Mid-Level Career Advancement for Individual Contributors

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Hey, you're listening to a special episode of the CTO advisor. I don't call it special often. It's because whenever I get a guest like this, I get really excited. You can hear the excitement in my voice is Pumala Schmidt. She is one of the first people I met in a tech field day community. And Pumala, I remember our meeting very vividly. You may not remember this, but you came and you sat down and I think we might have been close to Howard Marks.

Yes, you were. And you came in and you said, hey, do you guys mind if I spray perfume? And I commenced to smell my wrist and I'm like, wait, I think I put on deodorant today. So that was my first memory of meeting Pumala Schmidt, aka Exchange Goddess. Yes. Thank you for having me on, Keith. This is going to be great. And yes, I do remember that moment asking you if I could spray some perfume just a little bit.

And then I do recall pulling out some hand lotion as well, because I like to put my hand lotion and it smelled, it usually has some, you know, fragrance or scents to it. And then you commenced to destroy the presenters at tech field day with highly technical questions. I don't think they were expecting that, that they know. But I do recall that we made each other honorary Dutch cousins. Yes. Yes. The Dutch. We and we confuse so many people with that whenever we're either on Twitter or and like, oh, my Dutch friend and people look at us like, wait, Keith, you're OK, you're tall and black.

And then Pumala, you're a if you've never seen Pumala. She runs like 10 miles a day. She's so obviously super fit. She's a woman. She's not six feet to six foot, foot three, barely five feet. Yeah. So it is a but the thing was, there was a bunch of Dutch delegates, all of which were super tall. And we just, you know, we made ourselves Dutch. Well, because I had my wooden platform shoes and it was like, oh, these look kind of Dutch.

And I'm six foot four. Yeah. We're Dutch cousins. It made logical sense to us. So we're going to jump into the topic today. So Pumala, we're not going to talk about what you do today. T. career, people moving from like that junior level to a more senior role. T. T. position. T. vendor and talk about kind of your journey and recommendations you have for people in similar roles. You know what, yeah, that sounds great.

T. pro, whatever we want to call ourselves, people that work on servers and manage systems. You know, I was that person. I am that person, you know. Your Twitter handle is Exchange Goddess, and that's, you know, that's for those of you kind of new. And I don't think there's a lot of new people listening to this podcast. But you're a legit exchange expert, not running on-premises anymore, but you're a legit exchange expert, right? Oh, yes. I have done things that the exchange product group cringes every time I bring it up.

They do not like the fact that I've done it, but it worked. Like, you know, I've ran Exchange Virtualize on NFS. Like that is like taboo. Like it's not supported. But it ran like a freaking tank, you know, and I knew what I was doing. That's why it ran so well. Not everybody can do that. It just takes, you know, experience, it takes hard work to do it, you know. And I look back, I'm like, you know, I'm glad I did it.

I was cutting edge back then. Gosh, I say it like I'm so old, but... You're not that old. I think you're still younger. But back then, right? Because now, I mean, it's cloud. It's all cloud. Yeah, it's all cloud. It's all cloud. Yeah. So this will be kind of twofold. One is you're finding yourself, you're kind of at the height of the senior admin, senior engineer role inside a regular end-user organization. What were your career options?

There was a turning point. Once the cloud really became significant, I had to make a decision, like, do I embrace the cloud and learn more about it and pivot into a different sector? Or do I hug my server and say, I'm not letting go? And I pivoted. I mean, you kind of have to, right? If you want to continue to advance your career. This is back, what, 2014, 2015. I pivoted in a different direction. Well, more like a lateral move.

Like, I knew Office 365 was, you know, it wasn't going anywhere, and that was the future. I took an opportunity to run a unified communications team, Exchange, Skype for Business, video services, faxing, because healthcare is all about faxing. Knowing that Office 365 was pretty much going to take over, but it gave me the opportunity to help this organization transition themselves into a cloud-based organization. So it was a slower pivot, but for me, it was strategic in terms of, okay, yes, I'm going to be a little more focused in where the cloud portion I'm going, because prior to then, I was doing VMware.

I was doing storage. I was doing backup. I was doing everything that was in the data center, and that's where you have to figure out, okay, am I going to be the jack-of-all-trades, or do I need to specialize and pivot into that area, whether it's security or any of the, you know, the cloud services or DevOps? For me, I chose to go help from a unified communications platform perspective, and I learned a lot, right? I was still running Exchange on-premises, but I modernized that platform from physical to virtual, and this is still, what, 2015?

We're still running physical, and I figured, okay, we've got to modernize a little bit here, even though it was against the preferred architecture, but, you know, Skype for Business, things like that, Polycom Video Servicing. We have to transition to a modern type of communications platform. Now that organization is pretty much, I don't want to say all online or in the cloud, but maybe like 85%, so what I did there was help that transition so they were ready to be cloud because healthcare runs at a slower pace than everybody else does.

So that's really interesting. You know, you're talking about, like, many of the struggle that people still go through today, not just from an organizational perspective, but even from an individual skill set perspective. You're in a slow-moving organization. You like your job for the most part, and we'll get into kind of career progression, but you like your job, and you need to improve your skills. So there's a couple of things that has to happen. One, you're not in the management position, but you have to influence the organization to kind of move, and you need to be a thought leader.

So how do you be a, it's funny, other than putting it on your Twitter profile or your LinkedIn profile, how do you actually thought lead at that senior IC level? Constantly challenge yourself, and I never really considered myself a thought leader until my VP at this, at my previous employer at the healthcare company said, you are a thought leader. Like, you are constantly challenging the status quo. You're constantly challenging, you know, our technologies, your team, keeping up on what new technologies are out there, learning about them, and seeing how they fit into our overall strategy and vision, right?

And that growth mindset, I hate saying that word, right? But it's a real thing, you know? Yeah, but yeah, you have to have this growth mindset of thinking outside the box. If you don't think outside the box, are you really learning? You got to ask why. If you're not asking why, you know, are you really challenging yourself? And are you challenging others? Because if you're not, you're just, you're just there. It's a comfort zone, right? You're not really growing.

Growing is learning and failing. So let me push back on that a little bit. You know, I like to pick on the DNS administrator because they still exist. And if you're a DNS administrator and you're listening to this, I apologize. I don't. So if you're the DNS administrator, you're going to work, you get paid, there's plenty of DNS changes to make, and kind of no one's moved your cheese. If you don't get that reference, go read the book, Who Moved My Cheese?

So, you know, you go in day in and day out and life is good. I get paid a decent salary. Life is good. Why change? Like what's the, what's a forcing factor for someone who's kind of mature in their career? They, they've paid their dues. They kind of did the hard work to get into IT. They're now in this, I wouldn't say cushy position, but they don't have to, you know, yeah, they're cozy and they don't have to, you know, like what, what, what have you seen as like the, the drum beat or the motivator to get folks to kind of, that they have to move.

I mean, Mia, you see the cloud coming. We see hybrid infrastructure. We see exchange getting, you know, migrated out to the public cloud and SaaS taking over and our jobs basically not going away, but absolutely transforming what, what are some of the kind of, I guess, flags that people should recognize and say, you know what, it's time for me to do that thought leadership thing Pumla talked about. If you're not being challenged, if it's, if you can pretty much do your job with your eyes closed, it's just, you know, same, same, you know, same thing every day.

There's, there's no excitement. There's no passion. You're, you're just coasting and you're not near retirement, right? Cause there, there are some people I know that are very close to retirement and that's what they want to do. Right. But for the, for the young ones that are, you know, you're still priming your career. Think, you know, think about how you are working right now. Are you, are you being challenged? Do you feel like you are making an impact?

Do you feel valued? Is the work that you're doing making you feel good? Are you, are you being challenged? If you can, if you can't say yes to any of those, then it's time to start thinking about, okay, maybe, maybe I need to level up. Maybe, maybe I need to push myself a little bit more because we all have bills to pay. If you don't push yourself, you're not going to get that promotion. And who doesn't want a promotion?

Who does not want extra money? Please tell me who does not want extra money. There are some people that don't care about titles. Right. Um, but for underrepresented folks like myself and yourself, um, yeah, titles do matter. Right. They do. They absolutely matter. And if you want that extra, you know, few bucks in your paycheck, you, you know, you want that promotion, you've got to do a little bit extra. And this is where, um, I struggle with because I was doing that.

I was doing that extra because I kept telling myself, I want to get promoted. I want to make more money because I got to take care of my family. And I was putting too much into work. I actually, uh, neglected my family. So I'm kind of like paying for it right now. You know, trying to, you know, um, reconnect with my kids, my, you know, my family. Um, but those years of me pushing myself, uh, to get to a point where I can reconnect, that is a personal choice.

That is something that you, as you know, a junior administrator or mid-level person, that's a choice you have to make. How much do you want to put into this? Um, and for us underrepresented folks, we have to put a little bit extra than others that are more represented. Circa 2014, when you had to make this, these trade-offs, these decisions, well, what was the, I guess we've talked about the stick. Let's talk about the carrot a little bit. You've hinted to that.

Most organizations, most customer organizations that I talked to you, there's this limit to how much learning new stuff will get you will translate into more dollars into your pocket. If you're kind of, uh, I like to look back at the start of my career. You're the senior CC male administrator, CC male, if you're a senior CC male administrator, that was kind of equivalent to the senior network engineer. Engineer. You can move laterally, but you, there was not like a, a higher technical role you can go into.

So you're kind of forced to go into management. How did you navigate that part? So, um, I did go into management. Um, sort of, I had an amazing director that at first I actually was really pissed off at her. She said to me, your technical skills are amazing. You have such great, your talent. If I promoted you to a manager, I would be losing this talent and I can't afford to lose that. And I looked at her, I said, I want a promotion.

So you're telling me I'm stuck in this position. And she's like, no, we'll figure something out. But she was, I can't afford to lose this tech, your technical expertise, right? Your ability to be a sponge. And I know there's plenty of other people out there just like me. We have the ability to just absorb information and learn it and then apply it. And, um, there is this struggle. And so she came up with a position called a technical lead.

It was the first in the company. She's like, you manage a team. It's a team of five, six people. You are responsible for all their technical requirements. You know, their projects, you hand out the projects, you deal, everything technical related. But they report to a manager from a people skills perspective. And it was a joint, uh, management type of role where I would do reviews from a technical standpoint. How did they do in this project? You know, how did they do in that project?

Um, what skills do they need in terms of technical skills? Really? That gave it to their manager. And then we would, you know, meet and rate each of the, uh, engineers. Engineers, he read them on the more of the soft scale side. I rate them technical. That was the, um, I don't say consolation, but that was what my director came up with. I was still an IC and, but I was leading people. I was a leader rather than the manager.

And that's really how I see us highly technical ICs, right? We're not, we can be managers, but I feel like we are better leaders. We're better technical leaders. And if you have an opportunity to take these jobs, they are out there where you can lead technically. You are still, uh, you know, I don't want to say you're not a manager, but you are a leader. And I feel that it's more important than actually managing someone. We know we, we had a conversation with Brian Lau from VMware.

He's a, uh, principal engineer at VMware and very similar VP level type world at VMware in which he doesn't have direct reports, but he's absolutely a leader. I find it interesting that you were able to find a sponsor inside of a customer org, uh, that, you know, had that foresight to say, there's a technical path. Or there is a career path for highly technical people that doesn't lead into people management. Is there a big world of this or is it, is it only for kind of the, the, this, this tiny example where you could find a sponsor inside of a customer org that understood a champion almost to champion that for you?

Have you found these types of opportunities throughout the industry? So my previous employer, uh, which I will name Microsoft, yes, there are champions of highly technical ICs. There's a whole program for that. So a lot, a lot of vendors do that. Private industries, um, you know, customers as we like to call them, there are organizations out there that are realizing that not all ICs are meant to be managers and they are changing the way they, you know, build these career paths for their employees and, you know, realizing that, okay, they're highly technical.

We don't want to lose our technical skills. So we need to develop a career path for them on, you know, the technical side. For instance, you know, my new employer, which, um, I work for Vanguard, you know, a small, little investment firm. Little bitty, little bitty company. Yeah, it's just a little bit, right. You know, a trillion dollars, right. Of assets. Um, there is a technical path for ICs that is literally equivalent to the management track. And when you get to a certain level within the, um, technical track, you're considered a senior leader.

Hmm. Yeah. And so you, you attend, you know, all the senior leadership meetings and whatnot, because when you get to a certain point, they, they realize like, okay, yeah, like I, I'm a cloud architect, right. And I'm pretty far up the food chain. And while I don't have direct reports, my work makes a huge impact across many organizations. That's leadership. Leadership doesn't necessarily, you know, is defined by the people you manage. It's by defined by what you are doing and what you are leading people to do.

And, um, I'm very fortunate to, you know, be in this new organization that, that sees that. How do you, how do you identify those roles? Like what are some of the common search terms I need to look for to find like these high-level IC roles? Because I know, you know, I kind of know senior manager. I know director. I know those titles, but what are some of the titles that are indicative of a senior technical leader? Architects is probably the biggest, uh, flag if they're hiring architects.

But honestly, you've, you've got to talk to the recruiter because some organizations, they'll say, oh, yeah, they're architects, but are you? They're just senior system engineers. Yes. If the title says architect, dig into it. Like, is this architect a high-level architect? You know, who are they reporting to? What's the reporting structure? And that's, you know, what I did when I was, um, looking for another job, looking at the reporting structure and, and asking the recruiter and the hiring manager, how is this aligned?

You know, is this, how is your management track versus your technical track? Does it go beyond just being an engineer? And, um, you've each, each organization's different. So you have to ask those questions. But if you see roles like architect or chief architect, that's probably a good sign. Uh, because that means that they realize, okay, you can be an architect. You could be the chief architect. Usually chief architects don't have reports under them. Usually sometimes, you know, sometimes they may, but that architects are more IC related rather than, you know, a director or managing, managing director.

Yeah. I had the title of, uh, chief architect when I was at Lockheed Martin and I didn't have any, it's similar to your role. I didn't have any HR direct reports, but I had a organization that I led technically very similar to the role that you described, which kind of leads you to my last question that we talked about pre hitting report, which is how important is it to understand those levels and come in at the level you think you should come in at?

Leveling is critical, more important than your salary. I'm going to have you repeat that for me. Say that again. Leveling is uber, uber important. It is the most important thing when it comes to negotiating, uh, you know, your offer because you're leveled. Yes, it, it, it does determine the salary band you're in, but if they're putting you at a lower level and compensating it with extra money, hmm, you're going to get nipped in the butt behind when it comes to promotions.

Right? Uh, you know, certain organizations, they'll say, okay, we're going to down level you, but we're going to give, you know, we're going to give you extra money to, to kind of make up for that down leveling. Don't do that. Go in at a level that's appropriate for your experience and where you want to be at. I made the mistake of getting down leveled as an employer and, you know, I had to work harder to make sure that I got back to the level that I was at.

Um, down leveling is very common in big tech. Yes, it is for people that worked in big tech and interviewed big tech. Yes, we can all test down. Recruiters would down level you because to them, if they down level you, you're in a lower band, you know, pay pay wise. Uh, it, you know, they're benefiting the company for you. You want to be at a higher level. You want to be at the level that's appropriate where you should be at.

Uh, because once you're at the right level, it comes with titles as well, which then titles is so important. Pay, pay comes with the right level. Yeah, it determines so much. It determines how much is put towards your retirement contribution, how much, if you get stock options or issues, how much of that, if you're in a partnership model, how much your, uh, profit sharing is, it has, you know, your base salary at this level, your base salary is very similar across the board for a lot of levels, uh, for people at your, at similar type of job functions.

But that leveling thing can literally put tens of thousands of dollars a year, leave tens of thousand dollars a year on the table. Oh, yes. And that, and also soft benefits. Like if I was, you know, at, you know, you, you can, at certain levels, you can fly first class in organizations versus having to fly, fly, fly, fly coach at one level beneath may not seem to matter, but if you have to travel a lot. One day it's a big deal.

Oh yeah. Oh, trust me. It is that leveling. It makes a huge difference. Leveling comes with benefits. It comes, it comes with, you know, certain perks. It comes with titles and it does come with pay. If you are leveled, right. Pay naturally comes with it. So for everyone listening, always ask about the level that you are at. Uh, that is the number one thing. And then because leveling also helps with your next promotion. If you, if they down level you, you're going to work extra hard to get to that, to that promotion.

And that's just putting you back at the level you should have came in at the last piece about leveling that I'll talk about it in titles. Like I used to make this mistake that I used to say, I don't care about titles. Just as long as you paid me. And then I got inside of an organization and I found that I didn't have the implicit power that's or authority that's brought with a title. Like if I, if I came in as a senior engineer versus coming in as a architect, like inside of the organization, I can get meetings with VPs with the title of architect.

Whereas if I was a senior engineer, I had to work hard and go through an architect or go through my director to get that meeting, that critical meeting to become a thought leader inside of an organization. If I didn't have the title. You are absolutely, absolutely. 100% correct. Titles matter. I don't care who you are. Titles absolutely matter. And especially for us underrepresented folks is so much harder for us. We've got to work X an extra hundred percent on top of everybody else.

Right. Just to be heard. We get that title that, that, that just, it helps us even more. Like you said, right. Getting those meetings, getting people to take you seriously as a woman, as a, as a minority woman. I'm coming into a new organization now. I've been at this job for what? Three months. And, um, guarantee you, if I was an engineer or a specialist, I probably wouldn't be taken as seriously as, you know, a, a, a senior, um, architect.

They see that. Oh, geez. X level. Okay. That's pretty much a director. I got to listen. It, you know, it, it sucks. Right. But at the end of the day, that's how corporate politics, you know, works. That, that level, that title. If you don't have it, most aren't going to listen to you and you have to work extra hard to, for, to get them to listen to you. I've been there. I've done it.

I've had that senior systems engineer position title, and I worked my butt off rear end off to get people to listen to me and, you know, and to listen to my recommendations. And I could say exactly the same thing a manager saying, but the manager said it. Oh, well, oh my gosh. We got to do that. But as a senior systems engineer saying it, oh, no, no, you're just an engineer, right? You don't know what you're talking about, but the manager said it.

Yes. The manager said it and, you know, it's perfect. So leveling and titles, negotiate your title. If you can negotiate your level, don't worry about that salary because it will come with it. So before we digress into topics that people will be surprised. I know about, I know a lot about purses. I know a lot about shoes. And Pumila likes both. And we could easily digress into designer shoes and designer purse topics. Purses and food. We can't forget about food.

Oh, goodness. Don't get us started on food. And Pumila's beautiful seafood sundae that she no longer holds because, again, we have a lot in common, health challenges, et cetera, et cetera, that we can talk about forever. But no, let's not go there. For those that want to follow Pumila, the easiest thing is to follow her on Twitter at Exchange Goddess. Great insights. com. Meet me on Twitter at CTO Advisor. Until then, talk to you next CTO Advisor podcast.