The Technical MBA Path: Balancing Tech Skills with Business Acumen

This is building better developers, the developer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello. Welcome back. We are into a new season and we're going to do some interviews. I've talked about it in the past, but this time I've decided to knuckle down and get it done. The first person we're going to talk to is Trevor Ewen and he is probably, I would say almost the epitome of a developer type of person. Definitely sits more in the, I think now more in the entrepreneurial side maybe than the technical side, yet still very technical. We have a lot of topics that we touch upon and there's going to be a couple parts. I think it's probably going to be three parts. We'll see how it all ends up when we're done through editing and stuff like that. This first episode, I'm going to let him rather than me do it too much. I'm going to have him do a little bit more of his introduction and we'll talk a little bit about the technology versus management paths. We're going to start to touch on building software and solving problems and maybe how Some of our career choices will help us or enable that, including a little bit of discussion of degrees as far as getting an advanced degree and looking at some of the solutions, software as a service types of solutions that are out there. Then that'll actually lead us into the next episode. We'll really get a little deeper into the whole idea of degrees going through a degree what you get out of that and touching on side hustles and things of that nature. I want to go ahead and get started on this and have a little bit of a conversation here with him. Like I said, this will be a multi-parter. We'll do a little bit of this this episode and then come back next episode and put a little bit more into it. This starts hopefully a long series of interviews. We'll just see what kind of people I stumble across that make sense. There's some I've reached out to and just sort of see how it goes. I hope you enjoy it. As always, give me any feedback afterwards if you liked them, if you didn't like them. Of course, in the show notes will be lots of links and stuff like that to help you connect and see, maybe learn a little bit more about him as well. With no further ado, here's a conversation with Trevor. We'll just start with, if you want to give a little bit of your background, where you've been, how you got here. Cool. Yeah. Hey, Rob. So I am a software engineer by training, probably right down the center of the road of a lot of the developers you have on the show or who listen to the show. Done web application work since 2009, really, which is when my career got kicked off. And I've seen the space morph a lot, obviously, around HTML5 move and JavaScript being the biggest transition in there. And throughout my time doing that, I've acquired a few more skills and certifications, I guess you could say. So coming directly out of that discipline and moving more into entrepreneurship eventually culminated in me getting my MBA and launching two new firms this year. And I can talk a little bit more about how I got to that point, depending on what issue you want to pick apart. Yeah, let's go. I think that's probably a good little start too, from your background, is just to get an idea of where you've, because not a lot of people start that technical route. And then particularly the groups that I'm talking to, a lot of times they're developers, they set creative side and maybe even a little bit of that entrepreneurial side that gets them started. They like the technical side of stuff. But then as they get into it, they see opportunities to grow and really use those skills for things beyond just maybe being an employee or something like that. I've limited it probably in too narrow of a way, but my viewpoint was that you can either decide to be a practitioner that just excels so much in a particular area. So you could imagine machine learning, AI would be popular choices for that these days. But in the past, it would have been something like computer graphics or possibly usability, you name it, just really accelerate at something. Or you have to take on the organizational challenge of building software, which is, it's still technical, but it's a bit more of a business challenge. And I always thought those are the two roads that people eventually walk down, whether they know it or not. And some people may be straddled the two, but they're probably less effective at either if they're not being intentional about choosing a road. So for me, it was to go the route of managing the organizational process of developing software and where that touches business. Maybe it's because I have a bit more natural aptitude there. I have more of a varied interest, I think. So the idea of maybe getting my PhD in a certain part of computer science wasn't that interesting to me, as opposed to dealing with more of the business challenges that come with building software. Yeah, that makes sense. And that's really, I guess, the focus a lot of times I ended up with. And again, even from the development point of view, it's a lot of the focus is really more on, it's not always the technology as much as it's just solving problems. And technology is just a tool, but you get all these really, to these modern days, actually, you get some really fascinating problems that are out there in the business world that it's helpful to have that technical background because they're very complex and it requires a lot of computational stuff and things like that, or storage of data or some of the other big items that are out there. But it's still, it comes down to being able to go out, solve a problem, sometimes create a team to solve the problem. And then, so I think especially when you fall into, if you fall into sort of like that, we'll call it, I guess, it's been probably overused, but the serial entrepreneur kind of point of view where it's really more about moving from one problem, finding a good solution and moving on as opposed to maybe building like a flagship product or something like that and then just really sticking to that. Similar to how you laid it out, you can, I guess, a very general approach, but you can either be a generalist to some extent, or you can specialize and you can even do that in the business world. You can be a business or you can create businesses and specialize on a specific problem or a specific niche, or you can say, you know what, I'm going to move around and it does, your experience builds you in that way, I think. So if you bounce from maybe one industry another, the next thing you know, you've got a pretty wide set of tools to use to solve whatever that next problem is you run into. Yeah. And I think it bolsters your resume, whether necessary or not, it does give people a sense of confidence that you've been in the trenches. And I think there is, to some extent, it's a bit of a Wizard of Oz moment, I will say, having worked in finance and media, there is a sense you get outside those organizations that, man, what they're doing is really sophisticated and I'll never get to that level. And then of course you work on the team, you work on the critical infrastructure and they are doing a certain amount of sophisticated things, but there's still a lot of very rudimentary problems just going on every day that these organizations are trying to solve and they're trying to solve it the exact same way small businesses would. They have more money to throw at it. That's the big difference. But the kind of issues are very similar. And so I think that gave me a lot of confidence to go back out. There was always a tendency when I was younger, some of this is just graduating during the Great Recession and job security was such a badge of honor to have at that time. And there was always a sense that, oh, once I finally make it to this place, I'll learn the really sophisticated strategies that my elders have already learned. And the truth is you get there and things are just kind of crazy and they're messy and there's a lot of organizational dynamics and there's a lot of other stuff you have to deal with. And then I think from there, people flourish in different environments. There are some people who take on that big environment and say, you know, I like the security. I like the challenge. I like the organizational challenge of marshaling all these people. You got to play a lot of politics. So they like that as well. For me, I took everything I learned and I have worked in some very large organizations, but I turned everything I learned and said, you know, I like the problem now at the ground level a little bit more because the small businesses that I'm working with, they don't realize they have access to this, but they do have access to great, great software that just needs to be built for them and needs to be specced out and needs to be a managed process for them. Yes, between the sort of the rise and I guess, or maybe even it's almost come to a nice solid plateau of software as a service and actually everything is a service, you know, platform as a service. And then also there's, I think it did come out of that great recession as there was a lot of people that had skills that really had not, they had been, I think, a little too comfortable and they lost a job or they started worrying about it. And the next thing you know, you had this just flood of people that were out doing little side hustle things and they were, they were doing, you know, launch their own little businesses. They were starting, you know, sort of scratching some of those entrepreneurial itches. The next thing you know, you have a lot of resources out there that are actually available to even smaller companies, particularly when you do it on a like a consulting kind of thing or something like that, where you can afford to have somebody come in. You don't have to hire them for years. You can have them come in for a month and it may not be cheap, but you can get them to build out or customize something. Or you can go to some of these, some of these SAS tools are just, it's an incredible amount of power and sophistication at your fingertips. And it's, they price it down sometimes to a level where it's, you know, you can afford it regardless of where you're at. You could be just an individual and you can have the same kind of software that some of the, you know, in the past was really limited to enterprises and very huge organizations. Yes, I agree completely. And it also requires a slightly different way of thinking that I didn't always encounter in my career. You know, say you go to financial services, a bit more of a conservative industry, there is a tendency to believe based on security and regulatory requirements that we're going to be building it ourselves. Right. We don't really want to buy this off the shelf. And for better or for worse, I think that mentality traveled with some of the developers who were in that field. And one of the things I've I've encouraged developers who I work with, or certainly people who are my customers is, you know, I do not absolutely do not want to rebuild Salesforce. Right. Because you got Salesforce. So if you want Salesforce, you got it. But if you're trying to extend the functionality or work with the APIs or possibly, you know, a niche we found ourselves in a lot is connecting two systems that are a bit more disparate and you have some very bespoke need for your business that requires you to connect those two systems. You know, that's that's where we can get the magic done. And, you know, we can just lower the price of that whole thing because we're not building an entire CRM for you. You know, we're getting something pretty small done. We're deploying it to the cloud. The resources are cheap. The labor is, you know, I would say expensive on a per hour basis, but we can cut the hours down to a low enough amount that that smaller businesses, certainly medium sized organizations, but even smaller businesses at this point can really consider making those investments. Yeah, precisely. And I've run into some of the same thing where there it it has eased up over because I've been doing this a little bit longer, but definitely if you go back, I guess, now 20 to 30 years before when open source really sort of started and the Internet was really young, security was the kind of thing where everybody said if it's if it's on the Internet, if it's not built in-house, then it's just not secure enough. But over time, those say I think it's just because there have been successes and there's been some failures as well, but there's been enough success. There's been enough of a momentum for those systems that people now are they're getting there. I think there's still some industries that are more, I guess, concerned about, for lack of a better term, concerned about security. And some of them are regulated. If you get into health care and you have HIPAA and financial as well, you've got a lot of its issues there and privacy and things you have to worry about. But there are that goes back to, you know, people have solved those problems in a lot of cases where they do have some secure systems and you can do like you're suggesting, you know, what you mentioned there with Salesforce, you can have something that's been built up that has a lot of that stuff just already done by people that that's what they do. That is their forte. And then you can come in and you can say, all right, we're going to take our whatever our little set of strengths are and we can extend that and we can utilize our stuff. We're going to leverage this big system that we've got and build something that's actually very sometimes very highly customized. And it does get, as you mentioned, you get sort of these, I don't know how many times I've run in these sort of bespoke integrations of something that you sometimes you would never even think of those systems. But they say, oh, yeah, this is something that we do or we have done in our past. And we need this, you know, some sort of integration. We need data passed back and forth. We need to utilize an API or whatever it is to link these systems together. And it seems like there's at least as much of that just straight integration type work out there as there is even customization these days. Yes, I well, I agree, Kabali. That's a lot of the work we do. Part of it's because I like it. It's also because I like the customer base more than anything. I think, you know, when you're building products for technology specific companies, so think startups and entrepreneurs, there are I'll just say as customers, they need a lot. Right. And usually what they need is actually a CTO, you know, someone to just run the show for them. But someone who's in another kind of business who's doing a small integration, they really actually need exactly what they need. And so it's very easy to figure out how you can fulfill the needs of the project. And I think that's the big thing linking all of our customers is they are not actually selling technology as their end product. They're actually selling something else. Right. And technology is helping them to do that work. And I think that's a to get back to an earlier point, it does combine some of my interests in business and operations, which, you know, what's the saying? If you you want to figure out what to do with your life, don't don't figure out what you like. Ask another person what you're actually good at. And that's probably what you should do for a living. And I think, you know, took me long enough to figure out. But the operations side of a business, you know, how to streamline a process is it's just something I have very innately in me that, you know, I don't necessarily always aspire to, but but it's just kind of there and I'm constantly thinking about it. And I think if you've got other if you have a mix of skills, particularly if you have skills that you that are considered higher dollars, I'm like like tech skills are considered something that are, I think, more rare. There's there's a respect level that comes with those that sometimes if you can do that, you figure, oh, well, this is what I've got to do. I'd be like, I guess if you're really good at law or a doctor or something like that, you would say, oh, I've got to go that route. But then as you get into it, you realize that, no, that's really I can use those skills for something other than the standard approach. And I like maybe if I'm a doctor, I don't have to go be a surgeon. Maybe instead I find that I'm much better as a sort of like a CMO, like a, you know, organizing stuff and helping with treatment plans and doing things that are bigger scale than that, you know, that that more specific work at, you know, one doctor, one patient or something like that. And there's I think we find that in technology a lot, too. It's easy to go into technology and say, oh, this is a great area. And it's it's a huge expanse of areas that you can get into from there when you think of just coding versus testing versus DevOps versus design and architecture and all the different facets of it that I think it takes time. And it's it's worth it to sort of go on that journey a little bit to figure out what you like, what you don't like. And then, as you said, you know, what you're good at, but also what other people say you're good at, which goes back to, I think, a lot of times where I find mentors and that a lot of times I hear stories with that's that's really what turns a trick for people is that somebody that they respect, that they worked with enough said, you know, hey, you you haven't considered this thing that you do very well. So maybe you want to look into that a little bit. Yeah, I would agree completely. And I think my mentors knew me better than I did for a long time. So I guess I should figure out what they're saying to me right now, too. But that was that was an interesting thing, you know, early in my career. And it is true, the hard skills are what gets you there. Right. So I was a, you know, a good I should at least say good enough developer. Right. And that meant mostly writing code. But my mentors at the time, particularly the ones who knew me well, said, hey, long term, you got to you got to think about your role in the organization because your communication skills are strong. And some of the things that I just wasn't really prioritizing that high at that time. And it's just funny how much that stuff comes back to you later. I mean, I spent a lot more time, say, editing documents, for instance, in the last couple years, just because a lot of people would really want my second opinion on, say, editing choices, which is just something I never never really thought I'd be by using that so much in a technology context, certainly not in a software development context. And that is a pretty good place for us to stop for this time around. I don't want to go too long in these episodes, still keeping them somewhat short and try to focus a little bit because we do range pretty widely on the topics we cover. And I want to make sure we don't go too far and wide in a single episode. Next one, we're going to come back and we are going to spend a lot more time talking about that that technical MBA path conversation with he and I about our own experiences and similarities and differences and the similarities in particular, I think what you may find very interesting if particularly if you've considered going that your technical and going that MBA route, that there may be some hidden value in there that you had not considered that may basically push you over the line and say, you know what, I'm going to give that a shot. I definitely, as I mentioned earlier, I'm happy to hear any feedback on any of this. If you have any specific types of interviews that you would like to maybe more technical or more entrepreneurial or whatever else is out there, then definitely I will put that into the bucket of ideas and see what we can do. Just find some people that we can talk to along those lines. I know sometimes we get a little bit, it may get a little tired listening to me all the time talking through things. So now we're going to get some other people, I get to hear it in their voice and get hopefully some of these continued conversations around experience and some of the things we've solved and some of the problems that we still face. Hopefully this will turn out to be some great food for thought for you as you listen to this and the upcoming episodes. That being said, no challenge for the day or week this time. I think I'm going to leave the challenges behind this time because I think it's more just sit back and maybe think a little bit about what has just been discussed and maybe there's some insight there that you can take forward and either make your day a little better or make some adjustments in your career path or your roadmap that will help you in the future. But as always, I thank you for listening and go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. at developer.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developineur. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developineur site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Broadhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developineur.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.