Welcome to episode 119 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 David Klee in which we recount David’s career journey from generalist to specialist through career changes and a move into consulting.
Original Recording Date: 04-12-2021
Topics – Career Path, Scaling up, Transition to Consulting, Body of Work
3:39 – Meet David Klee

* David Klee is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and a VMware vExpert. He owns two companies:

* Heraflux Technologies – They do business to business consulting around Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Data Platform and everything underneath related to performance and availability.

* Virtually every application out there has some means to drive data to it. David specializes in SQL Server and how it interacts with eevrything underneath it.
* David has done a lot if presentations for VMUG, and Nick actually attended one the week before this recording happened.

* SQLibrium provides training content for performance and availability tuning for the Microsoft SQL Server data platform and each layer of the infrastructure stack, be it physical, virtual, or cloud, underneath the database.

5:10 – Walking the Career Path

* This is a follow up to our discussions about generalists vs. specialists in Episode 26. Go back and listen if you have not.
* David’s first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 3 at age 5. His grandmother was a librarian. He used to type in all the Basic code from magazines, spending hours playing around it and learning Basic by age 6 or 7.
* His mom got tired of David breaking her computer, so he was able to build his own from various parts at age 8.
* At 10 he was repairing computers for friends and family, which continued until age 16 or 17 (repairing anywhere from 10 – 20 computers per week).
* There were a lot of modem lighting strikes he helped resolve for people.
* In college David took over a Systems Administrator job for a small military contractor, learning Windows, SQL Server, and Microsoft Access.
* He eventually discovered a copy of VMware Workstation in 1999 and put a copy of Windows NT 4 and SQL Server 6.5 on it, running on a hacked together computer he had built. It worked great!
* Helping people fix their computers allowed him to tinker with all kinds of technologies. It was really fun, different than normal kid jobs at the time, and allowed him to keep learning.
* Family and friend tech support has not ended. Most family members have somewhat disposable computers.
* David studied Computer Science / Computer Engineering in college, which was mostly centered on programming.
* From here David got a job as a programmer / application developer and found out he was terrible at it.

* He understood it and could code but really did not like it, and it did not come naturally. Many of the methodologies learned were challenging and stressful.
* After a couple of years David realized the job was really not for him.