A YouTube viewer reached out to me the other day after watching one of my videos. He’d just started at a big tech company and wanted to know: How do you navigate the fog? How do you figure out what to focus on? What are things to avoid?
I’ve felt that fog three times—at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS. And after 27 years and countless conversations with mentees, I think there are three phases that help cut through it.
Watching Werner Vogels deliver his 2025 re:Invent keynote last week, I experienced one of those rare moments where separate threads suddenly converge. There he was, Amazon’s CTO since 2005, laying out five principles for “Renaissance Developers”, and I realized: these weren’t just career advice for …
At 54 years old, I just started a YouTube channel.
This is an experiment. I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments and decided to try something I haven’t done before: creating my own videos, not for a company or conference, but for anyone who might find them useful.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
— Robert A. Heinlein
When I read a recent article about Expert Generalists on Martin Fowler’s blog, I immediately changed my LinkedIn title. Finally, someone had named what I’d been doing for 27 years without realizing it!
154 months of building solutions at AWS taught me something unexpected: the most resilient professionals are people who can build cloud architecture, debug a cultural problem, coach a group of executives, mentor a struggling colleague, and learn something entirely new by Thursday. Think Robert Heinl…
In a recent blog article about the future of IT admins, my MUCOSUG-Buddy Wolfgang wondered whether the new generation of self-managed, appliance-like systems like Oracle Exadata (no link, page no longer exists), Oracle Sun Storage 7000 (no link, page no longer exists) and their friends from other vendors are making IT personnel redundant, or what kind of jobs IT people are supposed to be doing in the future.
This reminded me of Dan Pink‘s book “A Whole New Mind” (Amazon.com|co.uk|de, BooksOnBoard (no link, booksonboard.com no longer exists)). Pink argues that today’s “left-brainish” jobs are threatened by “abundance, automation and Asia” (the latter really meaning “outsourcing”) and that today’s knowledge workers need to learn how to better employ their “right-brain” and add creativity to their jobs, as a new competitive differentiator.
How does this relate to Technology or IT jobs?
