Careers

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Henry Ford

• 
  Totally Remote, Dude
  by Mike
  January 17, 2022

  WFH, Working From Home, or otherwise remote jobs afford an amazing freedom. Now that I’m designated as a permanently remote employee, I’m finding ways to balance productivity with mental health.

  Going to the office was always fun for me. I’m a relatively outgoing, extroverted person most of the time. Meeting with people and having the buzz of activity around me gave me energy. The physical office has also provided a natural barrier between working time and personal life.

  I’m in tech, so that’s not strictly true. I am constantly connected and have answered my share of middle-of-the-night support calls from home. I often worked “late” at the office too, but I could always work more from home if needed or, more often, if I was still motivated after the drive. The physical separation was effective.

  That’s all gone, though. Now that I’m fully remote, I have to be more intentional about getting out of the house and even taking breaks. Taking breaks isn’t actually difficult because there are loads of distractions at home, from cats to the kitchen. It’s dangerously easy to shift too far towards not staying focused. Who can resist a belly rub when this sweet girl sleeps right under your monitor??

  

  

  Getting out of the house is something I’m lucky to be able to do. I have friends with more urban locations that aren’t really pandemic-friendly. My friends in apartment buildings in Pune, India didn’t provide enough social distancing for millions of people to get outside, so the government just quarantined everyone inside. I’m fortunate to live in a suburban neighborhood in San Diego with more open space per person, lakes, and well-maintained public trails.

  Still, I don’t take full advantage of it either my location or my flexible working arrangement. Most days I wake up and go to work at a desk in my bedroom. It’s honestly hard to give up my sit-stand desk and 3 monitors even when it’s possible to work from a coffee shop or my balcony. I’ve been meaning to work outside the home more, but have been held back by several factors:

  • Sufficient Internet connectivity
  • The right balance of quiet and activity
  • A free location that doesn’t mind me sitting there for hours

  Power is important, but a decent battery can last me most of a day. Most locations offer power now anyway. Monitor real estate is a loss, but I manage by planning ahead. Most days I work outside are for a handful of focused activities and less about bouncing around on a variety of little tasks. I specifically avoid any heavy comparison and analysis work with spreadsheets. These are often so much better with two or more larger screens that I won’t even attempt them on the tiny screen.

  Internet connectivity is readily available around towns, but I live near the beach and mountains! They are just too tempting to pass up. I’ve always had this weird childhood fantasy of working high tech from an extremely remote location, like a forest. There’s just something about the dichotomy of it all that calls to me. I’m deep in nature while connecting with servers and people around the world. It sounds so peaceful to me.

  I experimented with working remotely when working in the office was the norm. I found myself getting more focus time by working at the library. There was just enough activity of people moving around to keep me energized, but I didn’t know anyone so I never got distracted. This was perfect for writing annual performance reviews or preparing a presentation. In between spurts of clarity, I could lean back and watch strangers meander through the library while my mind milled over something difficult.

  While my wife was traveling back to the Philippines without me, I once made the food court at a local shopping mall my office. For a few weeks, I would drive carpool for my youngest daughter to gymnastics in the middle of the day. She was home-schooled (or a hybrid of online and in-person) which allowed her to spend more than 36 hours a week training on a competitive gymnastics team. That really shaped our family life for about 10 years, but that’s a story for another time.

  The food court was actually a fun place to work. It was noisy! Random people would walk by, making it a perfect place to people-watch. I would take meetings there despite the background noise. It was a necessity for a few weeks, so I kinda had no choice. I picked a nice tall table area with bar stools that allowed me to stand when I wanted. Besides getting me off my butt, that was a great way to change things up to keep me energized. I like to pace a little when I think, so this also helped me think in its own way.

  This all sort of prepared me for today. I find myself writing this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He was a prolific speaker, giving over 2500 speeches in just an eleven year period in the crusade for civil rights. Fortunately, this day has been designated a national holiday in honor of his contributions. My company has also given all employees the day off to reflect or serve or recharge. With this in mind, I let go of my to-do list at home and made it a priority to get out of the house.

  

  The San Diego Zoo Safari Park is just a few miles from my home. I love walking around there. The animals, the trees, the buzz of activity, and the quick access to a churro are big reasons why I’ve wanted to try working remotely from there. Well, today I was able to get there and it feels great.

  

  

  My wife, Levy, and I had previously spotted a quiet spot near the top of a hill–a picnic bench under a palapa roof in the new California native landscape area. With a modest view through the trees, it is away from the animal attractions and, because of this, beyond the steady flow of visitors. The few visitors that amble past are quieter adults enjoying the plants and moderate exercise of climbing the dirt trails.

  There are no power outlets in the immediate vicinity, but the spot has good Internet signal and bandwidth. My cell phone hotspot worked well enough during a dry run last week, but today I’m using my MoFi 5500 cellular router. I chose this router for working from the trailer we bought last year. Since we both work remotely, we plan to travel around the country while working without waiting for retirement. Internet access is the most important, and difficult to obtain, utility we need to work from the road.

  

  The MoFi 5500 has dual CAT7 cellular modems for diversity and redundancy. The model I bought does not support the rapidly developing 5G network. Beyond a minimum bandwidth, reliability is the most important capability for us. Another time, perhaps, I will detail my trailer setup with external telescoping antenna. Today, however, I am just using the small cellular and Wi-Fi antennas provided by the manufacturer. The signal and bandwidth (~30Mbps down and ~11Mbps up) on my T-Mobile SIM card were excellent. I was easily able to have a full Zoom video conference with Levy at home.

  The ambiance is so nice here, I almost wouldn’t change a thing. If I were advertising for the Safari Park, though, I would offer a remote working package. Fifteen dollars a day could get you free soft drinks, Wi-Fi access, and power.

  Another excellent feature of working at the Safari Park is the substantial walk from the entrance to my retreat at the far end of the property. The 15-20 minute walk gets my blood pumping and gives me that little bit of physical separation I used to have coming home from the office. Unlike my old office, the animals here are behind bars!

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• 
  Interview Prep: Get Ready to Get the Job
  by Mike
  January 8, 2022

  I spent a fair amount of time interviewing not too long ago. In the months of emotional ups and downs, I refined a methodology that increased my confidence as I better communicated my experience and value.

  Even as an experienced candidate comfortable with interviewing and with plenty of examples to share, I was rusty. Being out of practice was the least of my challenges, though. I wanted to pivot back to a more technical role after feeling I had lost touch with the hard science I loved early in my career. Leading people was rewarding in its own way, but we were mostly solving process problems while working on mainstream technology. It was a far cry from the expression of art I found appealing when brilliant minds solved intricate challenges at the low levels of networking protocols and software programming.

  I needed to modernize my skill set if I were to have any luck getting the role or into the types of companies that fascinated me. As frustrating as interviewing for months on end can be, this time was an important opportunity for me to modernize my skills to match the new roles I wanted.

  Personal growth. It was easy enough in my field to gain concrete skills through online training and do-it-yourself practice. I didn’t go back to school, though that would have been really awesome. (In hindsight, there was so much I had forgotten or never had the time to learn in college that would have been great to revisit, years later.)

  YouTube was a surprisingly effective training resource. Specific topics could be learned directly with a simple search, but I really found out what I wanted to learn through a variety of company presentations. Large tech company employees could often be found presenting at a user group or a conference. These companies were on the cutting edge of technologies that interested me. They had overcome challenges with high availability, scalability, performance, security, and backwards compatibility and shared their experience with the world for free. This was a huge advantage in interviews at these very companies–I could speak directly to a problem they had or would have, and at least hypothesize about possible solutions in some detail.

  

  Communicating value effectively. A surprise to me was that new solutions often recycled old concepts. Although my experience on a topic might have been 10 or even 20 years prior, the principles of computing didn’t go out of style. I found old solutions were similar to new problems. Maybe most importantly, I started to confidently use the modern terminology and patterns that interviewers were looking for. I learned that I had to put in the effort to speak their language because they certainly weren’t looking too hard for a diamond in the rough.

  

  Another critical part of communicating my value was adopting the STAR methodology. When responding to interview questions, many tech companies have settled on this approach. It’s no secrete either–interviewees are explicitly told they should use it! STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result. It’s a concise way for candidates to share the basics of an experience without rambling on or leaving out key context. A short answer allows the interviewer to ask follow-up questions that take the interview where it interests them in the most direct manner. I have the ability to provide excess context, so this was a big help for me and the interviewers.

  Preparation and practice. It’s hard to get started, but so important. I am never really finished with my resume, but that’s a relatively easy one to polish up to get the ball rolling. As you do, you’ll be thinking of all your great experience and stories. These are key because a good interview response is real–something you really did. It’s easier to share and answer questions about it because as you’re talking in an interview you have this little movie playing the memory in your head.

  With a little review and some critical thinking, I was able to identify the lessons learned and behaviors demonstrated. This made it easier to select a particular story on the fly to answer an interview question. It also made it easier to provide context in the STAR format without being verbose.

  One difficulty of interview preparation is anticipating the topics. However, it’s relatively easy to find the 10 or 20 most common questions then prepare and practice answers for them. Honestly, my confidence increased significantly just by knowing I had answers ready for these questions.

  To get the specific jobs I wanted, I also researched them directly by role and company. The company’s own web site and their recruiter can be great places to get very clear expectations. The best companies know interviewing is stressful and an imprecise process, and it’s expensive and time-consuming for them too. They truly want to take all the distractions out of it so they can get a clear signal about whether you would be a great fit. Just be sure to take the hints and practice answers for questions specific to the job.

  I made note cards. Yep, just like when you might practice a speech or memorize vocabulary words. I made note cards to help me practice. On the front was a question or a topic and on the back was a story starter. Usually a single word or short phrase that triggered my mind to tell a story. I carried them with me everywhere and flipped through them whenever I had a few minutes of down time. That sure reduced my stress of feeling like I had to study and practice for several hours straight.

  My secret to building the cues for each prompt was to write up an interview cheat-sheet. I wrote it up in a spreadsheet: a keyword or phrase on the left and a STAR response on the right. S, T, A, R in a vertical column with a few turns of phrase or talking points for each one. This really helped me refine each response to the common questions and the role-specific questions. At first I wrote out paragraph-long responses to remember my experiences in detail. Then, each anecdote was refined to be more concise and effective until the keywords were short enough to remember.

  

  This cheat sheet came in really handy during video-based interviews where I could keep them just off-screen. I could casually glance over the printed reminders naturally when I got nervous or my mind went blank. I had stumbled upon this technique about 10 years earlier when I was being phone screened for jobs that required relocation. It was like an open book test! As an interviewer myself, I don’t consider this cheating, though. It’s about being able to share the real you quickly and effectively on the spur of the moment. That’s not every tech candidates specialty, so having a little reminder is fair. Besides, the organization and pre-work demonstrates other great characteristics you bring to the job.

  Despite my preparation, there was an emotional toll from repeatedly not getting the job. It seemed opportunities would come (and go) in threes every couple weeks. Three recruiters would contact me on nearly the same day to get something started and I’d go through the process for a couple weeks. Just as coincidentally, I would be rejected for all three around the same time.

  For each opening, I would reluctantly envision myself in this new role at this new company to better help me relate my experience to their needs. Losing the opportunity was like getting a miniature layoff each time–ending the career I had there, however fictitious. Exercising proved to be a good outlet to counteract some of that loss, though. I would walk, run, or swim at the beach then spend an hour on further study and practice with my note cards and interview cheat sheet.

  I managed to persevere. Like others before me, I found 99 ways to fail before I found one success. Afterall, don’t they say that people who work hard for something seem to have better luck?

  ---

  Every Topic on my Note Cards

  • Why ?
  • Operational Excellence
  • Bias for Action
  • Tech Leadership
  • Systems Design
  • Customer Obsession
  • Influence, Negotiation
  • Developing Relationships w/Customers
  • Hire & Develop the Best
  • Learn & Be Curious

  • Self-starter
  • Dive Deep
  • Crisis
  • Risk
  • Analytical
  • Drive Change
  • [Product] Ownership
  • Manage Multiple Complex Projects & Tasks (aka Priority, Clear Goals, Communicate Direction)

  • Deliver Results (aka Fast or Early Project)
  • Project Management
  • Judgement
  • Think Big
  • Insist on the Highest Standards
  • Have Backbone (aka Disagree & Commit)
  • Creative, Innovative
  • Frugality

  The topics are implicitly in the form of an interview question, like “Tell me about a time when you delivered a project faster than planned?” These behavioral type of questions encourage the candidate to describe a specific experience. These are thought to be a better indicator of future performance because it really happened. The interviewer can drill into specific aspects as the candidate tells a coherent story of what really happened. This minimizes generalized answers candidates give about what should be done which are easy to describe but difficult to execute.

  My responses even include examples where I failed in some way. While you may be reluctant to share any short-comings in an interview, it’s better to serve up a failure conversation of your choosing than to be pressed into one unexpectedly by questions for which you’re unprepared. This way, you get to prepare your answer in the form of lessons learned.

  As an interviewer, I always ask questions to find the boundaries of a candidate’s skills. If I don’t ask any questions they can’t answer, I haven’t found their edges. Finding limits do not eliminate them from consideration–quite the contrary, it gives me a better assessment of them as a candidate which is a critical step in finding a mutual match between candidate and role.