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**Autumn Nash:** Tim puts the personality in DevOps, okay? Y'all are not ready. If you want spicy tech tweets, but with actual personality, go check out Tim. |
**Justin Garrison:** Usually we start the show with "What software are you responsible for?" And I know you've done a lot of things in the past, and you can pick any of them of what you want to talk about, where you want to go with the podcast. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah, give us a brief overview of all the things you do, because you have such an impressive resume. You've done all the things. |
**Tim Banks:** So tech is what I do to pay the bills, right? What I am is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. I'm a two-stripe brown belt under Rui Fraga at Brazilian top team Austin. Crossing my fingers, I hope to make black belt by the end of the year, which would be after seven years of training... Which is kind of ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Dang, Tim... |
**Tim Banks:** You know how it is. But I've been a chef, I've done construction, I've been in the military, I've been in all kinds of stuff... And I landed on tech, not because I love it - it's okay, but it pays a lot. |
**Autumn Nash:** He's not wrong. |
**Tim Banks:** And so I think that framing of how I look at it has given me a lot of perspective on how I do it... Because it used to be I was like "Oh, my job is who I am", and everything like that. And that became real toxic for me. And I think it's toxic for a lot of people. |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh yeah, definitely. |
**Tim Banks:** So when I talk about my career, it's kind of like "What have I done?" Like the hired gun, is the thing. I've gone on in a lot of places, I've worked in a lot of things. I've been at some places you've heard of, like Amazon, Dell, or stuff like that. But with Object Rocket was probably one of my most fun ... |
I was a senior SRE there, working on Elastic cloud and a lot of their observability pipeline for observability stack, and did some really cool stuff there. And then I left, I went to AWS to become a TAM, and I was a TAM \[unintelligible 00:09:48.05\] Then I became a principal solutions architect over at Equinix, then p... |
A drum you'll hear me beat over and over again in my various \*bleep\* posts on Twitter is that that the tech is really the least interesting part of what we do. It's the actual collaboration, communication, interoperation, and getting context and understanding the problems that people are trying to solve. Because that... |
So I care less about how many commits you have. I don't really care about what languages -- whatever less than caring is about whatever the JavaScript framework of the week is, I really don't care. What I want to know is "Well, what are you actually trying to do?" Because that's what I want to build off of, and not wha... |
**Autumn Nash:** I think what you bring to the table that a lot of people -- a lot of people can be very technical, but most people do not know how to be... You bridge your life experience with tech, and the way that you talk about tech, you can relate it so many other things that makes it relatable and digestible for ... |
**Tim Banks:** I think it's really interesting how engineers especially - and I will point the finger at software engineers... |
**Autumn Nash:** Dang, why you've gotta do us like that? |
**Tim Banks:** \[11:57\] Well no, because I feel like software engineers have captured most of the attention of the tech community... And for whatever it's worth, they feel like it's \[unintelligible 00:12:05.13\] It is software engineers who delineate people into technical or not technical at conferences, right? It is... |
And so what I think is interesting is because my -- first of all, my background is operations. I started off in system administration and things like that... So I know how to code. You know, I code like Taylor Swift sings - just good enough, I guess, to get the job done. But more importantly, I understand that the code... |
So when I talk about things, I'm talking about things at a process level. I'm talking about things at an architectural level. I'm talking about things in like a human impact level. And people assume that because I do that, that I'm not technical. |
**Autumn Nash:** I have that problem too, I think, because being a solutions architect first and then being a software engineer and having a lot of people skills, people are always like "Well, you're really good at processes, and you're really good at this." And I'm just like "Why are we pretending like that's not impo... |
**Tim Banks:** Well, people are like "Well, yeah, but do you know how to do this small implementation detail?" And I was like "Yeah, 20 years ago. Why do I do that now?" Here's one thing you're \[unintelligible 00:13:26.09\] related to Jiu-Jitsu. Somebody's like "Yeah, but do you know how to do this one specific submis... |
No. I mean, yeah, I know how to do it, but it's not important." |
**Autumn Nash:** But be real - that part, this one implementation... I can google how to do that. Go find it, and if you know where to put it and you know the bigger picture, you know how to string that together. So yeah, that's cool, but let's be real, half of this job is googling stuff and getting an example... So th... |
**Tim Banks:** Context is key. Whenever I'm mentoring, especially software engineers who want to go to like "Hey, I want to be more senior \[unintelligible 00:14:24.18\] whatever. I'm always like "Context. You have to have context." You are very, very specialized in typing on a keyboard a certain way right now. And all... |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. |
**Tim Banks:** If you do not understand the bigger picture beyond what you're typing into the keyboard, if you don't understand the architecture... Not just of the software, but of the infrastructure; if you do not understand the business and the financial needs of the business at large and all the pressures that go on... |
**Autumn Nash:** But you want to know what though? I think that's our industry's fault. |
**Tim Banks:** Oh, it absolutely is. |
**Autumn Nash:** To get a job and to be a good junior developer, they just want you to code. Do you know how many times I've been told to just code, and not give talks, and not do processes better, and all that other stuff? I feel like sometimes you get almost your people skills and your extra stuff squeezed out of you... |
**Tim Banks:** What I think is really interesting about the dawn of generative AI - because generative AI can do junior dev work, in theory. You give it enough direction, it'll write code, right? So it's imperative for you to understand the processes, and have context. Because the grunt work of writing a Terraform thin... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[15:55\] So do you think that will change what the industry is looking for? Because think about it, we've all been in the interview process, and it's like all LeetCode, and "Write this code", and "Do this, and do that." And now that I think a lot of the dev rel jobs have gone away and people are going... |
**Justin Garrison:** Now, I don't know that that's a specific dev rel thing. All jobs are now more aligned with making money. They all have to show that they're valuable to the company, no matter what they're doing. And most of that value comes from having the context to give impact to your customers. Like, grow the cu... |
**Autumn Nash:** But I think as a software engineer, that's all they want you to do a lot of the times, is just the one thing on the keyboard. |
**Tim Banks:** Well, let me -- here's the thing. When you say "they", a lot of the software engineers place that burden on themselves and then on the other software engineers below them, because they weren't necessarily good at giving talks, they weren't necessarily good at communicating, they weren't necessarily good ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Because I feel like I've run into that problem over and over again, where it's like "Well, you're a great solutions architect, and you're great at this, but we need you to just write the code and be a software engineer." And I'm like "How, though?" Because I feel like that's some of my best skills is t... |
**Justin Garrison:** And the ageism here... |
**Autumn Nash:** No, but I think it's cool that you've found a way to make that work for you. How did you find a way to capitalize on all of your skills, and not just one of them, and to grow a career that way? |
**Tim Banks:** Well, I mean, the long and short of it is that, first of all, your ability to network and communicate and relate to others is going to be a huge factor in you finding a job, no matter what. If you are a good coder, but nothing else, you're going to have a hard time working on a team, and that's going to ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I always say engineering is a team sport. It's something that you have to be good at working with other people, because especially when you work in like a very deep team, everybody has their specialty or a part that they're good at. And if you can't utilize your teammates and their specialties, and wor... |
**Tim Banks:** Yeah. So the thing I talk about, the debate -- I remember when there was a debate on the 10X engineer, or something like that.. |
**Autumn Nash:** But I think that's where the industry is going. They just want this person to write a million lines of code, and I'm like "Dude, that's not..." |
**Tim Banks:** Here's the thing though - you don't need a person to write a million lines of code anymore. You don't need that. Again, that's something that AI is going to be able to do for you. What you need a person to be able to do is understand what it is you're trying to do. Because that's the only way you're goin... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[20:05\] Out of all the jobs that you've done - because you've had a very long career and you've done a lot of different jobs - what do you feel like, I guess, was your favorite, or the one that you had the most impact, or maybe the one that you learned the most out of your whole career? |
**Tim Banks:** That's going to be a tie between being a DevOps engineer at Object Rocket and working at Elastic. Actually, I'll take that back. Let me -- I will say the DevOps engineer at Object Rocket. And the only reason I'll give that over Elastic is because the DevOps engineer at Object Rocket was a startup that ha... |
We were talking to customers all the time. We knew our customers, most of them by -- all of our like named customers, all our big... We knew them by name, they knew us, we knew them... One of our biggest customers was Tinder, back then before Tinder got bought by Match. |
**Autumn Nash:** That's kind of funny. |
**Tim Banks:** \[unintelligible 00:22:00.27\] some party boys out of L.A, and let me tell you what, boy... When they came in for a customer conference... |
**Autumn Nash:** Oh, tell us, because I know you have good stories. |
**Tim Banks:** Man, look... |
**Autumn Nash:** What was your favorite Tinder story? |
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