Farewell and Reflections on My Time at Cloudera

Yesterday was my last day at Cloudera. After a short break I'll be pursuing new opportunities, but in the meantime I'd like to reflect on the past 8 1/2 years.

Cloudera SF Reception. https://flic.kr/p/dLeQY9. CC BY-SA.

My introduction to Cloudera came about by chance. My employer had purchased a training course for twenty and there had been a few cancellations, so I volunteered to sit in and learn about Apache Hadoop administration from Sarah Sprohne. We didn't have a need for the technology on my current project, but it did get me thinking.

While being pitched a role at Cloudera over kebabs and naan a few months later, I expressed concerns that I didn't have any operational experience with Hadoop. "That's okay," Joey Echeverria said. "We can teach you Hadoop, it's the other things we can't teach you that are more important."

I had developed a reputation of balancing the needs of my customer and employer, collaborating with others, evaluating and fielding solutions, all while not losing sight of the bigger picture. Joey hadn't worked with me directly, but had heard of me due to my contributions to the growing movement that we'd now refer to as inner source, and that was enough.

I had a phone screen with Michael Katzenellenbogen where he asked me about bonded network interfaces. It wasn't a trivia question to which he had the answer, he legitimately wanted to know due to a problem he was working on with a customer. These are the best sort of interviews, the sort that just feel like a conversation between two nerds, as opposed to the "we have to get through this list of pre-selected technical questions that may or may not have anything to do with the role" vibe that's oh-so-common.

My conversations with hiring manager Don Brown and his supervisor Tait Kirkham were brief, essentially "look, Joey says you're good so we're good." In hindsight they were probably too busy trying to land/please an expanding customer base to be more thorough, but they entrusted and delegated the responsibility to someone on the hiring team -- which was reassuring. Managers who are comfortable delegating are a boon.

These were still the early days of Cloudera so I got to spend time with then-CEO Mike Olson before being offered a position. He was likely sizing me up for "culture fit" (whatever that meant), but I had the opportunity to ask him a bunch of questions about his personal plans and vision. That style of dialogue continued throughout our shared time at Cloudera; despite the broad gap in organizational hierarchy, he always wanted to know what was going on and it never felt weird sending him a brief email or text with concerns. That's the sort of comfort you want to have with your leadership.

A few short weeks later I found myself walking into the office at Portage Ave in Palo Alto, unicorn festooned wallpaper and all.

Makeshift Desk @ Cloudera Austin. https://flic.kr/p/sa2pDp. CC BY-NC.

It's been quite the journey.

Plucked from a steady desk job working with the same team for years at a time, I was propelled headfirst into the world of Professional Services (read: post-sales consulting), working largely independently and on my own for a different customer every couple weeks. From Denver to DC to Key West to Nottingham, I went wherever Kari Neidigh said to go, logging countless airline miles and hotel stays. In each new city I'd help customers get started with this newfangled technology and it was very cool to hear about their progress later on and know that I had been there at the beginning.

I made time during my non-travel weeks to attend local Meetups and this is how I met Paris Pittman, Kara Sowles, and Terra Field. I fought to recruit at colleges that weren't Stanford and along with Sean Busbey and Julien Eid we had some successes at RIT. I remember wandering the stacks of Powell's Books in Portland with Justin Kestlyn during our first time exhibiting at OSCON (and coincidentally the same year I met Sarah Novotny, which would lead to me serving on the Program Committee). These seemingly ancillary relationships would continue to become intertwined over the coming years, providing the framework for friendship, mentorship, and career opportunities for myself and many others.

The life of a road warrior is exciting at first and always appears glamorous to those who don't travel often, but it loses its appeal over time. There would be mornings where I'd wake up, see the furniture and know I was in a Hampton Inn but not remember what city I was in. While it was rewarding helping our customers get started with the platform, I wanted to contribute in a more strategic way. I also wanted to spend more time at home. My next role at Cloudera would have me traveling further each trip, but for a few days instead of a week.

Desk at Cloudera Raleigh. https://flic.kr/p/rxzJTp. CC BY-NC.

My time in Partner Engineering was intoxicating. I traveled frequently to Seattle to collaborate with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft engineers on collective cloud offerings. I traveled to San Diego to work with Teradata on their Appliance for Hadoop and every time the staff there apologized profusely for the "cold" 72 degree weather. I started making bi-monthly trips to Palo Alto to meet with our Product teams, dovetailing visits to newfound friends in San Francisco. More importantly, I was working with a team again. And what a team it was: Calvin Goodrich, Dwai Lahiri, Jason Wang, Rick Hallihan, Tony Wu, among others. I'm still very proud of the reference architecture work that we did: the rigor we insisted on during the research phase, the formal technical review process we implemented, and the resulting documents that are still in distribution today providing guidance to prospects and customers alike.

I represented Cloudera at numerous trade shows, talking to attendees, hawking our swag t-shirts, exchanging war stories with our competitors across the expo floor aisle, giving technical talks, and spending a lot of time with some of the hardest-working women I've ever met: Aimee Schneider, Kate Tong, Marci Rosalez, Jessica Gass, and Miluska Berta.

Cloudera Support Mug. https://flic.kr/p/SQyf3F. CC BY.

For the last year or so I've been a fixer of sorts within our Support organization: building out cloud infrastructure, working to reduce cloud spend, and enabling our supporters to handle customer issues with CDP Public Cloud. It's been fun tackling organizational and systemic issues that no one else has had the time to address. After almost a decade I've got a deep bench of people I can consult with across the company when necessary, but often I've been working by myself (and been given the autonomy to do so). It's been a unique challenge, less so technical and more driving policy improvements and providing oversight and guidance.

It was time for a change.

Technologies and product strategies come and go. The people I met and the relationships forged in the crucible of a growing company will persist far longer than the software we produced. My intent isn't to name drop, rather to illustrate how my time with this one employer has provided a springboard for introductions to an ever-widening network of brilliant and inspiring individuals. I'm indebted to those mentioned above and many others.

I tried to do my part to leave Cloudera in better shape than when I joined.

Onward!

This post first appeared on LinkedIn on April 1, 2021: Farewell and reflections on my time at Cloudera 👋🏻

Last Modified: 2022-04-03

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