CTO Adivisor 064 - The value of user groups

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

Hey, how's it going? It's Keith Townsend from the CTO Advisor. And I know you're looking at the timeline in your podcast and thinking, man, this is a little long for a CTO Advisor podcast. But there's a lot of content and not just a lot of content from me and Mark. This is a recording, a live podcast that we recorded back in August 9th of this year in which we interviewed several members of the VMware community, including leaders of the local VMUG down in Indy, folks that drove all the way in from Kansas City.

We asked these basic questions of the who, what, when, where and why, why subject yourself to a few hundred mile drive to come to a VMUG user con? It's not like it's a VMware VMworld, which is this big used production. What's the value from an executive perspective and what's the value from a participant's perspective? Before we get started with the podcast, wanted to thank our sponsor Druva. According to Druva, Druva delivers the industry's first data management as a service. A single SaaS platform that unifies data protection and management for endpoints, infrastructure and cloud applications.

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Druva, the future of cloud data protection. Now on with the podcast. This is one of the larger community events. So the topic today is going to be about community. I don't know, 700, 750 people registered for the Indie VMUG, one of the larger events. And today we have two guests. Of course, I'm joined by our normal co-host, Mark. Mark, how's it going? Good, just got here. They call this like a little VMworld. Yeah, this is like the closest thing that you can get to VMworld.

So if you're in the Midwest in general, this is a great show to come to. Matter of fact, we have two people at the Indie VMUG that's not even from Indie as guests. First we have Tim, Tim from Tim Tech Thoughts. Yep, Tim Smith, Tim Tech Thoughts. Nice to be out here. And then John Hiddenbrandt. And we've had John on before. John, this is the second time you've been on and the last time was at a VMUG. Yeah, we were in St.

Louis originally. So yeah, I made the trek all the way from Kansas City out here to Indianapolis. First time with me on with you though. So I'm glad we get to do this. Yeah, I hope it doesn't go south real quick. Well, we are technically in the south. So we could go even further south. So there's no guarantees on there. So topic is community. And we haven't done, I don't think, a career episode in quite some time.

And the importance of community to careers. So let's talk about first, John, why did you make the trek all the way out from, you drove all the way out from Kansas City to Indy. What was kind of the edifice of that, or? Well, this year I've made a more concerted effort to try to get more involved in some of the VMware VMUG user comms, mostly as a community speaker, just to get out there a little more. Sort of for personal reasons, get my name out there a little more at the same time.

But I feel like I've done, I've got so much from the community, now it's my turn to give back to it. So, Mark, talk a little bit about that. What's the importance of getting your name out there, from both giving back to the community and personally, professionally? You know, I think from my perspective, professionally, getting the name out there gets you contacts with people that you may not have had in your day-to-day job, whether it's you need technical assistance or assistance on a sales side or a support side.

Knowing the right people, whether it's at the company or at friends, it's nothing like, oh man, I'm having a BRO problem. Who can I call? Oh, I know who I can call. I can call that guy and he can help me out. A channel that you would never have anywhere else, and that can help you professionally and personally, I think. So, Tim, you recently started a new role. Did the community play a role at all in helping you find your latest opportunity?

So, I guess it's kind of no secret that the company I worked with kind of went belly up. And so, I was in need of some paychecks, right? And, you know, I was very surprised that when I let it be known that I was looking and I needed to make a change, the amount of people in the community that were out and willing to help and put in a good name for me. And sometimes people that I only met in person once, that, I mean, I had, you know, Eric Wright was one person that I was talking to about job changes, and he was nice enough to tell me that he would personally recommend me and stake his job on me, you know.

Just hearing words of affirmation from community members like that was very encouraging. And, you know, it inevitably helped me land the job that I'm at now, just from the community people out there. What about you, Keith, right? You obviously went through a career change not too long ago. How'd the community help you? So, you know, we've talked about this in the past. My search was a little bit different. I, you know, quit my job and kind of posted out to Twitter that I was looking for a job.

And I was really overwhelmed by the amount of opportunity. What was surprising, I think, was the amount of attention I got from not necessarily in-user organizations, which is my focus, but from vendors and the opportunities that I've gotten to interview with some really high quality vendors from startups all the way up to the most well-known vendors. As a result, you know, the CEO of an extremely large traditional vendor reached out to me and we've become Twitter friends, at least. So the exposure has been amazing.

So at this table, we have kind of varying degrees of people that are in, and I hate to use the term fame, but popularity in the community, different stages. So John, I remember what, a couple of years ago when you did your first Tech Field Day, you were, you know, it was kind of like, was there a little bit of that whole imposter syndrome? Did you have any of that going on? If you vaguely remember from it, I didn't say much. And I didn't really say much on camera on top of it.

I had the biggest eyes open trying to figure out exactly what this entire thing was. And I'm sitting around people who literally are my Twitter following list for the most part. And it was a little overwhelming. But as time's gone on, imposter syndrome has dropped a little bit. I'm much more comfortable going to things like the Tech Field Day events and doing things like public speaking, which are some things I tracked back three, four years ago, I never thought I would actually do.

And you're going to actually speak at the show today, in a few minutes. So, you know, we can't go too long. Talk a little bit about the impact of the community on helping you get over that fear of imposter syndrome. Well, it's pretty simple. One of the things that it took me a while to figure out is that at these VMUG events, most of the people there, they're not necessarily looking at you as the complete expert. You feel like you have to be the complete expert, but in most cases, what they're looking for is a good story, that's backed by your experience, because what ends up relating with the audience is your experience for the most part.

And that's what some people, it took me a while to get over. And that's what I do primarily since I'm in Kansas City. I do a lot of mentoring with some of the people who want to try to get into some of the speaking roles, is the fact that you don't have to be the quantifiable expert. You don't have to be smarter than some of the PhDs, potentially that you go to conferences and see. What people want to hear is, what are you doing with product X and what sort of experience have you had with it?

So in case someone's looking at a new product, they've got somebody that you can at least reference and know, hey, well, that guy had this particular issue. And then from there, it opens up dialogue. Tim, what about you and imposter syndrome? I think we all feel that from time to time in our career. Absolutely. I mean, Keith talked about the varying levels of fame. And so immediately my mind was like, well, I'm the least famous person here. We love you, Tim.

Yeah. But, you know, and I don't say fame in a bad way. I know sometimes you hear the V Rockstar thing and it can have a bad connotation, but I think everybody has that person that they look up to in the community. And imposter syndrome for me, I think the big breakthrough was during this job search and just feeling that outpouring of community because I always thought, you know, like, oh, my blog articles aren't good enough or I'm not getting enough hits or, you know, I need more followers, which all these ridiculous metrics that somehow I think might prove my knowledge existence into the community here.

But just having that community support has helped me realize that that doesn't matter. And that's just about whatever, like John said, my experience with the products, my experience that I've had, and just sharing that. People wanna know. People wanna know what I think about X. They don't need to know all the right answers that they might possibly ask about X. And I think that's something when they're first starting a community, blogging or Twittering, they have a tendency to measure themselves with these non-important metrics.

I think the first thing I always tell anybody is don't worry about how many people look at your blog or how many people follow you. Just do you, right? And people will consume the content you create. People want to hear from everybody. There's not a person here at this VMUG that I don't wanna hear from. So, Mark, you set the next kind of question up really nicely, which is there's not a person here that we don't wanna hear from. If you just have no desire to create content and you just wanna get involved in community just by becoming part of the conversation, the VMUG, a local user con, meetups, are great places to do that.

What do you think about the approachability of folks in the communities? Do you have to be somebody of renown before I go up and talk to a Rolison Rivera, a Chris Wall, or people who are really famous in the community? Do you have to be someone before you approach them? Oh my God, Chris Wall. No, I don't think so. I've not found a single person that's not extremely approachable. I think I'll relate a story quickly that somebody at my office relayed once when they met Gene Kim.

They were just flabbergasted that he was so approachable, so easy to talk to, right? What do you guys think? And Gene Kim, for those who don't know, is the author of the famous book on DevOps. What's the name of the book? It's so famous I don't know the name. Phoenix Project. The Phoenix Project, right. Well, and I can say for the most part, initially I thought some of these people, if you want to call them the celebrati, or the Twitter celebrities, inside of the, especially the virtualization community, it always felt like, oh my God, that's so-and-so.

But as time has gone on, I've come to realize that they're not much different from myself other than they've gotten their name out there for the most part. And that's all you need to do to strike up a conversation with anybody is realize you're really on the same playing field, just regardless of whether or not someone's got a more famous blog than you is kind of irrelevant. I think they started creating content for the same reason anybody who does did, right? And they understand that and they want to interact with people.

Yeah, I don't think any one of them has created content to make themselves feel greater. It's been the desire to help other people. So I think it's just a lot of us not wanting to approach them because we think that we're not good enough for them. But that's the true fact, right, is that they want to help people. So they're really interested in talking to others and pouring into them and teaching them and sharing their experience. Yeah, it'd be horrible if as experts or as community leaders that we came to community events and didn't want to interact with the community.

So there's a point to the meetups and the user cons. So let's close out because we have a hard stop and John has to get to his presentation. Where can people find you on the Twitters or online to start with you, Tim? co. And you, John? I'm pretty frequent on the tweets. com that sometimes I have a rational thought once. Okay, continuing the theme of community, we've had three guests join us. Can you guys go ahead and introduce yourself?

First, Ken, since you are already holding the mic. Sure. My name is Ken Nelbon and I am a member of the Indianapolis VMUG leadership team. Okay, Mike. My name is Mike Ellis and I'm also a member of the NEVMUG leadership team as well. My name is Martez Reed. I'm an automation engineer with a solutions integrator in Indianapolis. And you are also a speaker at today's VMUG. So we're continuing the conversation along with Tim and John on community, the impact of community.

I thought it would be really great to get organizers and participants in the VMUG event to talk about it. So first, let's just talk about what is a VMUG user con. Ken, give us an overview. What is a user con? The user con is a event that we put on yearly. We take out a large portion of the convention center in Indianapolis. We bring together a lot of sponsors, a lot of community speakers, a lot of professionals from VMware to present all kinds of sessions and basically connect with the Indianapolis tech community, help them keep their skills relevant, help them let them know what's out there, what to keep on top of them and give them a chance to network with their peers in the area.

So that sounds like a lot of work. When did you guys start planning this? Gosh, I don't even remember when our first calls were. Do you, Mike? But I know that it was early spring probably, at the very least, when we started doing a monthly call with VMUG HQ out of Nashville. And then we started doing them biweekly. And then as we rant up, we started talking just weekly and ironing out the details. Well, VMUG corporate based out of Nashville did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the convention space, getting ahold of the sponsors.

And we did what we could to kind of steer the agenda for today, try to hook them up with other people locally to get some of the community sessions or other sponsors that may not be connected directly with VMUG corporate. So Mike, how much of your time from let's say hours per week is spent on organizing just the user con portion of the Indy VMUG? Well, really, we spend a lot of time, usually the last two or three months, at least two to three hours a week, putting together things like preparing the agenda, reviewing a lot of the materials.

The VMUG headquarters team, they really do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. And they send us everything that we need to review. So those of us, we don't always have time during the week, but those of us from our leadership team that can, we usually get a chance to review something and provide feedback on our calls. And that way, we can kind of steer the direction of where the user con is gonna be for us. That's a lot of time.

That's a big time commitment. So that begs the question, why? It's definitely a labor of love. But for me in particular, I started coming to the user con several years ago when I was just told by my boss, you're now the virtualization admin because somebody else quit. And so I needed to figure out what the heck I was gonna do. And I came to a user con and I got a lot out of it. And I kept coming and I started coming to the local VMUG meetings as well.

And then when I heard that, some of the previous VMUG leaders here in Indianapolis were now VMware employees and they were not eligible to be VMUG leaders anymore. This is a user group, not an employee group. They needed help. I answered the call because I thought I really need to get back and keep this going because it has definitely helped in my career. And I wanted it to help others in the area as well. I wanna help make the Indianapolis tech community as strong as I can personally.

So Martiz, you're a participant and a speaker in today's event. How did you move from being a person that attended VMUGs to someone that's speaking at a VMUG? I think the biggest thing for me was it was a great opportunity to sort of step out of my shell in a sense as a sort of a traditional IT introvert and start to step into a realm of being able to share my knowledge and really convey that information to others. So what was the process?

Did you reach out to the leadership or did they reach out to you? How did you get on the docket? So actually an individual on the leadership team reached out to me. Actually one of the individuals, Lindy Grady, who's one of the people I work with at Kinney Group and she knew of the work I was doing with my blogs and different things like that around VMware solutions. So Mike and Ken, what is that process looking like from, how do you guys, it's a really big community, there's a lot of topics, there's already the logistics of coordinating this big convention center that you guys have helped out with, HQ.

How do you guys curate content for the actual event? Especially when you're not just dealing with people locally, right? You have a lot of people here from various places, whether it's speakers or attendees. Well, so we're fortunate enough to have a working list with VMware. So when it comes to certain VMware tracks that we'd like to have or list in our agenda, the VMUG headquarters team works with VMware on scheduling some of those resources. Luckily for us, we can see the names of some of those people and so we tend to request the people that we know when we've seen some of their sessions or seen how well they perform at, for example, VMworld or other sessions.

And then we also reach out to some of our other personal contacts that we have and just see if they're available. And a lot of them, they're either partners that are willing to pay to send somebody or they work somewhere where their company is fortunate enough to sponsor that meeting. So I'm still pretty intrigued by the whole process of how do you even get on the list? I've presented at a few VMUGs and at some point someone reached out to me. com.

How did you walk, how did you come from doing a guest blog post to being up front in front of the community? What's the work behind it? Yes, I think the big thing with that is, for me, sort of getting really comfortable with the content and feeling confident enough to be able to stand up in front of, in essence, experts that are well-versed in different areas and feel comfortable delivering on the content that I'm providing. And of course, as part of that, that's getting over that whole fear thing of I don't wanna get in front of people and speak and talk and I'mma just stay in the back and just sit and ingest the content.

Now for you, was that more imposter syndrome or was it I'm just afraid of speaking? I think for me, it's really interesting because I'm not really afraid of speaking. I think it's just my natural tendency to just sort of slide into the background and you know what, I won't even worry about reaching out about speaking or I won't contact that person on Twitter because who am I? So you have to kind of get over that thing and understand we're all IT people who like to talk about tech.

So what value do you get out of speaking outside of obviously your day job, you personally? I think for me, one of the things with speaking is it really helps you to hone your skills because you, in a lot of ways, you have to build up that confidence to really know what you're talking about, much like the same thing with teaching. If I'm gonna teach somebody else, I feel like I really need to know what I'm talking about. So Mark, talk to me a little bit about the impact of that refinement.

If during your day job, your employees have done V-mugs and spoken, does that benefit your team practically? Does that add value? I think it does. Them increasing the network of people who they have that they can reach out to when they have an issue or when they wanna learn something, there's no other way to get that other than reaching out to the community and meeting people. So Ken and Mike, why would someone else wanna volunteer to be a V-mug leader, both, let's be honest, both selfish and unselfish reasons as to why they would want to be a V-mug leader?

Absolutely. Selfishly, it is definitely a great way to build your personal network, to get your name out there and to get noticed. But also, if you value what the community is doing for you and you wanna give back, it's a great opportunity to do that. And specifically being a V-mug leader, it doesn't mean that you need to know the technologies inside and out or necessarily be a great speaker. If you have some way that you can give your time to help create great user cons or great local meetings, then you can participate.

Speaking of Indianapolis V-mug in general, we're always looking for volunteers. So if you are interested, feel free to reach out to one of us. You can find us on Twitter at IndyVMUG. And Mike, your take. Well, I do find that it's just really beneficial. Sorry, question? No, both selfish and unselfish reasons of why it's beneficial. Right, so I found that being a V-mug leader, obviously selfishly, I did find that my name was being out there, that I was able to network with a lot of other people.

I was a V-mug leader for a couple years prior to stepping down and taking a partner role. But when I was on the customer side and I was the V-mug president for Indianapolis back in a couple years ago, there were so many people that would come up to me and tell me, oh, hey, you're the IndyVMUG president, right? And it just made me feel very well-known and like they appreciated what I was doing to give back to the community. So I felt like I was making other people closer and closer to each other.

So it was a little personal intrinsic value. Absolutely. Plus T-shirts. Well, actually, the nice thing is as a V-mug leader, we get to pick out what the T-shirts are or what the prizes are. Unfortunately, we just can't win any of the big prizes. There is that one thing, like who does not want to get a great T-shirt? So closing thoughts, Mark, you've done the V-mug leadership thing for a long time. Is V-mug the only avenue to have this?

Can this be recreated within a organization, like an end-user organization, or are there other avenues outside of V-mug where people can help? I think you can do it with inside an organization, things like your own little mini DevOps days, your people talking to each other about what they do. There's a tremendous value to that. But also you can probably get some value out of local V-mug PowerShell user groups, all those things by offering, hey, I've got a meeting space. Come here, because we're always looking for meeting spaces.

We're always looking for people to get engaged, to talk about what you're doing and how we can help. There's tremendous value, no matter which way you shake it. Okay, so let's close out. Where can people find each one of you online? Blogs, if you blog, Twitter, podcasts, et cetera. Well, so Mike Ellis, you can find me on LinkedIn. Twitter is at V2Mike. com. So Ken Nalbon, I can be found on Twitter at Ken Nalbon, K-E-N-N-A-L-B-O-N-E. I did just register a domain.

com. Okay, that's pretty cool. All right, I can be reached at GreeneryTech on Twitter, and then GreeneryTech is my blog. com. All right, and as usual, you can find me at CTO Advisor. That's Advisor spelled with a O, the proper way. That's right. com, you can find the podcast, the blog, and as always, you know what, grab your mom's iPhone, subscribe to the podcast. She will enjoy it, I promise. That's it for the CTO Advisor. We'll talk to you guys next time.