimes that might mean doing an engineer, sometimes that might mean product manager, sometimes that might mean, you know, engineering manager, like whatever that is.

and those are places. I also, I think that something that I've had to learn how to do, and I don't know if, I kind of feels tangentially related, but I've had to learn how to ask for what it is that I want. And that's something I've not been really good at always in my career, because I was just willing to kind of go along with, you know, like, let's see where it goes, or let's see. And sometimes like companies, they want you to ask. You know, sometimes people want you to like, say what is it that you need, and then to put yourself out there.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think people got to take hold of their career more and not sit back. Go ahead. No, I think that that was one thing. And when I first started and I've interviewed, and I kind of think it's funny, I've been around the block. It's just true though, and I've gotten out there before. Like, you're in a place for a year and a half, two years, and it's not been that I've wanted to leave. I'll say that. There are places I've wanted to be at for the rest of my career. That's not always in this culture and this time, this isn't, well, that isn't the world we find ourselves in, unfortunately.

But what I've said to people is every job change I've made, it's either been for a promotion or like a job title change or a raise, you know, and usually both. And so they're, what's the problem with that? And I tell people, wouldn't you take that opportunity if you have a chance? 100%. 100%. Do you feel like, do you feel like a society puts too much pressure on people for their jobs to be their life? I think it's a natural thing. I think like we all want to make a difference. We all want to have that. There's a thing inside of us that wants to make a difference.

And I think part of it, we find that most of our job, because that's where most of us spend most of our time. And so I think that's their societal, but I also think there's just an internal impulse to do that. Yeah. And have you struggled with that? I mean, I'm curious how you've been able to separate. I mean, listen, having six kids and I mean, you know, that's no joke. How have you been able to, because you've had a very successful career in tech and you've worked at some really big companies and I mean, you're at a great one right now. How are you able to balance and shut off and try not to make work all-consuming?

all-consuming? I think that it's been kind of hard at times. I'll say that, especially working from home, which is my primary, primarily what I do. And I've done it for like six or seven years now. So making sure that I have a dedicated space in my house that's my office. You know, when I'm off work, I shut the door. It's something that early on in my career. I will also say, I said this recently to someone else. I was very fortunate to have some friends that I I worked with that when I used to take PTO, that would make me take PTO and like make me be gone.

Like, so I wouldn't be able to like check in on Slack or I wouldn't be able to, you know, make sure the emails were getting out. Like, wouldn't they literally were like, stop doing this? You know, and almost like embarrass me a little bit. Like, you know, and I needed that though. Like, I needed people to say, hey, turn it off. And so that's been very helpful. And I've tried to also provide that for people because we just need space that's not tech, you know? And I mean, I will say that early on in my career, you know, I kind of, I guess where I'm at now, that's the view I have.

Early on in my career, I pushed myself pretty hard. So like, when I was first starting to learn how to do development, I was teaching, I was coaching full time, I had a baby and all this stuff. And the only time I could work was like nine to one, you know, so like every time nine to one, my wife and I had an agreement, like that's when I'm gonna be working on that stuff, you know? And so there were times like that in my career that I've had to be on. but for the most part, I've tried to take that mindset. My wife has also been very helpful in that to remind me of like, hey, this is where it's at.

This is the house, our family, this space right here, this is really what matters. And so I've been very grateful to have a career that lets me, tech, for me, and I tell people this with tech, it's such an incredible industry because you can really come from anywhere, it's just about can you do the work in whatever capacity that is, and you can really prove yourself. And I think you can really make it in that. And people can say it's a naive viewpoint, but I've seen that happen time and time again. And then on top of that, like it gives us flexibility and freedom that we need to, I've loved the idea of flex schedules.

And that doesn't mean working 24-7 for me that there are days where I need to take three hours because I've got some family thing and I'll just make it up later, you know? Yeah, I love that. I love that. And Barrett comes in, it's so important. We are on PTO disconnect. Yeah, and I tell my team this and I try to do the same, even though I live on Twitter, which is hard to do sometimes. So let's kind of pivot a little bit. Can I say, it's too fun to hobby that's outside of tech. Yeah, that's a great one. Like the thing that I've seen by so many people that are in tech is that they have these really cool, creative hobbies outside of tech.

But I would discourage almost discourage a person, unless you just love it, I guess. but like, but like don't make your side hobby building another project. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. I have ice hockey tonight. So I go like that's, that's what I do. So I want to kind of get into kind of some hiring. I mean, oh, oh, final thing, final thing. I want to get across and then we'll go into a little hiring and then and then wrap it up. You've, like I said, you've bounced around. You've had a lot of titles has. How, what's, how do I ask this? What is your advice to people who are like, I got to keep climbing, climbing the ladder, climbing the titles because because you've gone from like engineering manager, then you're like seeing your product manager and that, you know, I'm sure you probably would be, I'm sure knowing you, you'd be fine going to IC as well.

So like, like what, for the people out there that are just so dead set on titles, what would you tell them? Um, I don't know, it's hard because I think everybody's different in that. Oh, the first sure they are. I tend to be more of a generalist. So I'm very much more comfortable with that. Okay, I think some people are. I would say that be very careful with titles because I've also seen titles go the wrong way. Like I've seen people make senior before they're senior. I've seen that kind of thing happen a lot, especially in the startup world, like where we just get these weird, like I'm Ninja Rockstar, you know, I'm a big fan of engineering.

And it's like you would one other guy and it's like, no, you're, no. Yes, exactly. And so I've seen, I've seen, let me guess what titles I've just seen them hurt people and I had been given prematurely. And then the idea that, unfortunately, the idea that you have to tell somebody, hey, you might have to back off that title a little bit. Like maybe you're not senior, maybe you're mid-level and you've got to adjust that. People don't want to do that. And I understand that. I want to get the title that I deserve. I hate that. But that's kind of the way I've seen titles hurt people.

Yeah. I think, listen, I'll just say it's for titles. There's only so many of them. And then when you peak, then what? Yeah. I wondered about that before. So I definitely thought that I've had in my head. Like what happens with it. So I just titles are, I mean, yeah. Yeah. I again, I'll tell you is from a recruiter mindset. I don't care about your title. I care about what you're actually doing. Yeah. I will say is it is it, you know, internally, I love the idea of career ladders. Like I love the idea of like being very specific about like so that people coming in know like what's expected of, you know, of a junior, what's expected of a mid-level, what's expected of a senior and like we're in like staff and principal.

I mean, you can go up as high as you want, but like I love that in letting people know because so much of that, I mean, I worked for a company one time, and every year we did performance reviews, the literally the person told me, I can only give you a three, like it was a scale of one to five, and they're like, I can really only give you a three, that's all they let us do, like it's like, what's the point of this performance review then? And it was like, well, you did really exceptional this year. So I'll give you a four in this area just to signify that I think you did a great job overall.

And I'm just like, that did this is a whole other podcast and I'm itself. I don't even know what that means. Yeah. That's so stupid. All right, so to the last few minutes and again, thank you for coming on. This has been going to be good. What's some advice for people who are interviewing? Obviously, as a leader who's done a ton of interviewing, what's your biggest piece of advice for folks? My biggest piece of advice for folks is, well, I would say the first thing was the biggest piece of advice I've ever gotten. If you don't know something, you can say you don't know something.

It's really okay because I can tell when you don't know something. Like if you just try to like tell me, you give me a 10 minute answer for a one minute question, I know that, you know? And I would just rather you say, you don't know something. Because the thing is I can teach people skills, you know? And I've heard that before, like different, in different contexts. So I can teach people skills. I think that's a big one. I think another one, let me think. And you tell them now, as you see time and time again, when you interview folks. Oh, the other thing, well, I would say, you know, again, back to the like, make your work public if you can, to some degree, like even if you have something that's out there.

I know I've been very frustrated times when companies don't look at my GitHub profile, they don't look at, you know, things I've done in the past that's very frustrating. But as for me, for me as a hiring manager, I love to see that stuff. You know, I love to see, you know, the community involvement and ways that you're out there kind of learning and doing things. I think that the biggest thing for me is again, is about character. Like I said, I mean skills are one thing and we can train skills and all those kinds of things, but the biggest part of that is character.

Like who are you? Are you willing to learn? Are you willing to kind of like, to get in there and do whatever it takes and take initiative? Those are kind of the biggest indicators. And some of that is just like I said, getting out there and having a GitHub repo, having not even a personal site, but if you have a portfolio, you get something like what, I mean, all of that's really important. Yeah, I love that. All right, so last two questions as rapid up here. First off, any tech, oh, we got a question from Fritzen. What would you suggest individuals whose job tests get upgraded but whose title stay the same?

Seeing this a lot. Did they put what they are doing currently, for example, front-end engineers starting to do back-end work without their title at their current job? I have thoughts, but I'm interested in yours first. I absolutely think, so where are we talking about, What are we talking about updating? Is it like a LinkedIn or like? Let's just say for this sake, like professionally on a resume or LinkedIn, because I think both are the same. Yeah, I think that you absolutely need to put on there what work it is you're currently doing, even if it's not necessarily your title. And I think that you need to reflect that.

And I think, you know, even if your title is front end and you're doing back and sub and you can show the back and work that you're doing. Like you can say, okay, this specific project, here are the things I did as a back end. Now that's not to say like one time you built one database and like now a sudden you're a backend engineer. Like I mean, if you're actually doing that work, then I would say like by all means like you need to, just site that and then to put specific examples. Yeah, listen, Frisson, there's, there's, there's gonna be nothing wrong with you taking away your front end engineer title on your resume or LinkedIn and just changing it to software engineer.

And then in the, in the bullet points, you know, leveraging to react on the front end, out on the back end, AWS, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like that's what Adam and myself are gonna look at, right? If you have, I do have to say, I think if you are, have a front end title and you wanna do more full stack work, I would just get rid of that title on your resume and your LinkedIn. Yeah, and again, that point about adding the, which technology you've used, and you're using, that's really important, but I will say be careful with that, because like I said, if you put on there's something I mean, from my example, you put Cloudflow workers, and for instance, I'm a PM at Cloudflow workers, and I was saying, tell me about it, and you go, I don't really, you know, like it'll make me go, okay, well, what else is on here might be questionable.

Yep, I love that. All right. Second last question. What tech trends, things are you keeping an eye on right now? Or anything cool you're working on at Cloud for that you're willing to share? Oh, yeah, we're working on all sorts of cloud players. Cloudflare is ridiculous, the amount of cool stuff coming out of Cloudflare. I think that for me, just because I'm getting into this space is just the whole serverless stuff, the idea that you can, me, what singular engineer can literally run in an entire application, the entire stack almost by myself. I think the ability for companies to do this and to not worry about infrastructure and to have it, you know, auto scaling and all that stuff.

I mean, it's just, it really changes everything from, from my perspective, you know, because you don't have to have entire teams dedicated to these, these types of things, you can offload it onto some of that cloud player and let them handle it all for you. So that's, for me, I'm trying to figure out, right now, you know, how do we, how do we make the decrease friction for users that are coming into that ecosystem? Because right now, there's still a lot of like tech know-how, there's still some, there's some barriers to like, what, what do you even do with this, And so I'm figuring out how do we lessen those?

I love that. Last question, because this show is called guidance counselor 2.0, because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now not so much. What would be your biggest piece of career advice for younger self? I think the thing that has plagued me, and it's funny because people don't think about this a lot, but I've always struggled with imposter syndrome, always. Always. Always. And it's still to this day. And so it doesn't go away, but I think I've learned how to control it and manage it in a way. And part of that is just by putting myself out there. The things I tell myself in my head, if you do this, somebody's going to say something.

And obviously there are critical people. There's no way around to be on the internet and not have critical things that come out there. But just keep putting yourself out there. If you want to build something, you want to do something, just get out there and try it. And I think the same thing for content creation, the same thing for just anything that you're you really want to do, the worst thing you can do is just sit back and say like, what if, you know, like what, what if, I don't, you know, and just to kind of like have it just stuck up in your head, like, get out there and do it.

Yeah. Nope. Absolutely. 100%. Well, Adam, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. I got a bounce for another call. So I'm going to leave you here. When I'm here, I'm going to end it. You can go up a day. But for those of you who tune in, thank you so much. Go connect with Adam on LinkedIn on Twitter. You see his tag. Adam, right there. Yep. I have, so the rest of this week, so tomorrow, I have a individual that's actually, in brand new contact, her name's Elena, she's actually in Japan right now. And we're gonna talk about how to fit your career in your life, not backwards.

And then Wednesday, I have Ashton Pfizer, who's doing amazing things, she's a speaker at Render ATL this year. Thursday, we're back with unicorn finders, and then Friday, I have a recruiter on. So busy, busy week, Adam, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you. Thanks for having me. Let's stay in touch. All right, see y'all. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes, and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store.

I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So, thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T. Destin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.