Justin Ryburn - The Road More Traveled with a Field CTO

Kevin

Welcome to Life in Uptime, the show where we talk with the people behind the networks that keep our world connected. I'm Kevin, joined by Alexis, and every week we sit down with engineers, leaders, and builders in tech to uncover the stories behind their careers, how they started, what they learned, and where they're headed next. Our goal is simple, to help you see how far tech can take you, no matter where you start from.

Alexis

All right, guys, welcome back to Life in Uptime. Man, every week it gets better and better. I swear, if y'all haven't seen Kevin's performance on video, please head over to the YouTube channel that I learned we had five minutes ago.

Kevin

Nice, shameless plug. Yeah, good job.

Alexis

And watch it with video, because man, it just gets better and better. This week we've got a super special guest for you, one who I only actually see outside of the country. Justin, we're joined by Justin, and him and I joke all the time.

I mean, literally, we've never met in the same place twice, have we?

Justin

Nope, not once.

Alexis

And his job can look like a dream from the outside. He does a ton of travel, conferences in Hawaii, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Prague, Munich. He does a lot of public speaking, meets interesting people, and his employer pays for all of his flights.

But what I want to talk about today is how he got here and what some of these jobs that seem like a highlight reel can leave out. So we're going to talk a bit about how he got into the role he's in now, which is a field CTO, and the dark side that you might not see when you're in a role where you're traveling all the time, or there's, you know, ups and downs to everything. So Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin

Thanks. Glad to be here. Looking forward to unpacking this with you guys.

Alexis

So where was the last place? I think I saw you in, what, Munich last?

Justin

Yeah. Yep. Autocon in Munich.

Yep. For sure.

Alexis

Crazy. I can't believe how fast the summer's gone by. Could you tell us a little bit about if someone's unfamiliar with what a field CTO does?

Maybe that's a good place to start.

Justin

Sure. Yeah, we can start there. And I, you know, I find that that's actually a frequent question I get from people when I introduce myself, because I think it's a title that's not super well known.

And different companies also define it slightly different, too, which doesn't help with some of the confusion. But I'll just kind of describe how I do it at my day job at Kintik and how I've seen it done at other companies. But I'd say the basic summary is I travel around the globe, as you already highlighted, meet with our top customers, usually like executive level conversations, sometimes at the individual contributor level.

Do some public speaking engagements. I do podcasts like this one on some other podcast. Obviously, I write blogs from time to time.

So I do some content creation. And then I spend quite a bit of time with our our product team taking like tidbits that I've learned. I've been out in the field at these industry events and meeting with customers and their executives and feed that back into our product team so that it can help inform our roadmap, make sure that our product is going in the direction that the industry is going.

Kevin

It's that sounds almost like a tech evangelist.

Justin

Yeah, I'm going to say there's a lot of overlap one day. Yeah. Tech evangelist.

Yeah, we actually have that role at Kintik, too. And that officially reports into marketing. And as I would say, a little closer to what Alexis does, at least the way we have it defined here at Kintik, where it's a lot more of the content, 100 percent focused on content creation, basically, whereas mine kind of dabbles in that, but then also has I report into sales.

So I run the the SE team, the pre-sales engineering team at Kintik as well.

Alexis

I do.

Justin

Yeah, I have a 20 person team that I run as well. So how do you balance that with your traveling all the time? That is a good question.

Yes. A lot of well, thankfully, I have really good leaders under me. So I have a couple of SE directors that run their teams and I just, you know, checking them with them from time to time, obviously, see what they need to be successful.

I just kind of let them run their team. I think that's kind of the key to the success of scaling a company is you got to have good good people.

Kevin

Right. Are you so I'm just recently started traveling because of this whole content creation thing. I I've always worked very local at a network engineering job, never traveled anywhere other than down the block kind of thing.

And what I've what I've had to do is go to airports and work for hours waiting for my plane. I'm writing emails and I'm working. And even on the plane, I am now buying Wi-Fi just so I can work on the plane.

Do you have that same experience or are you able to like just travel and have your teams kind of take care of themselves?

Justin

No, I have that experience for sure. That's I would say part of one of the downsides of this job, like Alexis alluded to in the intro. Right.

Like three hour delay in a flight. It's like, OK, how am I going to take that three hours and turn it into productive time? So I'm not just sitting here, you know, in a seat in the airport waiting for my plane to take off.

Right. I I actually pay out of my own pocket for an airline club membership because I just find I travel enough and it's worth it to be able to go and have a quiet place where I have access to Wi-Fi and get some drinks. I can get some food, whatever makes the the the waiting a little bit more enjoyable.

Yeah. I've taken calls from airport lounges. I've done podcast recording in airport lounges before, you know, like calls, all kinds of stuff.

So you have to part of it.

Alexis

You have to fit it in when you can. Like, yeah, I think that's the other thing that people don't realize. I mean, if you're in a role where you travel once or twice a year with your company, sure, you can make sure that you nickel and dime every single expense and everything that you incur when you're traveling is put in your your company Expensify account or you're only traveling during company time.

And, you know, you can kind of keep track of your time better when you're traveling four or five, six times a month, constantly. Like the travel is almost a part of the experience. We are taking calls in different time zones.

There's no such thing as a nine to five. There's no such thing as an eight hour day. I'll take off on a Friday.

And if I'm flying to the other side of the planet, sometimes it takes thirty five hours to get there. Your weekend's gone. And when you get there, the pre conference event starts on a Sunday.

Like there is no. Oh, well, I think they technically call it time in lieu where if you end up working extra, you can like take a couple extra days. But when you're on the road full time, like there's there's no way to keep track of that.

There's no way. And it kind of just becomes like the show has to go on. You have to find a way to get your work done no matter where you are, no matter what time you're working in.

The travel is just part of the experience.

Justin

Yeah. And like, you know, a lot of my friends that don't do it will be like, oh, it must be great to get to go to some of the places you rattled off. Right.

The classic example that I like to tell is a story is like I I spoke at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand. Right. And everybody, all my friends were like, oh, my gosh, I've heard New Zealand so beautiful.

It must have been amazing. I'm like, yeah, but OK, hang on. Let's let's talk about how this went down.

Justin

Right.

Justin

I left on a Friday. I land there on a Tuesday. All right.

Because that's just how long it takes by the time you do all the connections, like 38 hours door to door to get there. Right. My talk was on.

I don't lose track of the days. The example will be the same like Wednesday. And I had to be back home by the weekend because I had personal obligations on Saturday with my kids.

Right. So I thankfully had one day after I finished speaking that I skipped out on a conference and when did just a little sightseeing because I did want to at least see something while I was there so that it wasn't a complete waste. But I was literally only in New Zealand for like 48 hours.

So, you know, it's 38 hours of flying each way. All right. So it's not not exactly glamorous someplace.

I want to go back for for personal and take a vacation there because, you know, you don't really a lot of times you travel for these conferences. You don't really get to see the place per se. I don't know much sightseeing you got to do while you're in Munich, Alexis, but I hardly saw anything.

Alexis

Well, and it also depends on, like you said, if you have somewhere else, you need to be back to back to back. And Justin, I think it's a lot different when you're in your situation and you're traveling and you have a family that you want to go home to. I've got the liberty of being I call it being sticky on location.

So if work sends me somewhere, I try to get seven nights in the same bed where if the conference is four days long, I'll take an extra three and actually explore the city on the weekend. But if you have, you know, your daughter's soccer practice or band recital or, you know, you don't want to miss that time with your kids. And so the trip becomes very different.

Justin

Oh, yeah, for sure. And I've done both. You know, I've done the balance where I've been able to stay a couple extra days over a weekend or something and fly homes like whether flights going to be the same price, whether I leave and come home on Friday or I leave and come home on Sunday.

And so I might as well stay for a couple of days and check it out. So I have I have had the opportunity to be able to stay and do a little sightseeing in some of these places. But, you know, I guess the point is it can be balanced so that you can get home and spend the time with the family and be there, at least for the important events.

I won't say I don't ever miss any events, but if I try to be home for the big ones. Right.

Justin

Yeah.

Kevin

Yeah. So you have a wife and two kids, right? Yep.

Wife and two kids. And you travel a lot. What is what has to happen at home before you can say yes to leaving for, you know, three or four or five days to go on one of these trips?

Do you have to like, you know, take the wife to go out one night?

Alexis

Kevin, who are you asking for?

Kevin

No, I was just like, so I'm asking personally for myself because like I'm traveling now a lot and I have a wife and three kids. And so I have to like pace it out a little bit and check in with my wife and be like, hey, I have this trip to go to San Francisco for a few days. You know, it's going to be good money.

I think we can spare it. And then like I have to like, you know, kind of butter up a little bit before I leave and make sure that she's taken care of, that the laundry is in a good place, that the house is in a good place before I leave. So I was just curious if you had the same experience or because as someone who does this a lot and I'm still trying to learn that process of how to balance it correctly.

So I was just kind of curious, you know, what does it actually look like for you preparing for one of these trips, having so much at home and having responsibilities?

Justin

Yeah, when I work travel first started ramping up, you know, my wife still worked full time. And so then it was a lot of what you're talking about is like a lot of balance, like, okay, well, I'm going to be gone these days. You know, our son's got this, my daughter's got that.

I was like, how am I going to balance all this? Um, her parents are close. So that helps us a little bit of a support system besides just me when I travel.

But I would say maybe a little over two years ago, my wife finally was like, you know what? I can't, if you're going to, if you're going to keep doing this travel and I support that, then I'm going to have to stop working. Right.

And be able to run kids to activities and do laundry and you know, the chores around the house that also have to get done while you're on the road.

Kevin

So this is, you know, that makes that she's already like, if you're leaving, man, I don't, I don't need to work anymore. Yeah. She's already starting to done that path.

Yup.

Justin

Yup. That's, uh, that's, that's the path that I went down. Yeah, for sure.

It is different though. Like I, I work with some people that are, you know, in different stages in their life, either, uh, empty nesters where their kids are growing out of the house or they just, they, you know, single or married and don't have any kids. And it's interesting just that we, we trade stories about like what the logistics is like, like, well, I just went, like, I didn't have to tell anybody I was going.

I just like booked a trip and off I went. It's like, yeah, that's not the reality of life.

Kevin

That must be nice. Yeah.

Justin

I have a shared calendar with my wife and I put stuff on there and then we talk about it. Cause you know, even, even with her being home, it's like, well, we were going to go to dinner with some friends that Friday night, but if you don't fly in till seven o'clock, guess we're not doing that. Right.

Kevin

Yeah. It's, it's, it's a lot of the stuff you don't think about when you, you know, when you sign up to go traveling, you're signed up for these kinds of jobs. You don't think about the, the, I don't know the details of the small little things that happen that get in the way of life.

Alexis

I was going to say, Justin, that's why everyone, at least the reaction that I've had when I meet all of y'all at conferences is do it while, do it while you're young, take advantage of it while you're young, travel while you can travel when you have no responsibilities. And I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm, I am experience maxing.

Justin

There you go.

Alexis

Might as well. I'm trying to fit it all in while I have the flexibility while I have the, um, the job I do and just the ability, like, I think one of my favorite books is, uh, die with zero. And it talks a lot about spending all of your money strategically at certain points in your life on certain experiences before you die, because like the whole point of life is to optimize your life.

And there's certain experiences that you'll enjoy when you're 25, that you won't enjoy when you're 55 or 75. And so trying to figure out, you know, if you are scratching off a bingo card, what are the spaces you want to do first? And even if it's a little more expensive or if you have to save up for the trip, like that's something that you'll enjoy at this stage in your life that you wouldn't enjoy later.

Um, anyways, all of that to say, I think that it's kind of like a catch 22 because later in life, you might have a job that pays you to travel or more money or ability, financial ability to go certain places, but then you have more responsibilities or you don't have the time, or maybe you don't have the interest to do those same activities. So could you tell us a bit about your path into the role that you are now? Like, did you know that a role like this is something that you wanted to seek out?

And also for someone who is earlier in career and is looking to do something similar, um, where maybe they get to travel a few times a year to interesting places, um, just how to get themselves into different opportunities like that.

Justin

Yeah, I'll talk a little about my path and we can chat through what some other, you know, other alternative paths could look like. But, um, so if I take a step back before I was in this role, um, most of my roles in the last, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years have been in pre-sales engineering, right? And so, um, for those who may not know what that is, I'll describe it briefly, but basically most modern hardware and software companies, most tech vendors, um, now have something they call an SE.

It's either solutions engineer, sales engineer, uh, systems engineer. Each company kind of has a different term for it, but it's basically someone who's technical, understands how the product works at a pretty deep level and can work with the sales person to help the customers understand the solution, how it provides value and help them get, get a demonstration of it. And even potentially an evaluation of it before they purchase.

And so I, I, uh, felt kind of fell into that by interacting with people like that and really learned to love that because I've always really enjoyed not just tech for the sake of tech, but being able to figure out how to use technology to solve business problems. So I actually have two master's degrees to, to that kind of that point, one in business and one in IT, right? Cause I liked tech and I liked business, whatever, I got two degrees.

Uh, so, you know, I, I really enjoy the, the SE side of things as far as like, uh, you know, traveling all over the world and doing the public speaking. I just, uh, I just found, I really liked being out in front of customers and part of the way we meet with our customers is at events. So I kind of got into it through that, through going and meeting with customers at events.

And then, you know, I was there, they're like, Hey, would you mind talking about what you're working on? So then I got invited to do some, some talks and kind of moved into, you know, into the field CTO role. I didn't really, didn't really plan it out that way.

It wasn't like I went and got this job as a stepping stone. Yeah, exactly. There's actually a really interesting book, uh, called the, I think it's called the social sales engineer.

I can grab the link to it and put it in the show notes if you want. But, uh, it's, it's interesting cause it talks about this dynamic where a lot of people that are, that are SEs for a lot of these vendors, uh, while they like interacting with customers one-on-one, they don't think of themselves as like a, an influencer, right. Or doing content creation.

They're not interacting on social media with other people and like, you know, making that mind shift set that mind set shift to doing that is difficult for a lot of people, but that's sort of the, the modern way that people are buying solutions these days is they're checking things out on Reddit or they're going and asking an AI, like what they should buy. And it's heavily influenced by, you know, the content that's out there on the internet. Yeah.

So yeah, that's how, that's how I got into it. But I think there are a lot of other ways. I mean, now that, you know, it's 2026 and the younger generation is coming up and they're like, you know, more proficient with social media and influencers and content.

I think there's other ways, other paths that could get you into a field CTO or tech evangelist or, um, a lot of software companies have a dev rel person that interacts with the developers and tries to build a community around their developers, which is a pretty similar role to what we're talking about here.

Alexis

I think, um, technical evangelist field CTO, maybe, maybe sales engineer is a stretch. Um, there's no like forward deployed engineers. I keep seeing that term kicked around on social media too, which I think all of it, all it boils down to is that if you are an engineer who understands how to talk, understands how to present and you like people, like the options for you are endless.

Justin

Yeah. Yep. For sure.

You know, and I've always really enjoyed not only, um, like I said, applying the tech to the business, but also helping other people understand it. Right. Which is a lot of the value of all of those types of positions, right.

Is being able to understand the tech and being able to simplify it and make it approachable to people who don't yet understand it. Right. Um, absolutely.

Kevin

That's what we do in content every day. Exactly. Yeah.

Alexis

So Justin, how did you become a sales engineer? Because I feel like every SE I talked to, um, the conversation's a little bit different. Right.

And almost like we said, no SE job at two different companies is the same. Like they're all going to be right. But how did, how did you originally get into it?

Justin

Um, so I was a customer of a, um, a vendor, I was working for a service provider and was interacting with like with Cisco and Juniper and some of the other vendors that we bought equipment from and started interacting with their SEs and just saw what seemed like they were doing on a day-to-day job. At least when my interaction with them, I was like, this seems really interesting. Uh, and so when an opening came up, uh, at Juniper for a job, um, I applied for it long story, but I didn't get, um, that position.

So I wound up as what they call a resident engineer, which is post-sales onsite. Um, but did get on with Juniper and then moved from there into, uh, into pre-sales engineering. So that's kind of how I found out about it and decided that was the path that I wanted to work towards was by, uh, interacting with the, the SEs at vendors that I was working with on when I was a customer.

What about the job was attractive to you? I think again, just being able to not only, um, well, I guess working for a vendor, what did, let's start there. What attracted me to working for a vendor was when I worked for a service writer and I had worked for a couple of them at that point, you get to know that network, that one network.

Right. And it's like, okay, we, this particular service writer, we chose OSPF as our IGP. So I'd never worked on ISIS before, like just had never worked for a company that had that protocol in their network.

And so didn't get exposure to it. I could read about it, could laugh about it, but like to actually like work for a company or work with a company that did it, I wouldn't be able to do that unless I switched jobs. Right.

And so we're being on the vendor side. What attracted me to that was, you know, if I have, I'm a, an SE and I have five accounts and they have five different network designs, five different network architectures, they run different protocols. Like I get exposure to a lot more like, uh, different types of networks and different type of designs and so forth.

And that was what I think really attracted me to the vendor. The SE role specifically was again, going back to what I said earlier about combining the business and the tech, right. Being able to like say, okay, I know how, you know, a Juniper MX router works.

And I know how these different line cards work. I know what the speeds and feeds are. Let me help my customers figure out whether that's the right solution, you know, for what they're trying to accomplish within their network or capacity, or they're trying to do this new design for their new data center or whatever it may be.

Right.

Alexis

So we talked a lot about, we talked a lot about being an SE and, um, kind of stepping into that role as a field CTO and traveling, um, obviously is super exciting, but can you talk a bit about building community on the road? I think that a lot, a lot of technical roles now, whether it's in IT or computer science or any sort of like development role, we're working remote, whether it's days a week, whether it's full-time remote and I think having a technical community around you of professional acquaintances outside of your immediate team that you can rely on is super important. How have you built that up throughout your career?

Justin

Yeah, I mean, I, I agree. I think it's super important. I'm actually a co-organizer for the local, uh, Missouri network user group Mono is put on by, uh, USNUA is a, the nationwide organization that has local hosts that host these like meetups for lack of a better way to describe it in their local area.

And I got involved with that because I think community is super important to your point. Um, it's been super influential in my career. Uh, I would say, I think pretty much every job since maybe like my first full-time job out of college, I have gotten because I knew somebody, right?

Like conversation led to another conversation and a person's like, Hey, would you be interested? We've got this role. And I interview and that's how I land the job.

Right. It's been again, since my very first one, I don't think I've landed a job where I like applied through their website and, you know, got an interview that way. It's all been through, um, you know, connections that I've made through, through my career and through the industry.

Um, you know, some of those come from, from getting out and going to conferences. Um, so even if you're not an influencer, even if you're not doing a lot of online content, if you're once in a while, you know, maybe, maybe it's even just a couple of times a year going on, going to one of your local area or like NANOG was big and influential for me earlier in my career. Cause I was working for telecommunications companies and NANOG was like the big three time a year conference that they, they always did.

So I met a ton of people through that, but, um, you know, Cisco lives, a good one's big. So there's lots of people there, but even just these like smaller regional, um, nugs that are put on can, can be a good way to meet a few people in your industry. The other value beyond just building that network and that community of people that could get you a job or could introduce you to your next career is just being able to talk shop with somebody who does something similar to you.

I think to your point, Alexis, a lot of us wind up behind a screen, you know, 40, 40 plus hours a week doing our jobs remotely. And we start to get in this little bubble where like, man, nobody understands the challenges I'm going through or like, you know, nobody knows how to like solve these problems that I'm dealing with. And going to these conferences, you start talking to people like, wait, you're dealing with that same too.

You're trying to figure out how to like, you know, scale your data center in this way. Like I'm dealing with that same problem. Like, let's talk about that.

Right. Just being able to collaborate with people who do the same type of job that you do is super valuable too.

Alexis

Yeah, no, 100%. Cause I think a big thing for me, you start to see the same faces over and over. And you don't, I mean, sure you can meet someone once at a conference and have a good conversation, but even just like you and I, I mean, we've seen each other five, six, seven times and it's not just you.

I mean, there's other people that we're like road warriors together and you're always working the booth and you become familiar with their companies or what they do. And I don't know, it makes traveling feel at least for me, like a lot less lonely.

Justin

Yeah. Well, again, it's, it's back to that, like understanding that there are a community of other people out there who do are doing the same thing that you're doing. Right.

And so when it gets, the travel gets tough cause you're away from home or you're feeling like, you know, you're dealing a lot of stress from delayed flights or whatever it may be. It's like, it's, it's good to know there are other people that are in the same boat. Right.

You can commiserate with, I guess, if you will. Right.

Alexis

100%.

Justin

Trauma bonded.

Justin

Yeah.

Alexis

That's half a, half a work, man. I was talking to one of my coworkers and I was like, at least we're doing this together. It's like, you know, as, as much as we may not enjoy this specific task, I get to work on it with you.

Justin

Yeah.

Alexis

It gives us an excuse to make jokes about it and have fun together, you know?

Justin

Yeah. And there's definitely something to that. Like some of my, you know, people that I still keep in contact with that I worked with, you know, 10, 15 years ago, a lot of it comes down to that.

Like we had a lot of stressful situations, whether it was like middle of the night maintenance windows or how to do code upgrades, it didn't go well. And so we're trying to figure it out and send somebody out to get some pizza and some more Red Bull or whatever it may be. Right.

Like, I'm still close to those people because like we went, we went through something together. Right. And it like bonded us together closer because we have a shared experience.

Right. So it doesn't, that happens inside of companies and inside of teams, but it can also, you know, if you work in a small company or we have a team that does something similar to you, that's where the community can help expand that circle a little bit. Right.

If, you know, it can be that, that team, if you will.

Alexis

Yeah. So we, we talked a little bit about sales engineering, right? You lead a team of SEs.

I think Kevin, we've talked about this on the show before, but a lot of engineers think about sales as going to the dark side. Do you still feel like you're an engineer, Justin?

Justin

I do. You know, and I, I've had that conversation with a lot of people who were considering, you know, should I become an SE? Is that selling my soul to the devil or am I moving to the dark side or whatever, if I'm getting paid to sell something?

I mean, I think, you know, unfortunately there are people who have done unethical things in our industry as salespeople and probably even as SEs. And so they've left the bad taste in some engineers, you know, mouth. They've had bad experiences.

It doesn't mean they're all bad. You can still be a good engineer, still be good at understanding the tech, be good at explaining the tech to other people and be successful as an SE or in sales for that matter. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

I'd still like to believe that I'm a good engineer. I don't, I don't, I don't get to do as much hands-on technical anymore. And it's less because I'm an SE and more just because I've moved up the ranks a little bit.

So the value that I bring to the organization now is more coaching and mentoring engineers and it is being an engineer myself. My team actually makes fun of me when I try to do hands-on work. Now I usually mess it up and they have to come behind me and fix it.

So they'd rather me just let them do it right from the very beginning.

Alexis

Was that hard to recognize that your value add was different? Because I feel like for a lot of engineers, like when they've been hands-on keyboard their whole career, stepping into leadership and realizing that, you know, not being the point guy that's going to get on and code the thing or fix the thing. Was that hard for you?

Justin

Yeah, it's, it's still kind of is some days. I mean, part of it is just because I really like the tech too. Right.

So, you know, I, I still play around with stuff in the lab, even if it's just for my own learning, even if it's not really for, you know, any quote unquote project I'm working on for work just because I, I learn best by doing, which I think a lot of people do. And so I, you know, I lab stuff up just because I'm like, okay, I read about this, you know, new thing. I want to lab it up and actually learn it.

So I feel like I understand it better. Even if the only reason I need to know that is so I understand what's going on in a meeting when people in the real engineers are, are talking about things. Right.

But yeah, it is tough to, to, to make that transition and realize that if I'm actually really doing my job well, I'm letting my team do the, the, the technical work themselves and not stepping in and stepping on their toes and doing it for them. Right. That is a, that is a tough transition, I think for, for most engineers to make.

Kevin

Do you lose part of your identity? Cause I don't know. I, I view myself like I was recently promoted and I'm now into like a supervisory position and I have to offload a lot of my, my work to people underneath me now.

And part of my identity has always been someone who's on, I'm the tech person, you know, I'm like, I like hands-on, I like to do stuff. And now that the majority of my day is not that it is meetings and decisions and budgeting and projects. Like I, it's like, cause I'm almost losing a part of my identity.

Like I'm no longer the computer guy. I'm now I'm the meeting guy. Have you had that same experience?

Justin

Yeah. And I think it's not so much your identity is changing. I wouldn't say necessarily losing it.

It's just, it's changing from, you know, being the guy or the gal who knows the answer to the thing to being the one who can orchestrate that. Right. Being able to get the right person to get the right answer and, and enable those people to be successful and to shine.

Right. So it's not so much, I mean, the identity is changing. Yeah.

If that was what your identity was wrapped up in is being the hero, being the person who knows the answer. Then it is going to be a hard transition. That's what I tell people who approach me.

Like, I don't know what I like being in leadership. I'm like, it depends. And sometimes you're never going to know until you try it.

Right. But if doing that and becoming the person who you're not always the go-to person anymore is going to cause you to have an identity crisis, then maybe it's not for you. Right.

Is what I tell, what I tell people when they, when they ask me, you know, if, uh, you know, leadership would be right for them.

Kevin

Where were you a couple of weeks ago?

Justin

No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Sorry.

Sorry.

Justin

We should have this should have recorded this podcast a few weeks ago, apparently. The other thing that, you know, I think, uh, I always tell people is you also got to remember that like you, you're not going to lose your technical edge overnight. So you can try, you know, moving into leadership, give it a try.

If you find you really like the mentoring and the coaching and some of the things that come along with the leadership and you're okay, letting some of the technical go and you want to stick with it, that's fine. If you get there and you're like, you know what? Interesting experiment.

Not for me. I want to go back to being an individual contributor engineer. It's not like the day you signed the check, you know, sign the offer letter to become a manager.

You lost all your technical skills. It's like, it doesn't work that quite that way. Right now there is a period of time where you're spending so much time in these meetings and doing budgets and some of these other things that you just can't keep up with all the latest tech that's coming out.

Right. I mean, at some point it's kind of kind of like Alexa saying earlier, there's only so many hours in the day. Right.

And so you have to figure out like, how are you going to spend those hours and which one is going to benefit you most and what the organization needs out of you going forward.

Alexis

For real. So I think we talked about being a forward deployed engineer a little bit. In the age of AI, what is the difference?

And I'm curious on this because I want to do a deep dive on this myself, but what is the difference between a forward deployed engineer and a pre-sales solutions engineer or systems engineer?

Justin

So we just, we don't have forward deployed engineers at Kentik today. We've talked a little bit about it. The way I describe, the way I understand the difference and the way I describe the differences for a long time, there were companies that had what they call product led growth, basically meaning that the product was pretty obvious to use.

And like you'd go out to I think it was like AWS, right? An individual can go out to AWS's console. You can sign up, get an account, start playing around with AWS.

You can start learning it. You can scale it. So you don't really need to test it out before you buy it.

Right. And so the SE team at AWS, they don't really help you deploy your production environment necessarily. They're helping you understand the product, right?

Now in the world of AI, we're starting to see, we're starting as vendors, we're starting to see a lot more buying behavior where customers are like, no, no, no. I want to basically deploy your software in my production environment, prove that it works with my data. This is especially the case with AI, as you were saying, Alexis, before I buy your product, right?

Which means the SE mandate has expanded. Now I don't know, I no longer can just go in and answer a few questions and do a demo of the product. And then the customer buys, I literally have to basically do a full onboarding and almost what we used to have professional services to do to actually enable and the product and the customer's environment.

And so that's where a lot of the companies are now starting to change the title and the mandate to forward deployed engineer. Basically, it's this concept of, we're going to put on paper, like what success looks like, but you don't actually have to buy until we deploy this in your production environment.

Kevin

Isn't that how things used to be though? Like, is it just going back in time? Like it's, it's now we've kind of a full circle.

Justin

I definitely feel that way for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin

Yeah. Yeah.

Justin

Yeah.

Kevin

Like proof of concept, like typically when you have a new vendor come in, they want to try it out. You do a proof of concept, you set it up for a few weeks, you let it run in your environment, you see how it goes and then you decide to buy or not. That seems typical to me.

So it's just going all the way back now into the, to the environment, the software side and doing, okay, it's the same thing now.

Justin

So I feel the same way, you know, and that's part of, like I said, we've been having this debate internally at Kintik, whether we do FTE because our SEs have pretty much been doing that since the very beginning, because, well, a couple of things. One, we're a very complex software solution, right? So it's not, we don't have PLG.

Customers don't just automatically understand and know how to use our product. And, you know, we have to, we're a startup, right? So we're, you know, not a well-known household brand where customers are like, oh yeah, I've used AWS in my previous two companies.

I know how to use it. Like, you know, we have to, we have to do a lot of proof, like you were saying, like all of our sales motions, pretty much with a few exceptions require us to do proof of value and basically get it all but production in the customer's environment so that they can see the value, they can build the business case and they could justify the purchase. So we've kind of been doing that model since the very beginning.

That's why I talked to SE leaders that are starting this whole FTE motion, like, we're having to actually proof the value of our product before the customers buy it. I'm like, welcome to my world. I've been doing that for nine years.

Like, I don't know. It's weird to me that that's news to you. But I guess if you're Salesforce or you're a ServiceNow or some of these other products, maybe you didn't need to previously.

I don't, that's what I hear.

Kevin

Their name just carries enough weight where they go, okay, everyone else uses you, might as well too.

Alexis

I guess it depends on the thing. I don't know. I mean, even when I worked for a very large company that started with a C, I still found them.

We're still doing POCs and POVs.

Justin

Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally like, same thing.

When I worked at Juniper, we did, I mean, we had a whole lab and we had an entire building in Sunnyvale, California. It was basically just a lab to do exactly that. Like customers give you test plans.

They're like, here's my network design. It has to have all these protocols running. We'd have to spin up the hardware and have our lab team wire it up and configure it and give them the exact configs and everything.

We had to prove it before they'd buy it. So yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.

You know, I, the, the snarky engineer in me is like, isn't this just changing the titles again to try and like keep it fresh or something? You know, there's already so many titles for what a pre-sales engineer is, whether it's SE or some call SA like solutions architect. That's what AWS calls it.

Now we've got FTE. It's like, do we need to get another title for this?

Alexis

Right.

Kevin

That's the one truth in tech. There's, there's a million terms for, you know, 10 different things.

Alexis

Like we're all competing for the same pool of peoply engineers.

Justin

Yeah, for sure.

Alexis

So Justin, what is, what is next for you? When is the next time I'll see you or you'll be on an airplane?

Justin

I think the next one I'm going to travel to is the AI infrastructure summit that is coming up in Santa Clara in September. I'm going to be participating on a panel at that. I don't actually remember off the top of my head what the topic of the panel is, something around network observability.

I'm sure since that's sort of my area of expertise, which is obviously super critical in AI fabrics. So that's the next one I have coming up. And then going back over to Europe in October, I'm going to be speaking at Capacity Europe.

So week in London. Yeah. How about you?

What's your travel schedule look like?

Alexis

I'm trying to pause. Well, I mean, there's always some caveats there. I'll be out at Megaports SKO in Nashville, and then I'm going to stop through Charlotte, spend some time with my social media manager down there.

And then I have some business travel out to Austin for two days. And then I got a short-term lease in New York city and I'm going to try really, really hard on social media. I'm going to try hard not to leave straight weeks.

So the infrastructure, it's funny, the Santa Clara conference was on my radar, but I said, no, I was like, unless it's a career defining opportunity, I think I'd really like to spend eight weeks in one location. I don't know how confident I am that I'm going to not make it on an airplane.

Kevin

I have zero confidence.

Justin

I was going to say, are we taking bets on this, Kevin? I've got thoughts.

Alexis

No international, no international travel.

Kevin

I think she lasts two weeks. I think two weeks is the max before she's that's the over under on the bedding pool here.

Justin

All right. Cool. Yeah.

This should be a cool experience though. I saw you post something about on social media to live in New York. I always thought that'd be really cool to live in Manhattan or whatever for some period of time.

I've never been able to do that.

Alexis

Two months, just to say, I did it. Scratch the edge. Why not?

Justin

Most people has their favorite restaurant.

Alexis

Yeah. I just feel like from a business perspective, New York is one of those places that's useful to know.

Justin

Sure. Yeah.

Alexis

There's a lot of business that gets done there. There's a lot of conferences there. There's a lot of random meetings there.

A lot of people have their headquarters there. To have some experience with the city, that's not just looking at Google map and trying to figure out which restaurant has the best, the most stars. To take a client somewhere that you've been in the past and can recommend something off the menu.

Especially from a sales or a business perspective, I feel like it's advantageous. I'm excited for that. There's a lot of good networking.

I'm going to be down in West Village. I've never been there before. Probably do some shopping.

Kevin

There you go. When someone wants to be an actor, they move to LA just to be in the scene. Is this like that?

Alexis

You know, I didn't think about it like that, but I feel like if I was going to do that, it would have been more San Francisco from a technology standpoint. Maybe I'll be in San Francisco in the spring.

Justin

I was going to say, maybe that's your next one. Do eight weeks in the Silicon Valley.

Alexis

I'm already on my radar. I have traveled in March, but maybe in March, who knows?

Kevin

It's always fun trying to figure out where you're going, where you've been. I can't keep track of you.

Alexis

I can't keep track of me either. Well, Justin, I always ask this question towards the end of the episode. If you had one piece of advice for yourself when you were younger, what would that be?

Justin

I think getting out and making community a priority. I was probably, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 years into my career before one of my coworkers pretty much drugged me kicking and screaming to a NANOG event. I was like, you got to get out and meet people.

You got to go to these conferences. You got to make connections in the industry outside of our company. It's going to be good for your career.

I'm like, really? I don't know. Now I wish I had done it sooner.

I think it's really important. Like we were saying earlier, I think we kind of covered this, but just that community, that support system for career development, for being able to bounce ideas off of, feeling like you're not alone. It's just super important.

I wish I had done that earlier.

Alexis

You can't make old friends.

Justin

There you go.

Alexis

You can always make new friends, but you can't make old friends. I feel like, especially coming up through the industry, I mean, I've been working in IT. I started in 20, we'll call it 2020.

It's been six years, almost, well, six and a half. I feel like I've hit the point where I can no longer say I'm early in career. I was using that hashtag on Instagram the other day, and I was like, am I early in career?

I'm turning 30. I'm not really ready.

Kevin

If you are, I am. I mean, come on.

Alexis

But even over the past six years, there's people that I've met at Cisco Lives, or I'm at the point where I've moved roles a couple of times, or people I've worked with have moved roles, and they'll text me and be like, hey, remember when we worked together at Cisco? I'm looking and applying for a job. Can you give me a referral for a recommendation?

It'd be great to work with you again. And I'm like, damn, that went by fast. And you just never know.

You just never know what's going to come down the line in the future.

Justin

We think that goes by fast. Yeah. I just had to update my bio again and add more years to it, because I say something about how many years I've been in the industry.

But yeah, 25 years, quickly approaching 30, and it went by like nothing. Yeah, it goes quick. That's how we all feel, Alexis.

Welcome to the club.

Alexis

Heaven's lapping me with those 15 years of experience.

Kevin

Well, what's funny is that sometimes I forget how long I've been in it, and I'll estimate, like, oh, I've been in IT for 10 years. And then I go, wait, no, crap. It's been almost 20 now.

It goes by really fast.

Alexis

I'm afraid to hit 10.

Kevin

Oh, it'll be here before you know it.

Alexis

So wait, I'm curious now. What actually classifies as mid-career? Like, when do you transition from early in career to mid-career?

Justin

Oh, man, that's a good question.

Alexis

And, like, what's considered, like, gray beard status? Is, like, gray beard, like, 10 plus years, or is it, like, 15 years? I feel like early in career should be, like, zero to five.

Kevin

But it could even be your position, though, not necessarily, like, your years. You know, there's multiple ways of classifying it. Yeah.

You could be in a leadership position and only have two or three years of experience.

Alexis

Yeah, but I feel like early, you wouldn't use early in career to describe someone who's been in industry for 10 years but only been in leadership for two.

Kevin

No, what I mean is they, you know, they work their way up in two or three years into a C-level, but at least, like, management or something like that.

Justin

I think that's the other, yeah, the other thing we haven't really talked about that I think is important is there are people who are perfectly happy, you know, having, say, an entry-level job, and they're not super curious, they're not super ambitious or motivated to try and move up. And if they're happy with that, then, hey, more power to them. I've always been wanted, I always had a thirst for knowledge and always wanted to learn new things.

And in order to learn new things, felt like I needed to move to new roles. And so, you know, I've bounced around a little bit or tried to push to move up the, you know, up the ladder a little bit. And a lot of that was just based on wanting to learn, you know, new things and more things, but not everybody's wired the same way, right?

Kevin

Yeah, I have friends that I worked, my entry-level job basically was a NOC, and I still have co-workers that are still there, you know, 15 years later.

Justin

Yeah, me too.

Kevin

And they're very, very happy. And, you know, they've made a career out of it. So, no shame there.

They can turn off their work and go home and not deal with it, not check their email, not to worry about work at all.

Alexis

And that makes them happy.

Kevin

Yeah, exactly.

Alexis

I would, okay, so I would say then like what early career is zero to five years, mid-career would be like five to 15, and then gray beard is like 15 plus.

Kevin

I object to that just because I'd be with the gray beard section. Yeah, I was thinking that too.

Justin

I was like, so what do you call like past 25?

Kevin

Like time to call it quits? Or is it corpses or zombies?

Alexis

Artifact. Artifact level.

Kevin

Artifact, so great. That's worse. Much worse.

Dusty old artifacts. Is it?

Alexis

No, I would say like, like, gray beard, like wizard, like, like god tier.

Justin

There you go.

Alexis

Take it as a compliment.

Justin

No, no, just wait until you're there.

Kevin

I'm going to call you a gray beard and you won't be happy about it.

Alexis

I'm a girl. Can you, can a girl be a gray beard?

Kevin

Yeah, by your definition, we're gender neutral here, aren't we? In these careers.

Alexis

I'm going to have Melina edit some like after effects.

Justin

Yeah, we'll put a little, little wizard hat on you and a beard.

Alexis

Yeah.

Justin

Look like Gandalf by the time she's done.

Alexis

Anyways. All right, Justin, well, before we wrap up, is there anywhere that people can find you on the Internet if they want to keep up with you after the show?

Justin

Yeah, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn, so you can just look me up, Justin Ryburn, R-Y-B-U-R-N on LinkedIn and follow me there. That's probably easiest. I ever, every once in a while, tweet, I guess is still what we call it, even though it's X these days, LinkedIn I'm more active on.

Alexis

Perfect. Well, you heard him. That is it for this episode of Life in Uptime.

Huge thanks to our guests for sharing their journey and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation with Justin, be sure to follow the show so you never miss an episode. And if today's story gave you something to think about, share it with a friend or colleague who might need it.

And until next time, keep learning, keep building and keep your uptime high.