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.
Back in the late 80s, I was a computer-enthusiastic teenager helping my mother, who was leading the German consulate in Rome at the time. I still remember teaching her secretaries how to use PCs for word processing instead of their trusty typewriters. I guess that was my very first gig as tech suppo…
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. (Marcus Aurelius)
If you have a job in IT (and who among my readers hasn’t?), then it is going to fundamentally change soon.
Why?
In my own job, I see the full spectrum from where IT innovation is created to the very last laggards who are still depending a lot on mainframes and other ancient technology. Some things in IT are new (like, every week there’s a new startup/technology/trend that is shaking up the industry), and some things are just repetitions of stuff that has happened before, albeit in slightly different colors.
So now, the world of IT as we know it is changing (again) and this time, change will impact organizations, roles and jobs.
Let’s dive a little bit into what’s happening. Don’t worry, change is good, but only if you prepare for it.