Welcome to episode 116 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 2 of our interview with Jeff Eberhard, recounting Jeff’s job change that started as a noninterest but turned into something he could not pass up and the implications of going through this change during the pandemic.
Original Recording Date: 04-01-2021
Jeff Eberhard is a Sales and Solution Engineering Leader at Oracle focused on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Catch part 1 of our interview with him in Episode 115.
Topics – Pulled into a New Challenge, Changing Jobs During the Pandemic, Learning a New Organization
2:09 – An Opportunity Arises

* Nick asks to dig into a talk Jeff gave back in February at the Dallas / Fort Worth SpiceCorps meeting.
* What were Jeff’s motivations for making a change even when he originally did not think it was needed?

* Jeff was a huge fan of a former boss at VMware, and his goal was to eventually take his boss’ job when he retired.
* While still working as part of the VMware Cloud on AWS team, he was asked to come back to the organization in the company where he had previously managed a team before making that move (and was able to be under a boss that he loved).
* Things were going well for Jeff, and then he received a LinkedIn message from someone at Oracle asking if he wanted to learn about what VMware and Oracle were doing together.

* Jeff said no, but the person was persistent and asked Jeff to take a 15-minute phone call.`
* Jeff felt there was no harm in taking the call to understand what Oracle was doing. It might even help him to know it in his current role at VMware.
* The job sounded like what Jeff wanted to have after his current boss was to retire.
* After having the conversation with the person from Oracle, Jeff called his boss and spoke to him about it.

* Caution – having a personal relationship with your boss is important in this situation. Many may fear being fired for telling your boss something like this. This is not recommended unless you know you are in a good spot.
* Jeff’s boss encouraged him to stick it out for a while in his current role.

* Jeff decided to go through the interview process, which was completely over Zoom.

* As the process continued, he got more and more excited about the opportunity and the team.
* At the end of the process, Jeff received an offer (a very good one).
* He had been keeping his boss updated on the process.
* A boss generally knows how much they can offer an employee to stay. Jeff was pretty certain his boss could not match or exceed the offer made to him (and he was right).
* This was an opportunity to build a business and a team around it, taking on something well outside his comfort zone.
* The team Jeff was running at VMware was comprised of very smart people who didn’t need him as much as a new team might.
* Jeff feels like his boss understood his need to continue the process and eventually take the new job with Oracle despite earlier encouragement to stick it out.