investing in your career w/amy dutton who is the director of design at zeal

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Amy, give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Obviously, you can press that them and we'll go from there. Yeah, for sure. And JC was at Magnolia JS with us as well.

Yes, he was. So I co-host a podcast with James Q quick called Compressed FM. We talk about web design and development with a little bit of zest. So actually, shameless plug, we will also be streaming later today. So I'm going to go to that. I love it. Where can people find you on the internet? They can find me at on Twitter. That's probably my favorite place to hang out. I know it's kind of crazy right now, but it's still good. It's still good. It's still good. So my handle is self teach me. You can find me there. And then like I said, I'll be streaming on James's YouTube channel.

So he's James Cukwick at 11 AM Central. I love that. I love that. And then and then Fritz and Mark and Michael. It's great to see you all this morning. All right, Amy. So let's get into kind of what you do currently. So you are the director of design for a company. So talk about kind of a little bit more about your role right now. Then we'll kind of backtrack a little bit. Yeah, sure. So I work for a company called Zeal. It's based out of Southern Oregon. It's a small software consultancy. So there's about 15 to 20 people. We are mostly a Rails and React shop.

And I do a lot of the design work. So the team is primarily engineers. And then I have a couple of people that work with me. and we do all the UI UX design for the for our clients and the applications that we're building. I love it. And I'm really, really good. Oh, it's really snowing right now. I'm really glad. You're jealous. I know, I know. I'm really glad that you're kind of on the design side because I want to, I want to talk about your origin story a little bit, right? Because I feel like in today's world, everybody is so freaking focused on soft, being a software dev.

Gotta be a dev, gotta be a dev, gotta be a dev, gotta be a dev. And there's so many different ways to get into tech. There's design, right? There's business analysts, analysts work, data analysts, recruiter. I mean, hell, I hang out with all of y'all, and I'm a recruiter, right? So there's a lot of ways to be part of the community. But talk a little bit about people who are getting started in their career journey. Talk about your career a little bit, and how you got in design, and maybe some tips and tricks. I know that's a lot there, but I'm just going to dive in.

Yeah, so I, for Warren Taylor, I'm a little bit of a grandma when it comes to the tech scene. So I've been doing this for a little over 20 years, which I know is a little strange. I got started when I was 16. Not everybody's story. It's totally cool if you're 40 and just coming into tech. And I think that's one of the things that I really love about tech is that there's a place for everybody. But I always knew that I wanted to do something design related and started working at an agency and just answered the phone during the summer and had somebody there that believed in me and said, hey, why don't you read this book on HTML?

And so I read the book and the short version of the story is the next summer when I came back, I was considered a production artist and doing front end development for all of their clients. So the designers there were really great too. And thinking back, I don't know very many 17 year olds at this point that had that type of opportunity where the designer on staff said, hey, we're gonna do our design work, you do your design work, we're gonna give you a professional critique. If it's good enough, we'll show it to the client. If not, it's not a big deal and you've gotten a professional critique out of it.

So I did have a few designs that got in front of the client. Most of them didn't. But the fact that I got that kind of feedback that early on really did set the trajectory of my career. I love that. I love that. So what's your advice for people getting started in the industry, right? I mean, I know that's kind of kind of the big question I get. I'm sure you've gotten it as well. and I would say, and you can create me for a moment, I feel like in the industry of design, you can really, it's almost like content creation because it's a visual thing, right?

So you can create a bunch of visual assets that's not even for a company. Is that what you would recommend? Like how would you recommend to get involved or get started? Yeah, I would just say, I mean, even if it's designer development, so even though my title's director of design, I still do a lot of development. And the same is true for both. If you can just build things and do things because when you're actually doing the work, that's when you run into say bugs or you run into design problems that you're trying to solve. And it's those real world application things that are gonna push you forward.

And there's tons of projects out there that you can get involved in. Open source is a great way to rub shoulders with senior people and be able to contribute to projects that are bigger than yourself. So when you say open source, like, I'll say don't know anything and I'm new trying to get you say open source like, where do I go? Yeah. So there is a guy named Brian Douglas that has a project called OpenSauced. And his project is all about connecting, say junior designers and developers with seniors. So I know when you say open source, you're talking about contributing to somebody else's project that they own and they have a vision for.

And if it's a senior level person, That can be really intimidating. But if it's a well done project, a lot of times you can go into the repository, say on GitHub, go to that issues tab. And if it's a well maintained repo or well maintained project, they'll have a few issues there labeled like best first issue. And what makes a good first issue is somebody that goes in and they says, this is a problem and this is how to solve it. So they know how to solve it. They just don't have the time to do that. And most maintainers are going to welcome people that are wanting to contribute.

So even if you come in and you say, I really don't know a lot, but you go into that project and you say, Hey, I want to help a lot of times they're willing to help people because they're getting something out of the relationship to. I love that. I love that. So check out open sauce. Right. That's right. Yeah. And I'm actually having Brian Douglas on unicorn finders too. Are you? Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. So I love that. So let's, so let's talk a little bit about kind of your journey. I mean, I think a lot of people, and I've sensed this for a while, but you know, I kind of, every month or so for me, it kind of feels like I have themes.

And one of the themes that I'm kind of big on right now is career journey, maybe having to take a step back to go two steps forward. Can you talk about a time in your career where you kind of hit maybe a speed bump and you had to pivot, you came out kind of on top afterwards? Yeah, sure. So I mentioned that I got started in web development when I was 16, but I didn't think that that's what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to do 3D animation and I thought I wanted to work for Disney and Pixar. So I ended up going to Middleton Sea State University and part of the reason I landed there was because it was a university that had a 3D animation program.

And most at the time, this is like 2003-ish, most at that time the only schools that offered that were like art schools. I knew that I wanted to go to university. So I majored in radio TV broadcasting. I took electives with web design and development and things like that, but thought that I wanted to go on to do 3D stuff. So I think there was a bit of a, I'd say stutter step right there, trying to figure out what it was that I wanted to do. And in the end, I obviously ended up going back to web design and development. I went over to Music Row, ended up working there for a year, went over to a publishing house and did a lot of stuff with design, doing print and development and things like that, and then I did freelance full time.

So it took a little bit, I think, to figure out exactly what that path was. But being on this side of it, the cool part is all those things have worked together to take me where I am now. So when you're talking about radio TV broadcasting, I'm doing a podcast right now. I have a YouTube channel where I'm creating videos, I'm editing, I'm doing graphics around that. And so all of those experiences have helped me along the way. So, and I'd also say, you know, if you're looking at your career right now and you're like, I started out as like in vet school as a veterinarian.

How does that have anything to do with tech? Well, a huge industry is tech and vets and how that marriage of those industries and how those things work together. So you can always find ways like everybody needs a website, web applications and technology are always going to make things better. And so there's always a place to incorporate those life experiences and what you're doing. I love that. James, look who it is. It's great to see you. Yes, group hug for sure. I can't wait to be with you all in person. Erica is great to see you both. Bill is great to see you in person together.

Yeah, Naranda, it's great to see your brother in the end. I've learned that all the steps come to go. They do. And that's why I want to ask Amy that because I feel like there's a lot of people. I tweeted this I think yesterday or the day before. And I was like, I was like, we, we as society put so much focus on the next thing, on the next thing, on the next thing. And I feel like we don't take time to celebrate what we've done, or we're too scared to take a step or two back to go two steps forward, right? And full, and in full transparency, I took a step back, or two steps back, compensation wise this last year to start this new division, no, hoping that I could get two steps forward and to be totally honest, that's kind of painting out that way, right?

And so, but again, it was the two years of taking a step back from what I knew was going to probably from my compensation to be able to take two steps forward. And so I just want to encourage everybody to, it's okay to do that. It's okay to do that. Amy, I don't know if any more thoughts on that. Yeah, it's all a process. I mentioned it. Maybe we can talk about this too. I've been reading this book by Sarah Drasner that's just absolutely fantastic. It's called engineering management for the rest of us. She's been a longtime hero of mine and just reading her book even solidifies that more so.

But I mean, she talks about just, um, I mean, she talks about all kinds of stuff in, in your career, but the even the things that you wouldn't necessarily think that are part of your career that really push things forward. So the relationships that you have with people, um, all of that is stuff to take into account. Um, it's not just the compensation. It's not just the day to day work. It's all these other things that factor into it. Correct. I do, I do want to talk to you a little bit about content, right? So I want to ask you it again for, for those, for, for the people I bring on the show that I know, put out content.

I like to ask them about it to encourage others as well. Talk about maybe a few successes that you've had because of content in your career. Okay. Well, I would say that I probably wouldn't even be here if I hadn't started a YouTube channel and that was three or I think that was about three years ago. And so much of what I'm doing now has come out of that. Even though I haven't posted a video in the year, but because I have a backlog of things that I can say, hey, this is what you're going to get when you talk to me. This is the level of production in terms of camera or microphone or whatever that you'll see.

This is how I talk. This is my teaching style. And so over the last year I've had opportunities to literally travel around the world speaking at conferences because of my YouTube channel. I met James. He poked his head in really through my YouTube channel. He saw that and invited me to be a part of his live stream. And now we're working on a podcast together. there's so much that has come for me just out of creating those videos and doing that consistently for a year. And even though it's something I'd like to go back to, it's still providing an opportunity and providing networking opportunities and relationships for me.

Is that, did your YouTube come to play at all with zeal? Like did that help you get the job at zeal at all. Like, no, I actually know because I did that after I came to zeal. So I started working at zeal. But this also goes back to content creation. Really, I started working at zeal seven years ago, which is crazy. I was a contractor with them for four years before I joined their team full time. So I've only been with them full time for three years. But they sell my blog. And at the time I was actively blogging and the interview process was really interesting because they said, hey, we already know how you think about projects because you've been blogging about it.

You've been writing about it. And we already see alignment there. And so it wasn't so much like, Hey, what like, are you a good fit? It's them trying to convince me to do work for them because they already know that there's alignment there. 100% I love that. And I think I really want to stress this to y'all who are watching again. I love, I love the comments. James over here, obviously kind of running us simultaneously. What he's doing picture didn't happen. Absolutely. Nick is great to see you and then I love it. My my my thing that I really want to get across here and Amy said it so beautifully is that is they got to see how Amy thinks through things and and and communicate.

And I think the biggest thing like what is an interview for an interview for is an interview is for to see how well you communicate how well you think through things. Yep. And that is what content solves. Right now, for those of you who are like, well, Taylor, like you have a fancy mic and you've been doing this for three years and Amy's got a fancy mic and she's with James Crickland, Caprest FM. I can't do any of that. Listen, I don't, and Amy, I'm going to tee this up for you next. Yeah, please do. I'm so ready. But literally my content, I'm streaming on my phone right here.

So I can't really grab it. but this is an outstanding bill I have to pay. But I used to when I started my content journey. I bought a $15 Amazon stand with my phone. And I sat in a chair when COVID hit, and I turned on the camera, and I filmed it first off, I filmed it horizontally, which that's something I was pre-COVID. I mean, that was pre-TikTok, right? Everything was horizontal, pre-TikTok. Now everything's vertical. I would do horizontal, and I would literally set up my phone and talk about a topic of the job search for three minutes, three minutes. That's a long-ass time. No one watches that anymore.

I everything's like 90 seconds, 60 seconds. But that's how I started my journey, right? And so I'm curious, Amy, with you. Can you kind of talk about what your first videos look like or? Yeah. Oh, goodness. They're still there. So I would say two things. If you have a phone, this really is the best thing. It's so good. Chris Seve, who's another fantastic content creator, he recently posted a tweet where he compared his phone to his really nice DSLR and a couple other cameras he had on hand and his phone by far had the better picture, which is crazy that it out did his DSLR and his fancy setup.

So I would say do not feel bad or apologize for using a phone. It's probably the best resource that you have. But in terms of my first video, since you asked about that, you can go to my YouTube channel. So that's it self teach me and check it out. But I would say, one of the best pieces of advice that I heard when I started and is constantly encouraging me is that the best thing about starting out is that nobody's watching. And so that allows you to experiment. It allows you to get in the habit of publishing and not worrying about, well, what are they going to think?

Who's going to call me out on this thing? Only my mom's watching. Like that is the perfect time to figure out what you're going to do. your style is and to figure out how you want to express yourself, what different things you want to incorporate. Like that is, there's so much freedom there that people that are larger and have bigger audiences, they can't do that anymore. So it really is a benefit. Absolutely. So Emmett fired up. We're talking about this. Emmett says the phone dev. I know devs been great on it. I've made eight YouTube videos using a $10 mic. Yeah, absolutely. I even started to not do a mic.

And honestly, if you watch all of my vlogs and stuff, I don't have a mic. I just, it's out of the phone. Barrett, going back to kind of what we're talking about, interviewing, and for some companies, it takes eight hours of investigating how you think for them to make a decision, hiring is broken, yeah, 100%. Everything you need is on your phone. There are apps, yeah, like, like if you have, if you have the new Mac, or I think if you have a Mac in general, you can now sync your iPhone as your webcam. So that's something that's pretty cool. And then Fritz in comes in and goes, do you get jitters when you're creating content?

Yeah, I mean, you go ahead and hit this first. Yeah, I mean, so I do too. But here's also a dirty little secret about my YouTube videos. I have a teleprompter. So I script everything out. And if you look really closely, you can see my eyes moving. And there's nothing wrong with that. So don't apologize or feel bad about it. And then also too, I will tell you this for a second. Like you always get digitors. Like literally I, you know, every time. So like in the morning when I do my vlogs and I sit down and do kind of my recap of the day before that I do I still get weird and I have to do a few takes because it's not good But there comes a point where you're never gonna get it perfect and and and the one thing I want to stress to everybody watching this now In the future caught it just like how I say resume your resume and your LinkedIn isn't for you It's for hiring managers to find you Content is not for you.

Mm-hmm It is for other people to discover you and I think when you start making content when you start to get in in the mind of or in the thought process of, hey, you know what, this isn't good, but you know what, I'm trying to say a certain thing and that's gonna be enough because, like I was talking to one guy on my team who wants to get into the car, he's a big Lord of the Rings fan, he wants to do kind of Lord of the Rings type stuff. And he was like, but I scratch everything, he goes, because I don't think it's good.

I said, that's the problem. I said, you're judging. So it doesn't matter what you think. It really doesn't matter what other people think. It just doesn't matter, right? And so again, I just want to expound that. And it's a man. Yeah, Nick comes here, I just use my iPhone for streaming way better than camera on my webcam. When I started streaming, though, basic webcam, black screen, screen share on my webcam, just start making it again. And Nick's got a podcast last show that he does as well, so go follow along with him. Brandon, who's actually my guy, who helps out with my content. Only reason I don't get Jersey anymore is because I know there's 1 million more videos I'm gonna make after this one that I'm making now.

So it takes all the weight off. Yeah, seriously. I'm thinking about gaining projection stream for me. That's fine. Do that. No, I've not heard the rule of 100. Yep, you just got a Yolo at me. Jordan comes in and had to learn to not be afraid to look like full at first because it'll all be buried by future and better content. Yeah, listen, you got to understand something content only, like content, like it only hangs around for like a day. So it goes away. Oh, just to put it perspective, I put out a show poster for Amy And I miss we I like combined Amy's name with Kelly Vaughn.

So it looked terrible on, but it's like, you know what? Like, whatever, like move on. So like I even messed up as well. So Amy, I do kind of want to, I kind of want to move, move into kind of the next thing. And that's, and that's investing in your future, investing in your career. What are some, what are some ways people should invest or some things people should look into? Yeah, so I would say learning how to learn is probably the best thing that you can possibly do within Tech. And so figuring out how you personally absorb and use information and put it into use is incredibly important.

You're gonna get stuck in your career if you are not willing to put those things into practice. So we can talk about different technologies and frameworks, but as soon as you have that figured out, really it makes everything else something that you can just add on and tack on. So for example, like I love React, I love S felt kits. And so all of the frameworks that are around that, like once you have a good mental model for how they work, it becomes easier to pick up the next thing or to move on or to iterate. And that also helps with any time you're working with projects.

So at Zeal, we're a consultancy. We're telling clients what we think is the best thing for them to be able to do. And so for us to be able to have all those things in our toolkit and that helps us make our recommendations even better. I love that. I love that. I do want to ask you a quick question because you've worked for a consulting company and you've worked for like a traditional nine to five kind of corporate. I don't know what the other word is, consulting versus non-consulting. Do you have any quick tips or tricks? Cause I do want to ask you that for you, for you wrap up about people who maybe want to get into consulting who have only done kind of your traditional corporate jobs.

Yeah. I've done a little bit of everything. And so, and I'm just going to provide a little bit of context in case somebody has a specific question. So I did freelance full time for seven years. So I worked for myself. I can speak to that. I've also worked for a larger corporation where I was part of an internal design team where we were creating things for the entire company. And then I've worked for like a traditional agency and then this is considered a company. Oh, wow. So you see, you've really covered the game of all types of companies. That's awesome. Yeah. So, and I'm obviously working for myself.

of one versus a large corporation where it's over a thousand people. So, you know, I think a lot of this stuff still holds true regardless of what environment or situation that you find yourself in or even what type of job that you're looking for. So, you know, we said, oh, wow, there's over a thousand people in that corporation. The team that I was on was still about 15 to 20 people. So it felt like a small company within a larger company. And so it still is all about the culture and finding that right fit for what you want to be doing at this point in your career.

Yeah. Do you have some words of advice for people who want to jump into consulting? Yeah. The best, in terms of consulting, the best resource that I have read a reader by far, and this is kind of an awkward name for a book title is called Getting Naked or Get Naked by Patrick Leo Disoni. I think that's how he pronounces last name. But it's a very easy read. He basically tells a story and incorporates all these different principles for consulting. And then the last like 10% of the book is like, hey, if you didn't catch this inside the narrative, this is really the principle that I was trying to explain.

And the thing that I love about how he really frames up consulting is that a lot of times people that maybe work at larger corporations look at consultants and think, wow, they just come in and tell everybody what to do and they really don't do the work or know what they're talking about. A good consultant, that's That's not true. So with Ziel, we're actually sitting alongside other developers on other teams helping them do the work and providing insight based on the expertise that we have. And so really trying to drive that. And a lot of times consultants are able to say things and speak into a project that somebody internally might not be able to do because of politics or whatnot.

So that book is a great asset if you're trying to think, okay, what is it, what does it really mean to be a consultant? I love that. I love that. All right. So let's see here. Any, any last wise words of wisdom at all, but before I ask you two questions to wrap it up, anything else that you want to, want to communicate to everybody watching? Yeah, I think just going out and build things and meeting people, you're talking at the top of this episode or how important it is to network. And really that has made a huge impact on my career is being able to network and who you know.

And it doesn't have to be sleazy. It really is just about having a conversation and making friends with other people. I love that. All right. So I got to get back in the normal routine of asking this. I didn't ask this with anybody else this week, except you. What tech are you experimenting with? And just some thoughts around that? Yeah. So there's three pieces of tech right now that are really interesting to me. So I am really excited about Redwood JS. I'm really excited about SvelteKit. So if you're into React and trying to build something full stack, Redwood is fantastic because it has the front end and the back end all grouped together.

And a lot of the things that I would reach for normally it's already incorporated in that stack. So for example, it includes TypeScript, GraphQL, just Storybook, all those things are wrapped up within that particular framework. I'm also a huge fan of SvelteKit. There's some really exciting things about how they think about code. And it just looks a lot cleaner and feels a lot more pure, which I like and cutting away some of the stuff I feel like sometimes react can get a little bloated. And then the third thing I would just say, it's completely different is it's very interesting just to watch the chat GPT and the open AI stuff right now.

And we've been talking a lot about it at work because it's, I think this whole fear of is this going to take over our careers, like take over our jobs. what's going to happen if we can just ask a robot to build an application and that kind of thing. But I think when you look at all these different industries across time, technology has always played a part in it. So when I went over to Music Row at that point, people were still trying to recover from the Napster Lime Wire days and record companies were trying to figure out what is the music industry. Well, it's 20 years later and the music industry still exist.

We just consume that content differently. We have Spotify, we have iTunes and things like that. Or you can look at taxi car drivers, you know, you have Lyft and Uber. We still need rides. It's just the delivery mechanism is slightly different. So I think tech has finally arrived at that place where technology, even though we are working on technology, but it's having a huge impact in how it's affecting our day-to-day work. And so one of the things that we've been experimenting is how do do you pair program with a robot? So as you're working through things, instead of necessarily going to Google, what does that look like to have an ongoing conversation with chat TPT?

So really fascinating. I love that Nick brings it up here. Oh, thank you Nick. I love that. All right, so last question, Amy, is just wrap it up here. And again, thank you all for hanging out. The chat's been lit this morning. Friday's always seemed to be a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more fun in the chat channel. So thank you all for hanging out. Last question for you. So obviously the show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and sometimes college, but now as adults, not so much. So what would be your biggest piece of career advice for your younger self?

Oh man, I think I would pour more of myself into the people behind me and look more to the people ahead of me to build those relationships into network. I mentioned that that was a huge part in when I was 16 is having somebody at the job that I was working at, to me, but I think even then like turning around and being able to teach that to somebody else. So we've mentioned James a couple of times, but he has a discord server called Learn Build Teach, and it's all based off of that methodology of when you learn something, build something, and then turn around and teach someone else.

And I think going the other way too is finding people that will pour into you to help you become the best version of yourself. 100%. I totally agree. I love it. I love it. Well, y'all, thank you again. Amy, thank you. Stay on. We'll stay on as we end it so I can say bye to you. But we appreciate it. Again, that conference next weekend or next week, rather, really actually technically Saturday. Saturday night is when it kicks off, which is crazy. I won't be there until Sunday, but get your tickets, that conference, unspecified code, for I think like 90% off basically. Me, Amy, James Quikleby there, a bunch of other amazing speakers will gonna be there.

And yeah, I hope you'll have a great weekend. So next week, there'll be no guidance counselor next week at all. So that conference Monday through Wednesday, I'll be back Thursday to do unicorn finders and then Friday I'm back traveling to our to the Bahamas for our Vaco sales rewards trip. So tough life. So anyways, you all have a great one. We appreciate you. And we'll we'll see you all in two weeks. Bye. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode.

So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at Tdaston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.