finding a job in this tough job market w/ barrett blake ms mvp & architect

full transcript

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

All righty. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We are back. We are so back. um and pumped hang out with my guy barrett today um you know again we're gonna talk about it today but just like the power of like in-person networking i met i saw barrett again at um uh stir track up in columbus i was like man we gotta get you back on the show again um and then of course obviously switched new job i was like yeah and now it's a perfect time we should we should definitely hang out so um uh you know funny funny enough barrett was like one of the og guests like OG, OG guests.

I was like, man, when we, as you said, like four years ago. Yeah, it was like four or five years ago. That's crazy. I mean, I've been doing this for five years. So you literally were like one of the first OG guests, which is awesome. And I think, you know, I think that's the power of me doing this. And we'll talk about today, like the power of putting yourself out there and networking. I mean, Again, I mean, Barrett and I have known each other for like four or five years now. And so it's good to have you back on, man. It's good to have you back on.

It's been a long time coming. For those of you who are tuning in, welcome. I see Jeff trying to make YouTube happen, I guess. Yeah, I mean, listen, I think LinkedIn, if they actually put some emphasis around streaming, I think it could be an amazing platform, to be honest with you. But it's kind of gross. It's kind of laggy. um so jeff i appreciate you yep there you go youtube gang strong it's good to see all this morning roxy it's good to see you mark's good to see you again it's like i tell everybody say hey we'd love to hear from you um uh you know this is what i've realized that this is just this is this is a networking event and again we'll barrett and i will talk about the power of networking um you know i've i've had a bunch of people tell me that like it's amazing the amount of dms they get after any torque event um that we throw so again um it's like i tell folks like listen if if you tune in every day and you message every guest i have on and just say hey it was good to meet you let's stay in touch sorry on guidance counselor two point oh if you network with everybody in the comments um your your your network would do would be would be pretty tremendous and so that's what i want for everybody So please say, hey, let us know where you're tuning in from.

Before we start today, obviously kind of some housekeeping things. First off, AppRite. Listen, I'm an AppRite hero. Love the folks over at AppRite. Go check them out. Great product. Even though I don't know how to use it, I still think it's great. Also, listen, we got a brand new refresh. We moved kind of the temporary Torque community page over to the Torque.dev website. So if you type in Torque.community, it's really pretty. It's got like a bunch, it looks nice. It looks very, very nice. Shout out to Jason Torres. for helping spearhead that. It's got all of our events. It looks a lot cleaner. So if you haven't checked it out, definitely go check out twerk.community.

And also too, listen, I think one of the things that we consistently hear in our community is like, hey, you guys are doing a lot of things. It's hard to keep up. If you want to be updated on when I go live with guests like Barrett every morning, or really it's not every morning, it's like twice a week now, please text live. This is actually my number. And I send out a text every time uh when i go live with amazing guests like barrett so we'd love to have you shoot me a text um at six one five two three five five six five zero um and uh again if you're not part of the discord discord we got a lot of cool things going on got a lot of conversations a lot of chatter um so i'd love to have you as well um and then again it's great to see everybody this morning we definitely got the crew here this morning um so barrett enough with me yapping man let's give the people what they want who are you what do you do and obviously it seems like you're a little bit of a star wars fan Yeah.

Yeah. Star Wars and Lego. Yep. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So, I mean, as far as me, I've been a professional developer, architect, manager for like twenty years in tech. And about ten years before that, I'm one of those people who was a midlife career changer. I went back to school in my thirties. I was working retail and factory before that. Got tired of that. Went back and finished my degree. And I've been working in tech ever since, mostly in the .NET space as a developer, but also doing a lot of JavaScript, SQL. um you know and spent about half my my professional career as a manager as well as a developer so i've done i've done the whole gamut i've done big companies startups uh everything from you know uh government uh insurance to consulting which is what i'm doing now yeah working for nimble pros uh and i'm also microsoft mvp for uh that's awesome man that's awesome um so a lot to cover today a lot of different areas you know but but i think i want uh to to really start with um really your last job search which wasn't a job search yeah it really wasn't yeah I was I'd been working for a company is a huge consulting company for a couple of years and wasn't real happy with the work that I was doing there and who the client was.

And I mean, I like the people. I like the project or project in general, just not the client and what I was doing. So. I was kind of starting to feel around for things to see if maybe there might be a better spot for me and kind of keeping my eyes open. And somebody that I had been connected with in the community for quite a few years now, Saduki, she had posted that they were looking for somebody for Nibble Pros. and i've known uh not personally but i've known our dialysis in the community for sure probably going on ten fifteen years uh you know he's been huge in the dot net community and speaking space he's been a blogger and a speaker forever uh he's one of the very first conference talks that i saw when i went to a developer conference with with steve and uh so i was familiar with his work in his company i'm like hey that's that's the kind of people i want to work for so i sent a message over she's like sure shoot over your resume and And really, because I have also been involved in the community, speaking a lot, blogging, posting videos and things like that.

They were somewhat familiar with me. So it really wasn't a whole interview process. It's mainly just getting to know them on a more personal level, getting to meet the team and just making sure that I was a fit. And because they were familiar with my work, I really didn't have to go through the whole rigmarole of tech interview or anything like that. So they said, hey, we like you. We want to bring you on. And there's just a matter of finding the right client for me to work for for them. I love it. That's so cool. That's so cool. Obviously, Emre, coming up with the heavy hitting questions.

Favorite Lego set you built? Oh, wow. I've got a lot of favorites, to be honest. The one you probably can't really see it here. It's a right there is the Galaxy Explorer. That's the new one. The very first big Lego set that I got as a kid was the original Galaxy Explorer back in the late seventies, early eighties. I don't remember exactly when it was. My parents got it for me for Christmas one year and I loved that. And I was so sad when I got lost. And when Lego released that set again last year, I'm like, oh, I've got to have that. I was like one of the first in line to get it.

So that's by far my favorite. i love that i love that talk about uh i guess the next heavy-hitting question we need to address in the room favorite star wars movie oh empire strikes back definitely now you can see i got poster up here okay all right awesome i love it i love it um uh so all right let's just talk about i'm trying to figure out how to frame this question but because there's a different way to ask this like Let's talk about LinkedIn, right? I've seen you on LinkedIn. You're posting on LinkedIn. I feel like you've gotten... I see you all the time.

Talk about the power of it in your eyes. Because I think the general consent is like LinkedIn's terrible. And listen, it's social media. You're going to have a lot of garbage. But talk about just how it's really helped you. As long as you remember what it's for, which is professional... connections, then it's great. Yeah, you get a lot of spam from recruiters. But if you learn how to filter that out and just kind of ignore it, if you're not interested in that kind of stuff, that's fine. But as far as building connections within the professional community, And remembering that that is exclusively what it's for.

It's not there to post your family photos. It's not there to post your hot takes or what you had for dinner last night. Sure. That's not the purpose of LinkedIn. That's not what you should be using it for. And the people who do that are the people that I quickly ignore and mute. Yeah. yeah um but no yeah i mean it's it's great for building community it's great for keeping up on what's going on especially in the developer community the technical spaces yeah it's fantastic for that and keeping up with what companies are doing keep up with what your fellow developers are doing um what you know speaking conferences that kind of stuff uh if you learn how to use it that way and keep it with that then it works great and it's a great way for building up your your relationships in a professional space How, how do you, how do you build?

So I think, I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people are like, they don't know, like you say, build up personal relationships or in the professional space. How do you do that? Right. Cause, cause I think people are like, all right, I'm on LinkedIn. Now what? There's a few things that I do. So one of them is, like you mentioned earlier, for people who come here to GC two point oh, I will every time that I'm on, I will connect with at least two or three people that I wasn't connected with before. I'll send a message, say, Hey, I saw your comments here on Taylor's broadcast and just wanted to connect and that's it.

Most of the time they'll accept and boom, you've added a couple of other people to your connections. A couple of other things that I do is whenever I'm posting new blog posts, new video posts, I've set up Power Automate to automate posting to LinkedIn.

so so every time that you know i post that it goes out looks at my youtube feed looks at my blog feed says hey barrett posted something new runs through this thing and posts it to linkedin so so like ninety percent of what i post to linkedin is automated it's not even me going out and typing something oh for real it's it's yeah it's like you know i'm watching stuff i'm watching my own feeds i'm watching other feeds and saying okay posted that yeah the third thing that i do is is interacting with people so you know every day not even every day maybe every

couple days i'll go in i'll look at the feed i'll look for posts of things that people that you know show up in my feed things that interest me things that that i like and i'll respond to i'll just put it you know a quick sentence it doesn't even have to be anything like that you know i'll click like maybe i'll put a reply and say yeah hey that's really cool point i like that maybe have you thought of this or something like that just a quick sentence And people will engage with that and that gets you interacting with other people and people will get

to know you that way as well.

So those are kind of the three biggest things that I do. Absolutely. Taran comes in here and says, how do you weed out spammy recruiters, real versus fake? It can be tough sometimes. Eventually you kind of get a feel for which ones are like mass postings that you can just ignore. A lot of the times I will specifically look for people that I've worked with before. I've worked with a lot of different recruiters over the years. So if one of them sends me a message, I'll pay attention to it. For any of the ones that are just kind of out of the blue, it's really obvious to pick out things.

For me, for instance, Ninety percent of the messages that I get are about contracts, like six month contract. I don't do contracts. I only work full time work. I will not do a contract. I tried that once or twice in my career and got screwed both times. Yeah, I will never do that again. So I could ignore those immediately. If I'm feeling nice, I'll send a message back that says, hey, I don't do contracts or I'll just click the not interested. But yeah, yeah. but you kind of get a feel after, after a while for which ones are more authentic, you know, just kind of give it a quick scan, scan and skim.

And if it matches your skillset, you know, if it looks like something that might be interested, then send a message back, say, Hey, you know, tell me more kind of thing. Yeah. I think I think the common misconception is like you have to respond back to everybody. Like, I feel like a lot of people have that. Like, they're like, oh, I need to respond. Like, I think part of the reason why folks don't like LinkedIn is the spam that they feel like they have to respond back to. Like, what are your thoughts on that? No, I maybe respond to ten percent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. but they do make it easy to you that's you know there's always that non-interested button you just click that and you're you know five seconds you're gone so yeah and i think too for tarami and obviously being a recruiter for so long like you know a lot of my dms like like a lot of them cut copy and paste the message over and over again right and so you can kind of tell that while i did because you have to scale that but like my messages were not necessarily like long messages right i think a lot of the canned messages uh i would stay away from but like you know for me i would do one of these things where it's like hey like I have this job.

Let me know if you're interested. I mean, it was like three sentences. So, you know, you can kind of you can kind of you can kind of start ferreting that stuff out as well. I tend to ignore those kind of messages, though, because if you're not if you don't. Yeah. If I get a message, if it does not include the details of the job and if it does not include a salary range in the message, I would ignore it. There you go. It's not worth my time and effort to go back and say, hey, what does this pay? That is true. What are the statistics for this position?

What are you looking for? What are the requirements? If you're not going to include that in your initial message, I don't want to hear it. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Roxy comes here. I feel the pressure to respond. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's okay. You don't have to respond. Me and Barrett are giving you permission, Roxy. You do not need to respond to all of them. So would you say... that i mean i mean you essentially got this last job because of linkedin pretty much yeah that's part of it but also because i've been involved in in speaking and being involved in the community so yeah going out speaking to user groups speaking at conferences um posting and posting content and making sure that that content is reflected on my linkedin uh as well as you know my other social feeds sure that, that I think goes a long way.

When, let me ask you this. So you're mid, mid career changer, midlife career changer, essentially. When, if you can kind of think back a little bit, when did it start to click for you? Like when, when, when were you like, Oh, I need to start speaking at meetups or I need to start like, like, like what was that light bulb moment for you? Yeah, I think it was about probably about six or seven years into my career. Um, Before I went to one of my first conferences, I attended a couple of user groups here in Columbus, but I hadn't really gone to a developer conference until probably five or six years in.

And being around a bunch of people who weren't my coworkers, but who were interested in topics that were out there and who were interested there to learn something that you know you go to a conference because you want to learn something or because you want to interact with people um you don't you know the people who are content with with their career which is you know most of the people i was working with you know those are the kind of people that work you know corporate jobs for thirty forty years i i don't understand people like that but sure um They're all content. So you don't feel that excitement of the industry.

You don't feel the enthusiasm for the job until you go to these conferences and user groups and get to know these people that are out there looking to learn the next thing, looking to learn something different. And that was, hey, this is a great group of people. I like being around them. And my career, I hadn't felt really the enthusiasm, but I was excited. very grateful for what it had provided to me to that point yeah and i'm like you know maybe i need to start giving back so you know it's probably another five or six years after that before i spoke my first user group okay um just because i i i'm terrified of speaking to people i'm an introvert at heart i hate going out amongst the world i want to stay home all the time plus you know i've got the huge imposter syndrome i i don't feel like i have even when i post stuff even when i go to speak and when i post content i don't feel like anybody's going to care even now as a microsoft oh yeah oh yeah and in fact you know the microsoft mvp it wasn't even that wasn't even something that i pursued that was something a couple people said hey you know what you're involved you're doing great stuff you need to do this wow and i'm like yeah nobody cares about me nobody cares what i have to offer um And so, you know, even after that, it took me another year before I even started pursuing the Microsoft MVP, even after people started pushing me at it.

I'm like, all right, you know, okay, fine. I'll try it. They're not going to accept me. And they did. Yeah. That's crazy. How, how have you overcome your imposter syndrome? Like, is there just, just do it? I mean, is there any special, I force, I force myself to submit stuff. I force myself to write content. I force myself to record videos. I'm like, uh, know nobody's going to care even even now i posted something yesterday and i thought nobody's going to care about what i posted and and i've gotten several messages already about it so really yeah that's talk why why do you think because i mean the people in the chat i definitely know most of the people some people are more active than others like if you like why why do you why do you think everybody should be do you think everybody should be posting do you do like like what are your thoughts on that i i don't know that everybody should i i if it's something the the one of the biggest reasons that i started doing it was like you know here's something that i've learned maybe somebody will find some use out of it but it's more by regurgitating that out into content of some sort, it helps me to remember the things that I've learned.

Oh, I like that. And it's also something that's like, Hey, this is something I'm sure I'm going to forget again, six months down the road, a year down the road. I'm going to need, I'm going to need that information again. So if I put it into a blog post, if I put it into a video, I have something I can go back and easily reference. And I do, I find that probably at least once a week, even now I'll be like, how did I do that again? I'm like, oh, yeah, I wrote a blog post about that. I just go back out to my own blog post and look it up and like, oh, that's how I do it.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's also, you know, self-education, self-referencing. I think, I think a lot of people have problems getting started. You know, I think, I think when, when, when I, you know, cause speaking about putting yourself out there and creating content, I think the word creating content freaks a lot of people out. Can you talk about just like, you're not really creating, you're just kind of documenting what you're doing. Can you talk about that? Yeah, that is really what it is, especially for me is like, like I said, having something to go back and reference later. So I'm. You just you just it doesn't have to make sense.

You just do like a stream of consciousness stuff. Yeah. You know what I do, especially now, what I'll do a lot of times is I will. Sit down the computer, pull up the mic and just have it record what I'm saying, you know, like text to speech or speech to text. Sorry. Yeah. And just put that into a Word document or a Markdown document. Just go back through and say, OK, I did this and I did this and I did this and this is how I do this. and just just speak it out over yeah over about an hour usually is what it takes and then i'll go back and i'll say okay how do i turn this into something coherent yeah um so yeah it's really is yeah it's just documenting it and then go back and clean it up so it looks nice what what let me let's go back to the meetups and i like what roxy said here like i gotta i gotta say my little treat linkedin like a blog experiment definitely helped me yeah i mean i i think here's here's what i would say is like the bar i'm gonna try to say without being mean like no one cares like no one cares but then also at the same time it helps you tremendously right like a prime example right this the the job you just got people have known you and have followed you and you put stuff out.

Like I talk about how content is interviewing first round at scale, right? Because like you're putting out things that you're probably going to be asked in the first or second round. And if you can specifically put that out, then people are going to see it. Like, like to me, like there's no negative to it. Thoughts. Like I, I think it's just a net positive, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's how I treat it. Every single thing that I put out, I always treat it like nobody's going to care. Yeah. But I'm doing it for me. I'm doing it for my own benefit. And if other people get benefit, great.

And if it helps me find a position, that's even better. Yeah, absolutely. So you create content for yourself. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, like, you know, Barrett's out here posting out things. I mean, what was that post the other day you posted that you didn't think anybody cared about? You got some DMs. What was that about? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. Basically, I spent this last weekend working with Copilot, just seeing, you know, vibe coding since that's a big thing now. So basically, I coded a little piece of software entirely by using prompts in Visual Studio. Yeah. writing almost none of that code myself. And I just wanted to document that just to see where the state of AI assistance are right now.

And they're a lot better than they were a year ago, which was the whole point of the content. They're still not perfect. They're still not great. But I'm like, yeah, here, I'll do this. It's mostly for my own benefit just to see where it's at. But I'll write about it at the same time. And so I wrote that up and put it out there. And like I said, I've gotten like six or seven messages about it. Like people saying, oh, this is fantastic. This is great. That's awesome. Yeah. So again, yeah, you create it for yourself. You create it for yourself for sure. I love it.

My definition of creating consciousness happened about my Python journey. Yeah. And I love that. And like, so I want to, I want to get to this point too, is that just because no one's interacting with your content doesn't mean people aren't seeing it. Yeah. So a perfect example is my YouTube channel. I have been posting on there for probably three, four years now. The first three years, I got maybe a total of a hundred views total of all my videos. In the last year, it is now up near ten thousand. And that's all just in the last year. So it just suddenly started picking up about a year ago.

No way. And now I'm almost to ten thousand total views on my YouTube feed or my YouTube channel. So that's the same thing with my personal blog. I've got, you know, the Google Analytics statistics I keep on that. It's the same thing. You know, it's it was, you know, first I've been doing that for probably ten years, at least maybe longer. And, you know, first six, seven years, nothing. And it's over the last three to three years that it's actually picked up. So. Yeah, don't post it because you're going to think you're going to go big really quick. It's not. It's just you got to keep at it.

You got to keep going. And eventually, you know, people start to notice and start picking up on it. I love that. I love that so much. Yeah. And again, like, you know, I don't engage with everything Barrett puts out, but I see it constantly. Right. And like now, same thing with you. Like, I don't engage with everything, but I see it. Like, I think I think people are so focused. And again, I think it's just human nature, like to get caught up on likes and likes. retweets and reposts and like like i understand that's human nature but man like the amount that people actually see your stuff is tremendous who do not engage with it um and so you know my big encouragement it's like barrett said man he he been you've been chopping wood for three four years on youtube and it just starts to kind of happen so i love that let me ask you this when when it comes to like meetups and whatnot um any advice for people who scared to show up uh how to navigate a meetup if they are a big introvert like ourselves yeah i'm really the the thing is just go i most of these meetups i feel really tired live so far it's just like you just gotta do it you just gotta there it is but you know most of the meetups that are out there most of the user groups I've been to groups where there was three or four people that showed up.

And I've been to groups where sixty, seventy people showed up. Every group is different. And even the same group from month to month will be very widely. And you don't have to go with any expectations. Nobody's going to try to force you to participate. Nobody's going to try to involve you if you don't want to be involved. You just go and sit and listen and enjoy the food because most of the time they'll have free food.

and and just you know if you want to participate participate if you don't want to participate just sit there and listen and when it's done get up and leave it's fine no nobody's gonna think what better or less of you for for participating or not participating yeah i think that's interesting um is that so i obviously the advice i was told was coming from a recruiter going to tech meetups to like not be salesy like one of the biggest pieces of advice i got from my old mentors like keep your mouth shut and like just show up and so like i i i did that

i kept my mouth shut i kept showing up and then about this was in raleigh right so like the raleigh.net meetup was like super active they would do like these small meetups every week where there's like ten to fifteen people then they would have like one big one at the microsoft campus in raleigh but like i showed up for the first like four to six meetups i didn't say a word like i i actually i literally actually just showed up took some notes i asked questions like i mean i didn't know anything but i was asking questions and then about like the six meet up

in i had somebody come up to me and be like uh are you a developer boy do i have a surprise for you but like and and uh this conversation is actually on our torque youtube i went live with leon um with hundred devs about like the process of the way people kind of interact with people like the first meet up you don't have to say anything but just like a head nod or like a hi and then the second meetup you're like oh i saw you last time and that helps the conversation and then by the third time you guys are like bobbing out

over whatever like like i think there's so much pressure put on people to like do something the first time with meetups And that's just, it's actually like, I want to encourage people to be like, if you, if you go to meetups consistently, there's not a huge pressure to do stuff every time.

Thoughts on that? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, no, most of them, there's no pressure to do anything at all. You know, you could, you could show up every time for, for six years and never say a word and nobody's going to care. Yeah. You just go enjoy the content. You know, if you want to get to know the people, that's great. Most of the time they'll, they'll say, okay, is there anybody who's looking for a job? Raise your hand. is there anybody who's hiring right now raise your hand yeah and then say okay go talk to each other afterwards if you want yeah you know so if you're looking for a position but other than that you know that that's about as much interaction as you'll get uh without you know making yeah and for me i'm kind of curious your thoughts on this and again as as somebody who Again, I mean, I know I have a persona of being chronically online and like yapping and stuff like it still is hard for me to show up to meet ups when I don't know people.

I think like some of the biggest piece of advice is like it's kind of like what you said about my show and kind of connecting with one or two people. I would just connect with the person to the left or right of you. Whenever I speak, that's my thing now. It's like, hey, open up your phones, go to LinkedIn, and just connect with the person to the left or right of you because that's just a great start. Because if you go to meetups, if you go to a monthly meetup and you connect with a few people every single time, you're going to start building those connections, even just connecting with the person to the left or right of you.

I think people – jason i love it jason finally uh chimes in shut up jason uh uh but like uh again i think i think leveraging linkedin i think leveraging linkedin it's like you said you connect with the person in person then go to linkedin and then just keep up with them comment engage like that helps tremendously yeah it helps able to scale yourself um yeah and i try to do that i'm probably connected with close to two thousand people i think now on linkedin overall and And obviously, that's far too many people to keep in touch with all the time. But if you just, like I said, look at your feed every couple of days and respond to one or two posts.

And that goes a long, long way. It does. It does. Let's kind of transition to mid-career transition, right? I mean, listen, that's big. Talk about your process. Talk about... how you got in how you got into an industry I mean you know some people would call you old and washed up when you were trying to transition so how did you overcome that yeah I I am old and it wasn't um no uh so so I mean what what happened I'd gone to school um right out of you know out of high school I've gone to college and spent a couple years there and it just I just didn't fit I didn't I didn't go to class half the time.

It didn't work for me. The whole college thing just didn't work out for me. So I ended up working a couple of factory jobs for a couple of years. And then I worked at retail for like eight years. uh and and eventually i just got tired of dealing with people you know when you work retail you get bad attitudes about two things you get bad attitude about people and you get a bad attitude about holidays i wouldn't even celebrate christmas i'm like you know i'll show up christmas morning to open presents but don't ask me to decorate or anything like that yeah yeah i just got sick of it so i uh um decided, you know, fine.

Uh, you know, by that point I was married, I had two kids and I'm like, I've, I've got to do something with my life. And so, you know, we sold our condo. I moved back in with my parents, uh, went back to school full-time working full-time, you know, a wife and two kids. And, and, uh, It was rough for a couple of years, but I'm like, you know, I've got to do this. I've got to make a better life for myself and my family. And so, you know, at thirty two or so, I went back to school and took me a couple of years. But luckily, I had some credits from before that I could apply.

So I had to go like three years to school to get my degree. Did you get a graduate or like a tech degree? Yeah, the first time I went for computer science before I dropped out. And then when I went back, I went for computer information systems. Okay, cool. Which sounded more interesting to me than the science side, because that was more focused on the actual development as opposed to the technology. Sure. So that was what I wanted to do. And I went back and finished my degree. And my senior year, one of the kids that I was in a class with, He said, hey, they're looking for interns for this particular state agency.

And so my senior year, I got a part time job working as a as a developer, you know, level one, you know, essentially. Yeah. And and that was when, you know, the first that was actually my first experience of saying, hey, being involved with the people around you can help you find positions. Yeah. Because if I hadn't spoken up to this kid who was, you know, he was like nineteen, twenty, you know, like thirty four at the time. And, you know, but but that helped me get into that position and get that job as an intern and get my first tech experience professionally. So that by the time that I was ready to graduate, you know, almost a year later, I was I was I had a huge advantage over a bunch of my other classmates because none of them had gotten internships.

None of them had any practical experience. So already having that ten months of experience, I was able to find my first full time job even before I graduated. Yeah. So like, you know, day one out of school, I had a job ready to go for me. and so you know that that was kind of my first my first experience with with getting involved in the community if you want to put it that way talk so so we got seth saying uh jason was what's never too late yeah what's what's your advice for folks like i mean obviously i have my thought process here but i want to hear it from you like if people don't go to college and they're just Trying to make a career transition now, especially with the age of tech and what's going on now, do you have any advice for them at all?

There's no doubt it's really tough right now. The job market sucks at the moment. Over the last four or five years, I've spent a lot of time mentoring people who are looking to career change into tech. And honestly, right now, you're going to have an advantage if you have a college degree. Really? You think that? I believe that just because setting aside doing the content and getting involved in community stuff, but just from a resume standpoint, I think right now you have that advantage if you have that college degree just because They're doing all of these filtering. For every position, they're getting thousands of resumes for a position.

And they do a bunch of automatic filtering right out of the bat. And one of the things that a lot of companies are doing right now is they're filtering on degrees. It doesn't necessarily have to be a tech degree, but I've heard a lot of companies say that if you have some kind of bachelor's degree on your resume, that's going to get you past the first cut a lot of times if you don't have any job experience. And it's unfortunate because it's college degrees. My opinion of that, yeah, it was great at the time, but it's kind of useless these days. It doesn't really help your career from a technical standpoint.

But a lot of companies, and not everybody, but a lot of companies, I think, are using that as a filter. And that's just one of the filters, just to get down to a reasonable amount of resumes to look at. If somebody doesn't have a college degree and that's not in the cards for them, then what? I think other than that is creating content, whether you're creating, getting involved in things like public projects, things that are out in like GitHub, Getting involved in these projects that are out there just so you can get people seeing your name, being involved in some kind of development and being able to demonstrate that development experience.

Yeah. And so people can go back and look and say, hey, you know, I've noticed your contributions to this project or, you know, things that you're involved in. I've seen, you know, you've put out a site where you've got a bunch of samples of your own work and things like that or things that you've blogged about or talked about. um those are the kinds of things that get you noticed these days yeah you know beyond that entry-level college degree stuff like i mentioned so if you can do that kind of stuff get involved put out content for yourself Those are even better because that will get you past the HR people and directly involved or directly communicating with the people who are in the positions, who are in that team that you're going to be hiring into.

Those are the people that you want to try to reach. That way you do an end run around the HR people because the HR people, their job is to keep you out. sure but their job is not to help you find a job their job is to keep you out so yeah yeah um would you say you almost have to do the job before you can get the job in today's in today's market right now yeah yeah you have to be able to prove that experience one way or the other even if you don't have a degree even if you don't have if you don't have a three-way position if you're just coming in you know blind you have to be able to demonstrate that knowledge um somehow.

Yeah. And whether that's getting involved in blogging or speaking or, you know, community projects or whatever it is. That's going to go a lot further than anything else. Yeah. Let me Okay, then. Okay, so I'm going to challenge you on this question here. bachelor's degree in computer science. No real world experience. somebody and then somebody who has no degree but has been able to develop something that's working and maybe even has a few users who you looking at in an interview oh i'm taking the person that has experience every time yep and who has demonstrated that experience yeah i mean you can talk about experience but um being able to prove and show that you had that experience that you've done something even if it's just for yourself.

Yeah, that goes much further than college. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Trey brings up a good question. Honestly, I think this is great. What about entry IT role? IT support, sysadmin, up, up, up. I mean, I'm a big fan. Like, I think... too many people want to get that first dev job, but what they don't realize is that there's more out there than just being a developer in tech. So thoughts on this? No, yeah.

If you can find a position starting as like a QA person or a support person, that gets you in the door that gets you meeting the people um and and that can go a long way towards you know later being able to say hey you know yeah i've been doing the support stuff for a year or two um but i also know how to do some coding and and find opportunity you know if you can find that support position find opportunities to write something whether it's a little script or or a little software application something like that yeah do things like that to show that

you're more than just that support person and that'll go a huge way as well yeah i love that yeah i mean i think like you know i want to encourage everybody like everybody just has to get a break right like someone just needs to get you just need to get your foot in the door yeah and i think i think sometimes people are so focused on i want a dev job i want a dev job i know i just said this but like i want to reiterate it but it's like dude if if you've been trying to get a dev job for like a few

years now and it's not happening like it's like you don't let your ego get in the way Yeah, exactly.

Like go take, I mean, even prime example, prime example, recruiter. There are two guys that I used to work with that were recruiters at Bayco. They are now in tech. One guy is in data at Deloitte and the other guy is like in data as well at another company here in Nashville. Both of them started as recruiters. And then what happened was, is that because as a recruiter, your job is to meet people all the time. They built up enough network to then they jumped into tech because they had the relationships, right? So even as a recruiter, I've had multiple people get into tech, into engineering, into development by starting as a recruiter.

So again, like, like, don't, don't be so headstrong on, I got to get my first dev job. I think you're, you're, it needs to change the narrative of, I just need to get my first job in tech. Yeah. Especially these days. Cause it's, you know, even five years ago, you could say you're a developer and somebody would probably hire you. Um, but, uh, right now, no, I mean, you've got to, you've got to wedge your way in there somehow right now. And, and however you can get your foot in the door, like you say, that's, that's goes a lot longer than, uh, than a degree or a bootcamp or something like that.

Well, right now. Absolutely. So, um, uh, kind of the last topic before I give you kind of some rapid fire questions here. Um, uh, Azure, right? You're a big Azure guy. Everybody's talking about AI this, AI that. I feel like there's a huge opportunity still for cloud engineering. Can you talk about just the state of cloud engineering, even more so Azure and just kind of the lay of the land and maybe some tips for folks? I mean, yeah, there's still a huge demand for that kind of knowledge. And even as a developer, you need to know that. And when I was kind of looking for a position last time, And I started putting out a few resumes before I found this position.

The vast majority of what people were looking for was like a cloud engineer or a cloud administrator kind of position. So there's still a huge demand for that kind of thing. Getting somebody with that knowledge of how to set up stuff in AWS or Azure or GCP or whatever it might be. There's a lot of demand for that. And that's not something that I specifically wanted to do because I wanted to focus on development. But yeah, that was probably... Ninety percent of the responses I got was people looking for those kinds of administrators and engineers. How does somebody... Let's say somebody feels really convicted after this live stream.

They're like, I want to do cloud. I want to do Azure. How does one... get involved with Azure? Like what would be kind of some simple steps or if there is any simple steps? I don't know. Well, one of the great things about Azure is that they let you do a lot of stuff for free. They have free levels of almost everything, not everything. So you can actually go out there and just create an account and just start going through the documentation, creating stuff, create a VM, create a virtual network, create an application of some kind. And there's a lot of stuff that you can set up and do for free so that you can get that learning.

That's awesome. And there's a lot of free stuff. I mean, Microsoft, ten years ago, their documentation was horrible. But they have invested so much in the last ten years in the Microsoft Learn site. There are so many free courses, free documentation out there. that you can literally get certifications just from their stuff instead of having to go out like you used to have to do, go out and find courses or find books or things like that. You don't have to do that anymore. They've provided all now. And there's a ton of knowledge out there to learn from. So yeah, just pick something. However you learn best, whether it's video or text or whatever it might be, just pick something and start going.

I do think, and you and I chat this backstage, so I want to say this here. I think there's a huge opportunity. I can see my eye. There's a huge opportunity. I still think there's not enough demand. No, there's not enough supply for the amount of demand in the Azure space. Yeah, that's true. I feel like, so when I was, I lofted this to bear it backstage to make sure I was right. When I was recruiting at Vaco, when anybody needed an AWS engineer, dude, I could go out and knock on a door next to me and find somebody. But whenever an Azure need came in, my recruiting teams would scramble because it was just really hard to find Azure people.

And I still feel like it's that way today. And so if you are watching this or listening to this now in the future, and you're interested in cloud engineering, based off what Barrett said, I would get on, start learning, start getting certs. I do think certifications to a certain extent still carry some weight in the cloud space and start learning Azure stuff. That is my two cents because there is still so much demand for it. Thoughts? I would agree with that, yeah. I think it's one of the benefits of being the second place cloud provider is that, you know, everybody goes for aws because it's the biggest in the world um not nearly as many people will go for like azure or google just because they're a lot smaller and yeah and so it's like uh any technology that's you know second or third place you know like like c sharp c sharp is is still not the biggest but it's it's huge and there's a lot of demand for it so yeah absolutely i i do want to i do want to point out what lawrence said lawrence it's good to see you my friend um i actually agree with this so um i was doing a one-on-one session from a dad who's a senior staff engineer in Nashville.

He sent his son to me to do some career counseling and he's a mechanical engineer at Vanderbilt. And then me and him were doing some workshopping together and I ran a mechanical engineering search or mechanical, so he's going to Vanderbilt. So I ran a, I should try to show him like to network with mechanical engineers who graduated from Vanderbilt. a ton of them were in AI now. And I do have to say this, I agree with this. And so something to look at as well, you know, if you listen to this and you're kind of tech adjacent mechanical engineering, like there's, I saw a ton of overlap.

I obviously have not dug into this, but this is interesting that Lawrence brought this up when I was just helping a guy who is a senior at Vanderbilt for mechanical engineering. So yeah, Azure GCP, Yeah, I am sure all areas. Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. All right. You ready for some rapid fire? All right. All right. Sweet. First off, what is one app or tool that you can't live without right now? Probably pretty sharp work. It's a tool that JetBrains puts out that helps you write better code. Okay. Is it a coding agent tool? No, I mean, they have their own separate AI stuff, but it's basically a quality thing.

It kind of checks what you're doing, suggests things that's like, hey, you should write this a little bit differently kind of thing. I love it. So you kind of talked about this, but maybe it's a different answer. The very first job you ever got paid to do, what was it? My very, very first job was as a dishwasher at a Woolworths cafe in the mall. That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And the restaurant. I lasted two weeks there. So I love it. I love it. Let me ask you this. Obviously you are remote right now. Yeah. I've been trying to figure out how to frame this question better.

If you could have your ideal remote onsite once a quarter, once a month or, or at all, would you like to go into the office or do you just want it or no? Okay. Never. Okay. I hate working in the office that the, yeah. The whole back to office thing, that's ridiculous BS. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're all going to go back in the office and get sit on Zooms and have calls. And that's exactly how it is. Yeah. Yeah. ReSharper, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Woolworths. Yeah. There is a major chain in South Africa. Actually, there was a Woolworths in Nashville for a bit, but it closed down.

They've been gone from Columbus for a long time. I love it. I love it. When you were young, young, young, young Barrett, what did you want to be when you grew up? Uh, the very first thing that I can remember wanting to be was a helicopter pilot for the army. That's awesome. But I got too tall and too blind and, uh, you know, I'm like, yep, they're not going to take me. So, uh, so that's when I started getting into things like engineering maybe, or an architect or something like that. I love it. I love it. Um, uh, let me ask you this. Have you had a career mistake you're oddly grateful for?

Yeah, actually, there was an experience when I was working for a really big bank whose name rhymes with itty. But one of the things that I was working on there was an application that would every night it would go through and it would process a bunch of stock trades and bond trades for the day. And then it would move all the actual trades around and then reconcile with the bank accounts to move the money. And I did something that I had posted. And that was one of the things where we kind of played fast and loose. So a lot of times we do fixes in production and things like that.

It's always a great idea. Don't ever bank there. Your money's not safe. But anyway, so I made a mistake and something happened and nothing happened overnight. The whole system went down. None of the money got moved. None of the stocks. And so, you know, we got in there in the morning and we're scrambling to try to fix stuff. And we were able to fix everything, get everything working. And one of the things that the biggest thing that I learned from that is that my boss at the time, she was fantastic. She had our backs. She supported us. She defended us against the business people who were screaming and yelling, you know, and rightly so, because we'd screwed up.

but but it taught me a huge amount about leadership and how to be a leader and and how to uh defend your people protect your people take care of your people yeah um because you know most managers they'll throw you under the bus in a second because they can't manage. And that's not what a leader does. And so she taught me a huge amount. And I think that's probably one of the biggest screw-ups that I'm grateful for. That's awesome. I love that. Real quick, I have two more questions. I want to go to this. What Azure certs do you think are worth pursuing? I mean, I think the first one to get involved in is the AZ-IX, which is kind of like the base level Azure general knowledge kind of cert.

Start with that one, get that one first, and then figure out what kind of specialties you want to go into. Because there are probably like, twenty or thirty different specialty certifications in Azure. Whether it's, you know, data or AI or whatever it might be. But the AZ- nine hundred is that general knowledge, learning about Azure. And so I always recommend everybody start with that one. I love it. That's awesome. A few more questions. If you weren't in tech, I'll tell you tomorrow. that you can't be in tech anymore, you can't develop, what hobby would you pursue? And I would pay the same amount of money.

Wow. I would build Legos professionally. There you go. I love it. I love it. Let me ask you this. I always ask, are we a coffee or tea drinker? Neither. Diet Pepsi. You're kidding me. We have another Pepsi. That is wild. It's become a lore in the Torque Discord. That's amazing that we have another Pepsi person. I love it. All right. Last question, man. Again, thanks for hanging out with me today. If everybody showed up, thank you so much. Uh, I got to bounce a little early. Um, but, uh, so shows called guidance counselor, two point O because we had guidance council, middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't have them.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Barrett? Uh, get involved earlier. Really? Uh, be part of the community. Uh, it's, It's been good to me and I've tried to be good back to it. And those are the people that I have the greatest respect for is the people who will raise up and support the other people around them. Yeah. The comments. The comments. Yeah, Jason. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, y'all go connect with Barrett. Barrett, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. But y'all have a great one. It's a great conversation. It's awesome comments that they really love to say.

If you did like it, obviously, like I always say, share it on LinkedIn for folks who may need it. And Barrett, I appreciate you. I appreciate your friendship. And we'll be live tomorrow. Different time. Eight a.m. is going to be early. I'm going live with my guy, Aaron Harmon. He is a heck of a recruiter. Used to work, you know, used to work at Tesla. hiring like mechanical engineers type of thing, like car engineers. And then now is at a drone company out of Huntsville. He's hired like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people at this point. So give me a great conversation on how to navigate kind of what Barrett was saying, like the HR internal side of things.

So see you all tomorrow morning at AM Central. Barrett, thank you, my friend. And we'll see you all tomorrow. Peace.