Don't Resolve... Make Goals

The day after this entry publishes (December 30, 2020) will be New Year’s Eve. I’m tempted to say “Congratulations – you made it to the end of 2020,” but we both know that:

A: You still have as many as 46 hours (if you’re in the Samoa time zone) for 2020 to get its claws into you. You are not safe – run. Run and hide.

B: The world will not be magically all better on January first so we can see and hug our friends and loved ones that don’t live in the same home as us. The pandemic and other socio-economic issues challenging the world will continue for quite a bit longer.

The best way to celebrate 2020 coming to a close is by… throwing weeds in our champagne?
Go home, stock photos… you’re drunk.

Still, I feel like we should acknowledge that this year has been tough. Dave Barry wrote that he’s called a bunch of other years bad and owes them an apology now that he’s seen what bad looks like. That’s a fair (if extraordinarily pedestrian, even for Dave Barry) take on the year, but it’s not altogether wrong. I mean, 2020 took Alex Trebek, Sean Connery, and far, far too many people around the world due to Covid-19. That said, I like to look at the bright side, and to my knowledge so far Betty White is still doing well (2020: you keep your damn hands off her!)

However, every year-end and new year provides many of us with a chance to evaluate where we have been in the past twelve months and plot a course for the next twelve. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been effectively nowhere since March except the refrigerator and have invested in more sweatpants than you thought ever thought you would – but Costco put them on sale, and the gym is closed so might as well, right? Regardless, New Year’s is a time for many to make New Year’s resolutions. You may want to lose weight because the “Quarantine 15” turned into the “Quarantine 30”, or you may want to stop smoking for the third time or stop spending so much time stalking people you used to hang out with on Facebook. Either way, you will (as studies have clearly shown) almost certainly fail at them. Were this a usual year, I’d say that we’re about to go into “tourist season” at the gym and bemoan how hard it will be to find an elliptical for the next three weeks and that I have to remind myself that it’s only temporary. And trust me - it’s always temporary. Those of us who are in the gym year-round will openly congratulate those still there in late February.

I hate New Year’s resolutions. I hate everything about them. I hate that people make a list of all the stuff they should be doing – and then don’t do it. I hate that people call them “resolutions,” when really they’re wish lists. I hate that people say they lead to a “new you” because that’s total garbage; it’s the same you with new attributes. I hate that failure is so predictable. But most of all, I hate that there’s some accepted principle that you get a fresh start on January 1st – but not on March 11th or October 8th.

Let me be clear on this point: the reality is that you don’t need January 1st to come around to decide to change things in your job, career, waistline, or life. You can just wake up on a random morning and say that you’re going to change something. Then you can actually change it – no pomp and circumstance required. Literally every single day is a day for you to make a positive improvement in your life. If you wake up on September 9th, you can decide to start training for a marathon – even if it’s not a full moon. Crazy, right? January 1st is no different and has no special power that any other day does not have. This year it falls on a Friday which isn’t even a great day to start something new except a vacation, frankly.

I feel like goalsetting should be a topic for a future post, so wait for that one coming up sometime in the future. Still, since many of you are going to go through the process of resolving to do something differently – I’d like to offer you a few suggestions that could help your career. I’m not going to call these resolutions, but instead let’s settle on “goals.” You don’t need a special day to start – or complete – a goal; the calendar isn’t there to reflect “a new you.” This post will be just as relevant on April 10th or May 6th as it will be on January 1st. In fact, I would guess that these particular goals will be ones that you can use throughout this coming year and likely for the next several years.

First: learn Linux. This is an area that I have personally been lacking in for too long and have recently started to dabble in a bit. Linux is the backbone of almost every modern appliance, device, and cloud platform that exists and so knowing it reasonably well gives you an advantage like knowing DOS gave you back in 2000 or really knowing the Windows Registry structure did when you were running a SQL farm. Unlike Windows which I use as a daily driver, Linux is a little harder to get experience on. I tried to get Linux to be a primary OS for me, but it was incredibly painful to use day-to-day. I tried it on a laptop for a while and I have never been less productive as I couldn’t get my WiFi adapter to work for a week. Still, I have been going through some courses in PluralSight (transparency statement: I receive a free membership to PluralSight as a gift from them due to being named a VMware vExpert) to build the skill, and have a little home lab that I’ve been working with. I use a Linux box for DNS, DHCP and some basic NAT in my home network – stuff that has to work, so I’m encouraged to get familiar with it so I can do anything else on my network. I feel pretty confident saying that if you are lacking Linux skills in 2021, you have a blind spot that can limit your effectiveness in a technical role. I promise that the time you spend getting comfortable with this universal OS will be returned to you ten-fold in gained productivity over the span of your career. It’s a good time investment.

If you don’t have any public cloud skills, you need to put that on your list. If you haven’t noticed recently, public cloud has been all the rage because it allows organizations to rapidly provision services that otherwise take time to implement on premises – time that your competitors are saving by launching in the cloud. The challenge here is in picking which cloud you want to learn and while I won’t tell you which one will be more valuable in the marketplace, I will tell you that I think Microsoft has a really nice on-ramp to Azure skills for a total newbie. Their Azure Basics path will give you the basics you need to at least be conversational and get started. That said, you may already be past this and I think the Microsoft Learning portal breaks out more advanced learning paths really clearly. However, your company may not be an Azure customer; if that’s the case you can certainly spend the time learning AWS or GCP if your company is invested in those ecosystems. Let me close this one out by saying that if your company isn’t using any public cloud for anything you may want to think about whether this is a place you really want to stay long-term; you may be risking the industry moving away from you. That’s not always the case, but it could be a warning sign that you work in a change-averse IT shop, which isn’t a recipe for long-term IT success.

Learn Kubernetes. I’ve talked to VMUG members from around the world over the course of the past year and almost everyone is talking about Kubernetes – but in very different ways. Some are talking about how adopting it has changed the speed their company works at and has transformed how products and services are being brought to market and others are saying that they keep hearing about it from vendors but it’s not at their company and they don’t see any reason to learn it. Generally, the former work for larger corporations and the latter work for smaller organizations without development teams. It’s actually for this reason that I want to encourage you to learn it either way. Either your company is large and seeing value in Kubernetes and therefore will see value in your enhanced skillset, or you may want to someday land a gig at a larger company where they’re using it. I’m not going to prognosticate when or if K8s is going to make its way into your small design firm, but I think the chance that you want to stay at there forever may be less than 100% - and Kubernetes is a great skill to have, especially if you want to move to a larger organizationIf you want to get started here, look no further than KubeAcademy from VMware – a 100% free resource to get you going.

It would be more believable that this person was actively learning if their phone wasn’t obscuring most of their notes..

Learn to code. In all of my conversations with technologists, this one seems to cause the most angina with people I’m talking to. I’ve heard everything from “but I didn’t major in Computer Science,” to “I’m an IT Ops Engineer – I don’t need to code.” Both are really bad rationales that I don’t have the time or mental energy to argue with. Here’s the simple truth – IT Ops jobs are going to be coding jobs in the next decade. In many ways they already are and you may just be behind. With today’s modern automation platforms, we get more done with a few lines of code than some admins were capable of doing in a week. Trust me when I say that employers are aware of this, and are actively looking for infrastructure and operations folks who know how to code themselves out of a role. I wouldn’t worry about losing the role though – “Infrastructure Developer” is an increasingly common job description that I’m seeing with more frequency than “Systems Administrator” these days. Plus, are you really having fun manually managing each of those servers? I didn’t think so. I’m not particular about what language you want to learn, but I’ve really gotten some solid milage out of PowerShell. It’s super easy to learn and might be a gateway drug to other languages and shells that you can use to become substantially more productive than you are right now. I think Pluralsight is pretty good at this (again, I get a freebie) but there are other resources that can help you start out including CodeAcademy and that old standby - YouTube.

Learn the language of business. I know, learning the difference between debits and credits is boring. You’re not wrong and I’m not actually suggesting that you need  to study accounting. Instead, I want you know at a visceral level what people are talking about when they say “top line”, “bottom line”, “revenue”, “margin”, etc. I want you to know how your organization creates value for customers and how they profit from it. I want you know what the mission statement of your employer is. Ultimately, I want you to be able to be in line behind someone from finance in the company cafeteria (you know – when we’re back to our offices) and have a meaningful conversation with them. This does two things for you. First, it can help dispel the myth that IT folks are tech nerds who only think and talk about the thermal paste they’re using on their CPUs, Pokémon, and WarCraft, and it can get you involved in conversations where you can find ways for IT to help the business. Just so we’re clear: “help the business” is business-speak for “be more effective or profitable.” Don’t you want to be the technical visionary that gets credit for that accomplishment? There are lots of ways to learn these things but if you’re willing to pay just a few dollars for it, there are some amazing college courses online through EdX that come with a certificate of completion – which means your company may be willing to pay for it. There’s one from Wharton about Business Strategy that wouldn’t be terrible for you to explore.

Woo hoo!! It’s a new year! Let’s blow some stuff up and scare some dogs!

So that’s my hope for you in 2021. I hope you can learn something new, but I also hope you don’t view learning as a resolution. Resolutions are arbitrary and fail, goals and learning help us succeed. Learning should be part of your continuous improvement plan month after month. You should be consistently setting new goals to learn and grow so that you’re even more valuable and productive. I can’t say this enough: IT is an industry marked by constant change. You simply cannot maintain relevance by sitting still in this field.

I hope you have an awesome New Year and I hope you hit all your goals - even if they happen to start on January 1st. Still, I wouldn’t run out and buy the Peloton just yet, maybe prove you’ll stick with basic calisthenics exercises before you dump two grand or more.

Questions for reflection:

• What did you resolve for 2020? How long was it until you failed? (Yes, you did – don’t lie to me.)

• What did you learn in 2020? How did you grow as a technologist?

• What learning goals are right for you based on where you are in your career?