David Tran - VP of Solutions and CISO at MentorMate

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to David Tran, the VP of Solutions and CISO at MentorMate, and we discussed the differences between authentic and inauthentic leaders, thoughts on how to build a productive engineering culture, and the importance of taking security seriously at all stages of growth. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(David Tran at 00:00:35) Hello, hello, hello, Joe. Hey, buddy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) How are you, my friend?

(David Tran at 00:00:40) I'm doing well. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Good. Where are you calling in from today?

(David Tran at 00:00:44) I am from Minneapolis area.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Oh, is it cold there yet?

(David Tran at 00:00:49) It's no snow yet. I'm looking outside there, still green.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Soon, my friend.

(David Tran at 00:00:57) Yes. I have lived here in Chicagoland, and both places are very snowy and cold. But it is what it is. It's a nice area to live in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Yeah. I was really excited to talk with you today. I got lost in reading your articles, and I want you to write more. It looks like when COVID happened, you started writing on LinkedIn, and you had a couple good ones. And I was like, this person's deep. They've been through adversity. They understand life, and those always make for the best conversations.

(David Tran at 00:01:30) Well, awesome. Looking forward to it, and thanks for the compliments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) So one thing I want to clear up before we get started. When I read the leadership articles, right, and then I saw MentorMate as the company name, and so I assumed, okay, this guy's into leadership. He works at a company called MentorMate. They must do something with mentoring people, but that's not the case. Can you explain to me what MentorMate does?

(David Tran at 00:01:54) Yeah. MentorMate, we are a software consultancy. We build software solutions where you can't really buy off the shelf, so custom software. And we specialize in all the popular tech stacks, including the mobile iOS and Android and React Native. We do the front end and back end for web solutions or other non-mobile solutions, and the .NET, the Java, the PHP for the back end, the Angulars, the Reacts, Views, whatever, all the JavaScript languages, we do that. And in addition to that, we have a strong design practice, and we do architecture and management consulting, DevOps, and cloud. And the reason why I'm saying these things is not so much as a long laundry list, but it's all the ancillary services to deliver a valuable custom solution. Because a piece of code that is insecure, well, that's no good. A piece of code that cannot be deployed into the cloud is generally not good in today's age. So that's our general service offering suite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:05) So how did you come up with the name?

(David Tran at 00:03:08) The name was coined by our founder. The urban legend is that he had a female friend who spoke a different language, and he wanted to determine how to take, at the time, the PalmPilot—I don't know if you remember those. It's way back in the day, the PDAs—and put an app on there. And he was thinking, well, I wanted to do some sort of mentor thing. Okay, the mentor has to be in the name of the company, and he was thinking about how do a company mentor, and then he came up with Mate. And then that stuck on, and 20 years later, we're still MentorMate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) Oh, I love it. I, yeah, I definitely remember when those Palm Pilots and all those, you know, black and—well, the TFT type screen devices came out. When we were doing the prep, our associate producer, Adam, he's like, "How are they making apps in 2001? The iPhone didn't even exist." And I said, well, we used to have these other systems of computing, which we had applications on.

(David Tran at 00:04:13) Yes, exactly. And the commentary is that Bjorn, our founder, had these concepts and the technology wasn't quite there, so he was ahead of his time in that context. And then when finally the technology caught up, we were able to put our skills to work on first iOS and then eventually Android. And then from there, we merged out to many other technology stacks beyond the mobile stack.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) And how big is the company today? Or how do you measure the size?

(David Tran at 00:04:49) The company is predominantly in two areas, and we also have a third area. And when I say area, it's geographic area. So we are founded in Minneapolis, and we have about 50 or so staff in Minneapolis. The bulk of our company is based in Bulgaria. We have over 550 or so people in Bulgaria. And then we also have presence in Sweden, and that's where Bjorn is from. And he has a presence there, and we have some folks there to help with landing opportunities in Sweden and other parts of Europe. And yeah, so in the big scheme of things, you know, we're not that big, but we're big enough to tackle the tough projects that even enterprise clients appreciate. And our value prop is that we're not the cheapest, we're not the most expensive. But when you combine the value proposition of what we can deliver at the price point in which we deliver, that's how we attract and retain our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) Have you gotten to go over to Sweden?

(David Tran at 00:05:58) Not Sweden, but I've been to Bulgaria a number of times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) I just got to go to Sweden for the first time last year, and it was beautiful. I went to this city called Malmö, and it was just a whole different culture, a whole entire different experience. I really enjoyed it.

(David Tran at 00:06:12) Awesome. Yeah, I'll have to talk over to Bjorn and see if he can show me around Sweden someday, right? Yeah, it'll be a good experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:22) So you wrote this one article that I really enjoyed called Racism, Empathy, and Leadership, and you talk in there about your journey to America and then growing up and then becoming a professional a little bit. Can you give me the 10,000 foot view of that?

(David Tran at 00:06:40) Yeah. There's a number of things in there. There are multiple themes, but I'll highlight a couple of themes. One is I want to emphasize the word empathy. And oftentimes when we talk about whether it's diversity or racism or something contentious, we tend to get into a visceral emotional state. Right? What I mean by that is, you know, it's almost like my religion is better than Joel's religion. And no matter what Joel says, I'm not going to pay attention to him. And whatever he says, I'm going to find ways to discount what he says. Right? And to me, I've noticed that when the topic hits these deep rooted chords in our system, we tend not to listen to empathize. We listen to prove the other side wrong. And that's why I started off with, well, why is there whether it's racism or prejudices or whatever, and it's not just the US. It's everywhere in some degree. And I think a part of that stems from each person not necessarily pausing to reflect upon the other person's perspective and potentially giving the other person the benefit of the doubt that the other person is also correct, and we can both be correct. Right? So that was one key theme that I want to emphasize, and, you know, we're all part of the human race, whatever our skin color. So how can we connect with each other at the human level? And in charged times, it gets more challenging for people to connect at that level because of what I characterize as visceral reactions. And so that's my key theme. And all the other aspects of that article are oriented around my personal experiences on how I've evolved as a human being, my emotional intelligence quotient, whatever. And over the years, I have determined, well, when I was younger, I got angry for a certain reason. Why did I get angry? I reflected upon all these experiences, and I felt cheated or I felt like I was treated unfairly or whatever. But as I got older and, you know, I don't feel as cheated and as treated unfairly even if I am because after a while, I realized that if I feel cheated or treated unfairly, I'm knocking myself out of my own sweet zone, sweet spot, and I'm not as effective as I should be. So I choose, which is hard to say and hard to do—I mean, easy to say. I choose not to let other people affect who I am. Right? Deep down, I want to be a quote-unquote good person who does good things and benefit society and my colleagues and my friends and family and put smiles on their faces. That's what I want to do. And you can try really hard to make me angry. You'd have to try really hard, and it's rare for you to succeed to make me that angry. You might annoy me. People do that. I get annoyed. But then I calm down, and I try to reflect on what is it I can do to help the other person see my perspective as well as learn their perspective and work through it. So that in a nutshell is the main theme, and all of my stories relate to how I've come up with that main theme.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:39) I like it. Yeah. And it was clearly articulated in the article, and I thought it was incredibly valuable. We'll make sure to post a link in the show notes to all three of the articles I read of yours. Can you give me an overview of authentic leaders versus pretend leaders?

(David Tran at 00:10:58) Yeah. That's one of the things that I have observed. And I grew up in corporate America in many larger companies, Fortune 500, Fortune 100, and Fortune 10 oriented companies. And being in those companies, there's a set of unwritten rules at times where you need to do certain things, act certain ways in order to be recognized and rewarded. And I tried in some of those companies to follow those unwritten rules, those cultural norms, but I didn't feel like I was being true to myself. And that to me boils down to the authenticity. Right? If in order to succeed at this company, I have to do A, B, and C. But deep down, I don't believe in A, B, and C. And I'm not talking about the superficial mechanics of how to run a meeting or anything like that. That's easy. The really hard stuff is how do I treat people? How do I reward people? How do I coach and mentor, and how do I instill goodness in a culture and whatever else? And if the company is espousing things that are counter to my core value system, then I'm being inauthentic. Right? So I speak or write about authentic leadership. It's more, do you firmly believe in what you say? Do what you say. And if that is the case and you say it to people, they will more likely believe you because they see it. Right? An authentic leader believes in his or her pores that this is the right thing to do. And inauthentic leader is one—no, pretender or whatever leader—is one who has been educated in these things that are supposedly the quote-unquote right ways to do things that they may not necessarily believe it. They may want to do it because it gives them more authority. It gives them more visibility or more information in some manner to make them more effective in some way. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily bad. Sometimes you have to do that. But if you do that too much, then you're less authentic. You're not staying true to yourself. And sometimes I see too many people who get rewarded for that. And because they get rewarded for that, they continue that behavioral pattern, and it's less authentic than my preference. I'll leave it at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:51) Yeah. And also, for me, I'm aware when there's a disconnect between the environment I'm in and my core values, and that bothers me, period. Just that alone. Not even me saying or performing any actions or doing anything, just participating in a place where it's like, this is not who I am. I'm not being the best version of myself. I'm not utilizing my time correctly. And then you have to make changes. Right? Because you want to reduce the period of time between the time you're aware of it that you're out of connection, right, that you're disconnected, and then the time that you get back on track. I found that for me, I'm in my early thirties. But I've been more and more introspective since, like, age 25 is when it kind of started the most for me. And I just figured that was, like, biological maturity, just my brain maturing. And so I started to get more introspective and understand these concepts that you were discussing earlier about empathy and how I tend to reflect to figure out root cause analysis essentially of the emotional states I'm experiencing. So I'm always very interested in exploring myself, understanding how I feel, and then I find that that makes it easier for me to interact with other people because I can see when someone's upset and the older version of myself would think that they're upset at me, but they're really upset or frustrated over something else, something internal within them, or they're angry because they're fearful, and that's how it expresses itself.

(David Tran at 00:15:27) Exactly. Very, very well said. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) So how do you go about mentoring your team, your direct reports?

(David Tran at 00:15:37) That is a journey that is unique for each person. I spend the time to learn what their preferences are, what their learning styles are, if they have pets and kids and where do they live. I get the opportunity to connect with them more at a personal level so that I know them as a person. Right? And once I know them as a person, I work hard to earn their trust. And once I earn trust, then I have a little bit more license, if you will, to give them quote-unquote constructive feedback so that they don't get defensive. And the whole intent there is to with establishment of trust is to lower the body and the mind's natural defense mechanisms. When I hear something that's, "Oh, great job, David." Right? Anything other than great job, David is, "Oh, that person doesn't like me." Not necessarily true. And oftentimes giving feedback is rather difficult for the giver of the feedback. Right? The giver, the feedback takes a lot of risk. They have to observe, they have to articulate the feedback and then determine how to support or reinforce that feedback, and that's not easy to do. And the recipient of the feedback doesn't necessarily reflect upon how much work it is to give feedback in a constructive manner. So, circling back to mentorship, step one, build trust. Right? Whether it's the Patrick Lencioni version of trust or any other form of trust. Right? That's the foundation of anything. And then step two is to learn the person and the person's preferences, not so much what he or she wants to do in five, 10 years. That's a part of it. But also, how does a person receive feedback the best? How does the person like to learn? Because mentorship and learning to me go hand in hand. And if I have a person who likes visual learning and I espouse experiential feedback, "Oh, you got to do this. You got to do this." I don't get that. I don't know how to respond to you got to do this, you got to do this, but if I started drawing for them, "Oh, now I get it." Right? And mentorship has a little bit of a coaching component to it, but I tend to lean toward more storytelling when I mentor. Hey, when I did something similar, here's what I tried. When I stepped five steps this way, both my feet got stuck in quicksand, and then I was—it took me years to get out of that quicksand because I got so deep in it. And I suggest that you don't step in quicksand, and here's how to detect quicksand. Right? Now I literally don't step in quicksand, but I hope you understand the metaphor that there's a lot of political quicksand in many corporations that nobody wrote down in a book for me to study.

(David Tran at 00:19:04) I had to learn the hard way, and then I want to pass on those lessons learned through stories as opposed to prescriptive teaching. So that's my general journey and recipe, if you will, for mentorship. And then because each individual is unique, each journey is unique, and I adapt to each person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:27) I like that you brought up stories versus prescriptive because I was thinking about that actually at lunch today, and why it works better, and I came up with a couple things. The first thing is that if it's prescriptive, then you run the risk of the blame coming back on you. Right? They're trying the prescription, and then it doesn't work, and now it's your fault that it didn't work. So that's one con. But for the stories, what I found, the reason why I think they work exceptionally well is because what the person's extracting when they're listening to the story is the principles of it and not the prescription. And then they're using these principles in their head, and their brain is algorithmically figuring out what the next steps are based off of these principles. And I find that it's a way to get through the firewall of the person. Your brain just filters stories entirely differently. Like, when you're watching a movie, you have the suspension of, I think it's called the suspension of disbelief, or unless you're Neil deGrasse Tyson. Right? You're not questioning the physics of it. But yeah, I think that stories is really great, and then for them to be the most effective, as you said, building trust and a meaningful relationship with the individual just makes it all the better when the story time comes around.

(David Tran at 00:21:02) Yep. Excellent. I'm glad that you have similar observations in life journeys. Reflecting upon my status at 32, I'm not sure if I was that evolved yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:21) Well, thank you for the compliment. Let's talk a little bit about productivity. So you had an article on productivity, and I was just curious, what are your thoughts there?

(David Tran at 00:21:31) Productivity is somewhat of a holy grail at times, and I'll use the term bean counter. I know that's probably not a favorite term for our finance friends, so no disrespect. But when they have to count beans, and the beans are dollars or staff or whatever, we want to understand better, well, how productive is each person and how much can they produce per unit of time. And I'll just shift from a finance person now to a project manager. I have to determine how much money do I have to reserve and how much time do I have to reserve to get this project done? And oftentimes, despite the best of planning, there's always some sort of issue that arises that's difficult to fix, and we risk cost overrun, schedule overrun, and so on and so forth. So the concept of understanding productivity, understanding the dynamics that go into productivity become increasingly important for project managers as well as the financial people all the way up to the CFO. Right? Whether I am in a consulting firm, whether I'm in an IT organization, whether I am building products, I need to understand how to optimize the productivity from the staff. And what I've noticed is that people tend to function well in a particular zone. Push them outside of that zone, they're less efficient. Right? And there's some theories and corollaries. For example, there's Parkinson's law. I don't know if you heard about that, but essentially, there's Parkinson's law, and there's a corollary to that called Horstman's theory or Horstman's corollary, which essentially says that if I estimate that you will need one day to do something, and it's within your skill set to get it done in one day, you'll fill up that one day. Right? Even if you could have gotten it done in half a day, you'd probably fill up the one day. And between the Parkinson's and Horstman's corollary, what I try to do there is give the team enough time to do the job, but don't give them too much time because I challenge them to get more efficient. So that is a part of the equation for productivity.

And then the other part of the equation for productivity is, well, Americans tend to work the standard forty hour work week. Other people around the planet say, well, that's too high. Maybe it should be a thirty-five hour work week or even lower. I've seen some people advocate for lower hourly work weeks. Honestly, I don't know that, but I have done some research and I've monitored people and monitored myself. I'm not all that efficient when I only do, let's say, less than twenty hours worth of work per week. Right? Sure, I can spend twenty hours, but then I don't get into a rhythm. If my work week were twenty hours, I probably would get less done than twenty hours in a forty hour work week. Right? Because I'm not in a rhythm yet. I'm just getting warmed up. But at between maybe thirty to forty hours, I'm in my sweet spot. When I exceed forty hours, I might start becoming slightly less efficient, but I'm still relatively efficient. But there comes an upper threshold where I get much less efficient, and I might even be doing things that are counterproductive. I might be starting to make mistakes. So let's say I habitually work fifty hours a week. Between forty-five hours and fifty hours, I may be making more mistakes for myself, and I may actually end up being less productive than I had I stopped at forty. Right?

Now, I'm throwing out some arbitrary numbers. I can't prove any of these things. It varies based on humans. It varies based on the team and it varies based on other factors at a larger company. But that's what I've noticed. And if you look at the curve, right, that I drew in the article there, and I didn't come up with all this stuff. I borrowed it from people who've researched it prior to me. There is a curve where there's an optimal range for productivity, and then it starts tapering off, and then it actually tails downward to the point where if you work beyond this number, you're making it worse for yourself. And that's where the danger, back to the project manager, the danger is, oh, yeah, I'll just push the team really hard to work sixty, seventy hours a week. You can, but what you'll end up happening is that you're going to add more risk to the schedule as opposed to reducing risk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) A hundred percent. Yes. I would like to verify that with you that I've achieved the same results. And by achieving the same results, I mean, I rode the entire curve as far as it could possibly go. I was just curious in my own human experience. I mean, I train for my life like I'm an athlete, right, as far as my health and fitness goes, just to see how far I could push myself when I was starting my business. Because when I started, I had a baby just being born and a new wife and, you know, using all my savings to start the business. And so I was doing all the things, all the memes to say, and all the experts are saying, you know, work as hard as you possibly can. And I was doing that, and then I got to a point where, you know, one day I was on the couch after work and I sat down after working twelve, fourteen hours or whatever. And my wife's like, you want to come on a walk with us and the kids? And I was like, I can't. I feel like if I work anymore, I'm going to be sick. Like, I worked my immune system away. She's like, you need to take a look in the mirror, buddy. Right? And so what I did was I was tracking everything, my whole progression from, you know, not working that much to working as hard as I possibly could and everything in between. And you are a hundred percent correct. You can overwork yourself, and then you're causing way more trouble than it's worth. Along this journey, one quote stuck with me from a Navy SEAL, and he has this concept called HALT, H-A-L-T. And when he's hungry, angry, lazy, or tired, doesn't make decisions. And so that's something that just once it got into my head as a thought, every time I'm sitting there, I call it either spinning or spectrum sliding where I'm changing my mind back and forth, I realize, oh, I'm tired right now. I can't control my mind as well, so I'm not going to make any decisions right now. What I'm going to do, I'm going to go rest, go eat, go get myself into a better place, and then approach the problem again.

(David Tran at 00:29:08) Yeah. Makes sense. So I'll use HALT in the future. I normally stop at H and A, and I combine it to hangry. Right? I'm hungry and angry and I'm hangry. And then but lazy and tired? Okay. I'll add those two to my repertoire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) Right?

(David Tran at 00:29:26) Yeah. They're good. They're good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:28) So you don't spend a lot of time on social media, which is probably why you're articulate and have deep thoughts and have time to write them down. Can you tell me a little bit about why you're not on social media?

(David Tran at 00:29:40) Boy. There are multiple factors there. I like the social aspects, whether it be the quote-unquote social media or connect with people in person. I tend not to friend people whom I've never met. Right? I don't have as many virtual buddies. I have real buddies who end up extending into the virtual realm. So that's just how I am. So in terms of virtual social media, virtual whatever, virtual friends, that's just not how I'm wired. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to have lived my formative years before the Facebook era, so I forged my relationships the old-fashioned way. Right? So that's just how I'm wired.

The other thing I noticed when I did go on social media, I got bombarded with whether it's religious or political or just some nonsensical rants. Right? And I noticed that the rants fed more rants, and the comments started to get more and more abusive in nature. And I reflected upon my own journey where I love digital technologies, that's I'm still in the technology space. And growing up in technology back in the day before the Internet, you know, we used internal email and then we emailed to different companies and we leveraged the World Wide Web and back in the day with the Gopher and Netscape, right, before Chrome. I was able to share and do other things, but I saw how it kept evolving where I was a different creature when I was typing a message in email versus conversing with somebody face to face. I noticed I was a little bit bolder, a little bit less empathetic, and a little bit more verbose. I rambled on more. And I noticed that, and I also got some feedback. David, you send a lot of emails. You send a lot of long emails. I still do, but I complement that with a lot of face to face or now these webcam chats, a lot of words, and I try to balance that more. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you is take that boldness behind an email and amplify that tenfold. And you have a whole army of people across the planet reading something that triggers some emotion in them and they fire something back. Not having thought through the implications of their commentary, not having thought through did what they read actually make sense? Is it even true? Right. And now we're feeding off of each other's anger as opposed to feeding off of positive energy.

And after a lot of that, and also after recognizing how these companies make money and they keep tracking me everywhere I go and everything I do, and, you know, I don't need to be tracked all the time. My phone tracks me enough as it is. I don't need Facebook and all these other companies tracking me as well. So I pretty much uninstalled everything from my phones. I still have the accounts. So if people have something cool to share, I might, you know, sneak on my computer and take a quick peek. But I don't miss the rancor and the nastiness that tend to be associated with, even my quote-unquote friends. Right? Said, wow. I can probably do without having to read that. And if I really, really need to talk with you, I might just use old school techniques like calling you, and that might yield a more fruitful conversation than firing off thirty-second snippets back and forth via Facebook for us to read without proper context.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:24) Yes. I fully agree. The interesting thing that was coming up in my mind while you were talking is it seems like the anonymous aspect of it, the fact that we're not face to face, you know, humans in the same room, increases the level of boldness tenfold.

(David Tran at 00:34:44) Yeah. And there's a degree of impunity there. Well, I'm going to give a piece of my mind. Right? Well, yeah. But think about did you think through the long-term implications of that? Right? Are you building and strengthening relationships when you say these things, or do you even care anymore?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) And it's tough too because the systems are designed to pull you down the rabbit holes. Like, my wife the other day was going, you know, I could tell she was feverishly typing away and she was in some mom's group arguing about some recent event or something that occurred. It was completely ridiculous. And she was just, you know, educating this other individual who isn't even going to really read it and not care and she doesn't do this a lot, but what happens is she uses her Facebook for, she runs ads for her business. She's like a cabinet refinishing business. And then the notifications will pop up, like, oh, you know, go over here and do this, or it'll come up in her feed when she's doing work stuff, and it'll just pull her attention away. And so we try not to get distracted and go down the rabbit holes. Me, personally, I've uninstalled the stuff from my phones. And I've also one thing I've done, it's been about seven or eight months now, but I've disabled all notifications. And my phone also lives in do not disturb mode. So it's in do not disturb twenty-four hours and all notifications from all apps are off with the exception of the text message one. And my wife can break through the do not disturb, because she's one of my favorites in my phone. So if she calls two or three times, it'll let her through. So

(David Tran at 00:36:38) That's a wise choice. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) I'm trying to get back my, I felt strung out like an addict one day. I said notification, notification. Oh, Slack, Slack, Slack, like, 800 times I'll do this. Did this happen? And I'm just like, I got my screen time report and it was like hundreds of pickups and I'm like, I remember, you know, Facebook and everything came out after I was in, after I left high school. So growing up, yes, I had a computer. I was probably the geekiest person I knew. I spent the most time on a computer, and that was probably two or three hours a day after school learning how to program and messing around online, video games and stuff. But, you know, now we spend an incredible amount of time, but I learned, I guess, kind of like what you said. I know you're older than me, but I grew up in a time where my parents locked us out of the house and told us, and we were trying to make up excuses to get in, and they're like, drink from the water hose and stuff like that and go run around the neighborhood and play with your friends and, you know, then we would have to come back when the mosquitoes came out because we're in Florida. Yeah. The lights go down. And so we would go back and yes. I definitely grew up in that and so I think I was probably one of the last generations of people to grow up like that. And now my kids are two years old, and they know how to use a tablet. You know?

(David Tran at 00:38:05) Wow. Yeah. It's interesting times. I grew up riding my bike a lot, hanging out with my friends, trying to catch toads and frogs, and doing things that have nothing to do with digital technology. And I guess I turned out okay. I don't have to know how to use a tablet at two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:26) It's amazing how quick they pick it up. And they also have, like, Android has a special operating system thing for kids. I don't know if you have kids and have used this, but they sell it on Amazon too. It's like this kid-locked tablet, and so it's like a very safe way for them to, you know, go through all their cartoons and these little mini games and stuff. So that's pretty useful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:50) But we'll go back to more technology stuff. Stop talking about the kids. So what about certifications and accreditations?

(David Tran at 00:39:00) So a couple ways I can respond to that. I'll start with MentorMate, and then I'll share a little bit more of my perspectives on certifications and accreditations. So being in a consultancy, right, we need to understand better what are the needs in the industry or multiple vertical industries, whether it be healthcare, financial services, education, so on and so forth. And what are the skills that those clients need from us? What do they value? And how do we attain and retain those skills so that we can add value for them? And one of the things that we found is that the accreditations, the certifications help us, one, elevate our own understanding of that subject matter, whether it be the cloud. Right? AWS and Azure are the two most prevalent options out there. And they have programs where you can partner with them and have people who are certified and accredited so that when you work with your clients, you can communicate more crisply what those solutions are from AWS or Azure, whether it be a data management or database solution, to a compute solution, to some security offering or whatever it is.

(David Tran at 00:40:34) So keeping up to date on that is often a nontrivial task. And being in a consultancy, if we don't keep up to date, then guess what? We become less valuable for clients. And then guess what? They don't come back to us. Right? So it's a part of our livelihood that we have to have certifications and accreditations. And out of 600 plus people, we have about 200 of them have some sort of certification and accreditation because it's that important to us. And each month, we get more. Right? Areas of focus include cloud for obvious reasons. Agile. Right? We have to be certified scrum masters, professional scrum masters, certified product owners, and so on and so forth. So that is the lens from a business perspective on individual certifications, but then there's also process-wide certifications.

(David Tran at 00:41:37) And in this day and age, not taking security and privacy seriously is a major mistake. And in a consultancy, it's a double whammy because then people will say, well, yeah, but if you write code and you get breached, then what happens? Well, how do I, as a client, feel confident that the code that you write is solid enough for me to deploy in my network? So we've also embarked on a journey to get, quote unquote, certified. They don't use this term, but for SOC 2, how do we improve our security posture? How do we promote data privacy in terms of processes and controls and other things? So that's the essence of the business angle for certifications and accreditations. My personal viewpoint on that is that certifications, accreditations help me, help my team, help the company. Each of us can learn more and stay more current and fluent. I'm a StrengthsFinder fan, and one of my top five strengths is learner. So I value learning, and accreditations encourage the continuous learning journey, if you will, and that's important to me. And I emphasize learning over getting a three or four letter thing after my name. Right? Yeah. The three or four letter thing after my name is kind of cool, but if I got it and I didn't really understand what it was, then it was kind of not very valuable for me personally. So getting the title is fine, but getting the lessons and the learnings from it, and not just from a book, but I also find that depending on the certification, you might connect with people. So it's another opportunity for you to broaden your professional network. And now you have colleagues who may have shared or will share common experiences in the future and leverage them and learn from them as opposed to learn from book. Because oftentimes, with technologies, the half lives of technologies nowadays are so short. By the time it gets into a book or even an article, you've already burnt its half life and it's not gonna be relevant by the time you internalize it. So you need more near real time feedback. And the way I do that is I leverage my professional network, and I get that through connecting with people through various seminars or programs to get accredited. So that hopefully is more of a yin and yang perspective on certifications from a business perspective and also more from a personal benefit perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) Yes. We get a lot of people that write us from listening to the show, like, message on LinkedIn or send emails about how, you know, they listened for several months of the podcast, implemented some insight or got some perspective from hearing someone share stories, then they improved at work and maybe got a promotion or just some other good news that was positive. Right? And that kind of connects back to earlier about learning through the stories and the examples. I was curious, though. Some people have asked about us doing small groups, like, groups of, you know, six to eight technology professionals around some sort of common interest, right, that they might have, like management or leveling up. I don't know, but a couple different things have been thrown out. And I have never been a part of one of those types of groups, and so my first thought was, well, I should go join one of those groups and see what it's like. And my second thought was, well, let me ask the next couple people I talk with if they've ever participated in those groups and what their experience was. So have you ever gotten to do that?

(David Tran at 00:45:56) A little bit. What I found is that when I am put into a new environment with new people, there's the stranger danger effect that kicks in. Right? And I'm no longer two years old, but that carries forward with me. Right? Oh, wow. Stranger danger. What should I say? What shouldn't I say? I don't wanna sound stupid, so I'm gonna keep it kind of formal and high level. And depending on the group, you might have some members who simply will dominate the conversation. Right? If you're, quote unquote, fortunate enough to have one of those persons, then it's usually a monologue, which is not that productive. So if you do have those persons, somehow there needs to be a counterbalance so that other persons can join in. But if you form this group when this is the first time anybody has even talked or seen each other, then there needs to be some sort of breaking in, breaking the ice type of window so that people start feeling comfortable talking first and having a better command of the subject, whatever that you want to talk about, and riffing a little bit before getting into whether it's a podcast or a video cast or whatever, might be beneficial.

(David Tran at 00:47:32) Because I've been invited to different events, and we were asked to participate and share our experiences and share our stories and whatever. And maybe, you know, when it's live, it's more interactive. But when it's through this webcam, maybe half or less than half of the people shared something. And what we did share felt almost rehearsed because of little short snippets. It's almost like the Facebook firing back at something. Boom. Here you go. Here's a little snippet of thought. But when I'm live, I feel the energy from the other people. And if you're able to, you know, once we get over this COVID stuff, invite people together, which is difficult in today's age, you know, because everybody's busy and there's cost of not just the cost of the travel, but cost of the time. But if we're able to get together, there's, I feel more energy and I'm more engaged. And you will likely get more fruitful insights from me. And that's been my experiences anyway with these types of group panel type of discussions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:47) Yeah. And so what I hear is that we need a good facilitator for the group.

(David Tran at 00:48:52) That's key.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) Professional facilitator to to keep the talkers at bay and make sure that everyone gets value out of it. Have you ever done a recurring long term small group where, like, you're with the same six to eight people, you meet monthly over the course of a year?

(David Tran at 00:49:10) I have not done that. Not at a, not where we talk about professional topics. Right? I do that more as a social thing. We talk about our hobbies, our lives, whether it's kids and hobby or professional, I don't know, activities. But I've not done it to share more broadly than the immediate group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:36) So we have about seven minutes left, so I wanna respect your time. So last couple topics we have here around goal setting. So I was just curious. You know, you're very introspective. You think a lot about life and how you feel. And I'm curious, like, how do you think about long term goals for yourself?

(David Tran at 00:49:59) There's multiple classes and techniques that I've learned over the years about goal setting and objective setting and all that. And if you work in any appreciable size company, you will have a system from HR that offers you the opportunity to submit your goals. And often it's not negotiable. It's mandatory for you to submit your goals. And I find all that well and good, and I find that the general concepts of writing down your goals generally good, but forcing everybody to do goal setting, goal documentation, goal tracking the same way generally doesn't work because it's back to my explanation on mentorship or my explanation on how to engage each person. Every person's a little bit different. Right? So, sure, you should have general parameters on how to set and track against goals. And you might need to document them in some way just to ensure that the goodness of the goals are being captured. But then there needs to be a little bit of latitude on how to interpret the progress of the goals and how much value each person or each group gets out of the goals. So that's a general backdrop.

(David Tran at 00:51:44) And for me, I generally have what I call more fuzzy goals. Right? And some of my goals are aspirational in nature. I may not ever be able to attain them, but it's good for me to have those goals so that I strive for improvement every week, every month, every year. Right? Some of my goals may be a little bit abstract for other people. I might have set a goal for some point in the future. I need to continue refining my ability to connect with people at different states of whether it's happiness or grieving or whatever. And I'm generally good connecting with people when they're calm, but I don't know how to connect with them as well when they're in an agitated state. Right? Well, I might set a goal. Well, I wanna figure out how to do that. How long it takes me? I don't know yet. What kind of classes I need to take? I don't know yet. What should I try to do during work to improve those skills? I don't know yet. But I will set that high level goal, and over time, I'll start thinking, well, what are the objectives behind that that I can start framing? And once I have enough formative thought, I might jot some of those down in my little note taking mechanism. Usually, I send emails to myself or I send text to myself. Right? And if there's a system, I might use that system and say, oh, here's my main goal. Here are some key objectives, and it might take me a while to achieve these objectives and goals. But then I track that, and people say, well, you really need to track that in a numerical way. And I said, yeah. I know. I get it. But sometimes these things are really hard to quantify, and I don't wanna spend too much energy trying to quantify how to measure. I want to learn and see the essence of the goals and objectives, and it's a journey for me. I'm experiential in nature. So the absolute quantification of I passed or not passed the goal is less important to me than the journey on embarking to achieve that goal. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's important to me. And that lesson that I learned through each of these things sticks with me. And at some point I said, yeah, I think I did pretty well against that goal. I don't know if it's 70 versus 90%, but it's above 50%, and I'm good with that. Right? And that's just me. And for other people, they need more numerical data, and that's fine. They can do that. But for me, I'm a little bit more fuzzy and it works for me. And that's how I generally do my goal setting, my objective setting, and tracking progress against them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:38) Yeah. Well, that's the most important thing, to know yourself, understand how your operating system and all its uniqueness happens to work, and be an intelligent operator slash programmer of your life.

(David Tran at 00:54:51) That's right. There's an awful lot of interrupt service routines I have to run through every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:57) Oh, we could on our next conversation next year, we could talk about boot sequences, which is, like, what I call my morning routine, and it'll be a lot of fun. Yep. Well, David, we did it, my friend. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(David Tran at 00:55:10) I feel great. Well, thank you, sir, for your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:13) Yeah. I'm very grateful that you came on and hung out today. Thank you so much, David. You have a great day.

(David Tran at 00:55:17) Okay. You too. Bye bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:21) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.