[00:00:00] Host: So welcome to the podcast, Avery. Would you please introduce yourself? 

[00:00:05] Avery de Marr: My name is Avery de Marr. I am a Phoenix native. In fact, I'm third generation from Phoenix, Arizona. And I have the good pleasure of going to high school with you Matt. At Brophy College Preparatory. Lots good memories.

[00:00:20] Host: I'm also a third generation Arizonan, but only 2nd generation from Phoenix. So now you're an engineer. So why did you choose this career?

[00:00:24] Avery de Marr: Choose the career cheer. Career chose me. Simple answer Matt, I was good at math. I all my testing through kindergarten, through high school was all great. I did well and it seemed like the natural, logical conclusion. The complex answer is, From a young kid, I was a tinkerer, right?

I was the kid that was going off into the ditch, finding pieces of wood, making forts in trees, going into my grandfather's wrecking yard, building things, taking apart my mom's cable boxes when the cable went out and putting them back together and getting all the channels for free. I think the more complex [answer] is when we were going to Brophy a really good friend of mine, Tyler Best, His dad was an engineer and he was a software engineer, But his hobby was really to take apart old World War II ham radios, so all of those old vacuum tube radios. And we would go to basically junkyards find 'em, and I would help 'em, polish the tubes. We would go through the testing matrixes to figure those out. And that just what it seemed like for engineering for me was, tinkering around with things, making things work, and trying to find a better way. 

[00:01:55] Host: I think, tinkering is a very common answer among engineers. And whether it's software or an old-fashioned ham radio, some of the same principles apply to problem solving.

[00:02:09] Avery de Marr: Absolutely.  It didn't matter when I got into my technical schooling, when I went to Seattle University, if it was a lab or if it was software . I think I excelled along those paths right when you were tinker. That I hit my sweet spot right when it was, hey, one plus one is two. I got killed by the fellow engineers, by the fellow people that were studying.There were tons of people that were a lot smarter than me in the room. 

[00:02:42] Host: I think it highlights to that, when you find your passion and you're enjoying like tinkering, then it doesn't seem like work. It's like a joy to do. The adventure of trying to solve the problem, the Rubik's cube, so to speak.

[00:02:57] Avery de Marr: Absolutely right. My kids are big Rubik fans, they just try and beat it a little faster. Can I do a little bit more? Can I move my fingers? I love that. And it's what keeps me engaged in my current job is everything's a new puzzle, right? Every time I work with a new customer, they have a different puzzle than the last one, and there isn't a cookie cutter, one plus one equals two, right? It's the, hey, there's some general applications, but you have to tinker with how you're working with them and their expectations. 

[00:03:29] Host: So you've been in the workforce now for a bit of time. 

[00:03:33] Avery de Marr: A long time. Matt.

[00:03:35] Host: So two decades. So what's one thing that you know now that you wish you knew before graduation?

[00:03:40] Avery de Marr:  I'm gonna go back to my academic career, which is I always thought I had to be the smartest person in the room. I thought that's what they were building me up to be, whether it was high school or college. Just because you do something doesn't mean you have to be the smartest person in the room.

I did an internship at Motorola and I had to start down the path of this is the way I did this. So the next logical step is here. The next logical step is there. And I always found myself not the smartest person in the room. And so it was always this journey t find if I could be.

And what I've found, as you so eloquently put it, [that] a couple decades later in the workforce is not only do I not have to be the smartest person in the room, I really enjoy not being the smartest person in the room. It gives me a lot of credibility that I can ask questions and be truly curious around what their problems are, and then try and solve them with them.

[00:04:47] Host: I think what you said about curiosity is very important. And I think sometimes if a person feels like they're the smartest person in the room, they don't feel the need to ask questions. I think asking questions is such an important technique to understand the problem that you're trying to solve.

And I think sometimes engineers might go down a path of where they think they know what the customer wants or needs, and ends up that no, the customer wanted something different, but you didn't ask or you weren't listening properly. 

[00:05:21] Avery de Marr: You, you nailed it right there, Matt. My current job all about listening, right?

If I'm talking too much, I'm not doing my job improperly. Now I get the ability to listen to my customers and truly listen. What words are they using and what does that word mean to them? Because you may say, Matt, hey, I need a better quality solution. What does quality mean to you, Matt? Is it one part per billion or is it one part per million, or is it something completely different?

Do you have to speak a different way? Does your software only have to fail once a day?  What is quality mean to you? And so you can't just take what you think it means. You have to ask somebody what that means. 

[00:06:14] Host: Yes, indeed. And I think sometimes, and this kind of leads into the next question about, recalling a challenging situation.

What did you learn from it? I think sometimes when there's that incongruence because of a lack of listening that can sometimes cause problems in a project or software design, and that is where it could, create a situation like, your boss is really unhappy because you didn't meet the customer's needs and then the customer's really upset.

That might not be the story that you're gonna share, but I think it, it's sadly not an uncommon situation. 

[00:06:50] Avery de Marr: Completely agree, right? I think there's challenges within everyone's career, and it's how you overtake those, right? And how you're going to journey through those, right?

It's not a crystal clear lake that you get to push your boat across for the rest of your life. It's encountering those windstorms and the big waves and then getting through those and over those and becoming a better. Person not just an engineer, but becoming a better person through all of those storms, right?

So for me, there were two big challenges that I look back in my career. My first big one I would say was working for a boss. And I do mean a boss in this point and not a manager and that, and there's a difference. I hope that everyone on your podcast in your career either understands the difference or learns to understand the difference between a boss and a manager.

And late in my career at my former company I had a boss and it was not a discussion, it was not a collaboration. It was a set of expectations without clarity and an inability for us to communicate through that curiosity and ask questions to come to a good resolution on what. My work product should be.

And it was very challenging for me so much that it shut me down for years. I think it took me about four or five years to recover from having that boss as a person. And I don't think anybody listening to this should ever run into that. They should learn quickly to hit the abort button, right?

It's not worth it. It's not worth it to your life. Especially when you have outs, right? You're, there's tons of smart people doing smart things and there's easy outs, which kind of came to my next one, right?

My next big challenge was a couple years after that boss, I got laid off from Freescale and  it was what I knew was home, right? It was the only thing that I had ever known for work and I didn't know what to be anymore. I didn't know who I was. I had a, crisis of, faith of who I was in terms of that because I was the synergy target for a company.

And what I quickly, instantaneously realized from the people around me, although I told you it took five years to fix in my brain in the long run, was that people loved me for who I was right? And respected me for who I was and the things that I brought to the table, right? Even though I'm not an engineer's engineer, right?

I'm never the smartest guy in the room, but I do bring something that's me into that room and people love that. And so those are two challenging moments and things that I really took away from those moments. 

[00:09:37] Host: I remember some of our bike rides at that time when we were discussing your job search and stuff.

I think it's important for an engineer's, an engineer to realize that there is a critical supporting role for people like yourself like you're customer facing and you're like the really the bridge between the engineering team and the customer. And they can't really do their jobs effectively without you and the customer can't effectively get what they need without you.

So it's a real lynchpin of and critical you know to software delivery. 

[00:10:11] Avery de Marr: Yeah. I always talked about myself early in my career as a translator, Matt. I was not the most technical, but I spoke enough technicality and then I would work with businesses or customers in those cases. And I did the translation, I was just curious enough, I wanted to know what the problem was, and then I could get that to the people that could solve the problem, right? And then I translate to them. So I'm a glorified translator. 

[00:10:42] Host: I used a similar term of translator or bridge early on in my career. And I think it, it is very appropriate.

So speaking of early careers, what advice would you impart to someone who's just at the start of their career?

[00:10:58] Avery de Marr: So I'm really gonna go back to the basics here, which is your career. And you're gonna have a great career because you can love yourself for what you bring to the table. Nobody's the same.

And if you don't embrace who you are, you're not going to bring everything you can to work and be able to be, the best person, right? And you may not be in the best role, and you may need to go find a new job. You may need to go find a new career even. But you gotta bring your whole self to work. And I know that gets thrown around a lot.

I know my current CEO, she talks about bringing her whole self to work. I think it truly matters, right? I think people. Respect you more. They understand you more, and it allows you to understand their perspective. If you do bring your whole self to work, even if that is a challenge at times, I think that there are many things that are difficult in our jobs and it makes it easier if you're your whole self.

If you're not trying to hide behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz and be somebody that you're not, just bring yourself and let it find it. Yeah. 

[00:12:21] Host: I think that's why it's important to try to find a good fit for you. And a good fit for you might not be , the good fit for your classmates sitting next to you in class.

We each have our own paths and as you brought up earlier about, pulling the escape lever if something's not a good fit, I think life is too short to be unhappy. And so it's important to try to put yourself in situations where going to work is like a joy because you're excited about the problem you're gonna solve, and it's not just a daily grind that you need to do to get a paycheck.

[00:12:54] Avery de Marr: Completely agree right there. There's too many avenues. Life is too short to bring home a paycheck, right? You gotta find things you love and do them a lot, right? I stole this from my Peloton instructor. He says, you know, I'm make suggestions and you make decisions, right? It's something we can talk about with our customers, with how we're working with interfacing between our businesses and our software deliveries.

You have to be able to negotiate around what that is. What is my set of requirements, what is my deliverable? And you have to be able to make suggestions and influence. Where you want to go, ? And what you want to be. And that applies to your career as well. Somebody's gonna tell you're gonna be this when you grow up, and you gotta be able to bring your own version of that and say, oh, what about this?

And apply that to your position, right? Because when I came to my current position as a solution engineer, people did it one way, maybe not everybody did it one way, but they did it one way a lot. And what my current manager said to me for the first couple years it didn't crack through, but he would tell me, Hey, Avery, you really stretch the way that I think about trying to talk to your customers, and you do it a lot different than everyone else.

And that scared me, right? It, I was so new at this so solution engineering position. I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. And it took me a couple years to realize, oh man, that's a big compliment that. He's looking out and he has looked out at, 20, 30, 40, 50 employees at some point in time that have worked for him, that have done kind of the same things.

And I'm a unique person within that. And I make him think differently and that's my value, right? That comes back to the purse, right? I don't have to be the smartest in the room. I have to bring my own personal value to. 

[00:15:10] Host: Bring your own personal value and know your value, 

[00:15:14] Avery de Marr: absolutely know your value, 

[00:15:16] Host: and you've brought in a lot of value to the podcast today and sharing your career wisdom and advice.

So thank you very much for joining us today. 

[00:15:25] Avery de Marr: Thank you, Matt. Anytime.