Welcome to episode 201 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 1 of an interview with Yvette Edwards, discussing her early career as a developer, the change to sales engineering, growth through frequent presentations, impostor syndrome, and life as an individual contributor.

Original Recording Date: 11-28-2022

Topics – Meet Yvette Edwards, Pass or Fire, The Unexpected Shift, Impostor Syndrome, Life of a Sales Engineer, Presentations, The Individual Contributor’s Path

3:21 – Meet Yvette Edwards

• Yvette Edwards is a Vice President of Solution Engineering at VMware serving public sector customers.
• Few people aspire to be a solution engineer / sales engineer / sales consultant when they are in college. In fact, you likely will not find it in a course catalog. Yvette didn’t begin her career in this field.
• Yvette studied management information systems in college (or MIS) at George Mason University, learning programming languages such as C++ and Cobol.
  • AT&T came to her school to recruit developers, and they had just build a new facility close to where Yvette went to school.
  • C++ was developed by Bell Labs, and Yvette voiced her love for the language during the interview. It turns out they were hiring Cobol developers instead.
  • Yvette was hired as a software developer at ATT working on mainframes.
  • Yvette loved programming because it was problem solving. She is not an artist, but being a programmer was her way of building / creating something from scratch to solve a problem, which she really enjoyed.
    • Note: Yvette later worked for Oracle and was able to create some programs for the IRS (one of her customers).
• John mentions the MIS degree and its distinction from computer science in that it includes a business focus.
  • The MIS degree was a pretty new degree at the time with not a lot of people who knew about it.
  • Interestingly enough, Yvette’s daughter got a MIS degree at Florida State around 2011.
  • Not a lot of universities may offer the degree these days, but it was a great blend of business and technology.
  • Yvette was originally encouraged to study business in school by her father and started off more on track with a general business degree. In her junior and senior years, she was encouraged to specialize, and the MIS track really interested her. The last two years of her studies were very computer science focused, exposing her to assembly language , computer architecture, and many other programming languages (Cobol, C, and others).
  • It was great having the business foundation and being able to read a balance sheet.
  • Interestingly enough solution engineers are taught to read 10-K forms for companies.
  • Yvette believes the MIS degree is similar to what people get by getting a computer science degree and then going back for a MBA.
  • John says it seems like a computer science degree with a minor in business in many ways.

8:05 – Pass or Fire

• At ATT Yvette worked on various algorithms that helped generate billing information for the circuits which ATT was selling (private lines as they were called), as well as the AIC system (an account inquiry system that was written to have a green screen).
• Think back and recall that ATT invented fiber.
• As a developer you had to understand the underlying circuitry and then translate into code.
  • "That’s really what is interesting about programming. You’re taking the physical world, and you’re translating it into basically the virtual world. But you’re coding everything that happens in real time into something a machine can understand." – Yvette Edwards
• Yvette did not have a telecommunications background going into to this and a new area she was able to learn as a developer.
  • This reminds Nick of our discussion with David Babbitt from Episode 195. He was a developer for IBM but got to learn about DNS (developing a lot of domain specific knowledge for the industry / market in which the software he worked on operated).
• Yvette didn’t have an electronics degree but kind of got one in that area through experience.
  • Being hired on at ATT put you into a 90-day new hire program, and it was 90 days of teaching you how to code the ATT way (their standards and processes, etc.).
  • During this time you would get specific projects and take them from start to finish starting with design. The instructors would provide the requirements to employees and allow them to come back and ask questions.
  • This was a pass or fire class and like graduating from one college and being put into another. You had to pass a final exam (which was a coding project). As you wrote the code the computer would give you smiley faces as feedback to let you know you passed.
  • During this class, Yvette and others were part of MPS (management programming staff) and considered part of management (management level but not people managers). Everyone else was union.
  • At some point during this class the CWA (communication workers of America) went on strike.
  • Yvette and the people in her class were told they may be asked to do strike duty since there was a strike. She and her classmates did not really know what that meant at the time. The class ended up pausing because of the strike, and they were deployed to take over the jobs for the people on strike.
  • Yvette and her classmates were flown to Philadelphia. Her job was going to be to test circuits. During strike duty Yvette went from one class to another to receive the necessary training (which took about 3 weeks). Once the training was completed the strike was over.
  • This was the first time Yvette had gone on a business trip or flown anywhere.
    • And at 21 years old and as part of her entrance into to the corporate world Yvette had to cross a picket line. Before entering the ATT building each morning, Yvette and her colleagues would see the picketers calling them "scabs."
    • Yvette says you could understand why picketers might be upset. They had gone 3-4 weeks without a paycheck due to the strike.
    • Yvette focused on the fact that she was a developer and that her employer had asked her to go show up at a specific place.
  • John says it is interesting to hear about being in a technology organization with such a strong labor component. This seems to be increasingly rare, and in John’s last few jobs most people were exempt employees earning salary.
    • Maybe this is due to the waning influence of labor which is a trend in the United States.

14:23 – The Unexpected Shift

• At ATT there was use of 3GL and then 4GL with some use of Informix. Yvette was assigned to a project for which they were building everything in Informix that was very interesting.
• They always needed more staff. As they kicked off new projects, they would hire contractors from CSC (Computer Systems Corporation). She started to notice the hire of more and more contractors over time.
  • Some projects were sunsetted, and people were not being re-deployed to other projects.
  • Yvette had an older friend who expressed some concern about the company not hiring as many developers. She encouraged Yvette to attend a job fair with her to see if other companies were hiring developers.
  • Yvette and her friend attended a job fair in the Washington, D.C. area at an Embassy Suites. You could walk in and talk to representatives of each company. AOL was there during this time but using older technology.
    • Yvette walked by the Oracle booth because she knew them to have an interesting development platform. From what she saw they were hiring for sales consultants, and she kept walking.
    • There was a gentleman who came out of the booth to talk to her. When he asked if she was going to come to the booth she told him no and that she was looking for a software engineering role. She wasn’t interest in sales. She was an engineer.
    • The gentleman asked if she knew what a sales consultant was, and she said no. He asked if he could explain it to her. She agreed, and this was the first time she learned about the sales consultant / solution engineer / sales engineer (or SE) role.
    • The gentleman shared the details of the role with Yvette, and he explained the nuances of it. This gentleman recognized that though Yvette worked as a software engineer, she seemed to have great interpersonal skills. The job was a combination of technical and interpersonal skills.
    • Yvette went through the interview process and was hired by Oracle, which was her first foray into sales engineering.
• At first the change into sales engineering was daunting and scary, but Yvette really loved that it was different.
  • She remembers needing to do an install on her very first day (a remote install). It was a pretty challenging event.
  • Yvette stayed at work until probably 9 PM on that first day to avoid needing to fly out the next morning to finish it.
  • Yvette loved and hated being consistently being put in uncomfortable positions of needing to do something with which she had no experience, which made her unsure of whether she would be able to finish the work successfully.
  • Yvette remembers being told she needed to do a presentation on a product called Data Query the next day. This required she teach herself the product and prepare a demo on a very short timeline.
  • The first year Yvette had a lot of fear and trepidation, which challenged her to learn.
  • Yvette also needed to deliver many presentations. This was not an area where she had much experience in her time as a developer other than walking through code she had built with someone.
  • As a young woman, Yvette had to present to customers she didn’t know. This was the 1990s, and her customers were government entities. Often times customers would think she was the secretary / assistant to her male sales counterpart and would not expect her to be the engineer who did a technical presentation.
  • During this time, Yvette was challenged on a daily basis. She feels her success may have been due to believing in herself despite that inner voice that didn’t seem to believe.

19:11 – Impostor Syndrome

• A lot of impostor syndrome hit Yvette during this time.
• Yvette tells the story of a young man she met at new hire orientation that she befriended. He was fresh out of college. He joined a different team than she did but invited her to attend his first official presentation at the office in Bethesda, Maryland.
  • When the presentation began, the young man started presenting in perfect French.
  • Yvette later realized this kid had a law degree, was educated in other areas such as computer science, and had just graduated from Sorbonne University in France.
  • Yvette saw this presentation and thought "there’s no way I’m going to be this good, and he’s speaking in perfect French!"
  • When this person told Yvette he had just graduated, she made the incorrect assumption that he must be both younger than her and less experienced.
  • "How did they hire me, and then I looked around and everyone was brilliant that I worked with?" – Yvette Edwards after starting at Oracle and wondering how she got in
• John says everyone must go through something similar when they get into a role like this. They don’t necessarily understand that the job is often to develop a breadth of knowledge (not necessarily depth) and then be able to, on demand, generate some depth in what someone is asking you about and then go and teach it to the person.
  • This type of skill may not really be something that is often asked of us when we go through school.
  • We don’t necessarily have great ways to find people with this skill in their comfort zone and may not have trained people to do it before the stakes are higher.
  • Yvette says this is context related too. You can potentially feel comfortable with a product or widget and specific use case, but then someone throws a different use case your way. Then you have to start thinking in a new context (could mean a lack of industry experience, for example).
  • Listening, understanding the context of the question, and always being truthful if you don’t know the answer is important.
  • One of the biggest things we have to do as SEs is finding the answer. We may not know the answer, but we can research the answer or may know someone who knows the answer.
  • Yvette has made it a point in her career to be truthful if she didn’t know the answer and says we can gain credibility by going to get the answer on behalf of our customers.
    • Yvette also would not stop working with the customer on something until she got the result they needed.
    • "And sometimes you have to ask for help, which is hard." – Yvette Edwards

23:18 – Life of a Sales Engineer

• Yvette mentioned the fear about her hire being a mistake (or a fear of being found out). Most of us deal with the this same fear (with the possible exception of people with some type of abundant / delusional self-confidence).
  • John references the Dunning-Kruger Effect here.
• Being self-aware about the fear and be honest about the lack of knowledge is a knife edge. You want to be seen as an authority but be honest about what you don’t know at the same time is challenging to navigate in your first year or in general early in a career.
  • This likely applies outside the sales engineering role, but as sales engineers, we are asked to learn about a wide variety of products, services, and use cases.
  • Nick says this is similar to the help desk employee being brought a microwave or some other technical gadget and being asked to fix it.
  • There is a mix of humility and willingness to learn in all of this.
• What can listeners know if sales engineering could be a fit, and what types of qualities does someone need for the role?
  • The biggest one for Yvette is curiosity and a need to have diversity in your day.
  • When college students ask Yvette what a typical day is like in sales engineering, she tells them there really is no such thing.
    • We could probably say working with technology and interacting with customers is a large part of it. Yvette believes you need to have some type of resiliency.
    • Yvette feels she is the sort of person who thrives in a dynamic environment where things tend to be different day to day.
  • If you are someone who truly loves technology, interpersonal relationships, solving problems, interacting with people at different levels within an organization (in which conversations can be quite nuanced), and seek a dynamic work environment…sales engineering could be a good fit for you.
    • You may be in your home office, at a customer’s office, possibly traveling, or even doing a presentation in a hotel room or inside a conference room you’ve never been to previously.
  • What about the myth that this kind of role is not for introverts?
    • Though people might not believe her, Yvette is an introvert now and was extremely introverted as a young woman.
    • An extrovert gets energy from being around people, and an introvert truly needs that time away.
      • Both types can be great public speakers, but an introvert may need time after a presentation to be alone and recharge.
    • It was easy to be an introvert as a developer. There were few presentations other than walk throughs of code (which was more reading from a document / coding tool).
    • One of the hardest things for Yvette was the presentations. She remembers doing a lot of practicing. Yvette’s daughter was 4 years old around this time, and she would walk around repeating the phrase "Oracle is not just a database company."
    • For Yvette, practicing presentations was a way to get past the nerves. She would not memorize a script but rather practice what she wanted to say.
    • If you’re an introvert and are interested in this kind of career, don’t let that stop you. If presentations feel scary, think about the other times you have done presentations (a presentation to your children, something in church or at a community center, etc.).
      • The reason these presentations were successful is because you had a message to get across.
      • Think of presenting as getting a message across, getting a story across, or as teaching. Yvette really loves teaching people and leaned into it in her career.
      • If you are someone who likes to impart and share knowledge, you too could enjoy presenting as long as it had those outcomes.
    • If you’re an introvert and this career excites you, try it out. Try some different presentations.
      • Toastmasters is a good resource for practicing presentations.
      • Nick says the best way to practice presentation skills is to keep doing it.

30:07 – Presentations

• John mentions presenting as a specific fear people have – standing up in front of a group of people and facing away from the slide deck you’re presenting. John says it is so specific that he has asked people to deconstruct what scares them.
  • Is it the standing up in front of a group?
  • Is it facing away from your notes?
  • Would sitting down in a circle make it easier?
  • Would it change if the audience was made up of all your friends?
  • Where is the line that determines presenting is not ok / not for you?
• Presenting is like any other skill. We should try practicing at the edge of our comfort zone and then press that edge continually.
  • Instead of doing this people say "oh, I never could do that" and treat it like a binary thing (people either can or can’t) as opposed to understanding that everyone is bad at it in the beginning, and we get better slowly over time.
  • Yvette once heard a motivational speaker say that the best way to not feel judged is to stop judging others.
  • Many teenagers are so afraid of judgment it can be almost paralyzing. If we give people grace as presenters hopefully they will also give us grace.
• Yvette says she gets the most nervous when presenting if she feels she does not know the material. That ratchets up the level of impostor syndrome.
  • Presenting on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is one thing, but Yvette would have to present Oracle technology concepts in her early days to people with 20 years’ experience or people to had PhDs.
  • This is why authenticity is so important. You cannot pretend to know more than people with this depth of experience.
  • In these scenarios Yvette realized she knew the new technology or feature sets on a deeper level than her audience, even in the case where they had more experience than her.
  • Yvette’s nerves get really bad when she is speaking about things she does not know well / well enough.
• Nick mentions you also have to be prepared for people to ask questions on top of being nervous.
• What type of peanut butter would Yvette have used in the how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich presentation? Listen and hear for yourself.

33:29 – The Individual Contributor’s Path

• Many companies have a career path / ladder where people can progress, stay, technical, and not be forced into management. Large technology companies have this kind of path, for example.

• Yvette has been blessed in that her employers over time (ATT, Oracle, Symantec, Veritas, VMware) have always had career paths for individual contributors.

• Yvette fully intended to remain an engineer forever. Though she made the shift from software engineer to sales engineer, she liked the individual contributor path. She enjoyed the job she was doing.

• Yvette would also do things that were exhibiting leadership, but she never considered them as being leadership.

  • She would serve as team lead, lead a project, or mentor team members. To Yvette it was still individual contributor work.

• Sales engineering at most of the companies Yvette knows has a strong individual contributor career path (all the more reason to go after this career).

  • Some engineering type jobs (like mechanical engineering for example) may have a step or two and then only have leadership as a way to progress.
  • At VMware as an example, there are 6 or 7 levels on the individual contributor path, and progression has to do with your sphere of influence and your sphere of impact.
  • Even though you may not be a leader you can make a bigger impact inside your company like impacting an entire region or geography rather than just your team.
  • If you are seeking to make a bigger impact, you can do that as an individual contributor.

• Mentioned in the outro

  • Similar to the way Yvette leveraged the experience of her colleague in the ATT days, should we leverage the experience of recruiters who contact us and take some calls now and then to stay on top of the job market and do a low pressure interview practice?
    • This sounds like something that will feed into an upcoming episode on resumes!
  • The pattern of people getting into sales engineering by blind chance is emphasized again with Yvette’s experience (perhaps a pattern we had not called out earlier).
    • Maybe we need to be open to hearing about roles which on the surface don’t seem like they fit?
    • This could help you address gaps in getting to a place that sounds interesting.
  • John is glad he asked about introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts in sales engineering.
  • Maybe when faced with impostor syndrome type situations (i.e. presenting to people with more experience), we can take advice from Ben Bergeron’s Chasing Excellence, lowering the definition of success and controlling it better.
  • John says preparing to deliver an extemporaneous speech in high school speech and debate is something that seems to map fairly closely to the idea of generating depth on-demand for a customer presentation.
  • Leave it to John to bring in a swing dancing reference here.
  • Should we mention Episode 141 on deep work too?
  • If you are aware of a degree that is similar to the management information systems (MIS) degree Yvette mentioned (that mix of business and programming) that somoene has pursued in the last 5 years, we would love to hear from you about degree offerings and schools that are offering these programs.

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