Conscious Decisions and Aspects of Technical Leadership with Tad Reeves (3/3)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

Technical managers are responsible for developing great engineers, right? Yes, but that is only part of the job. Technical managers should also be developing leaders on their team. But how exactly do you do that? It starts with delegating some leadership responsibility when you delegate work.

Tad Reeves, our guest in episode 298, returns to share his experience as a blogger, the progression from engineer to architect, and thoughts on being a technical manager. You’ll hear how Tad has made conscious decisions to take on or avoid certain types of job roles (consulting, people management, etc.) over time based on life circumstances outside of work.

Original Recording Date: 09-12-2024

Tad Reeves is a principal architect for Arbory Digital. If you missed part 1 or part 2 of our discussion with Tad, be sure to check out Episode 296 and Episode 297.

Topics – LinkedIn and an Emphasis on Technical Writing, Architects and Interview Questions, The Role of Technical Manager, Developing Leaders and Stepping Away from Leadership, Parting Thoughts

2:56 – LinkedIn and an Emphasis on Technical Writing

• Tad mentions he sees people every so often who question the value of being on LinkedIn. Ever since his job at AARP, all of Tad’s future roles (contract and full-time roles alike) have been a result of passive recruitment through LinkedIn.
  • Tad says his resume is what’s on LinkedIn. This is a great data point for all of us to consider (i.e. whether we are on LinkedIn and have our accomplishments listed).
  • “There’s also a reason to be civil and always present the face that you want other people to see on LinkedIn because you never know. Almost certainly, somebody who’s going to hire you is going to be seeing you. If you have a proclivity for political rantings or something like that you should probably take that somewhere else. There are other, better places that aren’t going to affect your career.” – Tad Reeves
• What was Tad’s motivation for leveraging his writing and presentation skills more as he gained experience?
  • Tad mentions he had been blogging for a while because it was interesting but originally began writing the articles for himself.
  • “Google is better than the Confluence search engine anyway. I’m just going to write it on my own blog, and I’ll find it later.” – Tad Reeves, on getting into blogging
  • Tad did not realize it at the time, but his articles were becoming popular. At Tad’s first Adobe Summit (a yearly conference focused on marketing technology), multiple people recognized him and thanked him for the helpful blog articles.
  • Many of Tad’s articles were about infrastructure, CI / CD pipelines and blue green deployments, and various other technical topics. Some articles even included diagrams Tad designed himself.
  • Tad started to understand the visitors to his site were real people that he could impact in a positive way. And for him, that was fun and exciting. He could impact both direct customers and other engineers, which has also brought Tad new work over time.
  • Many times, the thing that has brought Tad more work is writing “a bunch of helpful stuff.” He stresses the importance of considering the audience we are writing for as well.
  • “Would this help somebody else do something? Is it giving away some of my secret sauce? I don’t know. Maybe. But, is it going to help somebody? Probably.” – Tad Reeves
  • The articles became evidence of technical competence that could lead to more work while also being very fulfilling at the same time.
• When he began writing to share things publicly, did Tad have to get over initial anxiety or nervousness? How can others get past this fear of putting work out in the public spotlight?
  • Tad says he had some things to get over.
  • Being someone who is very passionate about analytics and statistics, Tad got certified in Splunk.
  • Listen to Tad’s story of writing a blog to share his research comparing Splunk to a new emerging competitor after hearing about a customer’s choice to move away from Splunk.
    • The blog article got the attention of the competing product’s sales rep, and Tad was asked by his company to take it down.
    • Tad learned to be a bit more diplomatic in the language he’s using. But he also tells us to be prepared for others to distort what we say. Rather than letting this be a discouragement, keep trying to create helpful content.
• How did the emphasis on writing improve Tad’s communication skills?
  • After doing consulting focused on Adobe Experience Manager, Tad worked for Rackspace in their managed hosting unit.
  • Tad describes the Rackspace headquarters as a location housing about a thousand top-end engineers. There were specialists in DNS, public cloud, load balancing, etc. People with expertise were easy to find if Tad had questions.
  • Tad continued writing to build his own expertise and was offered a job as a technical architect. Others saw Tad as a thought leader, and people continued to reference his work.
    • Tad considered himself just an engineer and didn’t really begin calling himself an architect until after he passed an architect exam.
    • Tad made a list of all of the Adobe Experience Manager (or AEM) installations he had touched, and it was scores of companies. The exercise of self-reflection helped Tad realize the breadth of his experience.
    • “I guess I can draw on that…. I’ve actually touched a lot of stuff. I could make a broad statement and have it not be based on my mind but based on having seen a bunch of stuff. That was the next major career jump…. I don’t have to be embarrassed about having an opinion.” – Tad Reeves

11:20 – Architects and Interview Questions

• What does it mean to be an architect as opposed to an engineer?
  • There are many types of architects in the technology field – enterprise architects, VMware architects, application architects, etc.
  • “Not only do you…know how it works, but have you seen enough implementations done correctly and really horribly wrong to be able to have some valuable opinions on how something should be put together? You’re not just reading the manual and doing what the company says are best practices. You have these things that are based on actual experience.” – Tad Reeves, on what an architect should be
    • An experienced architect could have valuable insights to contribute back to a company or a technology vendor based on their expeirence.
  • “Not only could I sit down and make this thing follow orders…and do it right and solve the problem, but do I know all of the things that this thing can do? Do I know what it’s meant for and what it’s really not meant for?” – Tad Reeves
    • Architects know things at a deeper level than the marketing material. Tad tells us architects can also think on their feet and have lived through some mistakes.
• Tad likes to ask interview questions about mistakes.
  • “Mistake related questions are some of my favorite and most revelatory interview questions…. Tell me the worst outage you’ve personally had, and then what did you learn about it?” – Tad Reeves, giving an example interview question
  • Some people are not able to share a fault in an interview. They seem to dodge taking responsibility.
    • Tad gives us an example of owning up to an outage situation, giving the context surrounding it, and what was learned.
    • Tad would opt to hire the person who can admit their fault and share what they learned in the process.
  • “I would like to know when somebody has recognized a fault or a way that they should have done it better. I would like to know that. Very seldom has somebody led a perfect technical career. I don’t even know that that exists…. If you’re ever in an interview with me, admit the fault.” – Tad Reeves
    • Tad gives an example of an outage situation where there were no health checks for a system to alert someone it was down. As a result of that situation, health checks then became standard for all systems.

14:46 – The Role of Technical Manager

• What made Tad want to pursue people management?
  • Tad says being a “people person” is its own skill. Being a tech leader is a complicated thing, and there might not be one simple set of distinct rules to follow for all situations.
  • Tad references his experience working for the Church of Scientology.
    • There was a large website stack to manage, and the organization also did a high amount of nonprofit outreach activities. One example was sponsoring the largest non-governmental drug education campaign.
    • Tad began working as a systems administrator.
    • “I can make that plan if you want. I don’t know that it’ll be exactly what you want, but I’ll make that plan. And if the plan is good and you’re running that plan, the next thing you know you’re a people person.” – Tad Reeves, on volunteering to build a plan when no one else would and becoming a people leader
    • In being a people leader, Tad says you will have to think about what type of organizations can get work accomplished. There will be a mix of technical expertise amongst the employees within an organization, requiring some different approaches.
    • Tad gives the example of a website launch. This could involve content editors, designers, developers, systems people, e-commerce personnel, etc.
    • “I’ve seen people with various philosophies on how they want to run things. Some people are like ‘it’s totally flat around here. Everyone has a direct line to me.’ I don’t know about that. You kind of have to figure out the right way to run that in terms of delegating responsibility – not just responsibility to get something done but delegating leadership responsibility. And that is I think one of the hardest lessons to learn in management….” – Tad Reeves
    • The manager has to build up engineers and also build up leaders.
    • Some of Tad’s first remote management work was managing a team in Denmark. There was no way for him to physically be there, so he had to choose someone located there who could get work accomplished.
    • Tad highlights fostering open lines of communication as an important aspect of managing remote teams. You want employees who are not afraid to bring problems to you. Tad admits he didn’t get it right at first.
    • “How can I be a better manager, a better leader, just really to the benefit of the project? Really, at the end, you’re just trying to get the project done. You’re not doing it for your own self-aggrandizement…. One way or another this thing’s got to get done.” – Tad Reeves, on the manager’s focus on execution
• Was it easy for Tad to spot leadership qualities in others, or did he have to look intentionally for it?
  • Tad says you can observe how people handle being delegated a specific task that contains some ambiguity. In this case there is clear assignment of the problem to solve / thing to be fixed, but you allow an employee to fill in the gaps on the “how.”
  • “This person doesn’t mind running with it and can actually get it done and can actually realize that he’s responsible for the whole thing…. Some people, they want a ticket. Can you spell it all out in a ticket? …That one’s not a leader. That one doesn’t want to be a leader right now. That one would rather do the ticket. And that’s fine.” – Tad Reeves, on seeing leadership qualities in others
  • The manager is looking for who will rise up and take a little more responsibility.
• What about interview skills? Did Tad already have those when he took on a role as a people leader?
  • Tad didn’t really have the interviewing skills when he took on the role of people manager. He had been mostly an individual contributor to that point.
  • “Sometimes you’re only a person leaving away from all of the sudden realizing you’re in a leadership role…. Sometimes it’s not ‘hey, you’ve been promoted.’ Sometimes it’s a bit more by default you’ve inherited these responsibilities.” – Tad Reeves
  • When the person holding all the things together in an area suddenly leaves the company, it might then be you holding it all together.

18:36 – Developing Leaders and Stepping Away from Leadership

• How did Tad determine if continuing as a people leader was something he wanted to do?
  • “One thing that I…struggled with a bit when I was managing is I knew that there was going to be a point in managing where I simply could not keep up enough with tech….” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad knew when he first started managing if someone on the team burned out or left, he could step in and cover the workload.
  • During Tad’s time as a people leader, he would see new tools come out that he hadn’t touched or didn’t understand well. Tad tells us this creates some decisions on how to proceed or how to juggle the right way.
    • Do you use your spare time to skill up / learn the things you need to understand about the new tool?
    • Do you accept that you can only learn the tech at a certain level as the boss?
    • Do you start doing individual contributor work for a specific amount of time each day?
  • “An effective technical manager knows about the technology they’re implementing. To a degree you’re not going to necessarily be effective.” – Tad Reeves
    • Tad gives the example of running a project that requires heavy Java development. He is not a Java developer. He can help manage the developers but would need a Java lead that could help with code reviews, etc.
    • Tad feels he has found his footing in the juggling act over time, but in the early days he had not.
  • For Tad, the time to step away from leading people was when he and his wife had a baby. He wanted to work during a specific time slot and then stop to spend more time with his family.
    • “That was a very conscious decision. There were people asking me if I wanted a leadership role, and I was saying I do not at this time…. I do need this much time to be dad, and I’m totally going to do that.” – Tad Reeves, on the intentional choice to be a dad and how that impacted career decisions
    • According to Tad, work-life balance is often misused because it implies you need equal parts of something.
    • “So that’s where you make conscious decisions about your career to say…can I follow this crazy, ambitious career at this stage of my life?” – Tad Reeves
    • Technical leadership careers have a composition of elements that one needs to consider according to Tad. It’s not just 9 to 5 when you’re the boss.
• Tad shares his current family situation and how that has impacted recent career decisions.
  • He has 3 kids, each involved in different activities. Tad’s wife provides him the air cover to work more intense hours in consulting.
  • Despite the above, they still block off family time. Weekends are reserved for family time, renovation projects, kid activities, mountain biking, carpentry.

25:47 – Parting Thoughts

• Tad works for Arbory Digital as previously mentioned. You can find Tad’s blog at blog.arborydigital.com and his podcast here with lots of helpful information about Adobe Experience Manager.
• Are there specific technical communities listeners should consider joining if they want to get into Adobe Experience Manager?
  • Tad highly recommends attending Adobe Summit. He attends every year, and it is a great place to get technical content.
  • The big conferences in your area (i.e. Dreamforce, Adobe Summit, etc.) are places where we have the opportunity to meet people who can take our career to the next level.
  • “One other piece of advice that I forgot to give along the way is…going to those conferences and not just being a spectator, going and sitting right up front, and then right afterwards go ask the presenter a bunch of stuff. The next thing you know you know all the people at the company. You know all the lead engineers, and you can get some really amazing stuff done. The sit in the back and be a wallflower thing…that was for grade school. Right now, it’s a good idea to sit in the front.” – Tad Reeves

Mentioned in the Outro

• Tad likes to build things people can use and enjoy, and it’s been highlighted multiple times. Getting positive feedback on his blogs at Adobe Summit was like a next iteration of this and a realization that the content he was creating was useful to others and farther reaching than he thought. Tad had started writing the blogs for himself to use for reference later, and he continued to write once he knew it was helping others.
  • This is a great example of what Andrew Miller described about being intentional with your personal brand in Episode 165 – Excel by Being Intentional with Andrew Miller (1/3).
• There were undertones both this week and in Episode 297 – specific times in our lives may be better suited for working in specific types of roles than others. Tad moved away from consulting at one point and then later back to it. He also moved away from people management at one point due to family circumstances.
  • Recommended listening for careers that might have zigzags:
    • Episode 201 – Generate Depth On-Demand with Yvette Edwards (1/2)
    • Episode 202 – Having Some Career Zigzags with Yvette Edwards (2/2)
    • Episode 68 – When Life Disrupts Your Work-Life Balance
• Most of our guests who have pursued people management in tech have struggled with finding the right level of technical depth after making the move. Some guests have even gone back to individual contributor because they wanted to get technically deeper.
• Technical conferences are great for networking with other people. Please take an active role in meeting and interacting with other attendees. Ask them about what they do. Tell them what you’re trying to do and what you’re interested in learning. You never know who you might meet.
  • Don’t forget about meetup groups in your area or smaller local conferences if you cannot travel or afford to attend a big conference.
  • Many tech vendors may have an online conference that could be free or paid, but these could be a way to get some good training. They may not be as great for networking with other attendees, however. Consider taking part of a day off or a full day off to focus on learning.

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