This week’s Geek Whisperers is 50% in person. Matt is in the same room as Aneel Lakhani (blog at Aneelism / Twitter @aneel) thanks to GlueCon and we dig into career paths in an entirely new light. 
Aneel is in Marketing (at SignalFx) yet has more than enough tech cred to take a different approach. He’s found, on his winding career path, that trying out new jobs is essential to finding what makes you happy.
We talk about pivoting your own career as we explore Aneel’s time as a sysadmin, analyst and much more in between. You’ll hear about:
- Understanding your job options
- Reviewing what skills you bring to the table
- How schools don’t teach you to understand job choices
- What a Computer Science degree prepares you for
- How he has been full time in IT since before having a drivers license
- The specialized skill set of talking technical to non-technical people
- The false dichotomy between Big Company life or “nothing else”
- Learning your adjacent disciplines in order to move
- Empathizing by doing the job
- Doing the job you think people are doing poorly at
- How you’d have to fire Aneel to stop him from doing the job
- How if you want a job, you should be able to start doing it right now
- The incredible power of Twitter to connection people
- Intent on Twitter
- Frogger as a metaphor for careers
- John being inspired by Barbara Sher’s books
- Llama farming as a service
- Maximizing your optionality
- Creating serendipity
We would love to hear about what you’ve found your options to be and what you hope to get exposed to in the future. Don’t be shy about tweeting us: @Geek_Whisperers.
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[…] trend of false boundaries continues into our work life. A person I’m happy to know highlights this thing he calls “optionality” – it’s the idea that you can feasibly do the work of person you’re “across […]