The power of community in enterprise IT - CTO Advisor 076

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

All right, you're listening to episode, you know what the format for the numbering of the podcast is 0xx You're listening to 0xx of the CTO advisor. I can guarantee is 0 7x. We're in the 70s we've been wanting to get Matt Broberg on for a while and uh, and and Mark you've come through again. I have and you know, I think the best part about Matt is he was the spirit behind The sphere We did yes, I love it a Podcast about nothing.

We are the noise that can be filtered later by non spherical things We we we absolutely have to do another episode of the spear I am I am proud to be a contributor to something that is just utter nonsense But at least it's a thoughtful utter nonsense and intention sometimes. Yeah sometimes All right, so Matt people In a community know who you are, but at this in this environment, maybe not so much You know this audience you're a little new to I think a good majority of our audience.

So introduce yourself Who are you? Where do you work? And why should we even listen to you about happy to Keith? So my name is Matt Broberg. I am vice president of community at Monitoring startup called sensu and I've been participating in the VMware community By via the EMC community for almost 10 years now And I've been building them ever since it's my passion. So I try to find the intersection of Community value for individuals as well as business value for community so that we find the right balance and it is sustainable over time Well, I'm actually really excited to talk to you Matt so the question I want to propose is What value does?

community have to an IT organization from a manager's perspective And I want to focus a little bit more on infrastructure because I think developers I think the development side of the house already have this right there used to open source contributing to code Going to DevOps days all that stuff. I feel like and maybe that's just me that they already understand that Infrastructure not so much Okay. Well, I look forward to unpacking that because my first point anytime we're gonna get into a discussion on return on investment Or perceived value of anything for a manager.

You have to anchor the discussion and something that they already value so we can either talk about what you value on your team and what you're trying to maximize for or What I'd also like to do for the sake of my own argument because I want to win this I want to unpack what you mean by Contribution from a developer standpoint and why why you think that they do that and why that's a norm So, you know why I think that from a developer perspective is in my experience They do things like go to community events at conferences.

They participate in More hands-on community focused events where they're committing code and doing build days and things like that and just in general When I go to events that are local to Cincinnati, I see a lot of a lot of people I'm gonna use the word DevOps, but they're they're DevOps people are doing their thing, right? They're networking and the only thing I see in the infrastructure side is VMUG, right? Yeah, I don't see a lot of other infrastructure specific things locally to me.

Okay Fair enough fair enough. Okay, so just running with that Which yeah, you leave me a lot to fill in my friend and I appreciate Yeah, I don't want to make your job too. Yeah, you're leaving me a blank canvas to get this argument going But just to unpack this a little bit So when we talk about community events sure there are in-person events and as a manager you got to think of those as potentially high-cost high-value Participations for for your staff and then you have the sort of virtual online communities Which there are many of those as there are projects on github and frameworks And store types of storage arrays There's just an absurd explosion of sub communities is the quick summary term that I like to use to make sense to people Because when we throw out a term like DevOps, there's a great way to start the conversation We actually have sub communities when you discuss DevOps.

You have people discussing, you know CI like continual integration Systems and you have people discussing culture at length But then you also have that aggregation point of all these subcultures in DevOps days I I think this fits really well in our infrastructure community, too I mean if we go back into the not so way back machine when V mug ramped up we had an aggregation point in the virtualization community because VMware was still like that place where we all were aggregating and We've slowly branched out into people that care more about vSAN people care about how vSphere and cloud Systems are playing together and so on and so forth and the networking of course as well So we've always had that kind of differentiation So starting from there I think of well back to putting it on you to continue this this argument with you a very friendly gentleman's argument mark of What what are your constraints and like what are people asking to do?

That you feel hesitant to let them do when it involves community You know, I think they're just not asking Actually, and I think that's kind of one of my centralized points is people and infrastructure. Sure They asked to go to VMworld, you know, the big the big bang things But other than that, I don't hear a lot of people asking. Hey, can I go to? Even even V mug user con right now You could say and that's I think a bigger infrastructure centric localized event Sure, I don't hear a lot of people asking for permission to go to those things And we can say that people go or don't go and V mug being on the decline is a whole different problem But even if I go back to its heyday, I don't hear a lot of people asking to go Which makes me think they don't see the value prop Well, I I don't want to jump to that conclusion where my head immediately went was that I don't think they know what they're missing And you as I agree with that Manager you as a manager.

I think it's in your best interest to maximize your team's expertise now if you have whether you have general assist administration as as your goal or a more specialized group focused on part of the infrastructure there is most certainly a Virtual community that your users or excuse me. I'm so used to talking about community that your employees Should be participating in in order to stay sharp and aware of changing tides Because I think the number one reason I can advocate for community especially especially in infrastructure is that the repercussions of a Missed opportunity as you architect something are extremely expensive once you put something out there it is forever going to be in in production and Getting exposed to people that have had the sharp edges of all our different tool chains at play It's just invaluable to get that experience through a peer as opposed to have to experience all of these, you know cuts and bruises yourself So Keith, let me get your input on here having worked at a company before in infrastructure a space that a lot of your peers Seek out community So a subset did I think I Don't know if this is the case Beyond just infrastructure and is the case within developers?

My son is a developer and I you know I had to push him and say you know what you got to go to meetups you have to do these things as part of The expected behavior at least from my perception at the same as yours mark that developers have to interact with the larger community But I think I still had a bubble at work of people who would go to vmugs people who would go to Events in general You know as I'm thinking to this as I correlate the folks that were really good were the ones that went to community events Like I'm with you Keith that if I'm thinking about from the perspective of a hiring manager, right?

I'm thinking about someone that needs to pay attention to their employees and understand what are they good at and how does that map to my work today and my My work, you know in this coming year for sure if not trying to you know future-proof a little bit along the way But that's gonna never be static So if you see gaps coming up in your team you don't necessarily I can think of this as a huge cost-benefit analysis that they're you know a Let's say 10% of their time participating in an online community Joining a community slack like hangouts, which is big for the operations and DevOps community or if they're if you're doing research on what it looks like to play with Kubernetes in production being in the Kubernetes slack and mailing lists like that is a small amount of investment to be exposed to a large amount of expertise on something you're gonna need to grow and do and Far far less expensive than a ton of training far less expensive than than consulting.

No offense Keith You know, I still there's plenty I still get plenty of Peanuts and the pinkies at the bottom Especially if people are asking you about like hey, which which features in Kubernetes and production are ideal Yeah, people are a little mixed up and what they're what they're after So what I'm really thinking Mark is to get to the point of like the the perspective of your employee and I can only Relate to them from a peer being like if if you're not moving forward with the technology community You are being left behind and that's a real existential threat to technology My joke I tell everybody is that if you wanted things to be to stay the same after you're done studying them You should have studied, you know rocks Geologists technologies move in at a extremely rapid pace and Diversifying constantly.

So if if people aren't learning at that same sort of pace, they're going to be left woefully behind So, you know, I want to pick on Keith here a minute Keith I've heard you say this time and time again, and I've said it myself too. So I'm gonna ask you We tell people that one of the things they should learn more about is The business of which they work in right? We've said that time and time again So if I am an employee, I have a finite amount of time.

I can spend that time Doing my job so that has to happen doing my family stuff that has to happen but in my copious amount of free time if I'm having to choose between the business of what I do and These community things like Matt's talking about where does Keith spend his time? Wow, that's a tough question. I think If I have to Look back at my career of the past 10 years or so at the 10 year point of my career. I had to make a decision similar to this not exactly the same but similar which is Do I spend time getting an advanced degree or do I spend more time spinning up and learning more about Technology, you know, do I get a CCIE?

I literally thought about this Do I get an advanced degree? Do I continue down the networking path and invest three years and get in the CCIE? Both require community and what I discovered is that the relationships not only the choice of getting advanced degree But the relationships that I developed in getting an advanced degree was kind of the equivalent of what we're talking here about Community, so I developed this community at DePaul that became a lifelong lifeline to all this all these parts about business that I'd never knew about or that I have questions about I have This deep bench that I can draw upon So I don't think there's a right or wrong decision to this when it comes to do you choose?

Investing in community from a Technology perspective or investing a community from learning your business either way You're investing in community and the payoff I think will be similar in each fashion. You know, there's the higher debate Is technical skill more valuable than business skill you need both and at some point You need to take away. All right. All right. So Keith given that Matt what do you think on that? Is that I Think he's just underlying essence to community of everything.

I Think he's just reframed this argument in the exact way. We should go You know, we were trying to talk about what it's like as a hiring manager, but if we re Re-evaluate who we're talking to and we're talking to the individual employee The answer is that no matter what you're doing. Don't go it alone There are incredible networks around you of people that are either peers that are trying to learn with you or possible mentors that want to teach you or mentees who need to learn from you and no matter what you need to find your people and grow together This is the absolute essence to in my opinion of having a successful career is Valuing that network of people that surround you and growing together with them.

So it's a baseline conversation It's not an either-or and then there's the discussion of what are you trying to grow into and how are you growing? But that's a very different conversation of whether you should have it or not I think the the answer is you must have it and you Need to find it and you will be better at whatever you're doing if you do that So and I actually you know, obviously I agree that the community is valuable as an active member of it But I think from a manager's perspective.

I think the biggest thing that you can do is invest in your people There's that old adage, you know, what do we do we invest in our people and they leave? What happens if you do and they don't you know, obviously that's a problem So invest in your people is paramount and I think community is one of the most cost-effective ways to actually do that It often costs nothing Yeah, we talked about V mug disclaimer, I do consulting work for V mug But that is such low-hanging fruit the value that you get from, you know I'll come down and do mark.

I'll do the sensing V mug. I'll drive down there. Someone asked me like, you know Do you still do V mugs? yes, absolutely not just because I'm you know speaking or whatever I get a Lot out of V mug personally, I can't touch, you know a thousand organizations I'm a one-person consulting shop so V mugs for me is the opportunity to get down and talk to the community and talk to real users and Understand what people are really going through are you know?

Is the average shop actually deploying Cooper Nettie's or have the V mug community not even heard of the term Yeah, and Keith I gotta you know get a little personal here too that I had that moment at the beginning of this year I'm like am I still a member of the VMware community? I Had to ask myself. I'm like, is this a place I continue to invest and participate or is it one? I kind of give up on because I'm so far away from the technology and I I really did have a bit of a weekend analysis and reached out some mentors of mine about that and What I came back to is that I don't give a damn about the technology that we're talking about in the VMware Events, but I sure as hell care about the people there because they are my people no matter what like the infrastructure tribe And how we're evolving together whether you call it DevOps or SRE or cloud computing I don't really care the way we're all evolving together.

Like those are the people I want to be around I want to help them grow as Individuals and they keep me grounded and not just hearing, you know The latest hype out of a Silicon Valley startup and stay grounded in real business operations So it's official. I couldn't I couldn't tell you the best practices of these spirits five that five anymore let alone six no But the I can most definitely tell you that you know, Brian Graf The the list goes on. I mean you Dean Porter de Leon is a V-mug leader in Silicon Valley and he's definitely not your traditional V spirit guy, but I think that that speaks to What the community has evolved to that's just us trying to figure out our careers to figure out Technologies and move the business forward.

Absolutely. I really sincerely agree and You know, so I threw out that point about that as an individual I mentor absolutely everyone I talked to and you finding their network and building that community together and to your point mark a Good manager will know that will make my employee a better employee and make their work while they won't be you know as busy on my to-do list that I give them as often the impact of their work will be greater and then for those that don't have good managers like that they do it in their free time a Small investment over a long period of time is is how you get a return of investment as an individual from community You can't just game it for one day and then ignore it for a year.

It's a little bit every week So it's very cost-effective And it's kind of forced Amortization there you have to do a little every day. You can't leave it for a while so as a manager I think we need to encourage our employees to participate in these communities and Also, see how we can support the communities. They're always looking for a place to meet right and it doesn't take much Just you've got a conference room probably or a couple hundred I'm sure there's a community that your employees would love to be a part of would love to use your space Agreed hey mark.

I got a question for you because I live in a very different place And I'm in Portland, Oregon pretty a Hoppin City these days Pretty decent tech scene. You know not as crazy as Silicon Valley or Seattle, but definitely decent so I see a lot of Intersectional communities happening here. There's some good DevOps days There's some great events like the open source conference from O'Reilly Oz Khan's coming back to Portland this year which excites me Some some other good startup events, so I feel pretty good here at Connecting to local community, but we started this conversation with you saying there's not much happening in your space So what does it look like and what do you hope it's gonna turn into in 2018?

You know there's a few we definitely have a DevOps days, which is a couple hours away Granted I'm in Cincinnati, so we're home to more fortune 500 companies than anywhere else So I have a certain preference on or I have a certain audience here But even that a couple hours away, and then several V mugs, but we do have a few smaller You know we have the kubernetes group and the docker group and those things. They're pretty small But they are they're growing, and I think that's a great thing and I'd like to see a few more right We've had a few vendors attempt to do Dell day or whatever they want to call it those typically go nowhere Because I think if it's too sponsored and too hands-on by a vendor it tends to just you know be a sales bitch So people don't go to those But yeah, I mean, I think it's getting better, and I hope that continues so so Margaret I got to ask this question which is Especially communities like Cincinnati Chicago as we look in them.

You know the the non valued that Valley the non, West Coast Does it make sense to kick start yet another community? sub-branded community so it can be You know kubernetes days or whatever the meetup that you you sign up for and lead and do or do we? Look at something like a VMUG and Invest energy and saying okay I want to do a VMUG meeting on this topic on this day because VMUG already has the infrastructure Like what what's the correct in your opinion approach to starting?

5. I Think it depends. I think if you've got something that's hot like kubernetes right now You host the coke kubernetes meetup people go to it It doesn't take a lot, but now and that used to be docker now you host a docker meetup And it's not so much But I think a lot of people still want to know about it So I think if you can leverage that platform that is a VMUG or a VTUG or whatever it is All the better I gotta tell you but I think especially with VMUG doesn't make sense for VMUG To embrace some of those things is a different conversation.

I think That is yeah, I was gonna say as a community builder and organizer. I can tell you I I Have found great success, and you know trying to put a little lipstick on an existing event and work with that existing infrastructure and the existing following And help them attract new people to it as opposed to branching off the more fracturing and sub communities The the more infrastructure needs to be repeated very similar to technology in this way where the more you just like OpenStack Exactly.

Yeah, so so in that way like if you do have a bit of gravity around a single community in your area find ways of doctoring it up or hosting maybe after the event like you have a Kubernetes meetup after or a DevOps discussion panel after Your your VMUG day That way you you can take full advantage of the existing work and if you reach out to the organizers a guarantee they want to continue to update and be relevant to What the audience wants to hear so if you if you can help them be relevant that all the better It's gonna be a rising tide rises all boats moment Agreed so Keith any final thoughts You know I just Really appreciate Matt coming on and helping us think through community from a different perspective Not just the whole personal.

This is the value I get from community, but from a managerial I love this argument on where's the value of community? I love to get into conversations with you mark at different points on how do you is this something that you can? You know command or order your team to go out and do and we've known how you know That's like commanding a tweet, so well. You know that I think that'll be an interesting conversation kind of part two as a manager How do you encourage?

Participation how do you incentivize it and not have people actually game next time so Matt? I think you're online you do the online thing right where can people find you yeah? I have some internets between me and you so very easily found as MB Broberg on Twitter github and a few other places so hit me up there or Find me at your next V mug. I will definitely be speaking at them in Boston and Portland again ideally And Keith people can find you on the Twitter's right On the Twitter's that's right now Twitter, but the Twitter's At CTO advisor and then the podcast is of course the CTO advisor and guys don't forget next time you're at your mom's house or better yet Take take your teenage kids phone go to their podcatcher and subscribe to the podcast They'll love hearing your voice and hearing my voice and Keith's voice.

Don't learn to love us and be friends. We'll all be a friendly family Thanks guys