Ep 10 - Network Engineering to Cloud Strategist: A Conversation with Eyvonne Sharp

00:00
Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast.

00:15
Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach. As individuals who have already started this journey, we would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap. Hello and welcome back to the Cables to Clouds podcast. My name is Tim McConaughey and joining me as always are my two co-hosts, Alex Perkins and Chris Miles.

00:42
How are you guys doing today? Alex, what's going on over there in Asheville? Uh, not too much, you know, just at our Memorial Day, three day weekend. So, uh, I didn't do a whole lot. My wife actually had to work Sunday and Monday. So there's not much of a weekend. Yeah. Um, but the kids are not this week, but next week is the last, last week of school, so there, there's nothing right now they're just doing like testing and, you know, cleaning up their stuff and having all these end of year parties. So.

01:11
It's getting ready for the summer. Yeah. Yeah, my kids are doing the, what do they call them? EOGs. They're doing those as well. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. They got two of them this week. I think reading and like reading and math, I think are the two we got this week. Yeah. What about you, Chris? How were your, are you doing your EOGs this week too? I'm gonna say, man, I don't even know what that is. So yeah, I'm doing some reading and a little bit of math. So yeah, sure. I'm doing those.

01:37
Yeah, I mean, I actually have a lot going on. I just moved house. So I'm in a new apartment. Hopefully, no jackhammers. And as we were talking about before we get record, there's, well, there's no jackhammers. There are about a million birds outside. There's a lot of rainbow lorikeets and cockatoos around this area, which is great for me, but not great for recording audio podcasts. But you know, we'll figure it out.

02:06
I actually had a big accomplishment. We got the cockatoos to come to the window and we were feeding them. So I have made some new friends. Very excited about that. The lorikeets are a little bit harder to get but yeah. No cucaburras? Kiwis? Cucaburras? How are the... The cucaburras are, I can hear them. They're a little bit further out. They like big trees and whatnot. I still have to get a sample of their...

02:35
the call that they make because it sounds completely insane. It sounds like a howling monkey or something. But yeah, so I'm becoming a bird person apparently. So yeah, I'll be probably providing updates as months go on. So middle age. So basically you're hitting middle age, right? Yeah, dude. What is it? Like as soon as I hit my mid thirties, I'm like, damn dude, birds are so cool. Yeah. You're like, what is that?

03:03
Oh yeah, then you can start identifying them by the noise. I downloaded an app on my phone where I can listen to the call and determine what kind of bird it is. So that's, you know, I've accepted it. This is me now. So it's okay. How about you Tim? Let's see, what do I have going on this week? I'd like to say that I have very exciting things going on, but the truth is I think I'm just coming out of...

03:28
I've spent, my wife and I have spent so much time the last week and a half playing the new Legends Zelda game that I don't even remember doing anything else of value in that time, to be honest. I'm this close to buying a Switch because it looks so fun. So I will probably be doing that in the next couple of weeks. I definitely recommend it. Even for non-gamers, it's like just on the right side of casual for casual gamers and very fun for those who...

03:58
who also already game. So anyway, all right, let's get started. We have a guest with us tonight. I know this is very rare for us, but we brought in a guest with us tonight. At Sharp Network on Twitter, Yvonne, how are you doing today? I'm good, I'm good. Like you said, it's the day after Memorial Day. We've had some family time and I had the day off to take care of some stuff going on with me. So it's been good, nice long weekend and happy to be here.

04:26
Awesome. Do you guys do anything fun for the Memorial Day? Do you go barbecue? Well, we we we hung out with some folks on Sunday night and, you know, hot dogs and chips and some things like that. And then yesterday we took the kiddos to Holiday World. So I'm about an hour's drive away from Santa Claus, Indiana, where there's this lovely little amusement park called Holiday World. And we we took the kiddos and hung out with some friends and made a day of it. So it's been good. They still have free Pepsi products there.

04:54
They still have free soft drinks there. Yes. So free Pepsi products. So all the Diet Mountain Dew I can drink. So if you know me, that's a huge win. I saw that face, but still. Yeah. So free soft drinks and, you know, water park, amusement rides, great roller coaster. So we had a good time. It's actually called Santa Claus? Like that's the name of the place? The town's name is Santa Claus, Indiana. And the park is themed by holidays. You've got a Christmas section and you've got a Thanksgiving section and a Christmas

05:22
Fourth of July section and Halloween section. And yeah, it's fun. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Sounds like Busch Gardens, but like very different. It's like if Busch Gardens was a state fair, I would maybe compare it to that. Huh, okay. It's a very non-commercialized, affordable, like family-owned kind of a thing. So it's nice. That's really cool. I'll have to look that up. I've never, I had never heard of it before you mentioned it. So.

05:51
One of the reasons that we brought Yvonne here is because she's awesome. But on top of that, for those who may not already know Yvonne, which will be like three of you, and you probably all got in tech last week. Yvonne is a, sorry, I don't remember the exact type of, is it solution strategist with Google or is it strategist? Or like what's the- So, a couple of things. So first of all, I'm a customer engineer.

06:16
which means I am on the sales side. So I help customers adopt Google technology, but at the same time, my very specific role is a technical transformation lead. So I work with customers that are doing either new and interesting things, or they're using a lot of different technologies. So think of what I do is how you would have like an enterprise architect, you know, inside of an enterprise who helps make sure all the technology works together.

06:45
I do a lot of that on the Google side for our customers. Gotcha. And you've been doing this for a little while now, but this isn't where you started, right? I remember even years ago, you were a network engineer just like the rest of us, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so I've been with Google Cloud almost three years now, if you can believe it. But before that,

07:11
I started my career in generalists like SMB space. So I worked for very small bars. And so we did everything from, you know, networking to servers. This is back when people still ran their own exchange servers on prem. And, and so did a lot of that. But eventually got a role at a large healthcare enterprise and their networking team. And so I spent.

07:35
You know, eight years they're doing lots of networking slash network security stuff, firewalls, VPNs. And so did that for several years and then moved over into pre-sales first at VMware and then at Google. So, yeah, that's kind of the quick version. So I'm curious, like, what kind of like got you? Because I mean, you know, you've been doing a lot of stuff for a lot of years, right? So what kind of led you?

08:05
And I don't want to put the cart before the horse, but I just wanted to ask because I was curious, what kind of led you to, you know, I'm a networker, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, and then to Google? I guess really the question for me is, you know, being a network engineer and transitioning to cloud, I'm curious, how'd you end up at Google? That's really an interesting story. First of all, I was very fortunate. I'll say that first off, because I really never would have

08:34
been like, oh, I'm going to go get a job at Google. I just didn't see myself in that sphere. So I was at VMware as really just a solutions engineer. So I supported customers across the VMware stack. And so that was really kind of a bigger leap for me than the leap to Google. We could talk about that. But Google was at a point this was in 2000, and they were.

09:01
They were kind of growing a national team and they were looking for people with that strong infrastructure experience. And, and a recruiter reached out. So I, I got a message on LinkedIn from a recruiter talking about a role. And, and my first thought was, you know, somebody's trying to spam me or somebody's to fish me, like they want me to click a link and fill out a bunch of stuff and then steal my info and so it's like, okay, email me.

09:31
And then we'll talk and so they emailed me and it was legit. And so I was like, well, you know, I don't, I don't know if this is something I can do or that I'm qualified to do, but at the very least it's an opportunity to interview with Google, so I'm going to do that. And it went really well. So I started off on an infrastructure modernization team. So that team focuses on our compute products. So like Compute Engine, GKE, so Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run.

10:01
those that platform of services, more infrastructure and service and things like that. And also got familiar with our networking stack. And then we kind of realized that there was this gap in this more overarching architecture role. And so I was kind of doing some of that work anyway, because it's how I think. More like how do we make this whole thing successful?

10:31
get in and help you figure out how much Compute Engine is going to cost to run, you know, this many BNs. And so after I've been there about a year, they created this team in this role and I moved over to it. So yeah. It's funny that you say that you did that and you never really saw yourself potentially even going to Google like that was something you didn't see yourself doing because I remember I can definitely count on both hands how many times I've seen people make

10:59
leaps to Google that I've just seen in the networking industry. And I'm like, wow, they went to Google. Like that didn't even, like, I didn't expect to see people go to Google just cause I didn't know what they were offering in these terms. Right. So that's, that's funny to hear you say that. Yeah, it was, it was definitely a pleasant surprise. But, but yeah, like I said, it was one of those things. I think it helped that I wasn't super nervous about the whole interview process. Cause I was like, you know what? I'm going to.

11:27
treat this like a learning experience. I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna experience it. At the very least, I can say I've done it. And I think that helped not be nervous and I was more myself and approached it more conversationally. And I think that worked in my favor. But yeah, so it was, I know a lot of people have tried hard and interviewed a lot of times to get.

11:53
to get a role at Google. And I'm not gonna say that my experience was normative. And again, which is why I started the whole thing with, felt super fortunate, cause the timing just happened to be just right. It's funny, like hindsight's always 2020, but just from the story you've given about your transition like all the way through from the beginning to Google, it seems like you were never really locked into one domain anyway. It's like you were always some kind of general

12:21
like more general infrastructure, or like when you were saying you worked at a small bar and you guys did all kinds of different stuff. And then at VMware, you were using the whole stack. It's interesting how that kind of, again, hindsight's 20-20, but it's almost like it played into what you're doing now. Yeah, so I have always been more concerned about being able to successfully and helpfully solve problems than I have about a particular technology domain

12:51
even before like where my story started when I was talking to you guys. So I went to college and studied computer science, did web development for a while. And then there were more opportunities where I was in the like VAR and integrator space. So that's kind of where I went. And so it's been a combination of what can I do and where is there opportunity?

13:19
Right. I have never been super married to a particular technology. And I was talking to my son who's 24 is software developer. And, and he would ask, you know, and they're, they're building mostly on Azure. And he's like, are you familiar with this product or this thing? I'm like, no, describe it to me. And I'd be like, oh, okay. Well, that thing is a layer of abstraction. He's like, yes, that's what it is. He's like, oh, well, and then there's this thing. I'm like, okay, that's that.

13:49
Once you've been in the industry long enough, like there are only so many different types of things and eventually you just learn to recognize them. And you know, whether it's a distributed system or whether it's a relational database or whether it's, you know, and, and, and so even though I don't know as much like how to configure all the bits and bytes exactly, I do understand how they fit together. And I think.

14:17
that, like let me understand the operating principles behind whatever this thing is, has served me well as opposed to, you know, let me be sure I'm super sharp on the exact send type text to type into my keyboard to enable this feature. Right. Because that stuff, first of all, changes. You can Google it and figure it out. And so I've always, even when I was in school, like even when I was a kid, like I wanted to understand the principles

14:46
underneath the thing. That served me well. I think that's a really good way to describe the difference, in my opinion, from what you're saying, between someone who is an architect level versus someone who's an engineer level. Engineers tend to be very focused on the problem at hand, on the specifics of that. You may not agree and that's okay. But whenever I try to explain what is an architect

15:13
People are like, what's the difference between an architect and an engineer? I'm like, well, an architect is concerned with systems, with solutions at interoperating parts but also the higher level piece of it versus what I find when I was an engineer, I was very focused on solving the particular problem that was the task to solve, if you will. So I think it's really cool to hear you say that. I kind of agree.

15:40
Well, and for those who may be familiar with Network Collective, the podcast that Jordan, Russ, and I, and Phil was involved in it some too, did a while back. I think we were recording an episode on segment routing. And Nick Russo was on. And if you know Nick, he's a master, he's a good friend. And I just had an epiphany. This is just not what I want.

16:09
You know, like I just wasn't energized by understanding the deep, you know, details of how segment routing works and, and, and had a maturity enough to feel like that was okay. You know what I mean? Um, and, and I think like, so that that's been the right, it's been the right path for me, it's not the right path for everybody. And it doesn't even mean that one is necessarily better than the other. Cause we need.

16:37
high functioning people in both types of roles. But I've really gravitated more toward the architect kind of thinking, really starting to think about what does it mean to lead a team of people? Not quite there yet, but probably gonna be exploring that over the next year or two. Just because those are the things that I, you know, when I'm not reading Python books in my spare time anymore.

17:07
You know, I'm reading books on leadership and, and how do you get a group of people that are very gifted to work together to accomplish a thing as opposed to, you know, how do you make the thing work? And it's, it's just a transition that I'm going through. And that's okay. You know, I think sometimes we act like folks who move into certain spheres, like either they're selling out or they're giving up or they're doing, you know, or, and that's just not always the case is sometimes as you change your interest change.

17:37
You know, nothing wrong with that. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's it's pretty obvious just reading back through some of your blog posts that you've kind of made made this transition because a lot of your stuff I was reading one I have to look this up about like the Western typology. There's all these things that you write about that I'm like, they're really interesting stuff, but they're not things that you hear a lot of people in our industry talking about. Like you said, it's not a podcast about segment routing, right? It's, it's much more.

18:03
Like taking the bigger picture and looking at things. But like my most read post ever was like how to push a VLAN down to a wireless access point when you're configuring it with ICE. You know, it was like a very specific like and it took me forever to figure it out because the documentation wasn't super clear and I had to do a lot of like, how does this work? And then I was like, oh, like I need to write this down because nobody else has done it.

18:29
Or at least I couldn't find it. It's not that people hadn't done it, but I couldn't find, find clear documentation on how to do this very specific thing. So, so yeah, like even back through my blog posts, you can kind of see, you know, when we go on from like detailed how to configure this thing and make it work to some of the more industry stuff. Like when I was doing networking field day, there were some posts about that. And then the, you know, the, the culture stuff, Westrom, and then of course the pandemic hit and it's all she shed all the time.

18:59
How do we think about what we do? You know, so yeah. I wanted to, and you got a little bit ahead of me, but that's okay because I was gonna go there eventually. I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, I wanted to kind of establish kind of what you are, what you do, kind of why we're talking to you. But I also wanted to ask you a little bit more about

19:20
I mean, you've been podcasting much longer than we have. I mean, you've done multiple, I mean, Network Collective was one of the first podcasts I ever really, and I admit it freely that I didn't ever really listen to a lot of podcasts, but like Network Collective was one that I listened to a lot. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, just the time, the other things outside of just being a technologist that you've been, you know, have done for a long time all around the industry, like NFD and, you know, Network Collective and stuff.

19:50
Yeah. So, um, one of the things like I love to, um, I love to be on podcasts. I love to, you know, connect with the community. Um, I don't love running one. Um, don't blame you. I see you guys laugh. You know, I mean, it's a lot of coordination. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of scheduling. Um, and so, you know, I'm happy to, to come on and talk.

20:16
but I just don't enjoy the coordination and I'm not really willing to invest to pay somebody else to do it. So, you know, that's where we are. You know, and Network Collective really grew out of the Tech Field Day community. It was really Jordan's brainchild. He was like, hey, who wants to do this? And Phil and I were like, hey, I might be interested. And so we really didn't expect it to be

20:46
as well received as it was. And I think it was great for all of us and it served its purpose for a time. And really proud of the work that we did there. Yeah, but it was really just a a slight conversation one day. And as far as Networking Field Day, that was a huge

21:15
growth experience for me because until then, I had always been like on the customer side and really looking only through the lens of an enterprise customer. But I think that the thing that Network Field Day that I saw there was just a broader view of the industry, how the industry works, what vendors care about. And I kind of got exposed and got to know

21:43
just some really interesting, fabulous people. Keith Townsend, for example, met him several times at Tech Field Day, Networking Field Day events. Drew and Greg from Packet Pushers, and Ethan, of course, who's fabulous. But I think for me, that experience was pretty formative. And also,

22:11
That group really put a lot of effort into being inclusive, into saying, hey, we need your voice, your voice matters, speak up, which again, it was something I needed to hear. I didn't know I needed to hear it, but I did. And they were always fabulous. And I still, I'm writing a column a month for Packet Pushers, really enjoy that. And they're kind of like, write whatever's on your mind. And I'm like, okay.

22:41
you know, tell me when I go too far or when I, you know, veer off the beaten path too much. But really, really enjoyed having that outlet and it's low friction and which is kind of, I'm trying to be low friction these days, so it's good. Yeah, I was going to say that though, the most recent post I think that you have at least at the time of recording this was, you know, people aren't stupid just because they don't understand the technology. I feel like...

23:10
You know, you make a great point in there that like, if you're going to categorize people in your mind, do it by strengths. And I think you need to kind of do that with yourself as well, right? And if you understand, like if you had that moment where you're like during a segment routing conversation where you're like, this isn't what I see myself doing the next, you know, 10 years. Like...

23:32
know, maybe you need to cater your strengths to fit your path, right? Or something like that. But yeah, I just thought that was a great point. We'll put it in the show notes. But yeah, I think it's very important to be able to see the bigger picture and understand that, you know, IT is not just, you know, changing VLANs and individuals productivity. It's a business, right? So, you need to be able to see the full picture. And maybe that'll kind of...

23:59
segue to the next thing. Like, because I wanted to ask, you know, you moved to being a strategist and all the strategists that I know, yourself included, are always very well spoken, very good at telling a story which I really admire. But like in your terminology, what is a strategist? And like for people that don't interface with them on a regular basis, what is your primary goals and objectives?

24:27
Yeah, well, I don't even know if I think of myself in that term, with that term, but I think so. There are a few things that I highly value. And I think, and as I've, you know, gotten older, and maybe a little wiser, I think one of the things I value more now is seeing through multiple perspectives.

24:55
Right. And, and, you know, when, um, and to try and, um, you know, it's, it's, everything is, is like three to your 40 chest, right? I think we so often want to take problems and we want to narrow them down until we can wrangle them and wrap our arms around them and make sense of them.

25:18
And I think one of the things and really one of the stated qualities for Googlers is the ability to thrive in ambiguity. And I think part of that kind of a role is to be able to walk into a situation that is very fuzzy, that is ambiguous, that is like uncharted territory, and to figure out a sometime and a lot of times you even have to define the problem, right? What?

25:47
What are we really trying to achieve here? And then define the problem, figure out, okay, what do we need to measure? And then also, what is the entire universe of solutions that could be used to solve this problem? And sometimes, technology isn't at the top of the list. Sometimes it's like, we need to reorganize how our teams work together. Or sometimes it's...

26:14
we need to change how we're sharing information back and forth. Or sometimes it's, we actually are over-rotating on, you know, what we're spending on things versus what we're focusing on and to make our organization healthier, right? Those are sometimes solutions to the problems as well. And so I think a lot of it is, let's look back.

26:42
Let's define the problem that we're trying to solve and then not looking at it merely through the tools I am competent to wield, right? It's the whole if every, if every, if every, well, you have the hammer, every problem's a nail, right? And yeah, and to think, okay, you know, I have to understand enough about the universe of potential solutions out there. Or sometimes it's like, oh, we need something that does X.

27:11
that doesn't really exist today, right? And then that may be a conversation with the product team and saying, hey, have you thought about this? So it's really taking that broad view and trying to solve that more of a brain teaser kind of a puzzle as opposed to, hey, I need to connect site A in location X with site B in location Y, which is a very

27:40
clearly defined problem, right? I think, and I'll let you guys ask a question and then I'll talk for a long time. But I think for me, the thing that I see now that I didn't 10 years ago in my career, 15 years ago, was that a lot of work goes into getting most individual contributors ready to work, right? Like by the time somebody comes to you and says, hey, we need a network here.

28:08
Like there has been a ton of work already done to make that request and it's real work. It's not bogus work. It's real work that somebody has to do. And if they don't do it well, then everybody suffers. Right. And that has been sort of epiphanal for me in the last several years. Does that help? That was a lot. It does help. Yeah. That was good. I'm curious. I'm curious actually. So what is, what is... Because obviously at Google...

28:38
Google's a very, very large organization, right? And then some of the problems that Google has to solve are gonna be very unique to where, compared to what customer problems that you knew it to solve. So how many, what would you say the spread looks like on those kind of unique Google problems to solve, which obviously empowers customers later down the line, versus solving just straight up customer problems? Yeah, so for me, I'm in Google Cloud.

29:06
And as a customer engineer, my entire job is how do we take the Google Cloud solutions that exist and help customers solve problems with them. So that is my focus. Now I can speak like more generally. I don't know how many folks because you've got a networking background or is familiar with Cloud Spanner, but Cloud Spanner is pretty cool. It is a globally consistent.

29:35
relational database with five nines of uptime. It is also the technology that runs YouTube is what was turned into Cloud Spanner. Right. Oh, very cool. So Spanner, it is, you know, you're not going to run a WordPress website on Spanner. Right. Like it is a Cadillac kind of a solution.

30:04
But there are customers who need that, right? So for example, if you're a bank and you want to build a ledger on and build a suite of applications on a database system that you know is going to be up, and you don't have to worry about backup. You don't have to worry about replication. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Like Spanner is a great solution for that. So more of what I do.

30:32
is like that kind of conversation that we just had. Right, so, you know, a customer's like, hey, like we need, you know, this is what we need. These are kind of our requirements. And I'm like, okay, well, and I can do that at a high level, but frankly, like once we get into, like when they start talking about CAP theorem, I have a data specialist I can pull in, right? And so I go to them and I'm like, okay, like we've defined the problem.

30:57
We now know like here's kind of what they're trying to do. Now, my deep subject matter expert, can you come in and have a conversation with them about X and maybe get on an office hours call with their deep subject matter database people and talk to them about that? So those are the kinds of conversations that I'm having, right? And I'll do the same thing when it comes to infrastructure. And so the hardest thing

31:27
for me is it's just so broad, right? If you think about like a cloud portfolio, you've got data, now you've got just the incredible interest in AI and ML technologies. You've got your infrastructure, and then you've got application modernization, right? You've got SRE conversations, you've got DevOps, you've got, you know, it's just a lot, right? And,

31:56
I can't be 300 level deep on all those things. No, nobody can. Yeah, no. Except for Chris. Not really. Chris could do it. I won't. All I heard from that was there's a... It's that or sleep, but you can't do both. I was challenged to run a WordPress website on Cloud Spanner. So that's what I heard from that. So somebody out there do it. If you want to pay to try, Chris, you go right ahead. We'll get that A1 money to pay for it. There you go.

32:25
Oh, actually, so this was not in the list, but you mentioned it. So I actually have to pivot just a little bit, Yvonne, and I'm not to push you on the spot and not to make you speak for or against any particular technology. But what's your hot take on the whole AI ML thing, the technology, how people are using it, where it's going, how companies are building it, maybe just a two hour dissertation, if you would please. Sure.

32:54
Well, first of all, this is Yvonne's opinion. I do think AI is going to change the way we work in the long run. I really do. Is it overhyped? Sure. But I also think it is going to change the landscape for knowledge work. Because just like we've used other technologies to remove some of the toil.

33:23
I think AI is going to do that. I think the fear that ultimately AI is going to take away jobs, I kind of chuckle because I look back in the 70s and in the 50s and in the 30s. They were always proclaiming that we were going to end up with a three-day work week. We're going to make things so efficient that we're going to end up with a three-day work week.

33:50
And ultimately, there's this concept, I might not be saying it right, but I believe it's called J. Vaughn's paradox. You can look it up on Wikipedia. But the idea is that when you increase the efficiency of a process, you also increase the consumption of that process, right? And so, if you increase the efficiency of people writing code, what you're gonna do is increase the demand for custom code, right?

34:19
And so I think, you know, I think right now we see lots of foolish people doing all kinds of foolish things with AI because they don't really understand what it is. It's not sentient. It, you know, it doesn't have a personality. It is really some amazing statistical analysis of words and how words work and how we use language. And so, not just language.

34:48
because you can create images with it and all that kind of good stuff. But it is a technology that will change how we work. And it will be disruptive for knowledge workers, disruption isn't always a bad thing if you're willing to move with it. And so I think, you know, I don't think it's something to fear. I think it is something we need to understand. There's gonna be some wild times ahead.

35:14
as people try and figure out where it works and where it doesn't and what makes sense. And then vendors swoop in and try to say, hey, here's my shiny AI thing. And all that will shake out. Like that's, again, it's another cycle that the industry goes through. I do think it's big though. I think it's a really big deal. And I think that there will be social good that comes from it. And I think there will be social challenges that come from it.

35:42
And we're just going to have to navigate those. I mean, it's, but it's not going to go away, right? It's here. Like the bell just doesn't untold ever. Yeah. Um, so, so that's, that's kind of my high level view. Um, I, I, you know, I, I'm, I'm just not going to be the kind of person that's like, oh, it's the end of the world, you know, um, no, we'll, we'll figure it out how it works and, you know, and we'll do great and terrible things with it. And, uh, you know, it's just going to become part of.

36:10
how the world works, I think. Just like cell phones, right? I mean, but I do think it is as revolutionary as the iPhone was. I think it's that we are in that kind of a moment. You know, I'm willing to say that. To bring it back a little bit to the main topic. Sorry, everyone, but. No, it's good. Cause I had a specific question about your, I guess your kind of leeway when you deal with customers. And if you're allowed, like, do you have any influence on kind of trying to help fix like organizational toil?

36:40
you know, helping fix structures and how teams operate with each other, stuff like that. Because that's a lot of stuff that you write about and talk about. So I'm just curious if you get to have some of that influence thrown into your interactions. Well, yeah. So first of all, like every one of the great things about being on the vendor side and working with lots of different customers is you get to see what's common across all of them and then some of their and customers have personalities like entire organizations have personalities.

37:09
And some customers are open to hearing that and having that conversation. Some aren't. And that's okay. Just like some are interested in product A and some aren't. We do have like an entire like services organization to help customers with that. But also in some capacity. Yeah, we do have an opportunity to speak into that. And I have a peer whose actual education has a...

37:38
my bachelor's in psychology. And he does a lot of that as well. Like he's a peer, mine is on my team, but he also does a lot of, you know, communicating around how do we need to think about how our organization is structured. And so, yeah, we'll talk about that if the customer is open. And if we have an opportunity, a lot of that, you know, is whether or not they want to hear it. But I will say that some of my most rewarding

38:06
interactions have been with customers who are really transparent, who want to get to know us and who really want to share what's going on. They don't come to the conversation in an adversarial way. And some customers, that's how they approach all their vendors, right? Like you are here to take me to the cleaners and I'm going to, you know, then they come in with a defensive posture. The most rewarding engagement, and I think the most fruitful for the customer is when they're able to come in and go,

38:36
Here are our goals, here are our problems. Now you come tell us how you really think you can help solve them, right? And then we have this very wonderful like relational back and forth. That's what I find the most rewarding and the most fun, frankly. Yeah, absolutely. I love it. That sounds awesome. I mean, it only takes a, the problem with tech sales is that it only takes a couple people trying to...

39:01
spiff out their number and sell somebody the wrong thing, they hit their number or whatever it is. And it brings that whole used car mentality, fear of, you know, to customers. And, you know, the truth is, we're not selling used cars and a customer that buys something from a tech company, you know, will probably need to stay a customer for years. And so managing that relationship is like really, really important. And screwing them over today to get your spiff is just extremely short-sighted and damages the customer.

39:31
in a way that that salesperson will just pop smoke and be onto his or her next company. Yeah, it's a problem. Sales is a challenge. Yeah, I think that's one thing that helps us as technologists that when we have the skills and the backbone to establish that level of trust at each rung of the ladder, even people at C level can, the C-suite level is what I mean. So they can see...

40:00
you know, in our interactions that we know what we're talking about, but the, you know, the task rabbits, the people that are doing the work, they can also see that. So it's very important to kind of establish that and, you know, once you're in sales, that's a little bit harder to navigate. But I assume on the strategist side, do you kind of get to maintain that balance a bit since it's not purely monetary focused? Well, so, I mean, I am in the sales org.

40:28
Right. My role is, and I want to say pre-sales, but pre-sales isn't even right anymore because with cloud technology, it's all about consumption. Right. So just because a customer says, hey, we're going to sign a contract and we are committed to you, they still, if they don't consume, we don't get paid as a company. And so there is a vested interest for me.

40:58
to make them successful. That's really what I'm here to do, is how to, and I've had customers I've worked with be like, they told us when we really didn't have a good technology fit, or they're not committed to us getting every single workload, regardless of whether or not it's the right fit. And I think,

41:25
You have to recognize that. And, and I think in general, you know, you can tell when somebody's generally concerned about helping you solve your problem and when, when they're not. And, um, and so that that's just always been the approach that, that I try to take. Um, and I think most of the time it's, it's appreciated, but you know, you, you gotta let, I mean, people be people and, and some are gonna, you're gonna work really well with, and some are, you know, you're just, it's, you're never going to hit it off. And that's, that's like, okay.

41:53
You just gotta kinda navigate that and figure it out as you go. It's funny, because until you just said that, Yvonne, I didn't realize that you and I, I think, basically have the same job. I mean, I do it for Aviatrix, but my job at Aviatrix is to help customers find the right fit, whether it be us or not for every workload, which sometimes it's not. Sometimes that workload belongs on-prem or somewhere else. But to help them navigate...

42:18
their requirements and help them, you know, consume and, you know, use aviatrix and be successful using aviatrix. That's what I do. So, that's interesting. Yeah. And I mean, sometimes my job is to help them think bigger, right? And to be like, okay, like you're focused on this little point solution, but what if you increase the aperture a little bit? But sometimes it's also to be like, hey, you're trying to boil the ocean.

42:43
let's divide this up into smaller achievable bits so that you can show progress, so that you can go back to the business and say, hey, we did this thing and it was successful. And now we have the credibility to do the next thing. Right? So all of that, and sometimes it's like just like taking your best guess. Like, and you don't always get it right either. But, you know, you give it your best shot and you try to be relational and get to know people. And, you know,

43:13
apologize when you get it wrong and move forward. Do right by the customer, generally. That's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I think we're actually rolling up on time here. Wow, it went super fast. It's really great to talk to you and really easy to listen to what you have to say, Yvonne. So thank you for being with us tonight.

43:38
Guys, Alex, Chris, is there anything else that you guys want to say or ask Yvonne while we've got her? I feel like we're gonna have to have her back sometime in the future because yeah, there's plenty more questions I'd love to ask especially about just mindset and approaching things and you know advice like how to get started for your path and all this so yeah, it was a great conversation like Tim said you say a lot of things that are really easy to listen to so It was awesome having you on

44:07
Yeah, happy to be here and I almost always have an opinion. So, um, happy, happy to come back anytime. We'll have, we'll have much more time to do the podcast whenever AI gets us to the point of the three day work week. So, um, we'll have plenty of time to chat about who God knows what. Right. Podcast Tuesday. Okay. I, you know, I, if we're going to talk strategy, I would like not bet on that one. There's now a gambling podcast.

44:35
Yeah, I am not a wagerer, but if I were, I wouldn't bet on a three-day work week anytime soon unless you're going to be self-employed and controlling the spigot of work. Actually, real quick, when you mentioned that...

44:53
I don't remember. I'll have to look it up because I think you're right on the name, but that law, basically the wider you open the spigot, the more rushes in to fill it. Anybody in networking already knows that one really well because whenever you upgrade your bandwidth immediately, it's consumed. You went from one gig to 10 gigs, you're already at 10 gigs. You should have gotten 20. My favorite analogy was always bandwidth is like closet space. No matter how much you have, you fill it up. That's great.

45:22
Absolutely true. Yep. All right, guys, well, let's wrap up. If you like what you heard tonight, please like and subscribe and subscribe to our YouTube, listen to us on your podcast, podcatcher, and we'll get all of Yvonne's information in the show notes, just in case you're one of the three people on the internet who doesn't know her already. Thanks for joining us tonight, everybody. Hi, everyone. It's Tim, and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today.

45:51
If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite podcast catcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cable's 2 Clouds. You can also visit our website for all the show notes at cables2clouds.com. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.