Welcome to episode 199 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of an interview with Nathan Bennett, discussing positive and negative feedback and our reactions, impostor syndrome, and the role of mentors in Nathan’s career.

Original Recording Date: 10-25-2022

Nathan Bennett (@vNathanBennett) specializes in the areas of automation and cloud across a number of different verticals, a bit like an Office of the CTO role. If you missed part 1 of our conversation with Nathan, check out Episode 198.

Topics – Reacting to Negative Feedback, The Unlikely Mentor, The Bigger Spectrum of IT, Addicted to External Validation, Impostor Syndrome, Emotional Responses and Parting Thoughts

3:42 – Reacting to Negative Feedback

• Nathan’s mention of getting the full context made Nick think about feedback and specifically difficult feedback. We don’t always understand the full context of where someone might be coming from (type of day they’ve had, what might be happening in their life, etc.) when we receive feedback from them. What’s some advice for taking difficult feedback?
  • "I cannot change what you think, how you feel, or what you should do. I can tell you these things, but I cannot change them. I cannot force you to do anything. I can only force what I can do from what you give me." – Nathan Bennett, a statement he’s built his life around.
  • If someone comes to you angry, we can only control our attitude toward that. If we point at someone and tell them to calm down before speaking to us, what does that help?
  • "I have to control the environment from myself before I can control the environment outside of myself. And that’s a hard lesson." – Nathan Bennett
  • We as IT professionals spend too much time in logs to say that we don’t need negative feedback. Seeing an error message is negative feedback and indicates a problem.
  • If negative feedback throws us into a depression or a rage, those are probably bad responses to the feedback. But this also does not mean we should allow people to walk all over us with feedback like a rug.
    • Sometimes feedback has a nugget of truth to it that you can take and think on, giving you the opportunity to accept it as something you can try to work on.
  • Suppose you gave someone the feedback of "you said that very badly. Try to phrase it like this next time."
    • That’s negative feedback without name calling and might make the feedback easier to take. But the person could immediately take it in stride and blow it off, continuing the behavior when you’re not there to give the feedback.
    • What Nathan is trying to get people to understand when he gives feedback is that he wants the person to succeed. People who want others to succeed will always give the types of feedback that can help others in their career.
  • Giving feedback from the standpoint of wanting others to succeed can apply to any environment. Nathan gives the example of working at Starbucks and being told he needed to move faster.
    • When he left Starbucks, he was one of the fastest working employees.
    • The negative feedback was move faster. The problem was that he didn’t know where things were. The solution for Nathan was to configure his space so that the milk was closer and so he knew how to utilize different portions of milk for different drinks he was making (i.e. how much went in a tall, grande, or venti size drink).
    • When it got to the point where something could not be used, Nathan would flip, clean, and move on. He turned the process into an assembly line.
    • This changed Nathan from a slow afternoon worker (around 3 PM time frame when things aren’t too busy) to being the opener (the 6-8 AM time frame when the store is at its busiest) who worked the drive through (making drinks and taking orders).
  • "Negative feedback can be a key to how you grow your career and how you turn something that is negative into a positive and turn that positive into success." – Nathan Bennett
    • Maybe this was a slightly different context for feedback. When someone says you are not fast enough they are identifying what is lacking.
    • Maybe you get a metric along with this to improve but maybe not. Increased speed leads to a metric.
    • John suggests Nathan used a previous lesson learned about understanding entire systems to help himself improve in the Starbucks scenario. Nathan understood the system as an integrated whole and then optimized it for himself to help improve the metric.

9:43 – The Unlikely Mentor

• Nathan has been riding this pattern for about 11 years now.
• The job at XTO Energy where he learned PowerShell scripting allowed him to create his own journey with XTO, being one of 2 people who understood PowerShell scripting.
  • The other person who knew PowerShell at the company was extremely talented and could seemingly do anything in PowerShell.
  • This person created s tribal forms front end for PowerShell and even a randomizer for what you might eat for lunch, for example.
• Nathan started learning from the person with PowerShell expertise immediately as a form of mentorship.
  • This was not mentorship in terms of life skills or advice as the person with the expertise was young and fresh out of college.
  • "In terms of technical expertise, you can look at people who understand something better than you as a mentor. And if they are willing to help you learn and grow, that is a mentorship that is well worth the time." – Nathan Bennett
  • It’s a hard lesson to learn because we have to swallow our pride and our ego.
    • Nathan was going to be a pastor and has preached in homeless shelters and some of the most foul-smelling places you can imagine.
    • When you do that you are doing what you believe you should be doing, but at the same time you have to swallow your ego a little bit and do your job to the best of your ability.
  • Because of these things it was easy for Nathan to approach his co-worker about learning PowerShell.
    • The co-worker was at first surprised that Nathan would ask him for help after being at the company for 3 years.
    • Nathan offered to help his co-worker understand the innerworkings of the corporate environment in exchange for help understanding PowerShell.
    • The two would spend an hour together each morning.
    • Nathan knew the person had no new hire orientation and would explain who the person could go to about certain issues and the organizational structure. His co-worker would bring up a block of code and explain what it was doing so Nathan could understand. They formed a good partnership for learning.
  • Nick loves the fact that this co-worker was open to Nathan learning from him after initially not understanding why Nathan didn’t already know PowerShell.
  • Nathan likes to think that he’s not an aggressive person but has had moments over the course of his life (mostly during Nathan’s time playing ultimate frisbee and being very competitive in that).
    • Note – Nathan no longer plays ultimate frisbee.
  • "The ability to just kind of be that humble, subservient person and walk up to someone is something that is difficult for I think all of us to do." – Nathan Bennett
  • Nathan is not scary, aggressive, or intimidating when approaching people but rather likes to use humor and finds it to be one of the joys of life. This can help build a bridge that can lead to things like learning, growing, career development, and even making friends.
• Nathan’s guilty pleasure movie is Mean Girls. Nathan was home schooled and didn’t know what high school was really all about, but he loved how this movie ended and the discussion of how relationships changed with characters in the movie.
  • Changes like this are just life. Your enemy could become your best friend, and Nathan has had enemies in his career who have become stellar examples of helping him grow in his career.
  • You may have someone with which it is difficult to find something in common. And then one day you find you’re in a meeting with that person and discover there is common ground.
  • Once you discover there is common ground, what do you do? Do you grow it? We may not want to open ourselves up to that.
  • Nathan feels like sometimes we’re all still in high school but just older. We’re still dealing with people that we have this cultural perspective on, but we have to try to break out of this and better understand.
• Nathan shares a story about his first job at KB Toys (not in IT, just his first job period).
  • He didn’t want to bother the manager because he thought the manager was so important.
  • A co-worker told Nathan the manager put his pants on the same way Nathan did, and that quote has always stuck with Nathan.
  • If you ever think someone is better than you or worse than you, remember…we all do the same things.
  • Trevor Noah always talks about going to the bathroom or pooping because it’s the great equality of humanity. We all poop the same way.
  • We’re all trying to move through this life. Charles Dickens called it being "sojourners to the grave."
  • "Are we going to help each other have a better life, a better journey?….What are you going to do with that life?" – Nathan Bennett
  • We’re all human. There are problems you can create in your life by putting people on pedestals or the opposite.

17:26 – The Bigger Spectrum of IT

• Learning PowerShell was a precursor to learning vRealize Automation. This is where Nathan learned JavaScript and what an actual developer language was like.
  • It was about piecing together input and output signals, changing information from one form to another, creating libraries, etc.
  • This was different from just writing a PowerShell script. Learning JavaScript and other languages helped Nathan learn more of the developer side than he had been exposed to previously. Nathan has yet to meet a developer that uses PowerShell.
• When learning vRealize Automation, Nathan met his first mentor. This person sounded exactly like Bill Clinton.
  • At the time Nathan was doing data analytics with PowerShell (something he did not really enjoy). One day this unexpected mentor (Brett) got in touch with Nathan.
  • This person saw that Nathan understood scripting and that he was using a system called BMC Remedy for querying information. He asked if Nathan wanted to automate how a ticket is created.
  • Nathan said yes and created a function that would do exactly that (call to the ticket database and create a ticket). This turned into tickets, work orders, change requests, assigning change requests to change advisory boards (CABs), and approving change requests automatically.
  • When Nathan was finished he had automated the virtual machine build process (and change control) so that it took about 20 minutes instead of 3 weeks.
  • Looking at the pieces of context individually may not sound like much, but looking at the organizational win this delivered gives a better perspective so that others can see this work actually matters and made an impact.
  • Nathan still considers himself a vRA (vRealize Automation) guy and appreciates what the product can do.
  • To help people choose the proper tool for the job, Nathan likes to talk to people about what self-service is, what a front-end broker looks like, how people want to create and manage it, etc.
    • Then consider whether vRealize Automation, Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform, or other solutions fit that profile.
    • What fits the profile for the need? Go back and start there.
• The mentor started helping Nathan understand the bigger spectrum of what IT is like.
  • Nathan’s mentor went to work for Dell at some point, and Nathan heard he was making a tremendous amount of money as a result of that change.
  • Nathan was still hourly at the time he learned this (and not earning as much as he would like to earn).
  • When Nathan asked his mentor how he could make a similar change and make that kind of money, his mentor told him…
    • "You need to come to an understanding. Job security does not exist in this world. It’s just not there. The only job security you can have is keeping your skills razor sharp." – Nathan’s mentor on advice for making more money
    • The perspective here is not about changing what is outside of you but rather changing what is inside to make yourself valuable outside.
    • Keeping skills sharp means you will always have someone who has seen what you have done or the ability to show someone what you can do (especially in the interview process).
    • This is probably some of the best advice Nathan has heard in the IT world. A pastor might look at you kind of funny after sharing advice like this, but in the IT world, this is solid advice.

21:42 – Addicted to External Validation

• Did a mentor also encourage Nathan to get involved in a technical community?
  • Tim Davis showed up at a VMUG (Vmware User Group) and spoke about Cloud Assembly (or CAS) one day and how it was going to "destroy" vRealize Automation.
  • Nathan, being a vRealize Automation guy, asked several questions, including what vRealize Automation folks like himself should be doing to prepare for the transition to CAS. Tim broke down several steps for the audience to help them prepare for CAS.
  • At some point Nathan had to leave and was not sure how to get in touch with Tim after the fact. But luckily Tim had put his Twitter handle on the slides Nathan saw during the session.
  • Nathan found Tim on Twitter and sent him some messages, stating how much he appreciated the presentation. Nathan then asked Tim how he could do the same kind of things Tim did.
    • Tim’s advice was to start a blog and to use Twitter.
    • Tim also shared that by doing these things and building a following, if you’re ever in need of a job you have a network of people you can immediately reach out to for help.
• This is where the community came into the picture for Nathan.
  • Nathan is the financial supporter of his household. His wife is a house wife and now stay at home mom.
  • Nathan’s job and goal is to make sure his wife can do her job, which he sees as far more valuable than anything he will ever do.
  • If Nathan were to lose his job, he would need to pick up something quick. Everything he does revolves around making sure his wife can do what she needs to do.
  • About a year after the conversation with Tim, Nathan did his first presentation at a VMUG on the topic of impostor syndrome.
• The job after XTO Energy was ECI Software Solutions, and at this job Nathan was the vRealize Automation administrator.
  • Nathan started to develop an idea in his head that if he did not get accolades from others / told he was doing a great job that he was not doing his job.
  • Nathan became an addict to the external validation. You might even call it being an atta boy junkie.
  • Some people don’t put a lot of stock in atta boys, but to Nathan this was more a positive log message that indicated success. When you work in automation, that’s what you work for (the successes).
  • While Nathan can make fun of his dad for looking through lines of code, he ended up doing the same thing trying to get the tasks he was automating to work.
    • You run a process, and after it fails change one thing. Then you run it again. Then you keep making changes until systematically you have achieved a success. Once it works, don’t touch it because you have created something that works. And then you can connect that function to the next function.
    • This builds a chain of tasks that you then run in an automated way. And if something breaks you can troubleshoot the system as a whole or go back to the individual pieces.
  • As an automation guy, Nathan would automate different tasks like unlocking a user and providing that task via self-service. A service desk team could use this task whenever needed. Once a task like this was automated successfully, Nathan would think about the next thing he could automate.
  • Over a 2-year period, Nathan would get accolades from people all across the organization (not just from people on his team). Nathan was the guy who would get up from his desk and go talk to people about their problems. That’s just who he is.
  • After 2 years of getting accolades, Nathan was struggling. He was doing anything and everything he could that would get him an accolade.
  • After a while of not getting any accolades, Nathan thought for sure he was going to be let go / fired. In fact, a week before he left the company, he knew he was (or so he told himself).
    • What was actually happening was the managerial staff was asking / trying to determine how they could create a group of Nathans. They were trying to figure out how to identify the skillset he had which made him so valuable to the company and how to duplicate it.
    • No one ever told Nathan this, and he is happy he was never told this as it may have made his junkie brain go into overdrive.
    • Nathan needed to get away from that environment, and it was the next part of changing who he was into what he wanted to become. Nathan took a role as an automation guy which turned into a cloud guy, and he has continued to find different things he likes to talk about and work on.
      • Nathan has found that he really likes cloud native stuff.
      • Listen to Nathan’s description of a Kubernetes roll out with zero downtime compared to hours of running PowerShell scripts and troubleshooting with developers. Why would he not evangelize that to people living that life?

29:25 – Impostor Syndrome

• Assuming we likely take a need for external validation with us to a new employer / environment, did Nathan experience any sort of detox period or realization that he did not need the validation after making the move?
  • Nathan would liken it to feeling full and dieting.
  • There’s nothing wrong with eating, but there is something wrong with eating too much.
  • Positive statements and positive reinforcement will always be a part of our careers. But if we start to rely on them, you will continually feel like you are about to be let go.
    • Nathan still feels this a little in his current job, and he has to deal with this mentally.
  • In Nathan’s talk about impostor syndrome, he says he is not a survivor of impostor syndrome but rather someone who is still dealing with it.
    • Impostor syndrome doesn’t just go away, and moving to a new job doesn’t make it just go away.
  • There was definitely a detox. Nathan figured there was no way he could get paid to do what he is doing now. He’s having too much fun, truly enjoying the work, and learning a ton.
    • Nathan had to compare that with his experience, what he brings to the table, and why they need people like him in a specific area.
    • This is about understanding the environment (and not just the technical aspects, which can be focused on too much sometimes).
    • We tend to forget what our role really is. We focus on "just keeping the lights on" or "I just do this."
    • "If you’re mentioning your role and you start it with ‘I just,’ you probably don’t have a good perspective on what your role is…because your role is so much more than that." – Nathan Bennett
    • Does a networking person just keep the top of rack switches running?
      • They maintain, manage, and update switches and load balancers.
      • What about your ability to help other people understand it, help the company grow by developing new processes that can be used for some of these tasks?
      • If you think you only do one thing, Nathan has just listed many. There are so many things surrounding that one thing that impact the greater organization that we often lose focus on them.
    • In Nathan’s story, he lost sight of what his job really was because it had become so centered around what people said about him, not necessarily about what he was doing.
    • John says this goes back to understanding an entire system. It’s not just one thing. It’s more about something you do and how it is important to the greater system.
• Pinpointing the superman complex / the atta boy junkie condition didn’t come until Nathan was preparing to give his VMUG talk on impostor syndrome.
  • There are different types of impostor syndrome such as the perfectionist, the superman, etc.
  • Once Nathan understood that, he understood the constant feeling of "I’m not doing enough," or "I should be more perfect," or "I need to go past the expectations and do better." These are still inside of him and are not going to go away because they come from many different places.
  • Every time Nathan hears an "atta boy" or a "way to go," he immediately wants to hear it again.
  • This is like eating something that is so good (like chicken wings, for example) it is hard to stop.
    • If you ever listen to the IT Reality Podcast Nathan and Richard (co-hosts) battle about whether the proper dip with buffalo wings is blue cheese or ranch.
    • When you’re a junkie on something, it doesn’t mean the something is necessarily bad. Caffeine is an addiction.
    • Nathan was addicted to Mountain Dew and stopped cold turkey at one point, which caused severe migraines. He now moderates his caffeine intake because he doesn’t want to be that addicted to something so as to produce a detox.
  • Impostor syndrome requires a mental detox. We have to turn our thoughts inward and figure out if they are true.
    • Nathan could give a presentation and have a number of people say he did well. But if he knows he could have done better and doesn’t feel like it went that well, is he responding appropriately?
    • Negative feedback can cause you to fall into depression, anger, or some other extreme. It’s the same way with positive feedback (can cause you to go to different extremes). You have to be able to accept it for what it is and move on.
    • We have to validate how to take the information, try to understand the nugget of truth in it, and work toward a better outcome.
    • If you receive positive feedback on a presentation, ask the person what you said that was really helpful to them. It may be a specific slide you showed or an analogy you shared that worked well / made an impact. But once you know, that is something to keep in the presentation as you think about tweaking it for the next time you give it.

37:52 – Emotional Responses and Parting Thoughts

• John mentions the emotional response to feedback seems like a universal thing.

  • Because of differences in biology, etc. between people, feedback can cause a different reaction in different people to the same inputs
    • It could be a stress reaction triggering anxiety
    • It could be motivation to grow
  • John suggests Nathan has talked about a similar thing for positive feedback. John is asking whether Nathan is now suspicious of his own reactions to positive feedback, not wanting to rely solely on the feedback but also not trusting the negative voice in his head that undercuts the feeling.
    • Maybe we can all take a lesson here. Just because we have a certain input to a certain feeling does not mean it is the be all end all of emotional reaction.
    • When we have an emotional reaction we can try to determine what an appropriate, objective reaction might be.
  • Nathan has constantly used an outsider to help be the litmus test to his own brain.
    • Nathan is a huge proponent of mentorship. If you don’t have a mentor, definitely get one. If you cannot get a mentor, contact Nathan, and he will do what he can for you.
    • A mentor is someone you can share all the details about a situation with and then ask, "should I be worried about this?" It’s a hard question to ask because to a certain extent you are swallowing your pride.
    • But we should ask the question anyway. Somoene might just respond with "I think you’re fine."
      • Nathan mentions Billy Downing has given him this response a number of times. Billy coached Nathan through the detox and would point out when Nathan was worrying too much about something.
      • Nathan sometimes worries about whether he is changing things fast enough, but it’s a metric of his own creation. His company may think the pace of change is just fine.
    • "These are all things that you will not understand in your vacuum of your brain, so having a litmus test that you go to and ask these questions will absolutely help." – Nathan Bennett
  • Nick admits to creating his own metrics every time he overanalyzes a situation.
  • In our jobs or in our personal lives we may see something someone did or hear something they said and wonder:
    • Hmm…what was that about?
    • What did they mean by that?
    • Why did they give me that look?
    • This turns us into overanalytic machines thinking about what it could have been. We play this game of preparing for what the worst possible scenario could have been.
    • Listen to Nathan’s humorous scenario related to this.
  • John likes the idea that we should be interrogating ourselves about emotional responses to certain situations.
    • An emotional response is not necessarily reflecting reality.
    • There may be context we are missing, or we may be creating context that does not exist.
  • Nathan says there is something to be said about making rational choices before letting your emotions get entwined in it. Overanalyzing negative or positive feedback can lead to emotions.
    • We need to try and cut some of this out to a certain degree.
    • We are all human and will have emotional feedback from time to time. But we must figure out how to take the information, put it somewhere, and then use it to spurn you on to do better things.

• Ways to contact Nathan

  • If you have feedback for Nathan, you can find him on Twitter @vNathanBennett.
  • Nathan’s personal blog can be found at nerdynate.life.
  • Nathan blogs for his job here
  • Nathan is also co-host of the IT Reality Podcast.
    • The show is about IT outside of the speeds and feeds. There have been shows on career, soft skills, dealing with impostor syndrome, landing a job, etc.
    • They also talk about technology beyond the sales and marketing pitch.
    • We’re all in this together (IT), and we can help each other by sharing our experiences.

• Mentioned in the outro

  • Perhaps more people struggle with the atta boy junkie tendency than we might realize. When we don’t hear the validation that we are doing a good job we might be fearful, and this could be more widespread across industries and jobs than we realize.
  • People have different emotional reactions to different stimuli like positive feedback (the addiction high / dopamine hit and the withdrawals from not getting this validation).
  • Maybe positive feedback and reacting to it is connected to negative feedback as a motivator. These two also seem connected to impostor syndrome.
  • Impostor syndrome isn’t a temporary condition. It is a long-term struggle for Nathan and many others out there (maybe a cyclical pattern of highs and lows).
    • The mentor as a litmus test approach to temper our reactions is a wonderful thing.
    • A mentor can help correlate a feeling you are having (big or small) with events that happened (big or small). The mentor can help us look at the situation in a different way with less of a stake in it than we have.
  • Don’t forget the journey into programmatic interaction and the developer side of the house. The concept of systems thinking plays nicely here too.
  • Take the lessons learned from systems thinking Nathan learned, and mesh those with the ones Joe Houghes learned regarding thinking / implementing technologies at scale.
    • See Episode 188 for more detail (a part 2 of 3 with Joe Houghes as guest).

Contact us if you need help on the journey, and be sure to check out the Nerd Journey Podcast Knowledge Graph.