Some hunters found a boy in a ditch on the side of the road, and all signs seemed to indicate that he had died from alcohol poisoning. The boy had clearly suffered more than the alcohol, as his eyes were sunken and purple, as his nose was crusted and bent, but the blue coloring of his vomit-stained face was the most apparent aspect of his ghoulish visage. I had known the kid, Perry Till, for much of his life because I was a friend of Joseph, his father. Hell, I was even invited to Perry's 17th birthday less than a year back, even if I couldn't attend. The boy called me Uncle, and I tried to do the best I could for him, but I never knew how much he really needed in his last few days alive. Joseph and I have no familial connections, we certainly were raised similarly, but we both found ourselves at the end of the line in a dead end town. I have nothing but respect for Joseph, even after everything that's happened, as he chose to befriend me when no one else would. A single father running a failed video store, I met him after sleeping in his parking lot, back when I lived out of my car. He set me up with a job at his store, and some money to sell up at a motel, and I just managed to stick to him like a leech. Perry was just for around this time, a miniature of his dad with the same short, straight straw hair, the same big hazel eyes, and even wearing similar jeans and shirts. The kid idolized Joseph, so it wasn't much of a surprise when he began emulating the same obsessions. Joseph had gone to film school, and had planned on being an independent director, and while that dream never panned out, it never died either. Now, I've seen a few flicks in my day, even consider myself a cobweb fan for all that's worth, but Joseph really knows his stuff. He has always avidly collected criteria in films, and he has lectured to me, on multiple occasions mind you, about the works of Easton Stein, Kato, and Ozzo. He's often had me over for his own makeshift film festivals in the living-turn screening room. It was one of these get-togethers that I could first picture anything indicating something off about the family. Perry was only 12 then, yet Joseph decided to invite him for an overnight marathon of Birdman films. Perry loved it, and it didn't seem my place to protest. However, I remember vividly how my skin crawled as the woman on screen, intimately described a sexual encounter with two perpubescent boys, while neither Perry nor his father was moved from his mesmerized state. Over the years, I was invited many times to act either as staff or in the traditional sense for Joseph's many film projects. Of the dozens of projects he tried, I doubt he finished one though, if he did, I never saw it complete. Joseph had a nod style of directing and somewhat bizarre taste, seeming a different person when his creative juices began to flow. He would stretch his nonexistent budgets to the limit, and create beautiful and surreal mad paintings and miniatures. However, he would also become distant and erratic with his actors, yelling at them if they forced another take on the limited film stock. No one else in town ever came back to him after working with him once, no one but me. I must admit to myself that it was more than just loyalty to a friend, that I have been pointlessly infatuated with this man for years now. I truly believe that he is a genius weighed down by his own shortcomings, and that he is a caring father and friend when he is not caught up in his own mind. When Perry started making his own films, Joseph was practically bursting with pride. I hoped that he would get along with others better than his father did. That definitely seemed to be the case when I was invited over to the screening of his first short film. The kid's taste definitely nearer to his father's, as the movie was a little horror story called, The Sound Diary. As far as I can remember it, the basic plot was that a man kept writing down his thoughts into a little notebook, and, as soon as his pen touched paper, a strange noise would sound. The noises were all very well done, and only one of which I could really place, that being the sound of the engine on my old truck starting turned down a few octaves. I don't think he really knew how to end the movie, cause the man ended up just killing himself, and we never learned where those sounds were coming from.  It was after this first project that Perry started working at the video shop as a more serious job, as he'd only done the obture or two up to this point. Him working at the shop was also when we really began to warm up to each other, enough for him to call me uncle without his father's provocation. He was a hard worker, but from time to time, I'd indulge the kid by just sitting down, and letting him drone on and on about all of his ideas for movies. Eventually, he started spicing these conversations up by sharing with me a little fascination he had. It was a semi-common experience, but sometimes customers would accidentally, and sometimes intentionally, leave the wrong disc in a case. Perry had made it a habit to look through cases for misplaced films, though only finding a few interesting things in most instances. It was a little hypnotic to hear him describe in excruciating detail the weddings of people he'd never met, and now kept on a shelf at home. He never bothered to look for the original owners, and they never tried to retrieve any of the tapes to my knowledge. It took a year of this before he found the skinny tape, as we'd come to call it, yet for all intents and purposes the thing must have been there all along. He had been browsing through the Dusty VHS section, when he discovered an out-of-place tape in the box for the seventh seal. It was an average tape in appearance, yet had skinny, written on the side in neat block letters obviously drawn with sharpie. At least two weeks passed before Perry decided to show the movie to me, and at that time, he admitted to watching it a dozen times. Up until then Perry was eating a quiet exuberance, paying little attention to his work and jotting something down in a moleskin notebook every few minutes. I asked him what was up, and he told me that he had found an amazing film that I just had to see. When we finally snuck off into the back room, where we kept the VCR, I wondered aloud why he didn't show this to his father. He ignored me. He put the tape into the machine, and silently stood next to me as the static dispersed. The actual footage only lasts for about 30 minutes before dissolving into static, but I could feel the time stretch. All of it is a single shot, a high angle of a brick off wooden doorway in someone's basement, to wind barrels on each side of the doorway. The scene is dark, the only source of light being a flickering lantern which is just out of frame, but you can see the shadow of the lantern on the ground next to a vague human figure. Every little visual action takes place, except for a mouse that scurried around one barrel at about halfway through. What seemed to entice Perry however, were the sounds that infest that bank dungeon. The basic atmosphere is composed of dripping water, quick enough that it was probably raining at the time of filming, and shallow breathing that suggests the camera operator's presence. After a while you adjust to these sounds, as they melt into the background with the accompanying events. It takes a few minutes, but soon after the tape begins, you hear a lone moan arise from behind the red brick barrier. A violent yank of chains follows, and about five times it seems someone or something is trying to break its bonds. The thing behind the wall resigns, and you hear a grunt followed by the jingle of tiny teen bells. At this time the mouse scurries past, and the thing must hear it because it produces another moan, more guttural now and accompanied by more yanking of chains. Once again the jingle of teen bells. It seems quiet for a bit, but slowly you begin to hear growing sobs, dry and pleading. It's faint, but little before the end, a small, iffy voice whispers. While the sob continues. After that, the background noise takes over again before quickly cutting to black, followed by static.  Perhaps that was what enticed him so much about it, as I could see that he wanted to play it again as soon as it had ended. I told him that I found it quite strange and disturbing to be honest, but he didn't seem to register that. Soon after that, Perry halted the project he had been working on, supposedly his woody third film about a man living in a transparent hallway between the front doors of two suburban homes. In its stead, he began working on a new project, an adaptation of Edgar Allen post the cast of a Montalano, using the skinny footage. I told him that it was a bad idea, that the tape could be a snuff film for all he knew, but he simply dodged this advice. The kid was getting a lot more closed off now, sometimes missing school if his father was to be believed. It was five days before Perry's body was found when I went to tell Joseph. He was also very concerned about his son's shift in behavior, and asked me what I knew. I responded with a question of my own, whether or not he knew of a tape with the word skinny written on it. He was confused, but he knew his son well enough that I think he could understand some of the implications as I described the tape's contents. We sat across from each other on the sectional couch he kept in his living room, and he chewed the words a few times before finally speaking. I know where a wine cellar is, he said. If it's the one from the video, he could be sneaking off to the old ranch. We should both go. I followed behind Joseph in my truck, as we twisted along dirt roads for about a mile. Eventually, we found ourselves in a huge overgrown field cornered on three sides by forest, with the road passing near a huge house that's most likely used to govern a plantation. As we got neared, I could see that it had been abandoned for at least as long as I had been alive, for the porch on the big building sagged with rot. We got out of our cars and, from the look of his red eyes, it seemed that Joseph had been crying the whole time. He walked towards me and gave me a hug, whispering in my ear. Thank you, thank you for doing this for me. I almost began crying myself. However, before I could get emotional, Joseph lead me around to the back of the house where the cellar entrance was. We could see that the doors were already wide open. Since Joseph lead on the gaping wooden doors, he quickly sprinted into the dark stairs that the doors opened up to. It took all I had to keep up with Joseph, because he ran like a bat out of hell. It smelled like decay in the cellar, more than it smelled like one, and I imagined many of the barrels were filled with vinegar at that point. Joseph lead me through the huge tomb of wine before, not taking a single run turned, until we got to our apparent destination. Here as my mother's name is and, I saw the same exact location from the video, only the wall was no longer there. I clenched my teeth and fists, for I saw Joseph crumple to his knees before a mess of scrambled bricks, just a few of them piled off to the side. In the small room, the one previously walled off, were for rusted chain manacles, all of them broken. On the floor was what once may have been something like a jester's hat, with three tiny bells attached to the ends of three different fluffy points of the hat, and a half missing, baguette-infested rat corpse lying beside it. Neither of us ever saw Perry again after that bay. Now would be the best time to reveal why I am writing this at all. I'm not the boy's actual uncle, so I don't have any right to disclose his life and fate to strangers. I do have a right, however, to do whatever I can to help my friend in whatever way I can. The truth is that I don't have the slightest clue what has happened, I'm too close to it all to wrap my head around it. I don't have time to figure it out though, as a certain event occurred soon after Perry's body was discovered. Joseph invited me over to his house once more. I found him quietly waiting in the living room, the skinny tape sitting on the table before him. It looked more beat up than when I first saw it, overused, and apparently found yet an under Perry's bed while cleaning out the room. Joseph said that he was sorry he hadn't told me earlier, that he had realized as soon as I had described the tape. He was the one who made it. I didn't know what to ask him then, and I still don't. We just stared at each other for minutes. He looked like he was twice my age, and he had gigantic bags beneath his eyes. I don't think he has slept once since the day he learned of his son's death. Finally, he said to me, I want to finish the movie. I need to, for Perry. I, I can't do it without your help. Can you work a camera?


The internet, websites and surfing the net. I spend a lot of time on the internet, as well as a lot of my friends do. The internet has become very popular nowadays. It's almost impossible to imagine modern life without the internet. I surf the net every day. I prefer entertainment and educational websites such as Facebook, Vkontakte, Wikipedia and YouTube. I have been using these websites since I got my first smartphone. I use websites mostly to study online or relax or chat with my friends. I think my most favorite site is YouTube. There are a lot of YouTube channels which help me in studies, and there are plenty of funny videos there. We usually discuss YouTube videos with my friends. But I also think that the youth should use websites very carefully. There is a lot of fake information, as everyone can create a site or a blog and publish whatever they want.


This next myth is one that Oren snuck in on me, that we decided to keep, which is just getting older always lead to management. Thanks Oren for putting that one in as your manager. I appreciate that. Maybe it's some kind of a subtle reference that I should maybe not read too much into. But in my career path working in IT, again, I said I started a long, long, long time ago just in the cable to get that printer to work and then progress through being a LAN administrator, being a WAN administrator, I got started in Banyan Vines as well back in the day, and then progress through to going off and being training and deploying people using new PCs, configuring and working with client server environments for that large environment. I ended up taking some training myself and then someone asked if I'd be interested in actually becoming a trainer at that point in time and a consultant, because I was able to explain things well to different people. Fast forward to where I am now working at Microsoft, and it's been a great journey. But at one point, I got out of doing public speaking, and I went and worked in engineering for five, six years, and on the Azure engineering team, the point I was doing is I was shifting my focus to become deep in certain areas to learn the background of different technologies that I now talk about again. But then someone came up to me and offered me the opportunity and said, hey, if you could connect up and build a team of people that did the stuff that you used to do, talked to the audiences that you used to talk to about different topics that are super wide for the stuff that you do, would you be interested in it? I'm like, yeah, because it gives me scale. It gave me vertical scale to go off and do what ultimately I'll have to do, which is help people solve problems. So they become more successful in their careers inside their work environments, and then they help their people go off and be more productive and do different things. That's ultimately a core of what I believe I should be doing. So now I've got a team of people that do that because I really did hire people that are smarter than me, because there's no way that I could go to the same breadth and depth of knowledge that these different specialists have. So Pierre is not in the room anymore, but Pierre is on my team as well, and he's my guy that's the generalist Azure all up, very much into automation, very much into networking. Orin is beyond super deep when it comes to on-premises and hybrid technologies with Windows Server, but then has this pedantic memory of being able to remember almost anything that he reads to be able to apply a big breadth of category of stuff across the board. I've got another person on my team that works specifically on VMware solutions because we have a VMware offering inside of Azure as well, and so on and so on. So I built this team that gives me vertical scale, sorry, horizontal scale, and that has vertical depth because I couldn't do that as an individual. I was a choice and I loved it and it's been great, but it's absolutely not for everybody. I would never wish upon anybody to be a direct report of Orin. What's your philosophy on this, my friend? My philosophy is I wouldn't want to be a direct report of Orin either because I would be awful to work for, simply because I have no idea of a reasonable amount of work and what's not a reasonable amount of work and how you take leave. That's always been a bit confusing to me. But one of the reasons that people will smile riley at the idea of this myth is that we have all seen people move into management and their technical skills of atrophied, and that's something we also fear because for a lot of our career, our currency is our set of technical skills. So I'm going to interrupt you here and just say you're treading on what's in ice, my friend, as a manager in the room, but you can continue. Go ahead. Go ahead. Our performance review is next week. Well, again, where I'm going with this is that we have seen other people move into management and have their technical skills atrophied. Why? Because I spent so much time dealing with these weird components called people instead of dealing with the fun solvable components called computer. Now, that's one reason why we might avoid management. It might also be and I cannot stress this enough. Unless you really want to manage people, don't do it because one of the things that we see a lot of, and you've probably seen throughout your career, is people that have been bumped into management because they wanted the higher pay packet, but they're absolutely terrible at management. There's a thing called the Peter principle, which you are promoted to the level at which you become incompetent. That is that if you're really competent, you keep getting promoted and you stop getting promoted when you can't you're not the best anymore at what you do. You can't go up any further. That doesn't mean management. So some people choose to get the higher paycheck of being a manager, but find that they're out of their depth. If it's something that you're passionate about, absolutely go and do it. Me, not a chance. Now, so what do you do? How do you go? Because this is the thing, I'm at my stage of my career, I'm a principal at Microsoft, and I'm looking around at people, and I know that most of the people at a partner level are managing very large organizations like Rick's boss, my skip box. Let's interrupt for one second. Just to clarify, principle level, partner level is three more steps above that, as far as progression in your career at Microsoft, and then above partner level, three more steps above that, is your VP level, and then there's even more VP levels before you get to the Satya level. But this weird is that the principal level is a big turning point that he's going to talk about here. So where I'm going with that, is that when you're looking around and you've reached a certain level of your career, the people that are still what we call an individual contributor start to get a bit thinner on the ground. Most of the people who are your peers at the same level tend to have very large teams, and Rick hooked me up with Jeffrey Snover as a career coach, and that was actually very useful because Jeffrey managed to go all the way to distinguished engineer at Microsoft without having anybody report to him, but the guy invented PowerShell. So what do you do with your career? You've probably heard the analogy of being T-shaped. That is that you're a good broad generalist, but that you're excessively deep on a specific area. So one of the things that you want to also think about as you move into this later phase of your career is really becoming the absolute expert on a stack or an area of technologies. Now, the first fear you'll have is I'm becoming an expert on a technology that's not relevant. Well, here's the thing, over the previous 25 years of your career, you've worked out what technologies are absolutely relevant to your business, and you've probably got a fair idea of what's going to be around and what's not going to be around. We know, even though there's a new name for the cloud version of it, that in some way, shape, or form, Active Directory is going to be around probably for the next 30 to 50 years. Now, why do we know that? Because we've still got people running Windows Server 2008, still got people running Windows Server 2003. So people don't tend to migrate off things as quickly as they used to. SQL servers are going to always be around. There's 800 billion lines of COBOL still in production. So there's certain technologies which are very rock solid that solve business problems that if you're an expert on them or you're very deep on them, that makes your career more valuable. And you will understand through the course of your career and your own understanding of the landscape, you'll have a fairly good idea of what's going to be around. There's a thing in economics called the Lindy Effect. That is that when a technology has been in use for a certain amount of time, a long time, it's probably going to be in use for a long time in the future. It takes a lot of change and a lot of momentum to disrupt a really lodged in technology. And that's something, if you look at the pace of technological change, in the 1990s, it was very fast. But now, if we think about why are people still running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012, which reaches end of support at the end of this year? It's because for the most part, the newer versions of those technologies aren't so massively different and aren't so revolutionary. When I was working in 2000 at a big metals company in Australia, I remember remoting across to a server that was running Windows NT 3.51 and thinking in 2000, oh my gosh, there's a server that's six years old.  Has anybody today remoted into a server that's six years old and gone, that's ancient? Or is that just standard operating procedure now? You've successfully managed to make every single marketing person at Microsoft kind of pass out, I think, with what you're talking about. But again, completely concur. There's a certain tipping point that you will come to know when it makes sense to go off and shift to that particular next version or whatever happens to be. However, another big long diatribe, which I'll save us all from because Orin and I go off on tangents with it, is around the complexity of IT projects and the amount of cost overrun that happens inside those IT projects. Generally, is that big barrier for being able to start it in the first place? Or you go ahead and start it and you realize after the fact, oops, there's all these other cost factors involved or other complexities involved that end up tanking that particular project and not being all that successful. As you mentioned, the IRS as an example, still running the majority of the entire taxation system for the United States on mainframes and on COBOL because it just works and they don't have resources to go off and even explore new things. But adoption of those new things potentially are not gonna offset the disruption that it might cause and or the cost factors for what it can cause. And there's another element to that as well and this is a slightly separate thing. In terms of cost overruns, the average IT project cost overruns by 700%. Now, that means that's the average and that's simply because there are certain tail IT projects that have gone so far over their budget that they've skewed it a lot. But in terms of likelihood of a project going over budget, the only thing that beats IT as a classification is nuclear energy. So that's why a lot of organizations are reluctant to embark on revolutionary change in IT. So our last myth we're gonna talk about before we give you some actions are specifically around the whole concept of evolving from a job into a career. So a job is a point in time and a career is a continuum.