How To Plan A Career Change with special guest Matt McCloskey

I just went ahead and threw us live, so what the hell. Joining the conversation already in progress. Good afternoon everyone, welcome in. Returning special guest speaker Matt McCluskey, my colleague from my Amazon and Twitch days. Matt was VP of Twitch Commerce working with me when we built sub gifting and of course, gifting of subs, community gifting of subs. We enhanced bits. We did a bunch of stuff together.

Had a several good year run, growing revenue by over 100% a year. Matt's former history, you can see Master Chief there on the shelf behind him. Matt was CFO of 343 Studios at Halo. COO. Yeah, CFO. CFO. Well, I've been advertising you CFO. CFO is a promotion from CFO, though. Oh, okay, good. So good, even more. And then we have Logan, known as Matchstick Man, in our channel. Logan is going to be our test subject for Matt's career change planning method. So what we're going to do today...

is we're going to have Matt take everyone through his framework for planning career changes. And then he's going to take Logan through it because Logan would be interested in moving to a slightly different career than what he does. Logan was an interior designer, a lighting designer for the cabins inside the 737? 777. Oh, the 777 at Boeing. And of course...

Much to my, look, I love to fly, I love to travel. I wish nothing but the best for Boeing. But there's so many bad Boeing jokes you can make right now about crashed and burned. And he needs a new opportunity. so matt's going to help him understand where he can migrate his career and how to get there so with that said i feel like we can just jump in logan will vanish off screen a little bit matt will go to full screen he's going to run through some slides Um...

and give us a little career planning background. And then we'll bring Logan back on and see how it works. As always, we'll take questions at the end. So all you channel veterans, some of you are here. We have Hitch who's resubscribed. It's great.

feel free to put in questions we'll take questions at the end and discuss uh and with that matt do you want to take it away i shall and uh okay and you can introduce yourself further by the way if you want further yeah if you want you can talk about what you're doing now yeah the fact that you began as a lawyer so you've already done that i should have said that career change you're an expert how many career changes have i had yes um

Yes, I've had quite a few career changes. I started out as making pizzas. That was in high school. I wouldn't call it a career, but all right. I did start out going to law school. I went to law school, practiced law in-house for a while, practiced in a law firm for a while, then went into business development at Xbox early on in 2004. I shifted from complex commercial transactions. as the lawyer to being the biz dev guy. I did that for about six years. I was also a transition of industries.

which was very different because I previously had been in the wireless industry at AT&T Wireless and then going to video games. Of course, growing up playing games, I loved it and it was something I knew about, but it was a very different industry. um and then ended up kind of accumulating disciplines over time i would say so i started out in biz dev accumulated kind of a finance team a strategy team a royalty operations team a bi team a data science

And then stuff just kind of kept growing until I got to this point where I'd done enough about money and operations. I actually hadn't done as much on making products. And that's when Mr. Evans called me and gave me an opportunity to come to Twitch and actually. run an engineering and product management organization, which was a great experience and just kind of took everything to a next level. Again, same industry.

but a discipline pivot. So that was expanding that now. And now I'm actually running customer support, CX, and marketing for Toys R Us Canada. which is a big box retailer in Canada. What the hell? Where did that come from? Long story. Let's just say it's COVID year. Lots going on. We'll leave that for another day. But yeah, I've been through. five or six different disciplines in at least three different industries in these last umpteenth years.

And this career planning framework is something I originally learned. I'll share my screen and start sharing slides in a moment. But I originally got this from a guy who was my boss.

at xbox a guy named dennis durkin who was the cfo and coo at activision i think he's still there um and it was just a great little framework on how to think in your at the time it was in your current job what is your development plan going to be what are you going to work on how are you going to what are you going to do this year to grow your skills or grow your experience and i think often that's

kind of a generic question that people's like, oh, I want to learn this and I want to learn that. But this is kind of a working backwards way to say, well, why are you learning anything? Why do you have the job you have? Why are you working on the projects you're working? What are they working towards? So there's a little framework to. a very amazon fashion work backwards from what your next goal is defining the goals and then have a framework for working towards so let me go ahead and

Yeah, put up the slides. Let's do it. Put up the slides. I'll have to change displays on my end, but you do it. Tell me if I can only see Ethan and Logan. Yeah, your slides are good. All right, good. And I will get rid of the double me. There you go. So I've used this myself. I'll tell you the stories about when I used it myself.

And especially my team at Xbox, my team at Halo and Twitch, when people would really want, when people were struggling to how do I get, what do I do with my career? I want to talk to you about stuff. this is always the framework that i'd lay on um first first rule of this is um this is about goal oriented work towards a three to five year horizon.

So this isn't like what you want to be when you grow up. It's kind of that three to five year horizon. It's also and this is something I tell everybody all the time. Getting a promotion is not a career plan. A lot of people will say, oh, I want to talk about my career. What they really mean is I want to know how to get promoted. And you're like, okay, well. That's fine. There are ways to get promoted and especially somewhere like Amazon or other places.

It's fairly explicit as to what needs to be true for you to be promoted. But getting promoted from a level six to level seven or level 65 to 66 or 59 to 60 or whatever your leveling system is at your company, that's not a career plan. That's a very short-term tactical thing.

And sometimes I'd have people come into my office and say, hey, I want to talk about my career. I'm like, wonderful. I love talking about careers. And they're like, how do I get promoted? And you're like, that's not a career plan. Let's talk about your actual career. OK, cool. And then we go into this framework. And by the time we were done, they were like.

oh yeah that's uh that's interesting i should i should think more about that so here's basically the five steps and then we'll go through the five steps um the first one is a declaration of intent And we'll talk about this in detail, but a declaration of intent is basically your goal statement, but it's very structured. There's three key elements we're going to talk about in the declaration of intent that are super important that people tend to overlook.

The next step is to find a job description. right this process works really well for existing and understood disciplines right if you go out and say i want to do insert brand new thing that no one has ever done before and that doesn't exist in a normal hr system this isn't going to be a very good framework but if you say i want to be a senior director of pm i want to be a junior engineer i want to be a ux designer i want to be a cfo or a financial analyst something that exists

this works great because what you're going to do is you're going to go out and get that job description and there's lots of them out there if you choose something that's totally obscure no one's heard of you won't be able to find that The third one is I call it self-assess. At the time when Dennis was taking me through this, he was the CFO. So he was like, you got to do your own balance sheet using that language. You've got to give yourself a real balance sheet of what skills.

do you have and what don't you and then crafting an annual development plan and then once you have all that in place you can kind of start looking for your next job. There's a whole other set of techniques for actually looking for a job. I'm not going to get into those. This is just the work that you do before you look for a job so that you recognize it when you see it.

All right. So here's the structure of the declaration of intent. And the three bracketed things are the most important parts of it, right? So you say, I want to be a, and this is a role. So product manager, engineer, UX, designer, leader, HR, manager, whatever, just put something in there in an industry. and industries are specific because product management in one industry means something else in another industry by date and the date is the one that people tend to overlook a lot of people

Or like, well, as soon as possible. Or, you know, over my career, I want to be the CEO of a startup company or something. It's actually not very helpful.

it's really helpful to put a date on things because again if you have a date you can work backwards and the art of this and this is why i started out saying it was like in a three to five year horizon it's got to be something that is definable and that you can accomplish and feel like you're making progress towards because primarily this statement will be a way for you to parse opportunities as they come to you.

So if you've ever bought a new car, Ethan, I'm sure you can recognize this. As soon as you buy a new car, it's all you see on the road. Yep. Right. And that's because it's now imprinted in your brain. And so part of this. career opportunity process is there are opportunities around you all the time. But if you don't really know what you're looking for, you won't see them. So I find every time I go through this process.

and get this declaration statement very clear in my mind, it's like the world comes into relief. It's like I see things. I talk to people that I wouldn't necessarily have talked to before. A job posting will jump up. that i wouldn't have known to get excited about but now because i'm looking at the world through this declaration statement um i'll see it

I'll understand it. I'll engage with it. When opportunities come to you and you don't quite know what you want, it's hard to say yes to anything. And so this is kind of the structure. that I use to focus your mind on what you want to do. So again, the role section of it is choose an existing role. It doesn't have to be a JD, it could be a person.

right like and that's a great way to meet mentors and also learn more about what it takes to get in a specific position like if you're in your job or you are somewhere and you're like i want that person's job I'm literally writing down variations of this right as you're talking. Keep going. Okay, wonderful. I've realized I need to do this, so you now have two subjects. Keep going. All right, great.

I was like, whatever it is, right? And in this sense, it's, you know, you could identify it as a person, you could identify it as an identifiable role, you could identify it as, I want to spend my days doing X. Right. But it is really what do you want to do? The industry is really important to choose. I would say kind of that you like or meet your life goals. One of the things that I.

don't think people give themselves permission to think hard about in this is a lot of your work can just be money oriented and practical. I'm not a huge fan of the follow your passion.

uh philosophy i think it's really distracting and it doesn't fit for 95 of humanity that doesn't have a choice to go follow whatever passion they have so i'm not a huge fan of that i do think you need to choose an industry that because you're gonna spend so much of your time in this industry it has to really satisfy your identity now your identity may just be go make a lot of money which is fine in which case choose a very lucrative

industry to be in. Or it may be change the world or it may be just, you know, hang out with kids or whatever. It's something that needs to appeal to you that way. I used to say when I worked at Halo.

that i get to hang out with artists and make little kids happy okay cool in a sense that's kind of the industry i like so there are some uh some philosophies there but in every step of this the broader you give yourself the less efficacious it is so narrowing is helpful and then we talked about date a little bit again don't get don't get crazy i remember my first job

I was at a startup company, a startup payment system company in Seattle called QPASS. And I just graduated from law school. And I was the only in-house lawyer. literally i was what 28 or 29 and i was the only in-house lawyer and it was great because

I got to, if I could solve a legal problem for the company, I'd save them outside counsel fees. And if not, I got to hire a partner in a law firm to teach me how to do it. But I was like, why am I not the general counsel? Why won't you make me the general counsel? And literally, I remember the answer, which I, oh, I despised this answer at the time. The answer was, you don't have enough gray hair. Like, I was like, I have the skills. I'm doing the job. He's like, yep, you're just.

haven't been around long enough to have that job. Like I'm literally doing the job. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You can't have it. That answer sucks. It does suck. But it was also. in that industry in that role i was not going to get that job at that time in that five to ten year period right so when you're setting your date

Don't get crazy. Look at the average years required to get that role. So again, you know, a 28-year-old straight out of college can be the CEO of a startup. 28-year-old straight out of college is not going to be the CEO of an existing Fortune 100 company. Not going to happen. Setting your time state correct. Here's the biggest thing about this statement that I find people struggle with. People don't want to be wrong.

And I'm telling you right now, it does not matter if you're wrong. This statement is not meant to be an accurate reflection of the job you will have in three years. This statement is designed for you to take action. You know, there's the old joke about Zen navigation where you don't know where you're going, just find a car that looks like it knows where it's going and follow them and you won't end up where you thought you should be, but you'll end up where you were meant to be.

So this is about taking action, not about being right. And so a lot of people don't get this specific in their job search or career definition because they're like, well, I could do this or I could do that. Or I like product management. I also like engineering. Maybe I like PM. I could do them both. I like video games. I like entertainment. I like all this stuff. And so they write like 12 versions of this. Well, if you write 12 versions of it, you basically wrote.

no versions of it, because which one are you going to act on? And so the value of this is not in its accuracy. It's in its specificity and how easily it prompts action. So I guarantee this statement will be wrong. I guarantee it will be wrong for you. But I also guarantee it will make you do a bunch of stuff that will pay off. All right, so... Let's say you have your declaration and you then go find a job description. So you can just literally go to Indeed.com. You can go anywhere.

If you know someone in HR recruiting, you can say, do you have a JD that you can let me take a look at? Identify someone in your network or at work, interview them. Right. Go ahead and interview them. I remember when I hit director at Microsoft, I was like, what does it take to become a GM or a partner at Microsoft? And I went on a little listening tour and I just talk. I found every GM that I knew. And I was like.

How did you get there? What did you do? How did that work? What did you do? I learned a bunch of things. It's a very common path to go work abroad in a big corporation for a while. I'd never thought about that. i would have never accepted if somebody called me up when i was at xbox and said hey matt do you want to go do a year in singapore i would have said no but after that discussion where like three out of five

GM said, yeah, I went and did a year abroad or did this. And that's a key part of expanding the profile of what it takes to be a partner level leader at Microsoft. Then all of a sudden, right, I had that in my head and the world came into relief. And that opportunity to go to Singapore, I was like, yeah, let's do that. That's not true. I didn't go to Singapore. But if that had happened, this would have been the type of thing.

So in this stage, you're doing everything you can to become an expert in what it takes to get that role. So you're kind of looking at yourself as if you were the hiring manager, what are you looking for? And then step three is you have to be brutally honest and assess yourself. And in that job description, in your interviews,

And your discussions with people, you basically became an expert. And you know, here are the 10 things that you need to get this job. And then you ask yourself, would you hire you? just go through each requirement and give yourself a yes or no or maybe and then list the evidence so in this little chart here of requirement yes or no and evidence so you have to be able to show the evidence at the level that you have for example um

You know, this particular JD, I think it was for a marketing coordinator or something. It was like, we want a bachelor's degree in marketing and business administration or an MBA marketing preferable. Yes or no? Well, yes, I have a BA. No, I don't have an MBA. What's my evidence? Well, I have a certificate saying I have a BA degree for marketing. And then kind of go through each one of those. And at the bottom, that got it, need it framework is basically your balance sheet.

There'll be a bunch of stuff that you have and a bunch of stuff that you don't have. Let me give you an example of this. So when I was in... When I started at Xbox, I was the biz dev guy for the third-party business. So all the relationships that Xbox had with EA and Take-Two and Square Enix and all the third-party game publishers.

I managed those relationships from a biz dev and finance operations and royalty perspective. And I knew the future of gaming was going to be in the cloud, live, live stream. games and so in 2007 or 8 i went through this exercise and i said i want to be the general manager so that's the role of an online gaming service

which was basically my proxy for Xbox Live, but it could have been something else. But for an online game service, so that was kind of my industry statement, by 2011. Turns out I did not... achieve that goal. But as I said before, it doesn't matter. What mattered was, I was like, okay, those are the things. And I did an assessment of a general manager for a program like Xbox Live, and it required P&L ownership.

And I was like, well, yeah, if you're going to go own a subscription business or something, you have to have managed a P&L. And at that point in my career, I'd never managed a P&L. I'd been business finance support, but I'd never been the guy that owns the number. So that's why I left that job. I left that job in third party, which was a fantastic job. By the way, a lot of the people that...

I left back then still have those jobs. I mean, that was a super stable team, but I left it because I was like, I need to get P&L ownership and there's only one P&L in this business. So I have to go. find another pnl and xbox live had lots of little pnls there was actually a little P&L just for avatar virtual items and other virtual items and all these little opportunities to own your own little P&L, kind of like category management at Amazon.

So I was like, well, that's, I got to get part of that team so I can get one of those things. And in one sense, from like a finance biz dev operation standpoint, it was kind of a diversion or step down because these were smaller businesses. I was working on a... $900 million business to go take over a $20 million business. But it checked a box on this very clear declaration of intent towards this thing that I wanted to, and it got me moving.

I would have just stayed there forever. And I would have stayed there forever and said, oh, what's going on with my career? But I had this clarity. An opportunity came up and I said, yes, immediately, let's go to Xbox Live. And that's one of the ways this came up. All right. So then once you have your got it, need it breakdown, then you figure out how you're going to go get what you need. And this becomes for the folks who are currently have a role.

this becomes your development plan this is what you talk to your manager about you're like hey i need p l ownership or i need experience writing press releases or i need experience doing social media marketing or whatever And you say, do we have any projects like that? Can I get any of that experience in my current role? And usually managers want nothing more than to have people on their team.

guiding their own development and learning new skills and developing. And for you to be able to go to your manager and say, I have a list of exactly what I want to learn, what I want, experiences I need, training I need, will you help me? That's like... It's like catnap to a manager. It's great to have someone come and actually tell you what they need and how you can help them. So you can usually get a lot of traction very focused on your current role.

And if there are things that you just can't get in your current role, like I could not get P&L ownership as the biz dev leader of the third party business, that just tells you what your next job is. And it could be a job in between your current job. and your ultimate declared job right so it could be like a couple jobs in between matt chats ask a good question here i think it's worth interjecting for which is they've asked how did you get p l experience

How did you get someone to hand you the reins on money when you didn't? How do you get into that when you haven't done it? A P&L, by the way, I defined this in chat earlier.

But a P&L is a profit and loss center. So it means that you're responsible for trying to make more P, more profit than... loss or expense so loss is like what you spend to buy the games you sell because you don't make them all you buy them from somebody and you sell them so the spread is what you get to keep as profit so i'm not going to explain what p&l is but matt

I can tell my story because I also went into P&L leadership. As an engineer, I had no experience in it. But you first. How did you get somebody to hand you the reins on the money? Yeah, it's funny. It's kind of like you're just scooching over a little bit. You're just getting a little closer to the money. Like I started out like my undergraduate degree is in philosophy and French. Oh, boy. Now you want to be surprised. No surprise he started making pizzas. Okay.

Like no skills whatsoever coming out of undergrad, right? Philosophy and French. Oh, yeah, dude. Don't even get me started. Any art history in there? Art history is my favorite one to pick on. Yeah, no, no, I didn't like her in history. You know, that was fluffy. Russian literature. Yeah, keep going. Russian literature. Yeah, anyway, so I went to law school. uh because i had no way of making money other than arguing with people and reading a lot and that's why law school seemed like a good idea

But once I got into law school, I became a lawyer and then I got into commercial law. And then like the shift from how do you get into biz dev in a private company if you're an external law firm? Well, you start working on complex deals. There's a big deal team.

you're the lawyer on it right next to the biz dev guy and then eventually you'll just move one seat right so that's what i i'm joking about like you just get a little bit closer to it and so then i was the biz dev finance ops guy if i was in biz dev then royalty operations was right next to BizDev because we had to sign the contracts and get them executed. And then once you're running royalty operations, well, that's right next to finance. Oh, and so then I took on the finance team.

as an expansion of the biz dev and the royalty so now i have to do forecasting and now i have to do all this finance work right and so then i get to strategy and xbox live having run a finance team and now they're like oh well You have enough finance, enough deal, enough operations to take on this little thing. So you just keep scooching closer and closer to it is how it worked for me. And then at some point you're like, Hey.

I had the $2 million P&L for the Halo EMEA avatars, like this small little slice, but it's a coherent chunk. And now you can say, see, I made $2 million. I know how to go out and set a goal and achieve it. And then it just goes from there. Yep. And I did it somewhat similar. So people know I'm an engineer. We bought a game studio. I asked if I could be.

gm of the game studio and so i moved from digital video which is what i did to digital game distribution and that team had a very small pnl they had a four million dollar pnl which four million dollars seems like a lot if you don't have four million dollars but amazon at that point was like a 50 billion dollar company so whether i made that four million dollars 10 bigger or 10 smaller really made no difference at all

to amazon as a business so they were basically willing to let me you know like sure see if you can make it bigger show us your skills and if you make it smaller we'll know you're an idiot but it won't cost us anything we can't afford And it sounds like Matt's first P&L was in similar, right? I mean, $2 million on the Halo thing wasn't very big either. No, no, not at all. um but it also got me from the other direction got me into engineering because when by the time we got to halo 5

I had the finance and business development team, and we created the business model for in-game item sales within Halo 5. And then I ended up taking on the operations team, who's responsible for producing content and releasing everything on a regular basis, right? So once I got in,

kind of the financial P&L aspect of it. What I really wanted was the engineering and product management side, is that I hadn't been as close enough to that. So I kept edging my way there. And by the way, that's when Ethan called me to come to Twitch. I took the call and I took the call because I knew there was something that I was not going to get in my current job. And when you're a finance and business and operations person in a video game studio, that's like.

being a development person at a movie studio it doesn't you're never going to get a chance to direct a movie right you're never going to become a executive producer of a video game

by being adjacent in that culture. And so I knew there was a limit to how far I was going to go in a video game studio. I was always going to be the money guy, the business guy, hanging out with the people that make the games. But if you go to a software company, then you can have a chance to expand and actually work on products because at that point, the products are more...

uh utilitarian pragmatic they're web-based it doesn't take you know super esoteric engineering physics code and they're not it's not as much art as it is science and so it's easier to migrate so when ethan called me because i had done this type of framework I knew to take the call, right? This goes to the fact that for most jobs, look, you don't have to meet every criteria on it. They say guys will apply for a job. It's a difference between men and women.

Guys will apply when they meet 30% of the criteria. They'll start considering applying. Probably, let's say, really to get hired, you may need to meet 50% or 70%, but you never have everything.

and the point i don't want to distract matt any further from the slides um i don't want to distract him any further from the slides he's working on but the point here to the question is number one you ask for it number two you move in adjacently in other words you can do 80 of the job and you ask for the last 20 you can do 70 of the job and you ask for the last 30 percent

And so in my case, I could clearly, you know, like in the story I tell, I was clearly able to lead a large team in digital technology. And so the question was, were they willing to risk that I could also figure out the money? And then after I had done that, you know, what was the next thing and the next thing? Because, again, I started only leading engineering. Then it was engineering and product. Then it was engineering product and design. And it's the same story as Matt. You just keep adding.

little bits at a time so um carry on matt go on with step five or the rest of step four when you're ready Actually, I just realized it's a four-step plan. Step five is go look for another job, but we're not going to get as deep into that. So it really is those four steps, like make your declaration, find your JD, do your research.

assess yourself so you know what you have and what you have to go get and then make a plan to go get it and that's i guess the four steps the most powerful part being the first one which is

define your declaration, because once you define your declaration, it helps focus you and things come into relief. So I think that's it. Yeah. Them's all the slides. So. all right so we'll drop out of slide mode here in a second and you can take logan through this logan can introduce himself talk a little bit about where he's at uh yeah I'll blow up the screen here so it's nice and big. I'll put you two guys front and center. All right. Here. Yeah. Have at it.

All right. See, I'm just going to imagine, Logan, you just walked into my office. I had a whiteboard, and I took you through this whole framework on a whiteboard, which is I usually just write. that statement on the whiteboard and then we go off and then you introduce yourself and start talking about what your declaration of intent might be yeah um so my name's logan butler um

Not too shy about my real name being on here, but whatever. I have about seven years of experience mostly working in the aerospace industry, doing design work, mostly interiors. starting off doing lavatories, move to wastewater systems. Ended up at Boeing recent while within the last couple of years doing lighting like cabin lighting design ended up getting laid off. And so.

Really, the past couple years before I actually even got to Boeing, I was considering trying to make a move to a different industry. Aerospace industry. I mean, I. I've got my degree in aerospace engineering, but it was never really a huge passion of mine. It was something that you pick at 18 when you're angsty and leaving home for the first time, right?

But it ended up working out like everything worked out okay. So hey, like, let's go see if we can do something different. I've worked on laboratories for what's five years at this point in time. Let's see what else is out there. I was a big fan of mechanical keyboards at the time and kind of getting into that hobby. And I'm like, well, hey, maybe we could start working on electronics. And eventually I did get my my out of the lavatories.

and started working on the lighting system stuff. And I'm like, okay, this is even closer to some of those electronic systems that I was kind of looking at, but it's still in the aerospace industry. it moves slowly and that kind of rubs me the wrong way sometimes um and now finding my fun employment um i figure now is as good a time as any to try to push hard for

that industry change that I've been considering for the past X years. That's awesome. When you talk about electrical engineering, Is there like I can think of there's lots of different industries that need electrical engineering, like you said, lighting systems. Is there a specific industry? Electrical engineering seems still pretty vague to me. Is there a target industry or maybe a top three that you would get excited about?

Consumer electronics is still like a pretty big industry itself, but I like the idea of something that's high rate moves a lot of product in time where like. you make a mistake and suddenly it becomes kind of this big process where in the aerospace industry, for instance, like if you make a mistake, you've still got like six months to fix that problem until the product actually gets there. I like...

things that are fast-paced where you can kind of learn quickly and if you're not careful, you can get easily overwhelmed. That's something that I've always been... drawn to is is drowning myself in something that i don't understand so what is that like computer peripherals or i'm just thinking about electrical hardware consumer electronics yeah turn over quickly i mean maybe cell phones yeah i mean consoles are coming out a couple years now so yeah like

And those are the sort of things that I've been applying to recently is I see openings at Microsoft. I see every once in a while, I see something with Amazon that strikes that same vein.

Yeah, there's a handful of industries nearby that hit that. Xbox team, Surface team at Microsoft are ones that I'll always apply to. Awesome. And is the role... engineering design design engineering product management is there a version like what um the specific role what do you want to spend your days doing i think i want to Stay in design. Ideally, I want to be in product development. That's something that I've always enjoyed, developing something new.

Rather than some of like sustaining work, like working on the consistent line, like surface X, whatever, and just kind of seeing that.

product through its lifespan i kind of like to be on the front end of that product development cycle so that'd be hard hardware pm yeah like product management in the hardware space sure you know the the guys that did design the surface for example look at the hinges and look at the placement of the cameras and and do all that design work that's really what you want to be doing yeah

Okay. So hardware product management and consumer electronics. And I know it's, if you don't have a job, it's probably as soon as possible. Right. To get that job, you got to give yourself a little... time so yeah um i i think it's got to be within a couple years i've got enough buffer i'm living comfortably enough right now that i can afford to

take time i guess um but i guess like yeah that that job if i could get it within a couple years like that would be great well you should be able to get it sooner than that let's say by the end of 2021 yeah yeah by herd immunity By the time I get vaccinated. Yeah, there you go. The first office you want to go back into. Yeah. All right. Awesome.

So the nice thing about defining hardware PM and consumer electronics by the end of 2021, that's specific enough you can go out and find some JDs, right? Sounds like you've already applied for a handful. Yeah. Have you gotten any interviews? No, not yet. Okay. So there's something that they're not seeing in your resume that's probably making them pass them over or go somewhere else. Okay. But you do have the job description.

Okay, awesome. Do you actually have them? Not on hand right now, unfortunately. Sorry. Well, so maybe we could pull one up or find one. uh if they're not too hard to get because it would help to look at one and specifically the the next step is the harder step it's a balance sheet assessment let's say let's say you have the job description you know what it is then you have to do some self-assessment maybe this is where chat

could really help as well or in the dialogue in terms of what what do you need what are you not getting why are you not getting what what's the difference between your resume and those job descriptions where the gaps are Right. Probably should have pulled some of these ahead of time. Sorry. Oh, that's OK. I'm curious because I know a little bit about Logan's background and resume. But yeah, it's go ahead, Logan. I guess most of these right now are mechanical engineer positions. Not quite.

The ones you're finding or the ones? Yeah. Well, the ones that I'm applying for right now. Oh, they're all mechanical engineering. That's not PM. It's not product management, is it? You're right. Yeah. Yeah. um i the intent was that i could get just getting my foot into the door because most of the uh to get into this industry a lot of times they want experience in high rate products. So kind of the hope was to use that as the stepping stone to push myself forward.

Yeah, well, actually, you just described one of the requirements that you don't have, right? Yeah, yeah. So you just, at least on that high rate, high turnover of hardware design, like, well, that's something that... let's say if you did have that in from the aerospace industry and you're like yeah i know arrows it takes a long time to make a plane but i work on this very specific thing that turns over and we have to crank these things out all the time

then you could check that box to go to a different industry because it's the rate that you're looking for. Okay. So it could be there. So what are other high rates? now there could be jobs in are there any jobs in your industry where you could i know you want to get out of aerospace but you're highly qualified for aerospace if there is a job in aerospace that would have that high rate would that be worth looking at to to fill that part as an interim job i haven't seen many

high rate production jobs in aerospace. I think if anything, they would be in the defense side. And I don't particularly want to be in defense. probably drones iterate faster than anything like commercial toy drones or the camera drones i think those come out with like new new products every year it's a great example is is one one place in true aerospace but yes Physical vehicle engineering is a slow cycle. So the question would be, could he take that somewhere else? Maybe.

Right, to something that's going to be faster cycle. Well, and then the other question is, is this the requirement of high rate engineering? more of a requirement for a mechanical engineering role than it would be for a product design role? Or is that the same requirement? Because the job, if you're doing mechanical engineering i don't know maybe it is maybe it's not but that doesn't sound exactly the same as product management or hardware product management

where you're talking to customers, looking at an existing product, figuring out what's working, what's not working, what the next rev of it's going to be. That seems a little different than mechanical engineering where i assume if it's like software engineering and product management kind of gives you a spec and you need to figure out how to design it and how to actually implement it

So from our previous discussion in your statement, you said you wanted to go upstream a little bit more on the design side than the implementation engineering design side. So I guess the question is, is the high rate of turnover a requirement for the product management role? From what I have seen, yes. In these same types of industries, that is.

So this is a good test case because Logan's trying to make a hard move, right? Aerospace is a very narrow, highly specialized field. His degree is in aerospace. His work history is in aerospace. So just comment for people. because there's a lot of people out there i want to change jobs this that the other if we can help logan figure out how to make this move it's a lot his is a lot harder because he's got a unique specialization

And in a field that, like, it's not general applicability. Matt, a couple avenues to pursue. His most recent work has been on lighting. that's where i was gonna go next could go to other lighting systems um rvs car interiors those are at least a model every year like a plane is every decade a car is every year Well, I was also thinking about if you wanted to get like Phillips.

As an example of a lighting company, the Philips Hughes product is very software oriented. They have a lot of video game and entertainment tie-ins. So can you go to someplace like Philips, get closer to lighting design? which would get you closer to TVs and entertainment experiences. Because once you get like a television or. a set-top box or anything in the video game or that hardware space, which could be peripherals as well, like most of Xbox started from Microsoft's mouse and keyboard.

company like all the guys that got to make a console they started out making the microsoft mouse and keyboards and such such like that so kind of hitting lottery I'm like a keyboard designer and suddenly I get to build Xbox. Somebody nailed it. Nailed it. Exactly. Welcome to Millennium Campus circa 2000. It's like, what?

I get to do what? But that's another great path. And I remember getting pitched by the Phillips Hughes guys when we were at Xbox and they were doing all sorts of immersive lighting in the bedroom sort of thing that they've continued to do.

but maybe that's a path right because just this whole notion of you just you just scooch adjacent matching over a little bit yeah yeah so yeah i i have applied um to phillips a few times uh looking at their uh toothbrush division actually yeah or even their ultrasounds yeah their ultrasound machines by getting into some of their other medical stuff because that's not quite as high rate as iphones um but it's not low rate like airplanes are

somebody in chat has nailed this you want to go somewhere where you can start getting with the internet of things connection yeah so any any place where the lighting you've done waste systems you've done other stuff where you can design a system that has the online control component. So whether that's household lighting, vehicle lighting, nothing to do with lighting, but something with IoT.

Because those systems get updates and have a software component and have much more of a product piece to them. I'm sorry, what about security systems? Oh, yeah. Home security systems, that's another one. you'll get into cameras there too which is yeah cameras ring would be a good target company um so the other thing I also wonder about autonomous vehicles. Of course, I thought of Tesla, but there's all the startups. We had Phil Compton on here talking about his autonomous vehicle startup.

But those are much more product jobs because they're so software heavy. All the software that's in a plane is so tightly managed and regulated. Yeah, I think... The thing that I've found most helpful for getting traction when you're applying or you're looking for a job is there's a combination of an open role and knowing somebody.

right so it's adjacency in roles but also adjacency in relationships to a certain extent yeah like uh ethan didn't actually call me when he went to hire me because he didn't know me but he knew lenny And Lenny called me and thought about me. And I wasn't planning that. I didn't even thought about Twitch or streaming video because I was in Halo making video game studios. I figured if I went somewhere else, I'd go to another video game studio. It never occurred to me.

that I would go to video streaming. But Lenny knew me and Lenny knew Ethan. So what we're doing here is we're coming up with lots of different adjacent paths.

but which one should you choose? You should choose the one where you can get there the fastest because this isn't the destination. This is the... the stepping stone to your final destination right because you have to get transition from where you are and like ethan said it's a hard it may be a hard move from what you've been doing to quick turnover

you know video game lighting rigs from phillips or whatever your dream job is in that in that time range and there may be a step in between but that step in between i would say don't don't be shy or bashful about you know, leverage your network, find out what's available, right? We always, I always, a lot of people say, oh yeah, this is my problem with the passion thing. It's like the job you have is a match.

And you're only one. It's like a relationship between a company and a marketplace and you, and you both have to choose each other. And so you can have all the dreams, aspirations, and passions you want. You're half the equation. The other equation is the marketplace. Is there somebody that wants you? Is there someone that at this particular time, and I kind of talk about, you're architecting serendipity.

right it's almost random when these things come together and when they do it's amazing but you can almost never predict it what you can just kind of do is increase your luck or increase your chances so while on paper you can look at toothbrushes or toothpaste or whatever uh it also depends on who do you know and how fast can you get there right yeah um and and then being open to it but see again

I only took Ethan's call because I knew that I wanted to get product and engineering experience. So when, you know, Lenny called me and says, Hey, would you be interested in this? I wasn't looking for a job at all. I wasn't, I wasn't. interested in that. I would never have taken that call if I didn't have this framework in my head. But then when the framework comes in my head, okay, all of a sudden that fits.

So if you have this in your head, we don't know right now whether it's, you know, we've just brainstormed all these different angles you could take. But if you start networking towards those, start investigating those, start going to lectures on those, find friends who know those dudes, start doing stuff to generate stuff, this framework will help you parse.

recognize things to lean into and things to say yes to. So a couple of quick things there, just on a networking viewpoint. I'm always talking about networking. When I needed to hire Matt, we had an open role. I talked to my team, and one of the biz dev leaders, a guy named Lenny Simon, knew Matt, as did, who was the woman, Teresa?

Somebody else you'd work. There were two people on my team who knew Matt and recommended him. And one of them reached out to him. And so networking cuts both ways is an interesting point for the whole channel. The reason to build a big network and to stay connected to people is I found Matt through my network. He found a job through his network. And that cut both ways. And so having that big network is super valuable. And that's why I encourage you to keep in touch with people. And obviously.

I had to have a good enough reputation with Lenny, this gentleman none of you have ever seen or met, that he felt like he could recommend working with me to one of his friends. And obviously, it probably meant a lot to Matt that multiple people that he knew were saying, oh, yeah, we work for Ethan. You should check it out.

because he had a good job he was in a good job now he was open to a move because he had this framework of other skills he wanted to learn but he was in a good job and you know possibly probably i i don't know if a recruiter had cold called matt on our behalf and said oh it seems like you're qualified would you be interested that's way less compelling than someone he's worked with saying hey Actually, it's funny because I had turned down an Amazon recruiter.

uh previously to this so that scenario specifically had happened ethan yeah but at that point it was largely because they wouldn't tell me what they were hiring for it was this crazy amazon thing was like we're doing all this secret top secret stuff and we want to hire you I'm like, okay, what are we going to do? And they're like, well, I can't tell you. I took my job on those terms, but I was in more desperation than you.

I did take my Amazon job where they said, we can't tell you what you'll be doing, but we can tell you you'll make good money. And I'm like, I'm in. I'm in. There you go. But I was at a startup that was taking on water. So it's different. the second thing is uh there are people in chat matt no pressure there are people in chat asking because matt's not reading chat right now he's focused on the show oh yeah sorry uh no that's fine

They're asking if you will take on mentees. So you have you have a clientele base building here for this. Oh, if you want. Yeah, I actually I would love to. I have. So I'm in the midst of writing an article called, Bonnie, you were right. And so my last boss before Ethan was a woman named Bonnie Ross, who's the CBP of the Halo studio. And so I reported Bonnie. Bonnie's great.

And I think about halfway, I was there for six years, and I think about halfway through the first three years, Bonnie got a little frustrated with me because I was still very driven. I still wanted, I was like... you know, just getting stuff done, maybe throwing some elbows. I had a lot of people that liked me, maybe 60, 70% liked me, 20% couldn't care. And like 10% hated me because I was just in that mode where I was just getting lots of stuff done.

And she was like, why can't you know, Matt, you got all this stuff to offer. Why can't you just be a servant leader? Why can't you just make those people around you better? Why do you have to accomplish anything? And at the time, I said the right things. I was like, well, I am being a servant. I like working with people. I'll do pull collaborative. And it wasn't until probably about.

I think about two years ago, honestly, two or three years ago, it was about a year into my time at Twitch. And I realized I wasn't ready to be a servant leader. I still wanted to accomplish things. I still wanted the credit I still wanted to be the guy that did the thing. And I didn't know at the time, but what I should have said to Bonnie was like, yeah, I'm not there yet. That's not me. I'm not your leader, servant, dude. I want the credit for doing things. And I'm over that now.

Like, I don't know what it was. It was some combination of being at Twitch. And I think it was being at Twitch and realizing that as I got that product and engineering experience.

I had to work through others because I was overseeing areas that I had never done before. Up until then, I was always kind of responsible for things. If things went south, I could go in and... basically do the job myself but once you get into big stack engineering ux design all this other stuff i was like man if i don't

If I don't empower these people and get these teams going in the right place, we are dead in the water. And somehow that diversity of accountability and disciplines just knocked it into my head that I was nothing. Like, there was nothing I was going to accomplish by myself. Nothing. And since then...

I want nothing more during my day than to get a chance to help somebody else. Because that's the only is there is for me at this point. And so that's why I want to write this article. It says, Bonnie, you were right. I just wasn't ready. But I know, no mentees and talking to anybody, I'm happy to do it anytime, anywhere. Well, so if people want your help, how would they contact you?

Just ping me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Actually, you know, I wrote an article on LinkedIn the other day about rhythm of the business. And this is the project that I'm doing to try to kill the rhythm of the business from a finance perspective and do all this mental model, blah, blah. You can read it. It's on LinkedIn. And actually somebody from probably circa 2006 pinged me on LinkedIn and said,

Wow, Matt, I just read your thing and I learned a lot about Rhythm of the Business and I have a Rhythm of the Business project going on right now. She's at Citrix, I believe. And she was like, it was really helpful. And I was like, that was great. Call me up. You want me to help you with it? Let's go through the exercise of the working backwards mental model and see if it sparks anything for you. So I just do it next Monday. I put Matt's LinkedIn.

in chat so those of you ask you can reach out to Matt there and I do want to comment I I wouldn't normally do this to a guest Logan but I went and looked up your profile on LinkedIn and I noticed that we were not connected. And you've known me a year and heard me preaching about build your LinkedIn network. And you've never connected to me. This, you know, Papa Bear, this is how not to do it. That's step six in my career development. Yeah, it's step zero. Step zero.

LinkedIn makes it difficult to get to the button to connect with people that are over three nodes away or something like that. Yeah, but you're not going to get off. We were two. Yes, if you're far separated, you're screwed. But you weren't. Busted.

yeah busted so i'm gonna out you only because i want people to learn from that it's not about connect to me it's about build your network because one day you'll need it and this is the point i've said this before too logan finds himself between jobs we're helping him i'm gonna get out of the

way and let matt continue that coaching process but um you have to build your network before you need it because now when you need it you need to be using it not building it of course you can work on building it But, you know, if I needed a job today, like I was doing this exercise, the same one Matt recommended, and I was thinking about my goals to reach more people as...

a career improvement advisor right as someone who's an influencer in helping people build their careers and i've realized oh one of the things i need to do is what matt said which is interview some more successful people Well, I need to go use my network now to say, hey, you know, let's shoot for, I don't know if this will happen, but like, what if I wanted to be able to quiz Joe Rogan on how he got to where he is? Could I work my way there through my network?

Maybe, you know, and people like that. Seth Godin, other big names. Could I get 15 minutes with them or, you know, and who could I reach? And so anyway, build your network before you need it is the point. So I'll let you off now. I sent you a connection request to help you out. All you have to do at this point is click accept. One step away. Perfect. I love that example, Ethan, because it is.

finding finding the people that are doing what you want to do and and and go talk to them yeah and you'd be surprised like This person on LinkedIn who was doing this rhythm of the business just saw an article pinged me randomly. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Like, you don't know. You don't know, Ethan. Joe Rogan might say, of course.

another little case study in this my wife and we met at law school um she was very ambitious and at a certain point she wanted to uh get to know she she wanted to get into tech she wanted to get into entrepreneurship and so she heard this will date how old we are that bill gates was doing his first ceo conference what was the ceo summit the ceo summit at microsoft And she just heard that it was happening. And she said, well, maybe I'll organize a bunch of students to go like, I don't know.

direct parking or just volunteer at the CEO Summit. She just wanted to find a way into the CEO Summit. So she sent an email to Bill at Microsoft.com, right? And said, hey, Bill, I heard you're doing a CEO Summit. I'm this, you know, a 2L law student.

washington law school and i want to do stuff um somehow it got to somebody who took her up on it and then she went to it and i remember she invited me because we knew each other in law school we weren't together yet and i remember i was so this is probably 1997 and i was a mic runner for in the auditorium at the first CEO summit with CEOs from around the world. I'm just running, you know, the guy with the microphone when they were asking questions from the audience and running all around.

wow what a networking opportunity oh my god a room full of ceos all right not exactly but it's a fun story but my wife who's way better at this than me identified patty stone cipher who ended up founding the Gates Library Foundation. And she just identified Patty as someone she could work with. She went back to law school, created an entire women in law and women in tech. student group to invite Patty Stonecipher to come speak. She created an entire women in law and tech speaker series.

so that she could invite Patty Stonecipher and be her host with Patty Stonecipher. Got to know her. Within three weeks, Patty offered her summer internship job at the Gates Library Foundation before they opened the Gates. That was just the Gates Foundation.

library foundation at the side right so that's an example i'm saying this to you ethan this isn't even about logan like you can you you don't know you might get to joe rogan quicker than you think because People in these big positions, they usually go la, la, la, but every now and then they're just like you and me and they're open to stuff.

And, you know, you never know until you ask. And that's a great example of that. Bill at Microsoft dot com. And three months later, through a series of machinations, she's got a job at the Gates Library Foundation working for Patty Stonecipher before they even opened the place. Wow. Wow, that is smart. That's really smart. That was clever. Yeah, she's clever that way. Anyway. back to you logan um i actually don't know how i mean

You've got to find a path. We probably should have grabbed the specificity beforehand to actually break down these specific things. We've identified high rate turnover as one of those gaps. So maybe that's an interim step. I would encourage you that. The value of this exercise is not at the level we're speaking about it. It's at the next level of super granular, like line by line. Gotcha.

um it and it really is ba mba whatever talk to people like you really do have to go like like you're being a product manager or a feature person like you are the software what features do you have what features do you not have uh to go get that job and then that'll get you really really specific on kind of what you need i also i'm just gonna there's another story um i have found

To a certain extent, and I think this is a psychological thing or just a serendipity in the universe thing. But there is something very empowering about just having that focus. And having the faith that once you have the focus and you know you're working towards the focus, it will happen. And I have... I told the story about going to Xbox Live. The first time I did this, I went to Xbox Live.

um the time i did it before then is what brought me to at t wireless and that was the first time i tried this and it didn't make any sense it felt like magic it was serendipitous i'll just tell the story because i do believe there's something in putting things out there to the universe so

i was a junior law associate at a law firm in roanoke virginia don't ask me how i got there i got there and i was like i gotta get back to seattle i'm like done with this east southern coast it's great but whatever i want to go back And I said very specifically, I want to be an attorney in-house legal department at a big tech firm on the West Coast in the next two years. It was the first time I did this.

exercise and i said okay how do i do that how do i really increase the chances of doing that and the only way i knew how to kind of guarantee the profile that that would happen was to become a patent attorney. Remember my undergrad background? Yeah, philosophy in French. They don't let you sit for the batonet bar unless you have basically the equivalent of a bachelor's in science, a BS, or its equivalent. But it gave me something to focus on.

Because then what I did is I literally just started taking online chemistry courses, online algebra courses. I took... three semesters of college level chemistry with a one-year-old and a two-year-old while billing 80 hours a week in a shitty law firm in Roanoke, Virginia, to get enough credits to try to sit for the patent bar so that I could then get a chance of getting a job back.

in Seattle. I don't know if you knew this, Ethan, I actually signed up to get a master's of IT administration from the University of Virginia. so that I could learn Java and all these tech skills, not because I wanted to do it, because I wanted to sit for the patent bar. So what it did is it gave me this path and this focus, and I started doing all this stuff, and like two months into it,

Just got a call from a headhunter. And they were like, hey, would you be interested in coming back to Seattle? Have you heard of AT&T Wireless? And I was like, oh, yeah, AT&T Wireless, where I did a deal with all these five attorneys and I rattled off all their names.

Yeah, you know those people? I'm like, yeah, I know them. I cut a deal with them when I was over there and blah, blah, blah. And it was 28 days from that phone call until my first day on the job in Redmond Town Center at AT&T Wireless in-house in their legal department. in Seattle, and they moved my whole family back from Virginia. So technically, there's no rational connection between getting that headhunter job. But in my mind, it's still I put out all this energy and focus and effort.

and it happened. Now it won't happen every time. But I do think there's something about bringing the world into relief, seeing the opportunities, putting yourself out there, communicating to people in your network indirectly, directly about what you need and what you're looking for. And if you do that consistently, I think that's how things happen. Anyway, a little bit of the architecting serendipity piece. So, Logan.

before we turn the floor open to people in chat and people who are watching do you have questions for either Matt or me based on his method or next steps you need to take I think I need to go back and look at the jobs that I've been applying to or the ones that I'm interested in anyway and kind of see like what it takes to get to check all the boxes at this point. The framework all makes sense.

to me um and if if your your messages are open then i'll definitely hit you up if i got any questions as i'm going through the process yeah it's also good to see if you can I mean, the big thing is, would you hire you? Right. Yeah. And if people, if you're asking people to hire you and they're not hiring you, you should ask them why, if you can. Don't tell me if they'll tell you or find somebody else who's, you know, maybe that's part of your your networking and your review as well. Right. Like.

I'd be happy to introduce you to my friend who used to design trucks in engineering. Now he's in Amazon. Maybe he would take a look at your resume and some of the jobs you're applying for and give you an honest read. You can try to make the big jump by getting people to believe in your transferable skills. That usually requires a relationship or someone like Matt has suggested who is in your field and says, oh, I know these skills translate.

It doesn't always work, but there's no problem mixing in a big gamble or a big swing with a more reliable approach. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

yeah chat says cast a wide net when applying so yeah uh yeah but leverage your network too like i have found in other times in my life applying for jobs if i just apply cold nothing happens if i just ask friends if they know of any jobs nothing happens if i know a friend or connection and there's an open role there's almost always traction but that you got to get that combination of those right yeah yeah

Okay, well, I hope that was helpful. Oh, absolutely. Apparently, it's kind of like... A lot of homework. It's kind of like losing weight, right? It's not that complicated. It's simple. It's just really hard. Yeah. But if you want to make a change, and particularly a change from a narrow specialized industry, it's going to be tricky, but it's not impossible. And this idea of a stepwise plan with a vision.

The vision's a little bit like the Simon Sinek start with why. Well, why I'm doing these things is I want to get to this place. And the other thing you heard from Matt is he never actually got directly to the things he envisioned, but he got to other things like it that were fun. So it got me to the next step. Right. A lot of time where people like I feel like I'm stalled out. I don't know where I'm going. And at that point, you're just like.

You're going to go on an adventure and you're going to be wrong because of that market matching concept. No matter what you think, the world has its own opinions and is in its own state. And so whatever happens to you is going to be a combination of the two. And so knowing where to interact with the world that doesn't really care what you think about it.

And being able to navigate it is kind of the purpose of having that vision in the first place. And again, you end up in a much better place. It won't be where you thought you were going to go. That's almost always the case. I don't know anybody in my generation that is exactly where they thought they would be.

Yeah. I guess best you can do is kind of push towards something that you think you're interested in, right? Sure. And that's progress. Yeah. The other thing, I had a very smart guy who was in Amazon talent leadership. Tell me, the word career path is actually a really bad word. It gives you the idea that everything is linear and takes these steps. Like career ladder or career path makes this idea that there's a line.

and he said you know one one great exercise and it works better for people who've had more career than less but you heard matt doing it is chart your actual career and it's more of a web Then at each you'll find you've made weird horizontal moves That you weren't planning on and that took you in unexpected directions And what you can also do is you can look and say, which of these moves or changes did I intend and which of them did I.

were thrust upon me by circumstances so whether i lost a job because the company went on or i lost a job because of my own performance or i got changed from team to team uh in a reorganization it turns out he said and i believe this from looking at my own career that about half your job and role changes will be involuntary

Now, that isn't going to be the same for every person. I'm sure there's somebody in chat who's going to say, oh, I never had an involuntary job change. I've always picked. And there's going to be somebody else who says, I've never gotten to pick. I've always had to just take and then been thrust into situations. But knowing that breaking the image that your career is going to be this nice little linear path will probably help you because it will give you a sense of flexibility and opportunity.

Because if you're expecting this smooth little linear path, I'll take 40 Pink Dragons, who I happen to know her career path. She started, as she's mentioned, in Starbucks. assuming I have it perfectly right, Starbucks offered her a chance to go internal to corporate, but Target offered her a better job pay-wise in their warehouse. So she went to Target.

Target that was sort of a crappy workplace, but it paid a lot. So she stuck that out for a while and then a friend of hers managed to Told her about a role in where she ended up which is medical distribution medical supply distribution medical distribution sounds like a marijuana dispensary which is not what was going on it was before all that um but there she came in as um

supervisor a shift supervisor essentially and then uh very quickly rose within the company so part of it was linear promotion but part of it if you think about starbucks to target Like Starbucks retail to target warehouse. The only real commonality there is managing people. Because being in a warehouse and being at the counter in a Starbucks is very different.

And if you think about either of those to medical supply, well, then it's warehouse to warehouse, but it's a very different industry. So those types of changes are very possible. So, and that's just one example I could rattle off the top of my head. So be open to the fact that you may get those dislocating changes. And Logan, I do think that means when you're trying to escape a narrow industry, you have to cast a wide net. People have said that in chat.

All right, so I don't think anybody put any questions into our Q&A tool. I'll just quickly throw it out to chat because we have a large audience here and we have an expert. uh any questions for us anything we haven't covered things you'd like to know about career changes because we have matt right here and he has this pretty good model that i've posted all the slides um I've posted all the slides in our Discord. Let me tell one other funny story. Please. Is that I did this with somebody who...

who asked that question of how do I get promoted? And he wanted to talk about career change, but again, it was mostly at Amazon, how do I get to an L7? And I was like, okay, well, let's talk a little bit. What do you want to do? And most people, when I do this program with them, I say, well, what's your declaration of intent? What is your role statement? They aren't super crisp.

They don't come just right out with it. It's usually a bit of a dialogue. And well, this is what I've done. This is what I want to do, etc. He was like, oh, I want to go back to India and make a school. Teach the little kids. I want to have a great new modern school in India that I have the skills to run. I'm like, dude, what are you doing?

You know, already, you know, that's great. That's fantastic. You've already filled it. But it was nothing to do with what he, his job, like what he was doing today. The rest of the conversation ended up being about, well, what transferable skills are you getting here? And it was someone on my own team. And by the end of it, I was like,

the hell are you doing here, dude? You got to go get another job. This is stupid. This is not what you or this is what you're going to get out of the role that you have right now. And then you have to go do something else because you're only going to get so far in this organization. Yes, you can get some transferable skills. but you're not ultimately, no one's going to hand you a school.

In India, if you've just been writing app software at Amazon for the last five years, you've got to go get some experience teaching or being in education or being an administrator or doing something. And for some reason in his mind, it was super clear what he wanted to do. And it was super clear what he was doing in his day. But the difference between those had never really been reconciled.

And so this conversation ended up being mostly about how do you reconcile the clarity that you have about what you want to do with how you're spending your day and connect the two. And that's why very often it's kind of like the measure what matters conversation quickly becomes a strategy conversation. Like, what is the output of what you're doing? What are you measuring? How do you know? And they're like, well, we think it's this and why? And then you get into the strategy conversation.

Getting very specific and forcing yourself to get specific in that declaration of intent is kind of like assigning a KPI to a process. It forces you to ask, well, why am I actually doing this? And then that forces you to have more confidence in what you're doing. The other part is when you know what you're looking for and someone asks you, then like.

back to the ethan and i's conversation when i interviewed with ethan hopefully he had this impression or i'm just making it up uh retroactively but we'll find out probably in a better situation to say what please what i wanted and what I was looking for in the relationship. Right. And so I was like what he was after. Yeah. I was like, this is what I mean. He also sent me a spreadsheet about how much damn money he wanted.

That took a little while. I might still have that spreadsheet. You know, I was just, why not be transparent? Like, why play games? So there's a lesson there. I will translate this down to non-real terms. But the job Matt wanted paid $1. That was the pay per year. And he came and asked me for $2. So literally twice the pay. And. i was like oh this this is hopeless like there's no you know it's like the pay range was from like 90 cents to a dollar ten and he wants two dollars and uh

So I have to go tell him, like, hey, buddy, sorry. I and the recruiter were like, hey, there's no way in hell. But the funny thing is, because Amazon's stock was such a dynamo, we hired him in for a dollar. He ended up coming down from $2 to $1 or $1.05. And then Amazon's stock was such a powerhouse during those years, he ended up getting $2 anyway. That's very approximate. Everyone got what they wanted. Everybody got what they needed. Yeah. I knew what I wanted.

Hey, it goes back. We've been talking in chat about Jia Jiang and the book Rejection Proof. And there's someone here who's honestly hitting me up to like manage my Twitter account to give it more value. And I'm totally cool with listening to that proposal. So. The point is you never know where opportunity can come from and those who ask get. So now the questions are coming in. Let's bang through a few real quick.

um logan would you mind if we uh ask you to drop off and i'll blow matt up big on the screen it's been great having you here you're connected to matt if you accept my request you'll be connected to me Maybe in a week or so. Yeah, in a week or so when you get around. Leave you hanging.

Thank you guys so much. Thank you for coming on and being a guinea pig for this. We know all the guests, it takes a ton of guts. They get something out of it, but they also have to be transparent with their lives. And so thank you for doing that. Absolutely. Logan, by the way, is a home brewer, and if it wasn't for stinking COVID, we'd have gotten together a few times already to sample his wares. I've got a cranberry cider that's about to be bottled this weekend that's going to be dynamite.

so and you're speaking 40 pink dragons language there she's a cider hound and uh yeah so we gotta talk anyway thank you for coming thank you guys so much cheers bye Let me play with the displays here real quick. I got to hide myself here. I'm just on Zoom. I don't want to bring up Twitch. No, that's okay. You don't need to. All right. So now you're big. Excellent. You're big and central. And we had a question here.

do hiring managers look at prospective employees trying to make a career pivot differently if they are young or old in other words is it easier for a young person to make the case for a successful transition and While Matt thinks about that, I will then go to the Q&A widget for things people have put in there or voted on rather than chat. But go ahead, Matt. What do you think about that? Does age matter on career pivots? Yes. Okay. Say more. I think...

The first pass of hiring managing and passing, like when you're looking at a huge stack of resumes, it is super easy to dismiss. a large differential if you will and so the more time you spent in industry a it's a bigger differential to go to industry b And so just by virtue of it being a longer period of time in industry A, it looks like a bigger shift. Whereas you've only been out of school for three years, you're like...

Oh, I get it. You were in sales for two years, but now you want to do tech recruiting.

yeah okay that kind of people that's finding you where it's not like you spent 20 years doing that and now you want to go build boats or something totally different so it's how quickly is the perception of the differential and i think just by virtue of time it looks bigger to more seasoned uh resumes that's my there's additional problems as well so let's take someone they've been an industry foo for 20 i agree by the way i agree unfortunately it's harder to shift

it's not necessarily harder to shift when you're older, but it's harder to shift when you've been in a single role for a long time. And what I mean by that is, one of the problems is i i talked to a woman who'd been a physician for 20 years and wanted to go into tech well first there's the problem of like oh wow she wants to go into tech and then second there's a pay problem because

unless someone's also willing to take a big step backwards you get trapped in the situation where whatever it is you've been doing you've been editing You've been a content editor. You've been a salesperson. You've been an architect. You've probably risen in that field to where you're being paid very well in that field. And your skills as you transition jobs probably put you at more of an entry level of whatever the field you're going into is. And unless...

you are in a field with very poor pay and you're going into a field with very high pay at the base level, you're probably going to take a big hit. And so there can be a huge challenge. needing to step across that gap so there's a couple things that make late stage career changes harder um they can happen but someone has to communicate clearly i'm okay starting over

I understand I won't be paid the same. And again, most of these things, what you should have late in your career, and Matt, you can chime in when I'm done here, is you should have a big network. If you've been following the steps I talk about, even before i started streaming my network and linkedin was a couple thousand people now because of people i've met through streaming and my profile whatever it's like 10 000 so that's not fair because i've been building it in a different way

but those couple thousand people could connect me to all kinds of roles and if i went and talked to someone and said hey i want to try a role in this area I could find people who would give me a chance because they know me or they know about my work ethic. And they'd be like, well, yeah, you don't.

seem to know anything about carpentry but we know you're a fast learner and a hard worker and an overachiever so sure we'll give you a saw and some boards like it There's more risk-taking because they can base their assessment not on your skills, but on your character. or your trades. Anything you want to add there, Matt? No, I actually want to ask you a coaching question for me about LinkedIn.

in that uh you said you know like 10 000 i think i have like 800 or 900 or something like that and i'm always wondering what's my criteria for accepting invites because i'm getting pinged with invites all there's like two or three a day yeah i don't know there's something about the retail industry by the way where everybody's trying to sell you stuff so i'd say about half of them are just sales people yep um but i i up until now i had this criteria that said

look, if I'm going to connect you on LinkedIn, I need to know you. Like, have dealt with you, done work with you. Something that if somebody pinged me up later and said, hey, Matt, could you introduce me to this person who's on your network? I would say, oh yeah, sure. There's no way you can do that with 10,000. So your criteria is different and I'm curious about it. So my criteria in the beginning was the same as yours. Do I know you from somewhere?

And then I started streaming and I had people coming to me that, you know, publishing on YouTube and stuff. And I had people coming to me I didn't know. And I made a choice to change my criteria to. okay, are you clearly interested in what I'm doing? And when I get, I decline the salespeople if I can recognize them because for what I do, because I coach people, I get...

lead generation specialists trying to connect to me daily. Oh, we're LinkedIn lead generation. And I'm like, so I decline those. And if someone slips through because they've camouflaged themselves and then I get a message from this says, hi, Ethan, I can really help you with lead generation. I declined that. I didn't remove the connection. So I don't bother to say F off. I just.

remove and i don't block them i just remove and move on but it is true that if someone asked me about someone on my network i may no longer know them right why i've decided i value it is when i need to post something if i ever got to a point or in a situation where i needed to post and say i'm looking for help or i um uh i need help with this thing

I could ask for lead generation help. Sorry. I have a big set of people that's going to reach who have a positive impression of me. And so what I've decided is given what I do. They have a positive impression of me enough that they're interested to follow what I post. Even though I am not a useful connection to them in the sense that I can't recommend them. Got it.

Is this person going to respond to you if you need something? And remember, of course, not everybody will, but a lot of people will. And that's valuable. The other thing I'll say, since you like to help people, I found is really interesting on LinkedIn. It's easy to help people. So I had an old coworker from a pre-Amazon job come to me and say, hey, I want to talk to somebody at Amazon.

about this thing could you hook me up and i was able to reach out to my network and say hey i know this guy he's a hard worker he's very smart you know um can you take a few minutes and talk to him and it's the same that servant leader of like got it okay now that in that case that's two people i did know both of them but neither of them were i like well the one guy worked for me the other guy was just a colleague like i didn't know him well okay

that's cool i was able to make a valuable connection i think i haven't wasted anybody's time if it works out you know so i like that i would generally say a bigger network better than a smaller one but you of course don't want it to be just filled with spam great that's my best advice all right um So I'm going to pin the first question here. We got people to vote. I appreciate that. The first question was, how do you evaluate which transferable skills you could gain from a prospective job?

What do you think about that, Matt? Well, if you've written this declaration, and you've done the balance sheet inventory on your skills so you know what you need and what you have. Then if you look at another job, then it has to be on the list of things you need. If the thing you need is a transferable skill in and of itself, that feels like one step too far.

It feels like maybe you shouldn't be looking to get a transferable need out of your next job unless you're trying to do like two hops because that means you would have your current job or role. You're looking for another job that'll get you transferable skills that you then get to the next job. Right. And so those transferable skills. would not be on your balance sheet. Actually, the skills for the final job would be on your balance sheet.

So it might be easier if there's an actual example. Well, OK, so there's no example here. But you really gave an example, which is I want to get to P&L management and I'm sitting in biz dev. And so the path for you was biz dev to. revenue ops, revenue ops to finance, finance to P&L. Oh, I see. And the transferable skill.

was oh well first i'll learn about revenue operation i'll learn about how revenue gets booked and how we collect and so on and then i'll learn about managing money from a financial perspective like what is a p l statement and how do we

know, you know, how do we categorize everything? And then finally I'll learn how to drive it. Well, so then you're back to the adjacency. Yeah. So. the question was how do you evaluate which transferable skills you could gain from a job it's essentially what does that job do right what is that job going to teach you and so i don't think i think this is like a

A relatively simple question, which is you're going to learn how to do that job and then which parts of those are applicable to the next job or adjacent. Yeah, but it has to go back to your original profile in this framework to go back to the original profile. So I need these five things. And then you imagine yourself in this job. Am I going to only need two things at that point?

Because I knocked out three. Or to your point about a two pot, does one of the things, I can't get all the way from engineer to P&L owner in one jump. Right. So I need to go somewhere that gets me closer to money and to making money before I can get that. And so you may need in a, in a big job move to plan out a two pot to your point. The only thing that I worry about two putts or three putts or four putts is that it gets too extenuated. At a certain point...

You're just going to want to say this end goal, even if it's only two putts away, that is the goal. I'm not going to worry about what's after that. I don't know. I see your point, right, which is... Theoretically, I could try and plan a career to be a Grammy winning artist. I just have absolutely none of the skills. And so it's so hard to envision that path. Maybe I better. Right. Three to five year horizon.

Pick something a little closer in, right? That's right. So the other thing I said here, and I just have to do an ad for it. I posted the link. I'm an advisor to this company, Astrum U. and astrum is trying to figure out how to use ml to be able to answer this question so basically um if we know what the the idea of the company is if we know what

makes a successful product manager across thousands of product managers and thousands of profiles, and we know you, we can actually both tell you in theory using a big multilinear regression.

you know ml model we can tell you this is what makes a successful product manager this is what you have and what you don't have and these are interim steps that will get you there so we're trying to do what matt has written up in slides Astrum is trying to turn into EML that can tell you what jobs and what certain certifications or education will move you towards where you're going. Was this just a setup for Astromew, Ethan? It was like this whole time you're like...

Here it turns out we're starting a company to make this actually use big data to do this career planning. Wow. It is actually, Matt. I didn't realize until after we talked through it that your career planning.

framework is what Astrum is trying to automate. They're trying to use big data. I'm a PM for Astrum without even knowing it. You are. Well, I tell them the same thing, right? I tell them that... as a coach and as a streamer i do this as a at an artisan level right in other words i do it one-on-one just like you do by listening to people by talking to them by learning what they want and trying to help them

and astrum's trying to automate what i do just like trying to automate and that's why i find it really interesting yeah of course it's super hard right they're they're far away from this um but it it is interesting because um you know they're trying to tease out what is a degree worth if you go get it in other words matt to your point Part of what they would be able to do is look at all the philosophy majors and all the French majors. No, no. And say, look.

People who majored in philosophy and French, this is what they were best at over the arc of their careers. This is what those education, people who chose that education and the grades you got in each class. This indicates your potential field of where you're most likely to thrive. And so you could have come out and been like, well, I have no skills. And they could have at least said, well, it's true. But it turns out you have some hidden skills under there.

that are gonna tend to you know lead you back i mean back to the artisan point that's why i went to law school because i was like well i can argue with people and read a lot yeah go that's my that's those skills i got It's interesting. If you take that big enough in the data set, then doesn't it just become like your career fate? What is your race background? Where do you come from? Of course, that can be argued. But remember, there are choices. There are choices that...

It may say, for example, that you had a better chance of becoming a lawyer than of becoming a banker, but that you could choose to go to law school. And that's going to take you with 80% probability to a successful corporate law degree. But had you gotten an MBA with a finance specialization, that would give you a 70% chance of ending up as a Wall Street trader. and you could decide and say you know i'd rather i'm more interested in that so i'm going to go down that path

It's like a predictive 23 and me for your career. Correct. That's what they're aiming for. DNA forecast. Yeah. And, you know, we have a data scientist, a strong data scientist. here in chat saying look this is hard yes super hard takes a ton of data and it's still only going to be x amount accurate but i love i think it's

The reason to pursue it is so many people end up guessing and they end up backing into careers and they end up in careers they're unhappy with no idea how to get out. And so in theory.

if what astrum is trying to do was all built out we could have dropped logan into it and said okay this is where you're at this is what you're closest to and these are what certifications or roles take you to the next step and do it based on data rather than our opinion it just isn't there yet it just there isn't you know but i think it for those who know ml or big data there's no reason this

I don't see any theoretical blocker to this working. I see practical data and volume problems so far. All right, we have a few more questions. It's late. We'll make them quick. We sometimes speed run these. Is there a negative outlook from industry professionals on people who want to transition from education to industry? So I take this to mean that they are teachers, professors.

Or somewhere else, well, it says, who want to transition from education to industries? Is there a negative outlook from industry? Thoughts on that? My first reaction is outside of PhDs in data science, yes. It's normally thought I agree people in education look there's stereotypes whether they're fair or not and People in education are thought to be impractical that they're in education because they love theory and they love having summers off

And neither of those is highly correlated to busting ass and making money. And, you know, so you have to disprove that somehow. And it depends on the discipline, of course. My father was a professor, was a tenured professor. So I have a bias in saying this. It used to have a joke that says, you know, the the. Politics and academia are so vicious because there's so little at stake. And I used to think that was a joke, like funny. And then I realized, no, it's because there's no reason.

to compromise right there is so little at stake there's no reason to compromise so you can just stay forever if you know anything about trying to get stuff done across multiple stakeholders in a corporate environment you have to compromise instantly right away So that's like, I wouldn't hire my dad from my experience with tenured academics.

Yes, there is a bias. Look, it's overcomable. Like anything, by the way, when there's an impediment, it's overcomable. There are all kinds of biases, right? There's biases of people. Okay, we all know this. There's biases against women, people who aren't white.

at least in america there's also biases against age okay like the gray mop up here not an asset um in most circumstances you know better to be like matt with some color left in the that's why we wear hats that's why we are yeah um and there's biases against academics uh but they're all overcomable So, all right. So that's our answer to that. We're going to keep going. What advice would you give someone?

who made a lot of impressions in a niche industry, but then dropped off all communication, i.e. left LinkedIn, nervous about reaching out to old contacts again. So this looks like somebody who pulled back from being active on social media.

I would advise them to read the book Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang and to talk to Maximus, who's here in chat, both of whom will tell you, what the hell the worst they could do is ignore you like reaching out to old contacts you may have to gut up and take a little rejection but that is super important um realizing it's both liberating and concerning when you realize most other people are not thinking about you at all.

Thank you. That was going to be my next point. And you nailed it. Please go. People like if you get passed over for a job or nobody reads your post or nobody does your thing. You know what? There's actually scientific psychology things, even when you're talking to someone directly.

Like, Ethan, let's say you and I were in this physically in the same place. We're kind of virtually in the same place. You're watching my lips. You care about what I say. You will understand about 50 percent of what I say because you're actually. In the back of your mind, running in a bunch of processes, you're thinking about chat, you're distracted, you're multitasking, you're going to be parsing everything I say for flight or fight response. Is it threat? Is it good? If anybody, right?

Even in normal course, people ignore half of what you say. And then just take that to the extreme when they're not paying attention to you. Why would they pay attention to you? And so that's both depressing because you have to do so much to break through and have any human connection in your life because people don't care about you until you create that connection. And then they do. And it's wonderful, but it's really hard.

But on the other side, don't take it personally. Literally, it's not personal. Nobody cares about you. And so don't worry about it and just keep going. And then you'll find a handful of people that do care about you and then you'll really enjoy that. Yes, that is so true. And I just love that you nailed the fact. We all think that...

If somebody doesn't get back to us, it's because they know we dropped off communication and they know we're nervous and they no longer respect us and blah, blah. And what it actually means, they didn't see your damn message. They were busy that day. They're not on LinkedIn anymore themselves. so many different things.

There's a great show on Hulu called Dave, which is about the rapper Lil Dicky, if anybody wants to go watch Dave. And the whole first episode is he gives this rapper $10,000 to lay down a cut on one of his albums, and the guy doesn't get back to him. And then he ends up going and accusing his new friend of ripping him off and setting him up for the 10,000. And it's this big, huge drama. And he's like, yeah, he changed his phone number. Yeah, I so believe it.

It's so, so yeah, my advice is reach out to all those contacts and when some of them don't get back to you, move on to the ones that do and no harm. All right, a couple more quick questions. We'll call it a night because we're having a talk here, and I'm having Thai yellow curry for dinner, and I know it's on the stove right now, so we're managing against... plating time for the curry what valuable skills or assets can i take in in my future career from a current tier one part-time role

being mostly focused on university the job is only to survive but i also don't want to spend hours just getting paid without growing great question uh so there's a book called um the art of possibility by benjamin zander who is the director of the Boston Philharmonic. He's actually wrote this book about career development, but he's a musician. He's a musical teacher. And there's a great chapter in there called...

It's something about leading from any chair in the orchestra. Basically, you could be the third trumpet, you could be not in a great... place, not in a position of power or in a specific area. But if you're working with other human beings in any system, you have an incredible opportunity to learn how to be a leader. within that system and learn how to show up and be within that system so like

Right now, I started working. I just fell into it. It's a long story. But I'd never done customer support really before. But I started working within customer support. So you kind of go native. You learn how to work with the people. And as long as you're working with people, I'd say... the number one skill you can get is how do you become an influential leader of people from any chair in the orchestra? And you have that opportunity no matter where you are in any job that you have.

People are asking, can you lead from any role? Leadership varies, but you can have influence. Part of leadership is influence. It's not just positional power. So Matt was an executive with me at Twitch. He's an executive now at Toys R Us. I'm an executive, blah, blah, blah. Positional power means you report to me and theoretically I can order you.

round that's actually not super strong power people think it is um but uh influence and having people trust you you can get from anywhere and so if they believe in you and they see you working hard and contributing and they respect you respect is stronger than orders

And if you really think about that in your own life, if you think about someone you truly respect, it might be your mom or dad, it might be someone else in your life that you have great respect for. And then you think about your boss, who you may actually like. And your boss tells you to do something. Your mom says, that's not a great idea. I think you should say no. Who has the real power there? Really? It's respect is more.

and so i would say in this case where someone has a part-time job uh what you can show in the transferable skills is first how understanding the first thing and oh god i I don't talk about this much, but it's a rant of mine. Particularly in jobs like that and early in your career, most people struggle to just get down the basic idea that they're being paid to show up and do work and be helpful. And I know like this sounds so fucking simple. My stepson, Jack, took a job at a local ski shop.

handing out the rental skis, adjusting the bindings and giving the skis out. And because he shows up every day and he does this job with a smile and he doesn't F off too much when there's work to do, they adore him. at this ski shop and they want to you know keep him through the year and blah blah now is this like a huge accomplishment is he going to you know cure cancer because he's moved up at the ski shop no but

It turns out simply showing up for the job and doing it and trying to be helpful and having a smile on your face is so fucking rare. And now you've got me cussing because I'm pissed off. It's so rare. that the first thing you can do is just learn to be a decent worker. Show up, do your job, ask how you can help, leave with a smile on your face, be nice to the customers. Those skills are enormous.

And so many people want to go with an attitude like I'm not paid enough and I'm tired. I'm hungover and I don't really like this place. Your subs suck anyway. I'm only working here for college. You're no fun. And then you show up late and you never help out. And like, well, I took the garbage out last time. Make Cindy do it. Take the fucking garbage out.

Ethan, you know where I learned the most about all the work that I've done in tech since after college? I waited tables for six years. Yeah. And when you wait tables... you know how to produce you're moving you're or you're just not going to get the the the gig tomorrow right yeah you're just not going to invite you back you're out like it's super quick and it's super fast and i remember at one point i was trying to be

really smart. I was like, how can I just, I don't know, bus tables faster, batch all the dishes. So I do the dishes. And then I realized at a certain point, you just have to move faster. You just have to work harder. You just have to hustle. Come in a little earlier, do the things, do the hustle. And I remember that just...

taught me forever more after waiting tables for six years, that was probably the number one skill, right? So if you're talking about you got a part-time job in another gig in another role, I probably learned the most transferable skills that I used in big tech running Halo.

from doing dishes in an italian restaurant in wallingford if you really do the you know the etymology of it or and go back and figure out where did that skill come from well it came from working really hard and showing up and doing what you just talked about yeah yeah so answering the question what you can take away is learn how to work and look i screwed this up okay real quick story i went oh

geez did the answer ever come through how long i have until dinner i'm sure it must have but i was busy talking We got off into what kind of curry and how spicy it would be and all of that. I'm not sure a time. Oh, 10 minutes. Shit. Okay, we're doing this fast. Wait, is this what your wife gets on chat to tell you that it's time for dinner? Well, my wife's one of the moderators, so she enforces keeping people in line.

Not that we don't have an army of people here who would do that. I have three to five minutes. We only have one more question with more than one vote, so we'll do that and wrap it up. Wrap it up, Domi, for those who know the reference. What would your advice be for jumping from an intermediate role to a senior role across companies when most recent work is restricted by NDA? What is the best way to sell yourself when you can't talk about specifics? It says game industry.

So my belief on this being super honest is you can say so much more than you think you can. You can find a way to describe anybody who has an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. They come in and like, yeah, you're not going to get a job if you're like, so what did you do? You know, welcome to the company, Fred. Tell me about a time when. you know whatever you faced a challenge with rendering at 60 frames a second and you're like well

My last 10 years are under NDA, and back in the day, we only rendered it 30 frames a second, so I guess I can't talk about that. Okay, you're not going to get the job. You have to find a way to talk about your business. And what you accomplished and the challenges you faced without going into the specifics of.

how it let's say you were working on grand theft auto for rockstar well at rockstar we have a proprietary technology blah blah blah blah blah no you can't say that but what you can say is i'm very familiar with the challenges of rendering a game at 60 frames a second

And the challenge is composed of A, B, C, and D. And I worked on these parts. And I can't talk about the specifics of how we solve this or that, but I can tell you the process. And you have to... you have to find okay so if you have this problem and i'll let matt add to this it'll be our last question um if you know you have an nda you have to think about before you go into the interview you shouldn't be like

Well, I wonder what I can talk about in this interview while they're asking you questions. You need to put in the work up front to say, okay. What are the skills I learned in this job? What are the things I'd want to share? And how can I share them in a way that respects the NDA?

but you have to pre-plan that so that you're like bang bang bang and you're prepared so whether you mock interview or you just go through it in your head you you have that that nda is your burden and you have to work around it And you still have to respect confidentiality. Go ahead, Matt. Well, I really like your preparation point about having the speaking points around the NDA.

i know in the video game industry a lot of times people work on undisclosed projects and a lot of games get cancelled so you'll be working on a game and again it'll get cancelled You can still talk about what you did usually without talking about the game or the project just by saying it's a generic project. Or I liked, Ethan, your example of we did the rendering. I know this pipeline. I've worked on this tool set.

And unless it's I'm having actually a hard time imagining the thing that like at Microsoft and Xbox that would have been. so incredibly secret that we wouldn't have allowed anybody to talk even around it outside of Maybe early HoloLens stuff, I can't really think of anything in my 12 years of being at Xbox that would have qualified for that.

I actually don't have much to add to the mechanics of what you said, Ethan, other than to reinforce it specifically for the gaming industry and that you can almost always talk around stuff and like from a financial standpoint.

i don't go out and say unless it was publicly uh declared ethan and i made this much money etc but i can say we raised year-over-year revenues by x percent right to a certain extent so there are those things that you'll rehearse ahead of time you go by percent you can't say revenue grew from 100 million to 200 million you can say we had uh very substantial revenue

Many tens of millions and we doubled it. And that's not and that's good enough. And usually interviewers aren't going to want to aren't going to want to keep drilling in past that point because they don't want to know. yeah any good interviewer knows that they don't want to get sued by the way i had this happen i hired a guy um i hired a guy his old company sued us feeling that they made the claim that

That by coming to our company, he was violating his non-compete, not his NDA. And that coming to work for us was inevitably competitive with their business. And they subpoenaed, essentially. my interview notes that were in our system and they went through them line by line and tried to use my interview notes to prove that it was inevitably competitive.

In the end, what this meant is we assigned him to another role for six months. We negotiate first. Understand NDAs are extremely rarely enforced unless you're an executive.

understand second so i'm not saying go violate it i'm just saying realistically nobody has time to come after you second if they do normally the company that's hired you ends up taking up the case of defending you because they want to keep you as an employee number three it ends up being negotiated and all that ends up happening usually again absent very very high level executives is some minor adjustment of your job duties or signing you know putting you in a role where they say well

he has proprietary rendering knowledge. He can't work on the rendering engine of your game. He has to work on whatever. This all ends up being negotiated by great attorneys uh like matt once was uh before he moved on this ends up being negotiated it's very very rare and again i'm not saying sell your old company out i'm just saying we were taught at amazon

never ask someone proprietary knowledge and if they start giving it to you actually ask them to stop that's right that's right because you don't want it you don't want the liability When you're junior in your career, everyone wants to know more secrets. And then there's a certain point where you're like, I don't want to know anything. All that does is get me in trouble with the SEC. Yeah, I want to know, really.

Anyway, so Matt, thank you so much for being here. It was so much fun. It was wonderful to see you. I'm sure he's probably still listening. Logan, if you're still there, thank you for coming on the show, being a guinea pig. uh for a great process if any of you missed it or joined in late the slides are in our announcement of discord i will get around to posting them on my website as well if you're hearing this later on youtube they'll be on the website under free resources

Assuming you're okay with that, Matt. Oh, yeah. Totally. Great. So we're going to help a lot of people get the career of your dreams. We have a great show coming up next Thursday where we're going to talk about why executives are scary and hard to work with. and how to do that effectively. Well, it turns out a lot, you know, it happens and people are intimidated and we're going to talk about it and how to get over it and how to be effective. And I hope you all come back for that.

and matt um still look forward i'm sure we'll catch up out on the trail sometime we're almost past the covet nightmare so when the snow melts i got my first jab I did because I volunteered. I volunteered. You spend a day volunteering at like a Swedish clinic or something and you volunteer and you help everybody else and you do it and they give you a job. Wow.

all right. Yeah, that's fair. Like you're working, you're working the clinic. That's very clever. I like that. Of course, my wife figured it out, right? This is the Bill Gates CEO. she's smarter than me that's why all right so we're gonna call it a night everybody uh let's see do we have uh I'm just looking real quick. Devin's not around. So I always forget to do a raid. I would normally move people over to Devin's world if you're interested, but go forth, improve your careers.

have a wonderful evening everybody matt i'll kill the zoom i'll talk to you later but thank you for everything thank you everybody really appreciate it thanks for the opportunity to help cheers matt thanks um So for everybody else, I've dropped him off, obviously. One second. I'm going to go ahead and go. I have Thai yellow curry to go eat. This has been a great show.

And so much fun. Thank you all for the time and attention. For the subs, those of you who subbed, it's always appreciated. And everyone else, please improve your careers. Join our Discord. Follow me on LinkedIn. Or connect on LinkedIn. You're all welcome to build your networks. And with that, I will see you next week. Cheers.