Welcome to episode 115 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 share part 1 of our interview with Jeff Eberhard, discussing his path to management, team career progression, and what makes a good manager.
Original Recording Date: 04-01-2021
Topics – Early Career Path, Motivations and the Move to Management, Characteristics of a Good Manager, Career Conversations, New Talent, Academy Team
Our guest this week is Jeff Eberhard, a Sales and Solution Engineering Leader at Oracle focused on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Contrast what we hear from Jeff’s path with that of Brad Christian in Episode 113 and Episode 114.
2:30 – Recounting the Career Path

* Jeff resides in Austin, Texas with his family. He grew up in California and moved to Austin after college.
* Jeff’s first job out of school was with a ticket resale company doing Systems Administration.

* The back end systems comprised of hundreds of hosts that purchased tickets from Ticketmaster.
* He racked and stacked servers, worked with proxies, and did some scripting.

* Jeff decided to move to a slightly different field with a longer career path.

* He started working for Dell selling personal computer equipment.
* Jeff’s peers in the Enterprise group were selling servers, storage, and networking. Jeff decided to go and learn how to do it as well.

* He eventually moved to HP and sold servers and storage to customers in the UK and Ireland.
* After HP, Jeff got a job at VMware after many tries. He had originally tried to apply for a role as a sales rep, but when he got the job it was for a Solution Engineer position.

* A Solution Engineer talks to people in technology and explains what VMware technologies do.
* After about a year, Jeff moved into leadership, starting a team that supported small to medium businesses.
* Over the course of 9 years he worked in a variety of segments, including Enterprise, and then moved into a management role related to VMware Cloud on AWS.

* This experience allowed Jeff to understand and work with people at AWS via the partnership between VMware and AWS on this solution (learning all the good and the bad that comes with this).
* This translated well into Jeff’s current role as a leader at Oracle, where he has been for about 8 months.

07:07 – Understanding Motivations and the Move to Management

* What made Jeff go into full sales?

* It was the hours and the money. Jeff had an interesting schedule at the ticket resale company, having to start at 6-8 AM to ensure servers were up and running during times of special sales. It was low paying at $12 / hour and required working overnight shifts.
* He had some friends who had started at Dell working the day shift and making more money.
* He loved the technology was getting well versed at scripting. "But when you are 21 and want money, you go where it is." – Jeff Eberhard
* Jeff had no hesitations about stepping away from the keyboard.