Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
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Consult and Build Trust: Influence the Business and the People with Richard Russell (1/2)
Have you ever felt a work task was boring or a waste of time? It might be because you didn’t understand why you were asked to do it in the first place. Richard Russell, our guest this week in episode 318, struggled with this in his early role as a programmer. All he wanted was to understand more about the business problem his work was intended to solve. In that role, however, Richard never got those answers, and he would later move into systems administration. Richard has developed a pattern of pursuing the things which he finds interesting – a pattern that began in college and has continued over the course of his career as a programmer, a systems administrator, and as a consultant. Each of these roles combined with his interest in the business prepared Richard for the role of team lead in the banking industry. Join us as we explore the team lead role and why Richard progressed to it, how he built trust as a consultant and as a sales engineer, and his genuine interest in people. Listen closely to learn strategies that will increase your ability to influence others, ask the right questions, and build strong working relationships with colleagues and customers. Original Recording Date: 02-17-2025 Topics – Meet Richard Russell, An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science, Moving from Programming to Systems Administration, Consulting and an Interest in the Business, Combatting Ego and Building Trust, Sharing Your Priorities, Progressing to Team Lead 2:43 – Meet Richard Russell Richard Russell spends most of his time coaching leaders who work in scale-ups, big tech, and other corporate environments. Most of Richard’s clients have some executive responsibilities and come from a product or technology background. Many times, these clients are transitioning into product / tech leadership roles or CEO / founder roles. Richard made the relatively recent transition from doing consulting work to focusing on coaching. Richard resides in Luxembourg with his family. 3:29 – An Interest in Mathematics and Computer Science What prompted Richard to study math and computer science in school? Richard’s father was an electrical engineer and was very enthusiastic about that career path. Richard had a Commodore 64 as his first computer and tinkered with various others over time, even getting into programming. In high school, Richard did very well in the hard sciences – math, physics, and chemistry. When forced to choose a non-science course during his senior year, he chose economics because it seemed the most mathematical. Though he did start out studying engineering in college, Richard made some changes to focus on the things he found most interesting – mathematics, computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, theology, etc. Richard found applied mathematics quite boring at first (just solving differential equations, for example). It was more interesting to him when physics and engineering teachers taught mathematics because there was a need to solve a problem. Richard later went into pure mathematics and found it the most interesting of all. Richard says computer science was something he got into primarily because of his talent in mathematics. Nick remembers hearing physics majors in college echo the same sentiment as Richard. They learned more mathematics in physics courses than in their respective calculus courses. To Richard, initial learnings in calculus seemed to be solving complicated problems that were not applied to anything, and it was a sharp contrast to the way problems were presented in physics or engineering. In the sciences, Richard had an interest in the practical need. In pure mathematics, he had the interest in learning anything within that discipline. Richard started wanting to learn more about the applications of mathematics and became really interested in the abstract concepts of mathematics. Was it a similar pattern when Richard learned programming? Richard says he gets interested in topics, and he wasn’t interested in the complications of applied mathematics (i.e. doing integrals, for example). When it came to computer science, Richard was interested in how things worked and some of the theory behind it. He also liked the ability to express creativity and control what appeared on the screen through programming (which required no artistic talent). Richard later became interested in businesses and how products are built. He had no background in product management and wanted to build games. “The mathematics behind, especially graphics, was very complex, and it was exactly the stuff I didn’t like doing. Whereas the business games and business side of applications or programs or websites and so on…they are quite simple in many ways. The complexity is really about…what do I actually want to achieve as opposed to how do I achieve it. And so that became much more interesting to me. A lot of that is related to my interest in product management as I went on further and in business generally. I have this habit of obsessing over topics, whatever they are, whatever I’m interested in…so I got deep in whatever topic it is.” – Richard Russell 9:40 – Moving from Programming to Systems Administration Was Richard still obsessed with programming once it became his job? Richard tells us within the last year he was diagnosed with ADHD. “I tend to just find things interesting and obsess over them. When it’s work it’s not necessarily interesting inherently. It could be. It might not be. The decision on whether it’s interesting or not is independent of whether it’s work.” – Richard Russell In his first job, Richard was doing software development but worked on a product that was very boring to him. The product was internally facing administration tool that did asset tracking for national parks. The product had only 6 users. Richard would be given a user story and have to build something from it (a web page, etc.). “I remember thinking…why are we doing this, and what problem are we actually trying to solve? Why haven’t I met any of these people who are using this thing? Why do I not understand what they’re trying to do? Is this even a good way of doing it? It’s just like we’re taking an old database system and turning it into a web application because that’s the thing you do. The whole thing…it was fundamentally…on a deep level boring because I wasn’t talking to the people who were having the problem. I didn’t know what we were solving. I didn’t know why we were doing it. I was just producing web pages.” – Richard Russell Richard then shifted from programming to systems administration. The goal was solving problems, and there was a person who had a problem, which made it interesting. Sometimes Richard would need to go and talk to someone to solve a problem. But if a system was down or not performing well, Richard understood the impact to the user base. He was motivated to solve the problems because they impacted people who would then appreciate that the problems were fixed. Richard also worked on patching for Solaris servers (again, a problem to solve). Richard contrasts the work in systems administration to his work programming and building web pages. It would take a long time to create a release, and once the release was live, he would never find out if what he did was of any value to anyone. There was no feedback or ability to see the impact of work completed. In his role as a programmer, did Richard express his feelings to his manager that the work was not making an impact? Richard says he kept his feelings to himself but also does not believe he was aware of what was specifically frustrating him. In that environment, developers were basically handed something to build and told to go build it. It was not obvious that developers would have an interest in the business. This has changed over the last 25-30 years, however. What were some of the challenges of moving from development to the systems administration side? Richard thinks his advice for someone looking to do that now would be well dated. But at the time, Richard had worked with Linux quite a bit and even ran a Linux Install Fest. He also tried to start a startup based on systematic remote administration and patching hundreds of Debian Linux servers. Richard mentions he had played around with Linux in his spare time because it was interesting. It became a hobby. Richard feels that today software development is more connected to the business, while systems administration is somewhat removed from it. Richard built a lot of computers earlier in his career and mentions people have moved up the stack. Doing this same thing now is an increasingly niche area (i.e. the hardware portion). “From my own personal interests, I found it much more motivating to be with people and businesses influencing people and understanding how and why people buy things and what kind of things people buy. That’s much more interesting to me now…. Sysadmin type work is very much a service. If you look at any business, sysadmin or anyone doing IT infrastructure…it is a cost center. It will always be a cost center…unless you’re in a business where it is a business where it is the profit center, which is very rare. In most cases it’s a cost center. When you’re in a cost center you’re always one of the people who gets secondary importance in the organization…at best.” – Richard Russell Nick clarifies that systems administration could mean hardware, software, the hypervisor layer, the virtual machine layer, the operating systems, administration of the pipelining tools that development teams use, etc. Richard mentioned he’s not hands on with most of these things any longer but that levels of abstraction continue to rise. Ideally people would want to be in an area that has some demand for the specific type of work (i.e. a growth area). Think about businesses who
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