Cloud Career Change - Lessons From My Recent Job Search Adventure - Stand Out in IT

I parted ways with Essence early 2023, and rather than start looking for a job right away, I took some time to focus on other stuff like SA magic, like growing my cloud community, and I also wanted to just take some time off, you know, and think for a bit about what I am going to do next. Then, a few months later, when the time was right, I got back to the market, and I started to look at available opportunities. And because I'm a big believer of the optimal stopping theory, I gave myself two months for pure interviews and set out to only take a decision afterwards. I looked at big established companies, the Oracles, IBMs, and Googles of the world. I looked at consulting companies, you know, companies like Ops Guru, Kaylent, you know, the big ones in North America. I looked at startup scene here in Montreal, in Toronto, and even south of the border. And I looked at various industry verticals, from healthcare to finance to education. Heck, I even interviewed with Facebook. Again, although I'd never worked for him, I did it because experience, and experience I got. I learned a ton about the current market and where we are, and I have some predictions also about where we will be going from here as we adapt to this new reality we're in. And yes, I really believe it's a new reality we will be going through in the few upcoming years. And I will be sharing all these learnings in this video, so if you're open to work, you can adapt your strategy accordingly. This is not gonna be a short one, but we will do our best to keep you entertained as well as sharing the learnings I mentioned above. So, sit back and relax. My name is Elias. I'm a senior solutions architect. Maybe I should stop saying this. Oh well, we'll see. Learning number one, organizations have spent money they don't have planning and designing products during the previous cycle. You know how IT goes through a cycle of roughly seven, eight, nine years? So when the economy is going good, when the market is bullish, when everyone is optimistic, everyone believes that new things are possible, IPOs start popping here and there, stock prices reach new levels, VCs start backing up all these new ideas and pushing these startups forward, you know, sky's the limit. And then when the economy is slowing down or rebalancing or in a recession or inflation or in certain times or however you wanna call it, ultimately, when a ton of money have been pumped into the system for a few years, well, it takes time for all the system to flush out all the excess. I've made a full video last year about how things will change in an economic downturn that you can watch later. But my point is what usually tend to happen in times such as the one we're going through right now is you start seeing companies shifting their focus away from sky's the limit approach and becoming more grounded, meaning companies start to double down on security, on automation. Automation is usually pushed aside in a bull market because you can always hire more people to get the job done, right? And even security tends to get kind of ignored when things are going great and you're trying to go fast and you're trying to meet the market demands and build new products. But you don't need to be a professor in economics to know that when things get tight, you usually start looking for areas to cut costs. As I was going through a ton of job descriptions, interviews, salary negotiations, I realized how organizations have made a ton of promises, spent a ton of money planning the next big thing during the previous cycle that they found themselves in a position where they need to deliver on these promises first before starting any other big projects. And from a job perspective, it seems to me that companies are more in the lookout for hands-on keyboard, individual contributors who can run with ideas and implement them and deploy them and scale them and secure them. I've had, for example, a harder time negotiating a salary for a solutions architect position than for a cloud DevOps position. God's honest truth. But this is my own experience, of course, limited to a specific part of the world. Your experience might be different and I would love to read about it. But after the initial surprise, after the dust settled down, I remembered how cutthroat IT is. You know, people outside of IT say we have it easy with our high salaries, but the reality is in IT, if you don't reinvent yourself constantly, you don't just stay put, you actually move backwards. So the first learning for me was, it is time to specialize, which brings us to learning number two. Yes, it's time to specialize again, meaning instead of being a generalist, it's time to choose an area to specialize in and strive to become the world's most expert in that specific area. I say again, because this is something I've had to do multiple times before. Let me give you an example. Nearly a decade ago, I looked at the market and saw a new framework taking the world of web development by storm. That framework was Lataville. So naturally, I knew I had to be part of it. And I made it my goal to be one of the top five people in whole Canada in Lataville, simple. My goal was for my name to pop up anytime someone is searching for a Lataville expert on LinkedIn across the country. I was an early subscriber to Latacast and used to consume every new video Jeffrey Wei posted like my life depended on it. I traveled to all the Latakons I could go to. I was very camera shy back then, but I found this picture I took in Louisville, Kentucky during one of the earliest Latakons, for example. I spent countless hours going through the frameworks and the lay and architecture, not just what the frameworks provided in terms of functionality for developers to use, but how Lataville's core developers built that functionality. By the way, here's something I love about Lataville. To this day, every line in the comments decreases by three characters than the previous line. And if nothing, this speaks to the level of craftsmanship and attention to detail put into the framework. Imagine this is just attention to detail to comments, not only code. Long story short, I believe with the current economic situation, it's time to specialize again. I love cloud architecture. So I started thinking, how can I specialize in it? I thought about specializing in serverless, becoming a serverless solutions architect. I was a member of the serverless TFC within AWS after all. I also thought about leaving solutions architecture behind and going towards enterprise architecture. I thought about edge architecture and how exciting it would be to specialize in it right now while it's still at the very early stages. I even interviewed and got an offer for a position to work purely with IoT on the cloud. But that was with AWS's ProServe team and I just don't wanna go back there at this time. So what did I end up choosing? Well, before that, let's go to learning number three. There are no future-proof companies, but some organizations are better positioned than others to gain from market shifts. Take a company like Essence, for example, an international leader in fashion and luxury e-commerce, a company that grew tremendously during the pandemic due to pretty much how everyone had to stay home, turned towards e-commerce websites for pretty much everything. And sometimes we bought stuff just out of boredom. But then when the world opened up, well, consumer habits changed and now you can't justify spending $5,000 on a chair when you can spend it on a vacation, can you? Not a lot of people can pull it off. The reality is some organizations are heavily impacted by consumers' habits. Now, on the other side of spectrum, other organizations are well-positioned to benefit from these shifts in consumers' habits. During the pandemic, for example, traveling, restaurants, parks, brick-and-mortar retailers, these industries were having a tough time. But on the other side, healthcare, online shopping, oil and gas players, internet companies, just to name a few, they were having a blast. So what kind of organizations can take advantage of this imbalance and pretty much win in every scenario? Well, ones that are diversified enough and have ties to all these industries, ones that we call service companies or consultancy companies. Big names include Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, KPMG, McKinsey. If you're looking for cloud-native ones, and trust me, I'm not paid to say any of this. I'm saying it because I have interviewed with them. I talked to the people. I had a glimpse of the culture, the leaders, the vision, the structure. One of my favorites in the sector are Slalom Consulting, which finds itself on the 1,400 best companies to work for list for the eighth consecutive year. Or Kaylent. I believe I even made friends there. Never have I seen a more human-centric interview process. Or Ops Guru, which once was AWS's chosen partner, and I had many opportunities to work with them directly on behalf of various of my customers. And you just have to ask ChatGPT to find you similar companies for a longer list or a list of companies that are closer to your geographical region. Now, these type of organizations thrive in turbulence. They are in a good place to provide value to all kind of industries during all times. For example, Slalom people assured me they didn't do any layoffs, and I believe them. They didn't have to. The company operates in 45 markets and owns 16 belt centers across the world. So my learning here was, I guess, there are no future-proof companies. Giants like Alphabet and Meta and Amazon doing many rounds of layoffs is proof. But some organizations are better positioned than others to gain from these market shifts. Hello there, how's it going? Am I bothering you? Am I talking, speaking too loud? Let's continue. So as I was saying, some organizations are better positioned than others to gain from these market shifts that we go through. So I kept that in mind as I was navigating my next move, which brings us to learning number four. Ladies and gentlemen, Ruby, learning number four. It's what you bring to the table now, not what you have done before. Every time I hear someone complaining about not being appreciated for the hard work they put, I wanna give them the tiniest violin possible. I wanna bring them to the side and tell them they misunderstood the game. Come on, dude. I know you're not happy about my performance, but you don't have to be a jerk about it. Cats. Yeah, it hasn't been about working hard since the days we used to farm our own food. It's all about the return on investment, ROI. LeBron James is insanely talented and has amazing work ethics, a rare combination, to be honest, and he's paid an insane amount of money. But not for his talent, not for how many hours he trains, but for the number of viewers he brings, for the number of tickets he sells. You could be someone who never played basketball, but hearing that LeBron James is coming to your town, I bet you would try at least to go watch him live. You don't believe me? He could start playing tomorrow and he would still sell a crazy amount of footwear just by putting his name on it. And it's the same in IT. It's not the programming languages you master. It's not the number of lead code problems you can solve. That's the wrong stuff to focus on. That's school mentality, focusing on grades. The reality is you will be hired for how much time the organization will save by you joining their teams. You will be hired for how much their products will be secure by having you design them. You will be hired for how much money you save them at the end of the year by optimizing their operational cost. And these are things we talk a lot about in the short resume series where we built together a resume for those of you who are looking for a job in the cloud. And I share with you also my resume that I still use to this day. It's a free series of two videos to watch. Just click the pop-up banner or you'll find the link also in the description. You know, I was at a middle school a couple of months ago, presenting the various aspects of working in software to secondary school kids. Conversation was flowing and we found ourselves at some point talking about salaries in IT. And the kid just turned to everyone and said, it's not about working hard. If it was, our mothers would be billionaires. And I couldn't have said it better myself. So my learning here was it's important now more than ever to sharpen a high ROI skillset. A skillset that can bring value to organizations from day one. Improve on it, brush it up to the point where it becomes your unfair advantage. Be it project management, be it software development, be it cloud security, be it infrastructure as code. And the latter, infrastructure as code was what I ended up choosing to go with. Onward to the final learning in this journey. Learning number five, reinvent yourself now and then. And in the process, do what you love. Now, IT is constantly changing. Every technology is but a step to the next technology. So it's only natural for us IT professionals to reinvent ourselves once in a while. I haven't always been a solutions architect. I haven't always wanted to be a solutions architect, but at some point I realized it was something I was very interested in and I started to transition to the role. A transition, by the way, I teach in my signature course, SA Magic, where I accompany every time 10 IT professionals during a two months transformational bootcamp to successfully transition to the role of a cloud solutions architect. Check out the pop-up banner to learn more or link in the description. Bottom line, I took all the learnings we talked about and decided to pursue a new role, the role of a cloud infrastructure architect. It's a role about designing for security, building for scale, but most importantly, getting closer to how solutions are being run and operated on the cloud. And if you want me to do a video about the difference between solutions architect and infrastructure architect, just let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to get to it as soon as possible. Promise. So I started my new role just a couple of weeks ago at one of the biggest cybersecurity companies in the world. You probably use their services many times without even knowing it. And I was very pleased to find myself contributing infrastructure as code in form of Terraform to the platform on day one from the beautiful office, downtown Montreal. So in conclusion, my job search journey has taught me several valuable lessons. It's crucial to specialize and continuously reinvent yourself to stay relevant in this ever-changing world of IT. Understanding how organizations are influenced by market shifts and economic cycles can also help you find more stable company to work with like service consultancy companies as we've discussed previously. Moreover, focusing on a high return on investment skill sets can make you an indispensable asset to any organization. But ultimately, it's important to do what you love and remain adaptable in order to find success and fulfillment in your career. So keep learning, keep growing, and don't be afraid to make changes in your professional life. And remember, sharing your experiences can inspire and help others navigate their own career paths. With that, thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope those insights benefit you as you search for your next adventure. My name is Elias, now a cloud infrastructure architect, excited for the new challenges ahead. Peace out.