Welcome everybody. My name is Mike Murray, my co-presenter here is Lee Kushner. Thank you for coming to the presentation. Absolutely, and we're going to talk a little bit about security careers today. And I thought we'd start by talking about where this all got started. This whole conversation, I think between Lee and I and even before that, got started a few years ago at Black Hat, when a good friend of ours whose name is Scott Blake asked the following question. What's the difference between a hacker and a security professional? And what answer did Scott come up with? The answer is a mortgage. So, from there, that was one of the first conversations Lee and I ever had. He was telling me this joke. And we actually met a few years ago at Black Hat as well. And the story has a lot to do with what we're talking about. Because for once, we both stayed at the Mirage. And that's pretty weird. We had both booked late, neither of us was at Caesars for Black Hat. And we got in the elevator at the Mirage one day. And we didn't know each other. We had never met before. I knew who he was. I mean, he's Lee Kushner. He's like the security recruiter, right? I mean, I put our bios up on the screen. But I think most of you probably know who he is. And at the time, I was running vulnerability research for a little company or an office up in Canada for Encircle. And we got talking.  And we got talking about where I wanted to go in my career and where he had seen people go from vulnerability research and how you get out of being just a vulnerability researcher to be something more. To be regardless of where you want to go, whether you want to be a CTO of a company or a CISO at a bank or whatever. The whole question was, okay, how do you go from wherever you are to wherever you want to be? And I think that conversation started about three years ago. And I think we talked at least once a month about that same thing to this day.  Let's do something for DEF CON. Let's come here. And there's probably a lot of people who are either just starting out or regardless of where you are in your career, trying to go somewhere. And I've been there and I've been the one in the seats kind of wondering how to get where I want to go. So hopefully we can talk a little bit about all of those things. It's very interesting when you come to a conference like this or any of the other events that you might attend in the information security industry. And the one thing that everybody has in common is that everybody has a career. Everybody is proud of what they do. Everybody has aspirations to do things past what they're doing. And with any young industry like the information security industry is, I mean really, I mean it's really only been significantly on the corporate map for ten years or so. Because the industry is so immature, there isn't any really well-defined roadmap on how to get from point A to point Z. So going through talking with your friends, understanding what you want out of your career is quite important. And we're going to talk about a lot of those discussions here. We're going to talk about probably a lot of things that you think about on your own, things that may be discussed with your friends, talking about things like, what's important to you? Do you want a job in a paycheck? I once had a, when I was first starting out, one of my first jobs was selling vacuums. I answered some ad and I'll make $100,000 in a year and it was all great. And the first thing they did was show us this, I guess, you'd call it a PowerPoint now, but they had job and they said, job stands for just overbroke, you don't want a job, you want to own your own business, you want to sell vacuums. So that was my shortest duration of any of my jobs, T minus two hours. But you want to talk about things about what is your career path? Because your career path is different than anybody else's in this room. It's unique to you. Things that are important to you are things that are important back to other folks. Just in things like taking ownership of your own career, how do you go about doing that? Building your own brand, helping define who you are, what makes people think, what others think about when they hear your name or when they think about your work and your work product. What really is the best job that you have? How you can make the most out of your own job the one that you do have? How could you make your job better? Understanding why is a good reason to change jobs? Really understanding what might be a bad reason to change jobs? And really trying to figure out how to get where I need to go. So we've been up here for about four minutes, and I think between the two of us we probably said the words career path about ten times. And you guys have probably all heard those words a million times. But I think we need to define what that is. I know a lot of people in security, and I'm sure there's a couple of people out there in the audience that just jump from job to job. You know, oh this sounds cool today, this sounds cool tomorrow. And that's kind of a neat way to live, you know, it's fun. But I mean we've both seen a lot of people who look up ten years later and go, well my skills are obsolete, now what the heck do I do? All those things, all your decisions, and I think the one thing that will be a recurring theme today is that whatever decision you make regarding your career you will ultimately reap the rewards from and you will ultimately pay the consequences of. So when you're making any of these decisions you have to really think about getting the information, getting the right information, and figuring out how that affects you personally. And security is particularly interesting for that because as Lee mentioned it's a young field. You know, if you think about a lot of the careers that maybe our parents had or people that we know that aren't in tech had, the career path is very different. And we need to be clear about what's different in those career paths than is different in ours. In most careers you get this well defined steps. You know, if you look at, you know, let's use accounting as an example. We all like to pick on accountants, don't we? Yeah, you gotta pick on accountants. So, I mean think about the career path through accounting. You go through school, you get a degree in finance. And then you start working your way up. And it's pretty well defined. You start out as a junior financial person and you pretty much move up through senior person, controller, CFO.  But for the most part, the steps are pretty well defined. There's a degree in it. Everybody knows that you have to get your CFA. I think is... CFA is Canadian. I can't remember where your CPA is, your CFP is, or some sort of C. Yes, and actually in that field the C actually means something. Well, the other thing is this, if you asked a hundred CFOs how did you become a CFO? You would probably find a hundred very similar career paths. And they'd all look like that actually. Somewhat. Yeah, pretty much. And security is different. I mean security is really more like a real mountain. Where there's a whole lot of different ways up the mountain. I can probably... You know what? I might actually do a little bit of the survey here. We can look at the security career as a whole bunch of different pieces on the bottom. I mean there's not... Let me actually ask the question. Is there anyone in this room who went through school and has a degree in security? Give a hand. Give a round of applause. Exactly. Because I know if I had asked that question five years ago there wouldn't have been a hand in the house. That's actually really cool. But it still wasn't very many hands. If we walked into an accountants conference and asked who has a degree in finance, the number of people who didn't put up their hand would be less than the number of people who just did. So really security has a particularly interesting career path because everyone starts out in a different place and everyone has a different way to get there. One of the things that we have been very lucky to notice is that there's really a difference between the technical track and the management track. And at some point you have to make the decision. One of the best things to talk to Mike is that one of the best things about this industry and I think one of the things that drew me to it 11 years ago was the fact that people come into this industry from very diverse backgrounds. There are not cookie cutter personalities in this industry. There are not cookie cutter education paths. The respect is earned in this industry. It's not just given because of some school you went to. Some letters after your name. It's kind of about what you've accomplished and what you've done and that own, I don't know if you would call it, whether it's the secret handshakes or the understated respect of what people share for each other as professionals by coming to conferences like this. I mean that's unique. People come to this profession, some of the best folks, they started out when they were 8, 9, 10 years old. And I'm sure most of some of you are in this room and you just became interested in things and you just became interested in wanting to learn and you become passionate about it and your avocation became your vocation because someone's now writing the checks and that's a really great thing about this industry and what Mike said that five years ago people wouldn't have had a function, a degree in information security. It just didn't really exist. Here and there, a couple of programs the fact that it's coming so quick and it's accelerating so much I think that's just a testament that finally we have a place where people who are interested in doing the type of work that you all do it's great because opportunities are being created and when there are more opportunities there are more challenges because there are more choices and I think that's kind of what it cuts back to. Absolutely and so fundamentally we're pretty excited about this. Anybody who talks to either of us for more than five minutes has probably heard us talk about some facet of this but really why should you guys care? And that's really the big question and my answer is that the rules have changed. When our parents went to work, the game was different. My mom worked for a large bank in Canada for 34 years. Same job, she moved up and her boss always took responsibility for making sure she had the right training and they defined her career path and every year they reviewed her and said hey you're doing a great job on your career path, keep that up and very few people changed careers. Very few people went out and changed jobs but the world is different and especially in our industry the world is different. This is not an industry so I actually spent six years at one company in this industry and by the day that I left I was the only person that remembered the day that I started. When I tell my parents or my grandparents how often I'm switching jobs they look at me like I've lost my mind and I'm seeing a lot of nodding heads out in the audience so I've got a pretty good idea that you guys have all experienced that and what we're really here to say and I hate to be the ones to tell you all this but it's all up to you. In our parents generation the company took care of you. The company made sure you had a pension when you retired the company made sure that you were growing the company made sure that you were doing the things that needed to be done not no more. It's all up to you and so you really need to take the responsibility for your own career because nobody's going to make it happen for you except you really. Ultimately you're the one that will have to take the responsibility for what you've said before that you'll reap the rewards or you'll pay the consequences so every decision that you make has a cause and effect to it and you know Mike was talking about you know it's a personal it's a personal issue here you really have to know yourself you really have to know what's important to you you have to know what makes you tick and you have to know what gets you excited and what you actually might want to get to. So fundamentally and you know the quote from the previous slide is an important one and was said a few thousand years ago by a guy who kind of knew his way around and it's the fundamental question when you're asking yourself about your career what are you good at you know what gets you out of bed in the morning what gets you excited and what are you not so good at I'll tell you about myself if you put me in a job where all I did was watch logs all day I would go absolutely insane I would just go nuts if you put me in a job where I just had to manage you know that everything just kept going the way it was going yesterday I'd go nuts but if you put me in a job where there's nothing going on you know my job in Canada they the only thing that was in Canada when I got there was a cafe we didn't have real estate, we didn't have an office we didn't have a team, we didn't have anything we started interviewing, there are a couple people here who actually interviewed in that cafe before we had an office and that's the kind of challenge that gets me excited I bet some people in this room would be absolutely terrified by that the point is you have to know what you're good at you have to know what you like and only then can you really make the decisions about where you want to go I always think of it as the vegetable theory when your child your mom or dad prepares you some vegetables you figure out which ones you like and which ones you don't like and if you keep liking broccoli well then mom continues to cook broccoli if you keep liking, if you hate cucumbers you don't get cucumbers anymore so the truth is this is that you're trying to figure out what it is that you're good at and you're being able to either dismiss it or be able to embrace it and I think that those things are just very important and when you think about yourself thinking about kind of what might be your strengths what might be your weaknesses where you might want to develop your own careers and your own skills to either make yourself a more rounded, well rounded person and be able to find yourself's positions that enable you to do things that actually take your skills, utilize them to the fullest develop your weaknesses so they don't exist anymore and those types of things so all the research shows that you're going to be happiest when you're doing the things that you're the best at if you read most of the research out there it will tell you that when you are working on the things that you're already competent at and you're expanding those strengths you're happiest and most challenged we'll talk about strengths and weaknesses in a second but I want to talk about skills for a second because when we have a tendency to talk about skills the first thing that comes up is what programming languages do you know and have you used Ida before and can you reverse engineer protocols and how comfortable are you with TCP dump on the command line and that is a really important part of skills but it's not the whole deal there's a whole lot of skills that when you're a hiring manager and I've hired enough people to speak to this pretty authoritatively you're looking for more than just the technical skills I mean there's a lot of people in the world who can code there's not necessarily a lot of people who can work together to solve a problem or who can solve a problem they've never seen before or who know how to research and find the answer to something that they didn't see in a book somewhere and so I actually I ripped off this model from something that was in the Harvard Business Review a couple of years ago and I sort of expanded it over that course of time to the point that it doesn't really look like what was in HBR anymore but it was called the portfolio model of human capital so the idea is how do we talk about all the skills that people have because technical skills are only one of those and technical skill here there's a reason I put quotes around technical because if you're a manager the technical skills of being a manager aren't necessarily what we would consider IT skills there are things like budgeting and power points and doing Excel spreadsheets and making sure that you can make a strong cost justification for things those are the technical skills of managers but there are a whole lot of other skills that we don't talk about as often strategic skill where you're talking about can someone think on a broad scale everyone pretty much can get a task list done can someone prioritize and figure out how to make decisions with strategy how well do they know the industry when you walk into DEF CON or actually more accurately when you walk into RSA how many of the companies do you know how quickly can you ferret out the snake oil how do you know how the puzzle pieces fit together and how does that relate to your job not just what your job is but what your company is doing as a whole I mean one of the questions are you talking about skills just by a show of hands how many people here think they have good communication skills how many people think that all the people they've talked to recently have good communication skills I think there's a mismatch there communication is a skill and everybody thinks in the recruiting business people always say to us well I'm a people person that's great we're all people persons you know I mean we're people people but I mean when you think about it though communication is a skill it's a skill that has to be developed just like technology it has to be developed just like anything that you do and it's a skill that you have to work on in degrees of people's communication skills how many people think they're good negotiators of course everyone's a good negotiator everybody goes to go buy a car of course we're going to negotiate those prices well the truth of the matter is is that that's a skill as well so all of the skills that we think about are just actually kind of coming towards us of things that we just assume that we're good at the assumption that we're good at it almost discredits yourself so when you're thinking about all these different skills that create a skill matrix or enable you to be successful in your career you have to then be able to put your own value and your own score to those skills take a baseline of where you are and then figure out and be honest with yourself about what do I need to do to improve how can I go about improving and is it even worth improving absolutely so there's actually something I wanted to sort of backtrack and talk a little bit about on here it's that line that says weirdness quotient and I think it's a really important thing that we all overlook because you know there are places where you will fit in and there are places where you won't if you like to wear a suit to work every day there's a lot of tech startups where that's going to be kind of strange if you hate to wear a suit every day I wouldn't suggest working on Wall Street and that's an important piece to know what is your sort of style and how does that fit into whatever company you're looking for are they going to think you're absolutely freaky and out there because you have to be able to form relationships with these people and so jumping away from that for a second we talked a little bit about strengths and weaknesses we came to the realization of talking about this everybody only talks about strengths and weaknesses but there's actually three categories because all your strengths usually matter but we spend a lot of time and I'm sure everyone has been in that performance review or at least a lot of you have been in that performance review where someone tells you that you're weak in something that you know has absolutely no bearing on your job and that if you don't improve that that you get your job done just fine every single day of your life so there's actually two types of weaknesses there's the ones that actually keep you from advancing in your career and actually impact you and there's the ones that don't and you really have to figure out which ones make the difference because unfortunately back to the whole theme of this nobody's going to tell you it's up to you to figure that out and learning which of those are which is going to allow you to spend a whole lot less time wasted on fixing weaknesses that don't matter you know again I'll use a personal example I have a tendency to get bored really easily luckily I'm in information security that doesn't much matter because I work in an industry that's fast enough and on in in jobs that give me the opportunity to work in 12 different ways on any given day you know I can be working on power points in the morning and excel in the afternoon and coding you know later in the evening I don't have to worry about getting bored in another industry that would be a difference that matter if I was an accountant for example that probably would not be such a good trade so you need to figure out which are which and move on you know move on that so you know all about yourself you know assuming assuming we've gotten through to you you sat down and you thought about who you are and what your strengths are and and what your weaknesses are and you're working on yourself but the question is who else does because your career is impacted by other people as well and what do you you know when you have your career and you know you're talking about who you are I mean I think one of the things that you talk about and Mike says he uses the term personal branding and you know when you're in your career you're all responsible for marketing yourself you're all responsible for marketing yourself on a daily basis you're responsible for enabling the people who you work with the people who your industry peers the people whom you report to to really understand who you are so they have a good understanding of what you're capable of and what you'd like to tackle and by doing that on a daily basis by doing that continually over the course of the time you're able to develop a personal brand both within your organization both within the industry at lower levels of your organization and at higher levels of your team and I really I hesitate to use the word personal brand it's the hot career topic of the moment if you read the career blogs and the career books but I really think of it really is just you know what do people think of when they hear your name you know and I've got some examples up there I mean if you have some thoughts shout it out what do you think of when you hear Schneier's name? airport security yeah exactly secrets and lies I mean we all have this pretty much the same picture of Schneier in our head don't we I mean I bet if I asked if I asked all of you about Bruce we could all give a pretty pretty similar picture any of the names that are up there and so that's what your brand really is what do people think of when they hear your name and if you can find a common denominator there that's what represents you in the world now of course I'm talking about this and I'm using all these names that everybody's heard of right I'm using all these famous names and you're probably sitting there going yeah but I don't have books and I don't have all of this stuff but it's not just about that because you do have a personal brand branding happens on smaller scales and I think it's really important to realize that you have a brand whether you like it or not I mean anybody can think about their friends and think of the guy who's always late or the girl who's always late everyone has that person in their life I'm sure and realize that's their brand to you that's their brand in your circle of friends you have a brand at your company whether you like it or not whether it's you're the person that everybody goes to when everything falls apart or whether it's you're always late to meetings you have a brand and these are the things that are going to cause you to succeed or not so much to succeed in your career so ask yourself what's your brand what do you want to be known for what do you want to represent when people hear your name and the hard thing is it's not always easy to change your brand I mean if your friend who's always late started showing up on time you're not thinking of them as the friend that's always on time takes time with that where it doesn't take time is with new people and the opportunity to meet new people is an opportunity to teach people about a different brand we have some people in the audience I mean I see some nodding about there's definitely some people here who are good branders but it's really an important thing to realize that brand will be the limit of what you can do I have a question I just did three slides on branding and talked about it for like three and a half minutes there's a common theme in all of it what was it it's your fault actually that was a common theme but there's actually another common theme and it was all about relationship your brand doesn't exist in you it exists in other people when I noticed I wasn't asking Bruce what he thought his brand was I was asking you what he thought what you thought Bruce's brand was your brand doesn't exist because you think you're the smartest it's because everybody thinks that you're the smartest and so it's all about being known your brand is ultimately a function of who knows you and who you know because the people around you ultimately determine who you end up being I love this statistic it's a fascinating statistic that if you do the research your income will be almost always your income will be within 10% of your five closest friends almost always that speaks to the power of how important the people around you are not only do they hold your brand in their hands but they hold your image of yourself in your hands and you live up to who they are ultimately the more friends you have and the better friends you have the better brand you have and the better network you have and the farther along that you go so what's the best job for you I mean the best job for you is basically the job that you have and that might sound really crazy coming from a guy who makes his living about helping people move jobs but the truth of the matter is the best advice that we give and Mike and I do each other for about 18 months before we ever even talked about any potential opportunities for him because the jobs didn't line up with what he was doing with what he wanted to do and the truth of the matter is that in your job that you currently have it's really up to you to try to figure out ways how to make your job better because you know the grass is always greener I mean when you talk to you think about what people might be doing in other businesses or in other careers or in other environments say wow they have it really good there you know their bosses they have a bigger training budget or they have half day Fridays or they're getting paid 10% more than what I'm earning but you don't really know what it's like to go up and work in that environment on a daily basis so the truth of the matter is that everybody creates an illusion that their job's really not as good as everybody out there and I think that you always think about what might be and I think that's a big trend because you hear stories about someone who just got a huge pay raise or you hear somebody who's just doing something uniquely different and say I don't want that job too a lot of times you could have that job in your own company if you know how to actually work the internal channels you know how to develop your brand and be able to look at opportunity and seize opportunity that you can create for yourselves I think that it's a pretty good assumption that there's more security work than there are qualified people to do it but most people agree with that statement and I think that there's generally more work where people do not understand information security in a corporate environment that could really utilize somebody who understands information security from a technical perspective from a business perspective from a marketing perspective about how that will all tie in with their careers and they're looking for help they're looking to understand people inherently want to know what they're doing nobody ever likes to feel like they're an idiot so by taking opportunities to help educate people about what you're doing and seizing opportunities seizing roles seizing different areas where your expertise can be applied to people who don't have it ultimately you will create more opportunity you will create a better job and when that promotion comes up when that opportunity comes up your name's going to be the one on people's cons inherently finding better opportunity it's your responsibility on a daily basis to try to drive yourself in those directions I got a great story about that which about I guess about a year ago now I took a particularly interesting job and it was a fascinating opportunity and it was an opportunity to work with a really cool team of people and work for a really cool CISO incredible work two weeks after I got there CISO got fired and they didn't replace the CISO they basically decided to mothball the entire department and it got particularly ugly so if you talked to me a year ago I wasn't I've always been interested in careers but I certainly hadn't studied this stuff to the point that I could get up here and speak about it and it was a great opportunity to work in a place where I mean I've never seen a group of security professionals so unhappy in one place it was like you wouldn't believe and so I called I talked to Lee and I talked to some other friends and basically it was it was do I go to work every day and be miserable with all these people or do I go to work every day and figure out why these people are miserable and figure out how I can help them and figure out how this stakes again and how I can never put other people in these places and so I spent the best part of the almost 10 months that I was there doing my best to figure out what the silver lining is doing my best to help and doing my best to find the opportunities to learn and add value where I could even in the worst of situations and I think that's really the key I mean your job might absolutely suck every day but I bet there's at least a few things that aren't so bad about the place I bet there's a few things that you can find that you really like or there's some opportunities to learn some things that you would really like if you're bored at work great time to learn about other things what most of us do when we're bored at work is we end up surfing the web reading random crap it's fun it's not necessarily the most constructive thing and if you have the opportunity you can really you can really find that silver lining and I'm not going to be the one that stands up here and sort of you know rose colored glasses says that's an easy thing to do I'll tell you those those 10 months there were a lot of days when I didn't want to go to work but knowing that I could go there and make something out of it made it a productive experience whereas I could have in the other direction thrown up my hands and not done anything I think that a lot of the things when you think about the environments that you're in trying to figure out those ways to make your days better trying to figure out ways to get more notice to get more information to just be seen and heard a lot more so you can actually have more influence so your job becomes more rewarding I mean most people when they leave jobs they don't leave jobs because of money they leave jobs because they believe nobody cares about what they're doing they believe that they're unwanted they believe that their advice is not listened to so I mean there are a lot of things that you can do you know as far as you know when you're talking about your skills you know you're doing it on a daily basis you know what you try to do is to really try to think about the skills that you have and try to how to build them and how can you go out and build your skills you know is it the idea of getting a different certification is it the idea of you know going to a different training is it building a skill that you don't necessarily have whether it's developing some communication skills whether it's picking up a new piece of technology whether it's learning a little bit about compliance and business type things or maybe it's even going back to getting a master's degree or an entry level degree whatever it might be you know whenever you're making an investment in yourself you can never go wrong I mean most people a lot of times will look at companies and say well my boss is not giving me any training budget well whose responsibility is it to train you is it your company's responsibility to train you or is it your responsibility to train yourself if you're not going to make investments in your own career how could you ever expect somebody else to so the idea is that when you say it really is up to you it's about it's really about not only understanding about where you want to go but really how you're going to get there and what sacrifices that you're willing to make to attain those goals and I think that everybody who has a job and has aspirations it's very easy to say I want to be the boss it's very easy to say I want to be a CTO or a CISO but it's very hard to understand the sweat the long hours the extra work that you do the sharing with your friends all the sacrifice that's the hard part that's the part that nobody sees that's the part when that happens when nobody is looking those are the things that you really have to think about what you're willing to do in order to achieve the things that you want to and you know what what's really unfair it's unfair because you might do everything necessary at least how you think is necessary but you cannot be able to get there you can push and push and push and sometimes those doors don't open up but there is a lot of value knowing that you have given your best effort to get there and that you've pushed on as many doors as possible to help you break through and there's enough personal satisfaction in that alone that should be enough but at the point is is that as you're developing those things as you're continuing to develop your networks of people and your personal brand and all those different things that go into helping you aspire to get to that place if your own company doesn't notice it somebody else will so everything that you do that betters yourself everything that you do that invest back in you your money maker your career planner everything that that happens you will ultimately see that benefit it might not be today it might be three years down the road from now it might be ten years down the road from now the one constant in everybody's job is time I see that I didn't know that when I started I didn't know that when I was at I guess Black Hat 2 or whatever it was but you know back here after ten years you do realize that you realize that as you mature that things do continue to stay the same and you continue to in your own mind that the more that you continue to build and build on a good strong foundation the better prepared you are to take on new challenges and when that bell rings you're going to be considered and I think that's the one thing that we talk to people all day long they'll call our office up all day we'll get the emails I want to be a chief information security officer okay what do you do I'm an assistant administrator okay so if I have any other jobs that will help you get there you don't want to hear about them no I just want to be a chief information security officer of course or my customers want to see those people the truth is this is that it's a long, arduous road but it's one where we're lucky enough that there's so much opportunity that's being created on a daily, monthly semi-annually basis where we are fortunate we're not accounts our industry is growing people aren't eliminating our jobs we have three or four customers right now that are laying off three to four thousand people but they're hiring their information security teams how do you think about that ten percent of their organizations are going to go home without paychecks and jobs are probably going to be very hard for them to replace at the same pay periods but the people that we're recruiting are getting five, ten, fifteen percent increases based upon the skills that they're letting other people go but they're hiring this skill the skill you all possess in one degree or the other but our clients don't pull us up for a garden variety people they don't want to pay our rates for a garden variety people they call us to find specialists they call us to find the cream of the crop they find us the ones when they ask questions that our people have the answers to them and as much as what you're doing it's about differentiating yourself from the pack it's about going the extra effort it's about jumping the extra mile and doing those things I'm going to jump in with the story actually because there's something on this slide and the guy I'm about to talk about is in the room so sorry there's a lot on the bottom here about using your friends and peers copiously and I think we don't do enough of that we get together once or twice a year most of us have a couple of friends that we use but a great example of using friends and peers is really seeing I saw somebody do it in a job search once and it was incredible he was looking for a job and so was a couple of his friends so they got together every single day and compared notes on their interviews studied the same things worked on the same things I'm going to find a job club and I actually ended up hiring two of the four people in the club because they were so dedicated and they were such absolute they were so insanely intense about it that they just made it happen these were guys who I mean you guys didn't have the resumes that anybody in this room did but they got hired because they were so intense about it they came to interviews so prepared that I've never seen anything like it but we're running short on time so I'm going to jump through the rest of the slides a little bit more quickly so how do you know when it's time to change jobs there's really only three reasons to change jobs ever there's only three good ones the first one is your life changes for some reason you need more money for some reason you have to move personal happiness or life balance suddenly your boss starts asking you to work 80 hours a week and never take any time off and you never see your family anymore great reason to switch career changes you've reached the end of the road as far as challenging this particular job you know it's time to move on to the next thing you know this job isn't getting you to where you want to go you know that your next job you want to be I don't know a web application a security person and you're spending all your time reading logs it's really not prepping you for it the third thing is org changes you know I was just mentioning my example from my previous job where the org just completely changed out from under me I did make the best of it but as far as going back to career when the security team gets wiped out and you're a security person it doesn't so much you know lend to your career path in general those are really the only three reasons we've seen you know a lot of times when you know in recruiting and things that you think about when recruiting really becomes successful at the level that we deal with is that when the employer gets something that they need and the employee gets something that they want and that's really where that intersection kind of happens that's where people are happy that's where career where people take jobs and they stay for long periods of time which is ultimately how we're judged in my profession so it's ultimately the best offer anybody here is that to be matched with a job they're going to be able to maintain for a long time and continue to build, develop and make the most out of it so you realize it's time for a change you realize it's time I'm going to go somewhere else you know I'm not getting what I need I have to go somewhere else the job search process pretty simple have it professionally written if you want post it on every site out there you know apply to any job that you think is at all interesting and call everybody you know every headhunter you can find and just say hey are you hiring for anything and then just sit and wait what's wrong with that wrong list no I'm going to give you a list that was crap because that's what everybody does and it really doesn't work that's about the complete backwards way to go out and look for a job yeah I think everything I could have done wrong I put in that list because it really only works if you're lucky and I know people who have gotten good jobs that way I mean we all do I put my resume on Monster and some guy called me and gave me a $15,000 raise I know people who have hit 7s on slot machines too I mean it just doesn't work like that for most of us the truth is that as you develop your skill and one of the fortune things about information security is that we're not a keyword business we're just not a keyword search business they're different degrees I mean you know if I wanted to get a job to get called by every web based recruiter out there I could write a great resume I know all the right things to say and everybody would call me back but the truth of the matter is is that that's a lot of fluff it becomes a lot of fluff so what do you do I mean we sort of harped on this the whole time you got to know where you want to go and you got to know what the next step is and once you know what that next step is for you you got to start reaching out to people it's back to branding and networking you've got to get to know people you've got to get all of those people that you know and say alright this is what I want to do do you know anybody who's doing that do you know anybody who you think's doing that and start to get connected to people the truth is this is that when you're wind up looking for something for yourself you should be having this circle of people whether they're made up of peers that work at other companies whether they're made up of bosses and former bosses maybe a mentor, maybe a professor I will go out on the limb and say if I was going to be if I was a chef I would find the best chef recruiter I had created possible if I was the best real estate attorney I would find a real estate attorney I wouldn't find a general I wouldn't find an IT recruiter if I was a chef just like if I was an information security I wouldn't be trusting myself to a generalist it doesn't make any sense you guys pour so much work into everything that you do why would you trust your career to somebody who only does that a part of their time and that's the problem with internal recruitment functions and corporations because they're so tasked doing so many different things they can't possibly understand what's important to you information security professional so we're sort of getting the we're about to get the hook here but I wanted to wrap up and say there's a lot that we haven't talked about we and I could have talked for three or four hours on this and probably not run out of topics because there's so many different pieces to managing your own career we're going to we're going to go to the Q&A room as soon as this is over if you have questions we'd love to answer them before we go out I actually wrote a book when I was working at that company I got so frustrated with the way things were going for people I ended up writing a book I set up an email address anyone here who wants a copy of the e-book just fire off an email to defconnitforgettheparachute.com it'll send you a copy of the e-book I just thought it would be cool to give that to everybody in the industry it was written because I was so frustrated watching information security people be frustrated in their jobs so I figure you might get some use out of it hopefully you enjoy it our email addresses are up there I mean feel free to email me if you have questions you have I will do my best to answer I'm sure Lee wouldn't mind being emailed anytime also definitely thank you all very much for coming seriously thank you this has been fun


All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new my name is Bobby guys coming to you again from hot beautiful Macedonia Tatl guys today's video topic is Traveling the world the mindset. Yes, because before you think about money before you think about logistics Time so on and so forth. You have to get your mindset, right? This is the crucial point guys if you're new to the channel I've been traveling the world for five years straight and you guys asked me Bobby. How did you do it, man? How did you do it? How did you finance yourself guys? If you have the will you will find a way that is not the issue to find a way to finance yourself First comes the mindset Therefore if you're interested in this type of video I will do a series a step-by-step guide on how to travel the world, but today episode one We're starting with a mindset before I dive any deeper guys Just a quick public service announcement If you like the content if you like to support Bobby's perspective All you have to do is click on our Amazon link through that link You end up on Amazon and you can buy whatever you want to buy It doesn't cost you anything extra You just get onto Amazon by what you desire and Bobby's perspective gets a small cut a small commission That's all it's a great way to support Bobby's perspective with no extra cost Now back to the video guys First comes the mindset When I started traveling the world when I left Germany back in the day I was living in Germany, and I was miserable. I Had nothing to lose anymore if you've been following this channel man. I was severely sick I was drug dealing all kinds of issues all kinds of problems in my daily life So therefore that was a blessing in disguise Because I wasn't comfortable and that is key here When you are too comfortable you won't change shit. It's that simple guys If you're comfortable, you won't change your current situation. Why would you it is human nature as long as you are? Comfortable in your surroundings. Why would you travel so many people tell me? Oh, Bobby? That looks amazing Malaysia, Vietnam South America, Australia, New Zealand and whatnot. I want to do that, too But do you really? Do you really want to do that guys when I got to Australia? That was my first destination I went over there with a backpack and 300 euros That's it. I had nothing else with me and I didn't book anything. I was so naive back in the days Man, all I knew back in the day was Macedonia in Germany That's it. I didn't travel at all and then when I made the decision to travel the world I left everything behind. I didn't know what a hostel is Can you imagine that? My first day in Australia? I came out at the airport, was looking around and I thought I'm in the wrong country Everybody was Asian and was civilized.  Somehow I thought I'm gonna open up the doors of the airport And I'm gonna see the outback. That's it kangaroos and psychedelic medicines in the bush That's what I was expecting.  All I had was my 30 kilo backpack and I ended up on the streets Nothing more, nothing less. Really. I was a bum for the first day I thought I would sleep on the street until I Tried to communicate with my broken English and figure out where I could sleep. I asked for hotel rooms Yeah, 200 dollars per night. I couldn't afford it man. I was asking around begging Until I found a solution a hostel in the middle of nowhere King's Cross dirty dodgy Cockroaches in my bed. It was horrific But I appreciate it. I loved it. I said this is the adventure that I was looking for. I Didn't go for comfort. I didn't travel for comfort I didn't leave my old situation to find comfort. I was seeking adventure. I was seeking novelty I was seeking the moment. I wanted to see what the world has to offer Do you understand this? I Met many people traveling Some people come for holidays. Everything is organized Some people come for short backpack experience and that is cool, too But many people that say they want to travel the world. They don't really want to I went to Australia with nothing in that hostel. I was asking around what to do how to find a job And I started working on construction sites ten days later From there on I was saving money. I was doing overtime. I was working 12 14 hour shifts, man Everything that I did I Deserved I Can't give myself that much credit. I earned my money down there Simultaneously I started working on YouTube simultaneously. I started working online But I was hustling hard every single day I was sleeping at the hostel eating cheap and working my ass off That's it because My mindset was that there is no way home I saw other people from Germany down there and they got stuck in the same old pattern They spoke German to each other and they didn't make a change guys when I arrived in Australia I changed my phone to English and I pretended to not be able to speak German I said I'm from Macedonia. That's it. I'm not speaking any German That's it never been to Germany right in order to not fall into the same trap of that old Mindset you cannot change anything in the external if your mindset is the same. This is why I make this video Your mindset has to change your reality Internally has to change and then the external will change the guys that stuck in their old mindset They went back to Germany after a couple of months. I saw it happen many many times not only German dudes French dudes English Dutch and whatnot. They all went back home They came for a quick experience Lost their money gained some money and left because they were in the same old mindset Guys I came from a place where I had nothing to lose anymore. You could say ah come on man You're exaggerating. Why didn't you just get a job in Germany and started having a normal life down there? And let's be honest that option was there, of course I could take a shitty job and just stay in Germany do that. You don't have to be a drug dealer, right? Why would you just get an honest job? But guys at that time I hated everything about that environment everything and let me tell you one more thing The environment is not wrong.  It is just like a flower that cannot blossom in a certain environment Hey, maybe you are a cacti, right? You do not belong in antarctis You do not belong in a cold environment and this is how I felt all the time. I hated the cold I always hated the cold before being vegan as well I couldn't stand it and therefore for me it was crystal clear that I had to go to a scenario Where I will have the beaches where I will have the sum That was crucial man So therefore guys, it is all about the mindset. It is all about your vision. It is all about your perspective You have to bring yourself into a scenario where you cannot accept your current status You can't take it any longer. It's too much That's how I felt. This is why I left and every single time Every moment that I felt pressure that I felt alone that I felt I am doing the wrong thing I said to myself. There is no way back. There is no way back. There's only Forward there's only further nothing more.   You gave up your comfort Now you're here.   You're gonna go further New Zealand Thailand South America all of those places I visited and I made my way through I will make a follow-up video where we'll talk about how much money you need how to do this how to do that But guys when I went over to Australia had no idea how much money I will make or how much money I need I went over with 300 euros and I said I'm gonna fucking make it no matter what if I have to fast one day I will if I have to work 24 hours. I will if I have to sleep on the street. I will This is what it takes People think oh, it's so amazing. You just go and travel. We are vlogging now. Yeah guys amazing times, right? So much fun cool Digital entrepreneurs digital nomads.    It is all about your mindset guys Again, why do I do this video? I do this video because people reach out to me They connect to me all the time and they ask me hey, do you know a good place to stay in Australia? Hey, do you know where to find a job in Australia? That is all fine and dandy. It is about your balls in the end It is about you really wanting it Otherwise, it will be an extended holiday. That's it You have to take your key so to speak and throw it away There is no home anymore. If you really want to be a world traveler a backpacker There is no home anymore. You threw away your key. You lost your privilege. That's it There is no home.   That is my investment. I'm renting out a flat for people that want to know How do you make money? Yes, I'm renting out a flat in Germany. I sold my bike. Yes, I did I'm not touching that money. That was an investment. I put it aside That's not money that I touch. I said to myself here. This is the 300 euros. I'm getting over to Australia I'm gonna work now. That's it. I'm not gonna waste my savings That is not how you start a new life by wasting savings if you waste your savings That's an extended holiday Ask yourself what you want to do Do you want to have an extended holiday or do you want to live day by day in different countries? That's what you have to ask yourself and then we can get into it How to start a YouTube channel how to start an online business how to start this and that I can tell you all about it No worries. We can make that happen as well, but first get it straight I'm passionate about this because I cannot hear those questions anymore.  There is no best friend. There is no girlfriend. There's no one you're alone alone a foreigner in a different country Do you understand that? That is the mindset that you want to have No friends no support system no backup no nothing no money no food Everything starts from scratch Guys don't let me paint the two negative picture here, of course it is a mind-blowing mind expanding positive experience overall I loved it if I compare those five years to the rest of my 25 years lived I can tell you that I never truly lived Traveling is the single most important experience in my life hands down. I wouldn't trade it for anything Never this is how I started my YouTube channel. This is how I learned English This is how I met my girlfriend. This is how I saw so many cultures guys. I have friends in every single continent It is the most valuable experience ever But you will have to ask yourself if you are ready for it All right guys and this is for today's rant if you liked it leave it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed already Please do so guys consider supporting Bobby's perspective through our Amazon portal or through patreon I have a fiverr page as well where offer graphic design video editing Thumbnail services if there is something that you need feel free to contact me on top of that I offer meal and workout plan regimens as well. All right guys, but this it for today's video as always much love and peace


Thank you everyone for joining in. So I just want to quickly set a bit of context about what today's talk is about So I'm the VP of products at a startup called Cloud Cherry recently, you know, we accepted Cisco's intent to acquire us and Zainabar actually reached out to me saying hey, why don't you guys come forward and share your journey with us to talk about how Various engineering decisions have had an impact on our growth, right? So Really here today, what I'm hoping to do is take you through the journey From some of the early days of where our product was and how it evolved and talk about key decision points that we went through So here's what you can expect, right? So we will cover off at a high level decisions that we had to make around Component design, right? How do how do teams moving really really fast in a fast-paced environment? Look at component design trade-offs Mistakes that we made things that we improvised on second architecture Things that we did around state management as well as areas where we likely even over engineered a few things Third design systems and I know everyone talks today about a design system and I think in at our end We'd like to believe we did a decent job of going beyond just having a UI toolkit To a set of principles and a framework that we have tried to apply so we'll share a little bit about this Next performance, I think we are still on our journey here There's more that we need to do but we'll share a little bit about things we've done in performance and finally about other things about engineering decisions that have implications on ongoing maintenance and We'll spend a bit of time on hiring and career-parting, right? I think that's a topic I sort of wish there were more discussions about around what are the career paths for front-end engineers? what implications does it have and Lastly soon after the session, we're planning a birds of feather where we'll get together You know, you know sort of a smaller group to deep dive into a couple of these topics because each of them has a lot of Context and we want to make sure we can go a little bit deeper into some of them So here's the broad what to expect in this context, right now I don't spend a whole lot of time showing you sort of then and now But I have a couple of screenshots of what our product used to look like earlier and what it looks like now Right, so this is what you see on the left is what our product used to look like about three odd years back And you could see sort of where it is now It's been through a significant journey, right? And it's been possible by an incredible team of people we've had and you know The reason I wanted to set this context is to give you a sense of challenge as we had now We were a very small team, right? So literally a team of less than 10 in a startup as part of the core engineering team going up against competitors who were 10 to 100 times our size and It is literally a David versus Goliath. It's a type of situation and We were able to go in and win in various opportunities against competition that was one more funded had larger teams ladder brand reach and so on and so this is part of the framing that I wanted to share with you is We've had our tough times getting to this point teams that have been stretched work hard We have made various decisions along the way, but you can see sort of then and now, right? Screenshots don't do entire justice, but you can see how much our product progressed, right? At least a certain extent just looking at the screenshots. So keep this in mind, right? Our journey is not done, but we have come a long way in three years with what we've built out So these are different screenshots of the product then and now with respect to the shift, right? here's You know our sort of journey that we went through right starting from where we initially moved over to angular To where we started and evolve an early design system the little smiley is that indicate our high points and low points Now after putting this together when I looked at it, you know to be perfectly honest as a startup that went through the journey It seems like this is nice, right? But the reality is I can tell you every day every week They were likely very high points and very low points where things would either go wrong and things were going well, right? And it is it was quite an emotional roller coaster So I'll now spend a bit of time diving into each of the stages that you see here in this journey, right? so This is really the first point where the the first version of our product that screenshots that you saw earlier was really build out using angular JS and You know literally we had an internal joke about it We you know and part of a startup's growth is in early stages. You had a lot of technical debt that accrued You're going to market. You're trying to find out where this product market fit and quickly iterating So our front end had a file called app.js back at that point Which had tens of thousands of lines, which could even make certain text editors crash You know, so from there we went through the re-flat forming exercise and moving over to angular now I personally am not I'm quite framework agnostic, right? We had choices at that time. We could have gone down react, right? It's not about which framework it is I'm not a big fan of any of the framework was because ultimately some of these choices are tools that enable you, right? I'm not we're not strongly attached to one versus the other It's a question of choosing the right tool for the job you have at hand But we chose angular, right and it came with various trade-offs, but Netnet if I was to look at it and say I think it worked very well for us Right now I will talk about the hiring implications that it had a little further downstream But at the point that we went with angular here Now in the communities when you went out and looked online There were enough people in the angular community who were actually switching to react Right because the whole migration path is very very painful Also at that point when we picked up the early angular beta and RC it was a ton of work for us It was really a moving target things were just not stable there just weren't enough component libraries in place and it felt like we were Solving very fundamental problems as we went along So a very painful path now a key decision we made here though was to stick with angular And thinking of look if you're trying to build a serious application at scale Right where multiple concurrent developers are looking to work with a somewhat opinionated system Which may have a higher learning curve early on But it really pays off over time because of the opinionated approach that it takes And I would say we made a fair choice here This isn't to say that we've chosen something else that this would not have happened But we were happy with the choice we made right, so here We were also a C sharp shop right we ran on Microsoft Azure So the fact that you could run C sharp in the cloud at the back end Right and also use type script was definitely a strong motivating factor and nothing like going down the strongly typed path Where it builds comes to building a more robust front-end application so with this You know we we had a ton of other issues because as we made the switchover from the older version of angular Right everything from we had One of the developers in the team earlier who was just doing css Now with the ship over shipped over to angular 2 and components this radically changed even how the team worked Right versus one person who would work on css now the whole workflow of how you would look at it With respect to someone building out a component Had to change so certain roles themselves had to evolve and Initially things were not smooth We we still had a lot of accrued debt which it took us some while to sort of work through There were still things that were using bootstrap and it took us a little while to get this off the ground So this was a Pretty painful phase right working through it because there was no visibility to dates Right when would rc stabilize It was hard right and I think there were times where I think I would lose sleep at night thinking did we make the right decision Right, but it it passed right now We were still a tiny team right there were only like two front-end developers at that time two back-end developers We I hired our first head of design who came on board And we started to get into thinking about look. What are the fundamental principles behind putting together a design system? Now we were early in our thinking here of thinking look a design system is not just a ui toolkit And putting together a set of components and saying here's what you use But really thinking a more long-term patterns that would emerge that you could start to use Now this is a journey, right? I don't think we're done there yet But we developed an initial set of guiding principles And we attempted an effort that we called initially lego blocks Right trying to build out very reusable components that would take various inputs Have different outputs and that could be reused in various different ways Right with angular and components at that point Literally the way you would think of cars and how you have brakes that could be used either in an omni or it could be used in a gypsy Now it was ambitious and it didn't work out as well as we had hoped Right, so it led to more complexity than we had hoped And we realized that look while you could look at some of the smaller components and plan for it this way The nature of how components come together get aggregated and composed It's so different that it has hardly established these patterns early on We also had challenges just with repo structures Right and today you have choices of going with a mono repo versus things split out with different repos We went back and forth a little bit here initially all the components were in a separate repo We were trying to pull them in we had our share of Challenges that we had to work through here Now on the design system and the reason I'm just spending a minute on it is I think Versus getting into the UI toolkit. I think we established a set of broader Principles based on which we would make decisions Because the key part here is really front end engineers engaging closely with design with a shared set of principles around What do your users care about? How are they going to use your product? What are the guiding principles that will help you with various decisions you make about how these components come together? And once this shared language is in place, it actually makes a lot of decisions easier So this is very contextual to us, but just as an example so that you could see it We established key principles at a very very broad level like things like enable action Don't overwhelm users and so on which then translated into the thought process further downstream So as we built out the design system, we had a sticker sheet. We had components behaviors that were documented So it got a lot easier later To work through this where engineers who are aware of the principles could even without design being in the loop Move forward very quickly to make key decisions So the point I'm trying to emphasize here is how this helped us to accelerate things Versus being stuck in a very traditional Dev cycle process which slows things down It enabled us to empower developers and designers to make certain decisions a little faster I won't say it always worked. You know, we had our share of mistakes, but I'll say that it helped This is roughly how we went about building product, right? I mean this I think familiar to most people the agile side for sure, right? But we also had a customer development cycle where product management design and a few key engineers Would quickly iterate with customers to ensure that the problem was known sufficiently enough Working these key tight loops Now this is incredibly key Because getting this structure in place helped ensure that engineers were close enough to the customers and every line of code that we were writing Was written keeping this in mind This then obviously expedited things because when you get into the agile cycle There is significantly more clarity and you can also respond with enough agility truly agile Without having to necessarily document everything capture everything and it brings people together with a better shared vision so Simple as this is I think it's a key factor which I think enabled us to move fast despite having a very small team While going up against competitors that were like hundred times our size, right? Now As we grew and matured right we really got to sort of the next stage where There were more problems new problems right as a startup You always have different problems You solve those problems and you go to a new stage and you have a new set of problems to deal with So one part of this now was around architectural decisions with respect to the component architecture state management We had technical debt that were accrued there, right? So for instance usage of local storage worked until a certain point But we started to have customers dealing with much more large data sets So in the space that we're in right it it If you can think of us as an analytics platform right without getting into too much detail about what we do So performance was often linked to The number of attributes of data that would come in and each attribute may have sort of sub attributes as well And this could lead anywhere into hundreds or thousands So there were many different scenarios in which the product could be used And we got to the point where we had a better understanding of the market and what these needs were So this meant coming back from an engineering standpoint to look at it to say how should we be thinking about it Right. So we went through a long exercise of revisiting our state management We will deep dive into this into the birds of feather a lot more but what I'll say is we went with ngrx and It helped with a ton of things But I will also tell you that we Likely over engineered a bunch of things too because the sheer amount of boilerplate and amount of complexity that this brought in Was way more than I think it likely needed Now the reason I'm sharing this is as a startup as you're evolving You really want to plan for the long term Now it's still a very delicate balance You don't want to over engineer too much for the future either Since that means a lot of wasted effort where your company strategy could otherwise moved on a different direction And you've solved for a problem that no longer exists So there's a balance here I think we erred on the right side But the key learning and takeaway here is look think about where this stands. How is it going to play out in the next two years? Some decisions are reversible Some are irreversible Irreversible decisions need a little bit more of careful thought and consideration If it's a reversible decision Empower your teams to make decisions quickly and just move forward because ultimately that isn't the best interest and The key thing about software today more than any time in the past is look Think of just rewriting everything that you have every few years It's much faster to do that than to have to have to worry about legacy So we constantly rebuild everything that we have a rebuild refactor The whole the whole systems keep evolving I think that has been a key factor because it has helped us to keep evolving without worrying too much about the death that at a cruise This is just an example I can go through some of this a bit more. I wanted to just share this now The interaction of product management design and engineering is incredibly vital here, right now Versus getting into a complex cycle where someone is creating epics breaking those down Separately engineering looks at it tries to understand it the qa team works at it separately Instead all of us just worked off Gherkin based syntax To capture each feature with the broad user stories as well as the scenarios So it provided a shared business language Which enabled product managers engaging with the market to come through with broad ass But design and engineering to put down behavioral specifications of how things should work So this is very important right because one designers actually versus just coming up with mocks actually sat down with engineers to write behavior aspects Second engineers as well empowered to understand the broader use cases would contribute directly to this Quality assurance teams would be able to use this as a starting point to then extend it to look at boundary value cases Right other test cases that they need add coverage for so all of it got written out as feature files in gherkin Now did we end up automating all of this end to end? We didn't right So some developers built out unit test cases for their components, right, which was important on e2v We started some efforts, but quite honestly the startup with things moving so fast We differed some parts of e2v, but longer term we will likely look at leveraging this This brought a lot of power to it because of joint collaboration and everyone contributing to One source of truth with respect to what do customers need and what are we building? And breaking it down all the way so that qa is linked into this and it also becomes a system of record for documentation Now I also wanted to share a bit about how we measured ourselves Now we're a company that's you know in the business of listening to customers Helping brands listen to customers understand what customers say and using that to make better decisions So Instead of trying to look at our engineering productivity in terms of look how quickly did we complete these story points, right? Or trying to look at burn charts We instead looked at it outside and starting with customers So it came down to uh, so g2 crowd is a website where for more sass software You see online reviews today. So customers can go out and write reviews of your sass products there So We turned g2 to crowd the primary internal reference point of saying look our customer is happy with what we're shipping And looked at various criteria around g2 crowd kpis things like did your product meet their requirements? Was your product easy to use was it intuitive? Was it easy to learn? What is the quality of support? So this became a key setup overall umbrella metrics The reason i'm sharing this is I think this is a more meaningful set of metrics to have the team align around Then looking at things like what is the productivity of this engineer versus that and trying to optimize for it So we instead took the approach of look Empower your teams and give them a sense of the bigger picture context and then let them make decisions on how they want to do things The other thing we did is we ran this thing. We you know every month we ran an internal survey So that's the second part of this course that you see here And we asked the team. How did we do in terms of delivering value to customers? How did we do in terms of speed with respect to what we put out? quality and did we have fun working together as a team and Just a simple way of having the team itself get their barometer of how this is And then this fed into the retrospective discussions where they would get together to talk about look What are things we need to do to improve it? So I think we did this well It brought people together as a team and opened out conversations around is what we're doing not delivering value Right, what do we need to do about it is is could we be moving faster are some decisions happening too slow? And I think this worked well for us So I just wanted to share that with you and of course we also track our glass door reviews and you know employee experience as well Now as we move forward, right? I would say the Part of the rapid evolution from here, you know the decisions we made earlier helped us really accelerate what we built out And we were up now working with global customers across global markets, which large brands Right, and we were still a tiny startup who was not known around the world And you know, we would we would go into opportunities against much larger competitors And when once they would see a product they would love it Right, but we were still a small team having to accelerate and more quickly against engineering teams of competition There was 10 to 100 times the size I would say the decisions we made earlier and how we went about this let us move really really fast I'll come back to this slide to talk about this in a bit, but I want to just tell you to give you a sense of it Right, this is mid 2018 This is the size of our team, right? We had one product manager one designer one architect Just three front-end engineers at this time three back-end engineers and one data scientist compared to competition much much larger And I want to talk about a couple of things here right one in the context of hiring and other in the context of career parts So one thing we did on hiring which I think worked well for us is We did away with you know interviewing people So, uh, literally, you know, we told our HR team look we want to stop spending time having many Phone interviews and face-to-face discussions with people and we just ran a system entirely off of our website So this is literally hacked together by an architect and he put it together using our own apis and put it on our website Where anyone could just come in they could sign up off of a website receive an otp Pick the task that they want to if you're interested in c-sharp product management design anything, right? There would be a task randomly assigned to them They would have 24 hours to actually show us what they do Right, so versus talk where you get into an interview and you spend like half an hour on Theoretical questions just getting people to actually show you what they do And then to submit it and then within 24 hours what we would do is you know what if we like the task and someone was great We would just fly them down no questions asked Right next day we would fly them down if they whenever they were ready We would run a quick check to make sure that they were the original author And pretty much if all is good we would make a spot offer on the same day so I would recommend this I think it really worked well for us because it took away a ton of time from things where Otherwise we would have been interviewing people and spending a lot of time now the other thing I want to share Is around career paths? so Through this journey right we were fortunate and literally having zero attrition in the core team right of engineering But finally there's one engineer who left us last year So it was a front-end engineer who joined us and in about three months down He said that you know what I want to work on the back end and he didn't actually have the skills right? You know to work on our back end And so it was a interesting conversation I had with him because he said that look I don't know if front-end is right for me And he said that look most of the architects I know Today are all back-end architects So I don't want to work in front-end anymore. I want to be a back-end engineer Because I see that as the only possible career path for me long term So this was sort of very interesting for me right so I mean I And I want to thank him for sort of bringing this up because after this I had conversations a lot of other people in the team And I want to open this up too for this audience because I think this is very important Right. What is the career path for front-end engineers? Now if I went off what he told me right saying that most people most architects I know of today are back-end architects right at the point at which I started my career if I was to look at it that way Most of the architects back then were likely working on you know had experience with mainframes and You know systems which are irrelevant today Right. So the key thing is Are likely most of the architects around today back-end architects? Yes But is this the future? It's not This is not the future Right. So all of you in this room have a very key part to play because I think conversations that we want to have And I want to dive a little bit. This will be one of the topics in birds of feather Is what are the career paths here for someone who's in front-end? Right today more than ever Front-end applications have way more complexity than in the past The overlap of front-end engineering collaborating with design has become incredibly important So this is one dimension where one of one of the key engineers in our team in the front-end has been engaged much more with design in the recent past so Once you have a great design system in place those front-end engineers engage some problem solving solving a higher order problems Using the design system becomes incredibly powerful Whether it's system architecture and design at the front-end Where to use web workers where to use service workers, right? What do you need to do to look at performance and optimization? What do you need to do for larger applications at the context of localization and accessibility? So these are important conversations for us to have because I truly believe that as we look at the future The path here for various front-end architects to emerge Whose roles may look similar in some ways to back-end architects, but also likely being very different Is a very very very real possibility so I want to open this up for discussion and I would love to get more thoughts on what others are doing here and how you Looked at career pathing But this is a key part where we step back and say hey guys look we need to have this conversation Outline paths for you to discuss. What does this look like? Right, what would you be doing? I spoke earlier about the shift from the earlier version of angular someone earlier who was just a css Primarily css developer Found it hard to make the transition to angular And he tried for a while, but instead we moved him out of a very different role in the team where he's doing great But these changes are going to happen only more and more Right with web assembly starting to be a key part of likely what might be a big shift in how front-end is built That may also start to have significant implications so This is an important topic that goes back to the team, right? We have a tiny team But as we looked at this it start to give us some Thought on how we want to shape roles How it aligns to design how to align some more systems and performance and how this starts to get built out so Look Some of you may be aware of this. There's an article that came out in the can Uh, I think about a few weeks back and there's an announcement too in public, right? So, you know cloud cherry is in a space which is incredibly hot, right? So, uh, you know, uh, two of our large competitors one went, uh, public went IPO another Large competitor was acquired by sap last year now We in incidentally, you know had conversations with a number of other key strategic Uh, um, strategic in the ecosystem and, um Just late last month We were very happy to announce that Cisco Has expressed their intent acquire cloud cherry, right? So we're in the process at this point of closing this transaction So This is a key stage of our journey, right? We were a startup that grew from a tiny team going up against huge competition And the challenge we always had is we never had a brand in the us, right? We didn't have that kind of market access And now to be a part of Cisco this opens up incredible opportunities for us to go out its scale and to have market access and reach now The reason I wanted to share this journey with you is I wanted to share how For a small Indian startup a bunch of people with dreams And a lot of hard work and toil that went into it. This has been incredible for us Now every startup usually is likely six to nine months away from dying at any point in time, right? And this isn't to say that look we succeeded because of this but these were key factors and these were key engineering driven decisions that really played out into this Because for a small team To be able to do this is not easy The choice of going on to move on with angler C sharp and type script How the team was set up and how people collaborated How we ensured that the team was empowered to make decisions to move forward fast Balancing engineering debt at various points that kept accruing But sort of the right point of where do we start to look at? Okay state management, right at what point do we need to go back and say look These components are not consistent in various parts of the product. It's fine. We'll get back to this at this time right these were not easy decisions and I think we're fortunate at this point to be where we are And I'm proud to be here. I'm representing really an incredible team that's helped us get this far Sharing some of the learnings we've had so far. We haven't gotten everything right, right? Like I shared earlier. We had many slips along the way I think our decision to pick up move over to angler may have been a little early and we went through a fair amount of pain While we did it While we attempted to get our design system in place with lego blocks We ended up having to discard that whole thing and redo it later Along the way as we move forward fast We maybe should have given more thought to career path for front-end engineers. How do we think about it? How do we ensure they're supported and mentored someone who wants to go deeper into application performance on the front end? Are we make making sure that that's being planned out right so some of this Some of these are key learnings we've had This isn't to say it will necessarily work for you, but we wanted to share it as a part of this journey And we're now at a point where we're actually moving over to angular seven This has been a relatively smooth update so far touch wood. I think we'll know more soon We're still at a point where we're having performance issues that we're working through Just because of the sheer scale of the amount of data on the front end that we're handling So we have gone through and made a number of improvements here using web workers in certain places Now we've also relied very heavily on the material components Right by sticking as closely as we could with angular material components. It's actually given us a lot of things for free So for instance accessibility and other things just come literally with it But sometimes if you modify the styles that are involved Then upgrade ability starts to get broken, which has still been a bit of a sore point The last part too is increasingly we're also using vue.js in some parts of our product, right? and likely We are also exploring other ways to use angular elements to permit more seamless use of web components across different frameworks We're not at a point yet where I can say that this is completely worked well, right? but By and large, I think this has been good for us now Broadly if I was to recap it right, I would say that We took an early call on moving to some of the latest technologies that were available Some of that came with a certain amount of pain, but some of it worked well I think we made slightly forward-looking decisions on the component design and on the design system um I think the way we set up our teams and how people collaborated and the culture around it was key with respect to how the org worked And um, I think we're at a point today where we are still working through performance issues during the birds of feather We would love to trade notes with some of you to see what you're doing and see if we have learnings that we could share so This mostly wraps some of the key things that I wanted to cover off with that We all wanted to open it out to questions to see if any of you have anything that you'd like to ask We have a mic here that will get passed around And join us later as well for birds of feather session. I think I may need help Where would the birds of feather be on the outside on the left side, right? Yeah, great Also in the left we will break out into sort of three groups there, right? We will sort of talk a little bit more about state management. We want to share our lessons on what we over engineered Right and what worked well Talk a little bit about component design our approaches And would love to learn from you and based on what you've done and third You know also a discussion and just career path thing in front end How your organizations are thinking about it and what your thoughts are I forgot to mention this earlier, but on the front end career path too We are slightly opinionated on full stack versus front end Our leaning is less towards full stack and more towards specialization in front end But doesn't limit people from necessarily exposure to all of it end to end But would love your thoughts on how all of you are looking at it Yeah, I have a question regarding web components. So you are mentioning that Angular elements and web components. So have you used this in production or you are trying to explore this Angular? Yeah, no, great question. We're actually just trying to explore it. We have prototyped a couple of examples at this point But we're not used it in production yet. Okay. The only reason we're partly exploring this too I should give you a bit more context is in anticipation of Cisco stack for instance uses a mix of you know other platforms, right? So keeping that in mind, we wanted to make sure that is interop between what we have In case for instance certain widgets may get plugged in together and so on We didn't have the need until now, but we're exploring it a little bit now looking at the future saying hey in case Some parts of a product get integrated in together where it's react plus angular coming together. How would we want to see it? It's still at an early stage of exploration. I'm happy to share what we have done, but would love to know what you're doing One more question Just in case people are probably hearing that question. It was really around Using usage of angular elements. Is it something we're doing in production or not? One more question regarding view js. So This angular and view are you are you using both together or yeah in a different projects you are using? Yeah, great question too at this point. We're using it as a separate project Okay, so where we're using view js for a more administrative view Of certain functions But not for the primary product at this point. So is that view are you combining with typescript or directly? TypeScript With typescript. Absolutely. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, and I didn't talk about this enough But you know, I think we have gotten better at using the typescript capabilities But I think we have more work likely to do there to fully leverage it, right? To have a strongly type system brings a lot of power I think I think in the last year We have really looked at it and started started to define types better in the context of all the apis and what we do But there's more that we will look to do there Okay, thanks Yeah, hi, I have a question regarding the career paths and The way you decided Between the features you are going to release for example, let's say for a start of its very small team It's very very difficult to decide whether you are going to do customer facing features Or something you want to do with the stability and you know performance based, right? So how what factors made you? Make make those decisions and the second one to answer your question is for Fronted career paths. I think product management is one of the very keen way to move in because You know the product and it's you know, uh, you know the How how customer is going to engage with it with it? You'll understand other competitors and so I think Moving into products can be a good career path for a front-end engineer as Just to answer your question Could you clarify the first question a little bit more? I had a bit of trouble Yeah, so yeah, the question is let's say You have two features which will one will be your customer facing Which customer ask you to do it for you for them? And then you have a feature that will make sure that your product is more stable You have more scalability. You have will have more performance So what would be the factors because being a start of it is very difficult, right? You have very less time. You have to be fast-paced. So what factors make, uh, you know take take that decision Great question. Uh, there's two parts to it. So I've split it into two parts One is how do we prioritize? Right, so we prioritize by looking at a matrix of four things We call it density Intensity frequency and urgency right density is really what percentage of the users or customers Have have this need Intensity is how intense is the need? Is it something that they have pain? Which is incredibly high and they've already like found some work around to do it because the pain is so high Right, it's very experiential The third is frequency. Is it a daily pain that they have or weekly or monthly? And the fourth is urgency urgency may be driven by something that's more strategic, right? That's these four are sort of drivers that help you help us decide look, um Customer facing feature with respect to something very visible Was there something under the hood? Which still lies in it and keep in mind even engineering tech debt Feeds in as well to the same system of prioritization right now This is a system of prioritization now with respect to who takes it up My larger developers have freedom Right, they have the freedom to look at it and align with their sort of career path of look Here's what I want to be better at now You know in a startup where everyone look is an owner in the company and wants to enable the success People are also aware look today. This is the more urgent need that the market has So we try to find the balance by lining between the two Right, so focused on the long-term career path Right, which may be someone who for wants to more focus more on system and performance While still balancing that a little bit with more short-term more pragmatic needs No easy answer on that one. Unfortunately, right because market needs a ball. We have tried to balance it out Not always getting it right Hello I'm audible Outside. Yeah. Yeah, please. Really nice to talk with So I want to know like uh, you're using angular and which is very type safe and really good support for Why did you pick view along with angular and what was your experience in terms of type safety and View API Yeah, so just to clarify we have not moved into using view as heavily Right, it's only one part of an administrative piece But it wouldn't surprise me. We start to use it a whole lot more Right. Uh, so but bulk of it is still primarily on angular Uh, we've been very happy with type script, right given that the overlap between c sharp and type script Uh, a couple of the developers in the team for instance also go in and work on the back end as well Right. So the the extent of familiarity allows some of that to be a little bit more seamless Uh, it may be worth my mentioning to why c sharp You know the our primary architect achieved after architect of the company was one of the early open source people out of here in banglore You know and at the point at which he chose c sharp It was just a purity of the language itself Right and just that azure pass Enabled us to get to significant scale and you would have noticed in the team. We had zero devops Right, so I would blindly recommend this to anyone today Look at look at running on a pass system if you're a startup today You don't need to have a devops engineer or any of that to get to significant scale and auto scale And versus any other stack you're running python anything else you've still got headaches of thinking of The virtual environment all that it took all of that away Plus gave us this seamlessness of look c sharp type script Right that help people move between the two. You just likely we will likely do more in the future


So my beautiful people, I am back with another Outer Ring video and today guys I bring you possibly what's the best rune farm in this game. Kinda like the Boulder one we uploaded the other day, just slightly better. How's it going guys? My name's DPG and if you do enjoy the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you're seeing and want to see more be sure to subscribe.  Well today guys it's basically the same farm but with an extra Boulder meaning you get double the runes in more or less an extra 10 to 15 seconds each run it is that crazy. So how this works is pretty simple. You need to come to the Lennis Rise on the northeast side of the map as you can see right here. You can get here in numerous ways guys but just head here I mean you can take this long path if you want to just avoid everything on your way. You can use the teleporter near the third church of Marica to spawn just north of here and run down. What's important that you get here. Now once you are here guys you need to run down this hill as I do on the screen now. Now the first board you'll see will spawn right here you need to stand near the cliff so it rolls at you and then just dodge out of the way. In doing this guys you will earn 2k runes it is that simple. Once you're done there guys you run down a hill a bit further you'll get to this point here guys another border will spawn this one's much easier to dodge because you can hide behind this tree as I do. So if time's right guys this one will also roll off the map off this cliff and reward you another 2,000 runes. Then it's simple as fast traveling back to that Lennis Rise grace point and running back down here doing the exact same again rinsing and repeating and earning 4k runes every what 20 to 30 seconds easy yes it's absolutely crazy guys and there we have it. A show about sweet videos for you guys today hope you earn as many runes as you need and if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps me out if you're new around here and want to see more out of the ring be sure to subscribe and hopefully people I will see you one day next one