Welcome to episode 113 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we discuss a series of humbling experiences in part 1 of our interview with Brad Christian.
Original Recording Date: 03-16-2021
John has to step away for a few weeks to focus on house hunting. The journey will continue, and he’ll be back with us as soon as he can. This reminded Nick of Episode 68 – When Life Disrupts Your Work Life Balance.
Topics – Early Career Journey, Leadership Potential, The Value of Practice, and the VCDX Journey
2:46 – The Career Journey

* Brad Christian is a Solution Engineering Manager in the Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware. His team is responsible for products such as NSX, Avi Networks (software load balancer solution), and VeloCloud (SD-WAN).
* Brad is from El Paso, TX. He started building computers for gaming in college and fell into a job as a webmaster and really enjoyed the work.
* After learning programming languages like Perl getting into Linux, he needed to get out of El Paso and moved to Dallas.

* Brad slept on a cot in his brother’s apartment for a month or so while job hunting.
* He landed a job at a Marketing company around 2000 and was the only heterosexual in the company. This taught him many lessons on how to get along with different types of people.
* Brad learned a lot about not losing one’s temper and slowing down to listen to others’ points of view.

* He got fired after later working at the Dallas Stars. As part of a very thin team, he was short with users and greatly humbled by this experience.

* Brad mentioned he would not be where he is today without that ego-crushing experience of getting fired.
* It doesn’t matter that you’re smart if you’re a jerk.
* Brad was furious for weeks but eventually got over it, understanding the company did this for a reason.
* What a company does affects the way they use people. Brad worked every home game that season.

* After this Brad did some contract work (short term projects) and eventually landed on a job at Dallas County.

* Counties are much larger than cities from a datacenter perspective. The county has the sheriff, court, judges, and the jail.
* Listen as Brad shares an interesting story of employees at the jail finding a workaround to the web filter.
* Brad worked here for about 4 years, and this is where he got exposure to SANs (storage area networks) and a large rack mount server farm (about 30 racks). He learned a ton at this employer.
* Brad had to learn how to work with consultants. He initially did not think much of consultants.

* Brad learned there was more to IT than working for a brick and mortar company.

* Consultant is one thing, but a short term contractor did not give Brad a sense of ownership with what he was doing. Being at Dallas County gave him that sense of ownership he wanted.
* Nick mentions the humbling aspect of working with consultants.
* Brad learned how much he could learn from consultants and that he needed to just listen to what the consultants shared with him based on their experience.