After three years with Cloudera I still have difficulty explaining what I do for a living. I still have difficulty explaining what the company does, specifically, especially to those outside the computing industry. Whenever I say "we're in the software business," people always seem to want to know what kind. I'm not sure why they want to know, exactly, but I try to appease them:
"We do distributed computing." confused face
"No, we don't really have much to do with the cloud." blank look
"We're kinda like the Red Hat of Hadoop." quiet stare
"We write the kind of software that makes Facebook and Twitter possible." light bulb moment
Close enough, I guess.
Aside from me needing to work on my elevator pitch, what's going on after three years?
Cloudera's growth is most noticeable when I visit our offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. Two years ago, I was still getting to know everyone and so there'd be a handful of faces I'd recognize and a good number of names that were familiar to me (from email, group chat, and teleconferences). A year ago, there were far more people whose names I'd recognize but not their faces. Last week, there were far more people whose names and faces were completely unfamiliar. It's a side effect of company growth, but I feel weird about it, more so when some of my colleagues who actually work in those offices report similar feelings.
As Cloudera has grown, more policies and procedures have needed to be put in place. Some of the "wild west" startup behavior has started to be reeled in a little. It's only natural. It's been fascinating to observe my colleagues' reaction to these changes: some have been there before and understand, for others this is their first job and so they don't know any better, and a few have never worked for non-startups before and by their reactions you'd think the world was coming to an end. Coming from a much larger organization made up of 40,000+ employees, I knew it would happen eventually. I've enjoyed the startup culture so far, and we're certainly retaining plenty of it, but I welcome the changes that will allow us to grow into a more mature company.
I left the world of professional services about seven months ago, migrating over to our partner engineering group. That meant leaving customer consulting engagements behind. Now I work with external partners to research and evaluate their technologies and make recommendations about new architectures. For example, I might do performance benchmarking on a new hardware component and try to determine whether we should recommend it to our customers.
I'm still a part of the larger field organization, although technically on the pre-sales side of things. While my immediate team is significantly smaller, I engage with a much larger and wider swath of people across the company on a daily basis.
Two years ago, my primary objective was making customers successful through consulting, one customer at a time. Today, my objectives are far more strategic to Cloudera as a whole and I have to work with multiple partners at once. The partners for which I'm responsible are big household names each with annual revenues of $50-100 billion, which means the work I do is far more visible both publicly and to the company executives. It's certainly been a change of pace. With more visibility comes more responsibility.
It feels like a big deal. And to Cloudera it is certainly is. But does it matter as much?
Jeff Hammerbacher -- one of Cloudera's founders -- told Bloomberg in 2011 that "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," adding "that sucks." He's since focused his efforts on genomics research at Mount Sinai Hospital, but a lot of our company's product is still used by our customers as a means to generate or increase profits.
I find less intrinsic value in the work I'm doing today, both because I'm one step removed from end-users and also because of the commercial nature of my "very large" for-profit partners. We absolutely have customers who are using our software (possibly utilizing our partners' offerings) for disease research, national defense, environmental protection, and humanitarian efforts, but in my new role I'm not exposed to them directly.
It's not just me. The head of my department used to work in the natural gas industry. When the pipeline and distribution network were running smoothly, he took comfort that the work he was doing contributed to keeping people safe and warm. First responders can take similar comforts in their line of work. I've known that feeling of comfort previously in my career and it's been hard to wean myself from it.
I do get satisfaction from knowing I'm doing a good job and that my contributions are important, but there's a nagging inner voice that asks what exactly I'm contributing to. I want my efforts to enable more than mere profitability.
One of my goals for the coming year is to spend more time with customers, particularly those engaged in not-for-profit efforts. I may not get to work with them every day, but seeing some of the results of my efforts being used for good may recharge me.
Working in professional services was very hands-on, one-on-one with a customer, and finite: get in, do the task defined by the contract, and get out. I still get my hands dirty building, configuring, and troubleshooting Hadoop clusters, but I'm spending more time doing solo research to lay the groundwork for discussions and decisions. Then there's the coordination and sharing between business development, field, engineering, and external partners, all of whom have wants and needs with regard to schedule and requirements. This work is ongoing. I sit in the middle, taking it all in, proxying internal and external concerns, and trying to prioritize and balance. That's the new job, in a nutshell, and I find it challenging.
I've also been creating reusable procedures and documenting expectations for our team. For example,
These things may seem simple for veterans, but they aren't always clear to new hires. Since our team is small, and completely geographically separate, we're taking the opportunity to standardize how we work before it's too hard to change.
With all that coordination going on, I spend a lot more time in meetings and since I'm a remote employee that means a lot of time on the telephone, WebEx, and Google Hangouts.
Times have certainly changed. A few years ago, I'd use the phone to call friends but rarely make or take a business call. I rarely use the phone to call friends today, but find myself on business calls most days (and some days all day).
Someone told me that the more time you spend in meetings indicates your relative place in the organizational hierarchy. I have mixed feelings about that.
After doing a fair bit of public speaking in 2014, far more than I had planned on, I stopped submitting talk proposals in 2015. Since most of my work is done under non-disclosure agreement with our partners, it's hard to come up with relevant topics that I'd be allowed to speak about.
I want to speak about things I'm passionate about, rather than things that the organizers want to hear about. Most of the talks I've given have been the latter. Ideally, I'd love it if the organizers and attendees wanted to hear about the things that I'm passionate about, but we're definitely not there yet.
I'm also a little fed up with conference politics that are in part responsible for this routine:
I might not write the most glamorous proposals, but they're honest. Perhaps it's faulty logic, but it feels like the organizers don't want to hear what I have to say. Or maybe there are too many Cloudera people speaking already at the conferences I've submitted to. Or maybe I'm a horrible speaker. No idea. Rarely will a conference organizer/committee provide specific feedback to submitters on why their proposal wasn't accepted; it's something I think we could work toward.
In any case, I still wanted to give back to the communities that have inspired me over the years. If not by speaking, maybe by volunteering instead? I discovered that help is rarely turned away, particularly when it comes to reviewing proposals. So in addition to sitting on the program committee for Accumulo Summit, I was particularly pleased to be part of the program committee for OSCON 2015, especially when a couple of my top picks were selected for inclusion.
I've also started mulling over how public a person I'd like to be. There are perks to private life, some of which you give up when you take the stage. It's hard to hide when you've got a unique family name.
I wrote about my first twelve months at Cloudera about two years ago, and after re-reading I find that most of my observations are still relevant:
After three years at Cloudera, it's still an adventure.
Last Modified: 2020-08-08
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