Mentorship in Tech with Aaron Sachs

About Aaron Sachs

Aaron Sachs is a home brewer, banjo player, and also happens to like monitoring things. He helps make his customers look like monitoring badasses to their customers at Sensu, where he's a Customer Reliability Engineer.

Links Referenced
Sensu

Aaron.sachs.blog

Twitter: @asachs01

Transcript

Mike:  This is the Real World DevOps podcast and I'm your host Mike Gillian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps. From the creators of your favorite tools, to the organizers of amazing conferences, from the authors of great books to fantastic public speakers. I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

Mike:  This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at Influx Data. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database, Influx DB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraph for metrics collection from systems, chronograph for visualization and capacitor for real time streaming. All of these are available as open source and as a hosted SAS solution. You can check all of it out at influxdata.com. My thanks to influx data for helping make this podcast possible.

Mike:  Hey Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron:  Hey Mike, thanks for having me on.

Mike:  So I want to start with a a little bit of an origin story because everyone loves a good origin story.

Aaron:  Oh yeah.

Mike:  You and I met over hot wings many, many, many years ago.

Aaron:  Hot wings, pizza and garlic knots. All good stuff.

Mike:  Right? Sadly the place is closed now, but we ended up going..

Aaron:  No.

Mike:  I know at the time I think you were working help desk support while studying for a communications degree?

Aaron:  Oh yeah, yeah. I was at a University of Tennessee's Office of Information Technology doing desktop support with a bunch of other students and yeah, working on my communication studies degree. Yep.

Mike:  Yeah. So the thing I find interesting about all this is that you never intended to go into IT at all. Like you weren't planning to go into tech in any way. You were really planning to go into something communication related.

Aaron:  Yeah. Yeah. So I was planning on being a communication professor and kind of aligned my career up to that point to do just that. And yeah... It was during that time, like so I was the whole reason I got out of that was I was writing my thesis on how one determines a blogger to be credible. Like what sort of behaviors do they exhibit when they were writing a blog uh and because that was nowhere near the specialty of the department I was in, there was just a lot of politics and I got so fed up with it and I was like, I'm done. And I'm already working at the Office of Information Technology to, do you know my grad assistantship, so why not just do IT?

Mike:  I remember you and I went out for beers, I want to say it was like a month after we met, and you you asked me a question of, "What if I stopped doing communications and went into tech? What would that look like?" And like the immediate follow up question was, "And can you help me?"

Aaron:  Yup. Yup. That's correct.

Mike:  Yeah. So, me not knowing what I was getting myself into of, "Yeah, let's just totally change the course of someone's career over beer."

Aaron:  By the way, for the listeners out there, if you ever want to sucker Mike into something, get him real drunk and then asking me if ask him for help. Totally works.

Mike:  Yeah apparently. So…

Aaron:  Haha

Mike:  This kind of started an interesting thing of you and I weren't really initially friends is more of a, you were looking to me for help on how to change your career and how to get better at a thing that you had not focused on at all. We actually became friends as a result of that like going through that whole thing, but it really developed into this informal mentorship situation.

Aaron:  Oh yeah. Yeah. I very fondly recall all of our a Tuesday nights at Old City Java in Knoxville, just gorging ourselves on Meg's croissants and downing gratuitous amounts of caffeine.

Mike:  Right. And wishing for a whiteboard to further explain concepts. Right?

Aaron:  Right.

Mike:  So through all this, clearly you've, you've done well you're working for Sensu now as a Customer Reliability Engineer, helping companies with improving their monitoring using Sensu. But one of your big focuses throughout your career, many years after us working together, has been to help other people improve their careers and improve their professional lives.

Aaron:  Absolutely. Yeah. It's so you're ready for that, by the way.

Mike:  Yeah. And so I know you've given several talks on this and you've had several other mentees over the years as well. I believe you were involved in a pretty formalized program at Rackspace on that topic as well.

Aaron:  Yeah, there was actually... I did a lot of mentorship with my team at Rackspace, so as I moved up in the admin ranks, I always took it under, rather took it upon myself to mentor the people that were coming in. And then that somehow turned into me mentoring folks that were in my wife, Ashley's department. We actually started like a meetup that would happen once a week at Rackspace and these are folks who came in as customer service technicians. They knew enough to spell DNS and grow them from just that to actually progressing into paths as like a one guy is a, I think he's a customer success manager for a startup in San Antonio and other guys as systems engineer now at Rackspace still, and then I've got another great friend of mine who's constantly blown away because she's actually taking this whole mentorship principle that we worked on at Rackspace and she's doing it with other people that she knows now. Her name's Elle, she works at I think Lennox Academy or Jupiter Broadcasting. So yeah, it's, it's been a crazy journey.

Mike:  Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. So I want to dig into that. Let's back up and say what is mentorship?

Aaron:  So let's talk about what mentorship is not because I think that that's an even more useful way of discussing the concept of mentorship.

Aaron:  So mentorship, in my view is not simply... It's not transactional. It's not just the like... I mean I came to you initially and thought it was a transaction. I'm going to go to Mike and Mike's going to help me, which is fine, but that's not me...