In this episode of the MonkCast, RedMonk Senior Analyst Kate Holterhoff sits down with Chris Williams, Global Developer Relations Manager at HashiCorp, for a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from tech certifications to corporate espionage (sort of). Chris traces his career from data center crawler and hands-on infrastructure engineer to podcaster, community builder, and accidental DevRel professional. They dig into the enduring value of certifications in the age of AI, the origin story of the vBrownBag podcast (“nerd show and tell”), and how wearing 18 hats across competing vendor communities is actually a feature, not a bug. Equal parts therapy, smoke jumping, and a game of Clue, Chris’s career arc is a testament to curiosity, community, and the surprising power of asking dumb questions in a room full of experts.
IBM is a RedMonk client, but this episode is independent and unsponsored.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff (00:04)
Hello there, my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at Redmonk and today my guest is Chris Williams. He’s a global developer relations manager at HashiCore. Chris, how the hell are you?
Chris Williams (00:16)
Kate, I am doing fantastic and I’m so happy to be on the show with you. It’s about time.
Kate Holterhoff (00:20)
God, I know it’s a long time coming. Yeah, yeah, no,
no, we’ve been, we talked about it for a while. know, fellow podcasters, we get in a group and we just want to talk about the craft and how we’re gonna, we’re gonna all be buddy buddy and, and, and, know, So.
Chris Williams (00:35)
We see each other at conferences
like three, four, five times a year and we’re like, why aren’t you on my show? And you’re like, why aren’t you on my show? You got chocolate in my peanut butter. And then, yeah, and then it doesn’t happen.
Kate Holterhoff (00:41)
Yeah. huh.
That’s right. That’s right. That is the trend. Yeah, I know. That’s true. What was the last conference we saw each other at?
Chris Williams (00:58)
It was TechXchange 2025 at the Universal Studios. No? I’m sorry, you’re right, it was re:Invent. There’s so many, there’s so many.
Kate Holterhoff (01:02)
Is that right? No, it was re:Invent.
This is what I’m saying. I know I did a gotcha there. But you’re right. The TechXchange one was particularly memorable and and on brand, right? So this is the all the IBMers descending on Orlando, which was yeah.
Chris Williams (01:24)
That’s why I stood out in my head. The, the, the picture of you in front of the velociraptor that’s popped in my head. And I’m like, yes, that’s, that’s, that’s my Dr. Kate PhD.
Kate Holterhoff (01:32)
Yeah,
I’ll never live that down. Yeah, no, it was a good time. I have small children, so I’m always like, should I take them there? Nah, I was just there. You know, this is really about me and the good time that I’m having. So, you know, maybe after a year or something, I’ll just let it simmer for myself. So I’m so excited to have Chris here. We’re gonna talk about some of his background, some of the stuff that he’s seeing.
Chris Williams (01:36)
Ha ha ha.
Kate Holterhoff (01:57)
And it’s worth noting that the last person I recorded a MonkCast with was Stu Miniman, who I would say was probably the tallest guest I’ve had on the podcast. But I believe it’s possible that you are actually now the tallest guest on the You’ve probably figured this out amongst yourselves.
Chris Williams (02:03)
Stu!
So Stu and I and Cody De Arkland and several other very tall conference attendees have this thing where we see each other across Aaron Hunter at AWS. There’s a number of us, the six foot six and over crew. I beat Stu by just like a hair and he hates it because when he sees me he’s like, you Williams.
Kate Holterhoff (02:42)
Wow.
Chris Williams (02:47)
And so we actually use Miniman as a unit of measurement. So Linda Linda Haviv is exactly one half of one Miniman.
Kate Holterhoff (02:54)
No, no you don’t.
You
Chris Williams (03:00)
Ha
Kate Holterhoff (03:03)
Wow. I should have assumed that you spoke about this issue amongst yourselves, but I didn’t anticipate that it had gone to such extremes. Well, now I know about the Miniman. Okay. Well, that’s exciting. So yes, I’m having a tall guest, a series, I guess. It’s a series at this point, but yeah, that’s this.
Chris Williams (03:13)
You
Yeah, we’re doing a run. Tall these up,
six feet up.
Kate Holterhoff (03:28)
Okay, well, all right. I’m super jazzed to hear about your background, some of the cool stuff that you’re working on. I want to start with some of the stuff that was on your LinkedIn, because of course I snooped before we did this here. so one of the things that jumped out to me is all these certifications that you have. Now, I was an academic, and so certifications are super interesting to me as these sort of like non-accredited, but still super valuable ways of demonstrating your ability.
Also, I don’t know, I have a lot of questions about it. So just to begin with, what is your relationship to certifications in the tech space?
Chris Williams (04:07)
Sure. It’s there’s a couple of different angles for why I did all of those certifications. I have so many of them. I started with A plus and then CCNA for the Cisco stuff. did several iterations of Microsoft. I’m an MCSE from like NT 4.0 all the way up to 2000 something. Then I carved over to VMware.
where I got the VCP, the VCIX. I never went for VC DX because that’s an entirely different story. And then I saw cloud happening, so I pivoted and started doing the AWS stuff. And I did them for a number of reasons. One, when you work for a partner system or when you work for a company that has a partnership with a large technical entity, for lack of a better term,
you have to have a certain number of people on staff that have X certifications. So that was a prerequisite for some of my professional career, not all of it. But when I was in those other non-required, non-partner positions, I always had vBrownBag or my podcast, or I just liked studying. I like studying. Like when I’m at home at night and
we’re watching TV or something like that, I’ll fire up a Udemy course and just like do a speed run through something to, I just, I really enjoy studying. I hate sitting down and taking a test. That fills me with anxiety and all that stuff. But I love the process of learning new things, which is honestly kind of like why we started our podcast, Be Brown Back to Begin With, was we were all getting ready to study for VMware certification way, way back in the day.
And we said, hey, we should just record this because each one of us was learning and we realized that the best way to learn was to teach. So, so we would pick one of the domains of the certification process and then learn that domain and then teach it to the, everybody else. And so we were like, we should film this. This is, this is really good content. And we just posted it and then just kind of took off. And that was, that was the root of it. And so now it’s just.
The show is now like all of the cool things that are coming out and learning about tech and everything, but it’s always from the perspective of learning how to get into the industry or how to skill up on a certain piece of technology. So yeah, yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (06:41)
I should have plugged your podcast when I mentioned that you were involved in that earlier. apologies for that foresight lack of foresight rather.
Chris Williams (06:47)
that’s okay. I always forget too, to be perfectly honest. I’m really bad at plugging my own show.
Kate Holterhoff (06:52)
You’re like, what do do? Yeah,
yeah. Okay. Well, show plugged. We did the thing. Okay. So amazing. So here’s the question I have for you. You have, you’ve done many certifications. You enjoy the format, you know, pre-testing at least. So you’re deep in what is the scuttlebutt right now on certs, post AI? Like are, is there a future for certifications now that we can just ask Claude to, you help us learn about, you know, said technology.
Chris Williams (07:24)
lot of places that make money off of selling, I’m going to help you pass the certification. They try to imply that if you get these certifications, you’re going to get the job. And that’s not true. That is one part of the equation. If you have a certification in a certain technology, then there is a baseline of expectation of what you know. But that does not
the Venn diagram of what you know and what the job requirements are is not a perfect circle. So folks that are disingenuous about it will say, pass this AWS professional certification and you can get the big job and the big bucks. And that’s their money making ploy. There is very, very good value in studying for and preparing for and sitting certain types of certifications like hard tech certifications.
give you exposure to the entire breadth, depth and breadth of, I’m gonna pick AWS because that’s what I know right now. I mean, I’ve done tons of them, but I’m gonna pick on AWS right now. There’s a million services in AWS. Any one job that you have, you’re never gonna touch, not even half of them, not even a quarter of them. You’re gonna touch a small subset because that’s what the company wants you to do. When you do a certification, you learn.
all of them, or at least get a good understanding of what the thing is supposed to do. And so through the certification process, you would learn things you would otherwise not. And that in itself has a value because you’re broadening your scope of knowledge. You’re becoming that T-shaped or M-shaped engineer. So there is that value in that. I like the studying for the certification process. And when I wasn’t working for a partner, I would also have to pass exams too, but I don’t have to do that anymore, so I don’t take them anymore.
in the, in the world of AI, there is still value in that because you’re still broadening. You can’t just like, like if the, if the internet goes down or, or if your connection to the internet goes down and you have no longer have access to Claude, what are you going to do? you, you still need to have the critical thinking skills and the engineering mindset and the, the troubleshooting skills that you can get from learning and from studying and from understanding how these things work and doing the real work. that you’re not gonna find with an AI. So yes, it’s still valuable.
Kate Holterhoff (09:58)
All right, I love that advice. And I do find that, yeah, having the certifications positioned as something that’s going to be a career enabler is just not necessarily the right way to think about it. Like it can help you augment your skillset and keep up to date on the latest and greatest and to learn about a vendor’s, like the breadth of tools that they have available in a.
certain domain. But in terms of like, this is going to get you a job, much more questionable, especially today in our economy and Okay, so let me ask this then. For your podcast, is it still aimed around like, not necessarily studying for certification exams, but like education and upskilling?
Chris Williams (10:31)
Exactly so.
Yes, that’s always what it’s been. So when we started off, was like, OK, watch this video to pass this section of the domain of this particular exam. And we did that. We’ve been around for 12, 13 years now. So there’s been a lot of transformation. When we first started off, it was exclusively just passing VMware certifications. But then we realized that anybody that’s doing VMware is also going to be doing Kubernetes, is also going to be doing Terraform, is also going to be doing…
Kate Holterhoff (11:01)
Wow.
Chris Williams (11:17)
networking is also going to be, you know, learn how to, how these things wire together storage. and then, and then, you know, we kind of pivoted into software. So we got into version control and, and like, then, then DevOps became a thing. And honestly, the show is fairly like the things that, that me and my co-host find exciting. It’s like, it’s like, find the thing that brings us excitement and joy. Find the person that is like the, the preeminent knowledge.
base for said technology, convince them through duplicity to come on the show and just have a conversation with them about all of the cool things that get them excited. It’s nerd show and tell is what it is.
Kate Holterhoff (12:00)
Beautifully put. Okay, nerd show and tell. Awesome. And I’m interested in how you meet all these nerds. You’re deep in the community. DevRel, how long have you been working in DevRel?
Chris Williams (12:02)
I well, that’s a loaded question. Because if you ask me, Chris Williams, how long have I been in DevRel? The answer is almost exactly three years. I came on as the HashiCorp DevRel manager three years ago next month. When they hired me, they said, hey, Chris, do you want to apply for the position of DevRel manager here? And I was like,
Kate Holterhoff (12:15)
exciting.
Chris Williams (12:42)
I know what three of those, I know what two of those three words mean and I don’t want to be a manager ever again. And so, so, when they explained the role to me, I was like, I that’s, that’s what I’ve been doing for a very long time at night for free. And I said, you mean that you mean I can actually get, you know, a daytime paycheck for doing my evening hobby? and they said, yes, you’ve been doing DevRel.
for the past 10 years at night for free. So according to me, professionally DevRel for three years, according to everybody else, non-professionally DevRel for about 13 years.
Kate Holterhoff (13:27)
man, okay.
You’re right, I like that loaded question, but I don’t know. I mean, it helps me to better frame, your excitement about technology and making sure that it’s the developers are getting what they need from these DevTools. So, yeah.
Chris Williams (13:44)
The developers, the operations folks, the sysadmins, I I was a data center crawler for many, years. So I have touched everything in the stack from backups to security to network. mean, everything from the physical hardware all the way up to, and now including the software.
Kate Holterhoff (13:50)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Williams (14:08)
So I do have imposter syndrome. mean, when somebody says, you’re developer relations, how do you interrelate with the developers? I’m like, well, if they’re a brand new developer, I can talk to them very easily. If they are somebody that’s been doing it for 20, 30 years, they know a lot more than I do.
Kate Holterhoff (14:25)
We just returned to that data center crawler idea because, I’m mildly familiar with the dungeon crawler. I assume that’s the, that’s the reference there because that’s hilarious. Yeah.
Chris Williams (14:35)
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate that. And I didn’t know that you were reading it either, so props to us, go team.
Kate Holterhoff (14:40)
Oh yeah, yeah, that’s big right I try to keep up with the terminology of the times. very, au courant, I did it again, Chris, see, there we go. We’re just talking about vocabulary. This is, I know,
Chris Williams (14:50)
More words to Google, thanks.
Kate Holterhoff (14:53)
so talking about community, you’re also a hero. Let’s hear about that.
Chris Williams (14:58)
So the AWS Hero program is, okay, I’ve been doing community for a very, very long time. I’ve had user groups, I’ve had iterations of, so like we did the virtualization technology and user group for VMware for a long period of time up here in the New England area. I’ve started a couple of AWS user groups, the AWS Portsmouth user group.
the AWS Boston user group. We’ve run a couple of different community days. I’ve been a VMware vExpert, which is the non-affiliated, non-employed person who extols VMware out in the public and the community and writes blogs and stuff like that. Microsoft has a program like that. It’s called the MVP program. HashiCorp has a program like that. It’s called the Ambassador program. IBM has a program like that called the IBM Champions program.
AWS has two programs because they always have to be different. They have the AWS Hero program and they have the AWS Community Builders program. The AWS Hero program, there’s about 250 of us and we are folks that basically do the same things that you do in the VMware vExpert program and the MVP program. You talk about AWS out in the public, writing blogs, doing conference talks.
yada, yada, yada about things about AWS. They also have the Community Builders Program, which I believe is about 2,000 or 3,000 people. And they do the same kinds of things too, writing blog posts, things of that nature.
Kate Holterhoff (16:35)
than having another feather in your cap, what is the advantage of becoming a hero? mean, I suspect you have some free time to enjoy hanging out with your cats or, you know, whatever. The lovely New England snow, I don’t know, cross-country skiing or something.
Chris Williams (16:52)
You
Kate Holterhoff (16:53)
But you know, what is, what do get? You just get like kudos or, know.
Chris Williams (16:58)
So the programs themselves are really fun, going back to the fact that I enjoy learning. So what AWS does is they fly the heroes to Seattle once a year for the Hero Summit. And we get to closed-door, locked-door, NDA-signed talk with all of the folks from the different product teams for the services that we want to hobnob with.
It’s a really tight feedback loop on, and the 250 people that they pick for the HERO program, we are super users. We are people that are seeing all of the corner cases. Back when I was in the partner program, I would just come with a laundry list of all of the grievances from all of my customers to those product teams to say, hey, fix this. This is super important because I see, and I was.
Ironically, it’s almost kind of like DevRel inverted, where I’m on the outside yelling in, whereas with DevRel, you’re on the inside yelling out. yeah, so I get that out of it. I mean, I get to get into really sticky problems with really lots of, I’m not gonna say spaghetti code, but just things that.
Kate Holterhoff (17:59)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Williams (18:21)
our turtles all the way down. There’s like a rat’s nest of things that you’ve got to like try to figure out and fix. And why are we doing this this way? And help them fix these problems. And in recompense, I guess you could say, they treat us, the heroes, like royalty for two weeks out of the year. They fly us to Seattle. They take us out. go to like ball games and stuff like that. And then once again, at re:Invent, we all descend upon re:Invent and…
you know, get treated very well as heroes at re:Invent.
Kate Holterhoff (18:52)
Okay, and here’s my next question, right? So a lot of these companies that you have this status with are competitors. So how does that work? you know, is your company okay with you being an expert in other companies’ stuff?
Chris Williams (19:00)
Mm-hmm.
not only are they okay with it, they actually are really encouraging of it. because, because I get The word isn’t fame or notoriety or anything like that, but I get access to places where I wouldn’t normally, hello Noodle. I wouldn’t normally get access to. Here’s the other one, here’s Noodle. He’s got a good.
Kate Holterhoff (19:30)
another cat sighting. It’s a great episode guys. Good content. Yeah.
Chris Williams (19:35)
Two sidings, yes.
The internet was made for cats, so here we go. No, no, they absolutely love that I do it because it allows, I mean, again, that tight feedback loop with product, like learning what’s happening out there, being able to take it to product internally for my company, and helping fix use cases. I mean, because at the end of the day, we’re trying to fix the problem for the customer.
Kate Holterhoff (19:40)
Absolutely. That’s great.
Chris Williams (20:03)
whether it’s with just a Terraform Community Edition versus Terraform Enterprise versus HCP Terraform or whatever. mean, whatever the customer’s problem is, the tool, which in an ideal world you want to be an agnostic solution, is what you use to help fix it. the more, I mean, they view it as the more knowledge, the better.
Kate Holterhoff (20:14)
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Well, that helps me because it confused me. I’ll be real. It’s Chris, like, don’t you already have a job? Why are you working for all these companies? But you don’t work for them. You’re just an ambassador of sorts.
Chris Williams (20:39)
It’s all.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s exactly the title for the HashiCorp ambassadors. mean, it’s a… And because I’m a part of all of these programs, I get the community networking aspect of it. mean, DevRel is community and community is DevRel. So when I’m out there doing community, I’m doing my job, whether it’s as an AWS hero or as the DevRel manager for HashiCorp or…
a VMware vExpert or whatever like that. mean, we’re still fixing the same problems and whether or not I’ve got one or 18 hats on my head is irrelevant at that point.
Kate Holterhoff (21:25)
Any hats can you hold, Chris? A lot of hats. Yeah. There we go. All right, back on the height issue. Okay. so we didn’t really talk about all the jobs that you had to get here, but you and I have spoken before about consulting work that you did and yes, what did you call yourself? A server room crawler, hilarious. So I guess I’m interested in…
Chris Williams (21:27)
I have a giant head. It’s so high up here too, so it’s fine. I can wear a lot.
Kate Holterhoff (21:50)
what that evolution has been like for you. So you made a leap from doing hands-on infrastructure work into more developer relations. You don’t consider yourself a manager, but you obviously are. So, hey, I’ll let you work on that personal journey. But what’s that like, now you’re in technical leadership and, and, doing less of the things that you, did for decades beforehand. So, I don’t know.
What, yeah, how’s that transition been? you, I mean, maybe let’s make this a, I don’t know about a CTA, but what sort of advice can you give to folks who feel like they’re on that journey themselves? how did you make that a successful transition?
Chris Williams (22:28)
Well, mean, the first thing I would do is I would ask my team if it was a successful transition. So let’s just say a transition for now. Exactly. Every engineer or architect or consultant that I know that was then asked, hey, do you want to get into management or are you being shoehorned into being a manager? We all fall into that.
Kate Holterhoff (22:36)
Yes, unreliable narrator.
Chris Williams (22:54)
Well, the ones that have awareness, they fall into, are you familiar with the Peter Principle? Failing up to your level of incompetence.
Kate Holterhoff (23:03)
Yeah, I didn’t know that’s what it was called. But yes, okay, but why don’t you why don’t you tell us about it so that so that everybody knows
Chris Williams (23:08)
So the Peter principle, I think it came out of the military, but I’m not sure, is the concept of you fail up to your level of incompetence. You were a great laptop fixer, so they promoted you to a systems engineer. And then you became, and you were a great systems engineer, so they promoted you to a senior engineer. And then you were a great senior engineer, so they said, oh, you should be a manager. And then you make the transition into management.
You’re a terrible manager. Nobody says it to your face. importantly, nobody demotes you back to the area where you were actually good. They just leave you to founder at this layer of incompetence. That kind of happened. The reason why I think it happened out of the military was because you go through promotion cycles every so many years. And then at some point you just stop. Because not everybody makes it to general.
Kate Holterhoff (23:39)
Mm.
Yeah.
Chris Williams (24:05)
So you stop at your level of incompetence, is a terrible place to be because it’s disheartening and it’s soul-sucking. So I’ve never wanted to be a victim of the Peter Principle, so I’ve always fought getting into management because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be good at it or not. The very first time I ever got a job in tech was as a manager to a small software firm, and I was 25. I was terrible at it. my God, I was the worst manager ever because I was just…
Kate Holterhoff (24:34)
Baby Chris.
Chris Williams (24:35)
I did not know what I was doing. I had no management skills and they’re like, Hey, you’re the manager. I was like, okay. And I was, I was awful. I, I would have fired myself. I I’m fully like looking back at myself there. I was like, what was I thinking? Flash forward 30 years. Uh, they asked me once again, do you want to be a manager? And, um, uh, Steve Jobs.
Kate Holterhoff (24:37)
Mm-hmm.
Yup.
Chris Williams (25:02)
once famously said that the best manager for the role is the one that doesn’t want it. The guy that looks around the room and says, there’s nobody else that can do it. I guess I will just swallow this bitter pill and do it myself. So I take that to heart. I hug that close to my, to my bosom because, because that’s kind of like the position. mean, cause
management is tough because you’re not doing the thing that you were doing before. You’re doing this. You’re adding this new layer of watching everybody else do the thing that you love doing. So it’s a balancing act. have to figure out, know, is this, do you want to progress down the management path? Do you want to become a principal and just like do the thing that you want to do for the rest of your life? I’m good at talking to people. I’m good at making connections and asking
dumb questions and doing the things that like, know, just kind of like, I’ve always been a good leader, but I didn’t know if I was gonna be a good manager. And there’s a very important distinction between those two things. can like have a small team of like technical ninjas go do the thing and just knock it out of the park and like have a party afterwards and yay, but managing is different. So here I am.
Kate Holterhoff (26:21)
in the manager role. That’s good. But you just said it, right? You don’t necessarily want the job. you’ve never been more qualified to perform it, right? You didn’t fail your way up. You’ve achieved this. is, you know, put the little crown on. This is you. Or tiara You did tell me you would be wearing a tiara for this interview. I don’t see it.
Chris Williams (26:43)
You know what I did and
I didn’t, apologies. I totally forgot about that.
Kate Holterhoff (26:47)
Okay,
that’s all right. That’s all right. I don’t know how you could wear a tiara and your headset. I feel like they would be in conflict, but, there’s a little line. Okay. Well, Hey, next time. All right. So now Chris, you’re, you’re deep in the containers, infrastructure writ large. I want to know what the hell is a cloud therapist.
Chris Williams (26:54)
Oh, there’s there’s a space I could totally do that. Yeah, I could do that.
A cloud therapist is an earned title. You can’t get it by studying really hard. You earn it. And the way that you earn it is you… Okay, I was a multi-cloud consultant at WWT, Worldwide Technologies. And I was there for a period of time.
during what I will call the heyday of cloud transitions, when everybody was moving workloads. I did a lot of projects for very, very large companies. I gained a reputation as kind of like a smoke jumper, like somebody that would be dropped into, here’s this multi-million dollar project. It is on fire, everybody’s screaming, the customer is very, very upset. Let’s throw Chris at it, see what happens.
And so I would come in and I would just start asking questions. I would walk in the room. would be, my schtick was very kind of like disarming. I’m like, hey, my name’s Chris. I’m the new guy. I’m literally the dumbest person in this room. I’m gonna ask a lot of questions and we’re gonna figure things out. And I’d be in there with the C-suite. I’d be in there with the VPs. I’d be in there with like the principal engineers. And they’d be like, who is this schmuck? He doesn’t know anything.
I’m like you’re right. Let’s let’s let’s all do it together So I get out a big whiteboard and I draw things out and I just start asking dumb questions Why are we doing this? Why is this happening this way? We would leave that room and people would take me to the side and say my god. I Had been wanting to ask that question for three years. I do not know why we did this that way I would get people to I called it getting in their get-along t-shirt remember when remember when you were fighting with your brothers and sisters and
They’d always make that joke about the get along t-shirt, two neck holes, stick the kids in there. I put so many C-suite executives in the get along t-shirt, CTOs and CFOs, because they just couldn’t friggin’ figure out a way to like talk to each other. So, so people started calling me the cloud therapist. It was, it was, it was like an, it was an earned title.
Kate Holterhoff (29:26)
Wow.
Chris Williams (29:30)
Degree is psychology. I’m a psychologist. I have a psychology degree. I specialize in conflict resolution For for many many years. It served me zero purpose until I got into executive boardrooms and folks were like Having marital difficulties literally right in front of me and I’m like
We need to work on our dictionary of words with each other and we need to figure out like communication patterns and all of the things that I learned in conflict resolution psychology 101 served me in great stead in these boardrooms. So I got cloud therapist.
Kate Holterhoff (30:11)
And when was this? When were you doing this kind of work?
Chris Williams (30:14)
This was at WWT and prior to that, I was at a company in New England called GreenPages. And so as a consultant slash ProServe engineer, I would be just dropped hot, dropped into these other customers. I loved consulting. loved going into new companies every six months with new giant problems and just figuring stuff out and like being dropped in the middle of the.
Kate Holterhoff (30:20)
Okay.
Chris Williams (30:42)
the forest fire and fighting your way out and figuring out how, loved it. Absolutely loved it.
Kate Holterhoff (30:46)
Yeah.
I’m fascinated by this role. I’m also a little confused about the relationship between therapy and like smoke jumping, because they seem kind of different, but you’re using both as, as very compelling metaphors. feel like maybe you, you start with the one and then you end up, but once you get down there, the fire is feelings and then you have to talk about them. Okay. Okay.
Chris Williams (31:08)
Exactly. yeah, exactly. Yeah at that level the issues are 99 % personality 1 % technical It’s it’s always It’s always the the politics of the organization. It’s always the the mismatch of communication patterns Love languages people are just not using the same love language mines mines physical affection There’s is you know gifts or whatever so
You just got to figure it out.
Kate Holterhoff (31:38)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What an interesting thing. All right. And so when they would call you in, what would be the reason? Like I get that, having these inner conflicts, it just seems like that wouldn’t be the first thing that they do is like, we need to call a cloud jumping therapist or smoke jumping rather. Is that, yeah, that happened.
Chris Williams (32:04)
owner.
No, no,
that was never like the clarion call. It was, we need an AWS expert to come in here. we have a hero on staff. We have a literal AWS hero. Let’s bring Chris in. That’s how it started. I got, it ended with me with therapy. Yes, always. I have one really fun story. I was brought in because this DevOps,
Kate Holterhoff (32:18)
Yes. Okay. But it ended with therapy.
always.
Please.
Chris Williams (32:36)
initiative had been scoped at six months and it was a year and a half before I was brought in. And the company was very, very upset with the deliverer, the ProServe team. And so they brought me in and I said, okay, well, this is… And I had prior knowledge of what kind of things could potentially be going wrong in there. So I said, let’s play this very, very close to the vest.
I had a meeting with the CTO and I said, you’re gonna bring me in, but you’re gonna bring me in as a junior engineer. I am going to be a junior engineer for one week. I’m gonna ask questions, I’m gonna get to meet people, I’m gonna ask around. You’re then gonna promote me to senior engineer. And then I’m gonna, for one week, and I’m gonna go around, I’m ask questions. You’re then gonna promote me to director of DevOps. You’re then gonna promote me and bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, work my way up the chain.
The entire time I was having back channel communications with the CTO, the CFO, and figuring out what was happening in the organization, where were the bottlenecks and what the problems were. five weeks later, one, one of the senior execs was let go for cooking the books, having, having two sets of books and, the pro then the project got fixed and got finished within the next three months.
Kate Holterhoff (34:02)
Wait, wait, wait, wait. We’ve moved beyond therapy now.
Chris Williams (34:05)
It was it’s such it’s such a fun story and I hate that can’t use any names or anything because it’s like it’s so good
Kate Holterhoff (34:06)
This is nothing.
Yeah, wow. mean, what do you even call, yeah, what is that? There’s like cop shows about this, right? You were a plant. This is undercover.
Chris Williams (34:21)
Like if if I had the Carmen San Diego hat with the trench coat and like diving off the build it would have been such a good story.
Kate Holterhoff (34:30)
all this time, was the leadership at the top. mean, my goodness, this is…
Chris Williams (34:35)
It was Colonel Sanders in the library with a candlestick the entire time. Yep.
Kate Holterhoff (34:38)
is always the candlestick. Deadly weapon. my
God. Well, this is, this is incredible. And so consulting, you, you enjoyed the consulting life. and so you’ve consulted. Yeah. So, what is it about consulting? But you worked with companies, right? You didn’t have to do your own HR and all that. You were a consultant. Yeah. Okay.
Chris Williams (34:49)
didn’t think I would.
No, no, no, was
consulting. was the hired gun that was loaned out from the mothership. like I started off at GreenPages. I was terrified. I thought that, so I had done work with the folks at GreenPages in previous engagements as an IC for their customer. And so I would do work with them and I got to know the team there and they’re like, my God, Chris, you would.
Kate Holterhoff (35:08)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Chris Williams (35:28)
being a consultant, you are wasting your cycles here, come work with us. And I was like, no, no, no, no, for years, for years this went on back and forth, back and forth. were trying, like, I would meet them at VMworld and we would go out and have a couple of drinks and they’re like, please come work with us, we have an amazing time together. And I pushed them off, I pushed them off, I pushed them off. Finally, I was like, okay, let’s do this. And I was kind of pressured, I was under the gun to like make a move out of the position that I was in.
And so I did it and I was like, am I gonna like this? Loved it. my God. I wish I had done it years earlier because new technology, new customer every six months. I didn’t realize that I had been hopping from job to job because not hopping, but like, know, I’d work at a place two, three, four years later, I would then move on to the next place because I was bored. I didn’t, I got used to the thing.
Kate Holterhoff (36:05)
Wow.
Chris Williams (36:26)
and it became rote. had automated most of my position out of myself. I scripted the things and wrote little programs for the other things. And then I was just languishing. So then I’d move on. This was that, but just hyper speed, know, fire hose of knowledge, new people all the time. And I’m a huge extrovert too, obviously. And you could, I was just like new people every six months, new technology every six months, sign me up.
My best friend is the exact opposite. He wants to work for one company for 30 years and he’s like, I don’t know how you do this.
Kate Holterhoff (37:00)
I mean, it is remarkable, but I get the idea of being bored and like not just getting complacent in it and there there being a sort of don’t know excitement to coming in and doing something new all the time. So hey, It’s just different strokes. I mean yeah designing for external clients I can imagine as being like I don’t know it are they all
Chris Williams (37:12)
Yeah, it’s super fun. For me,
Kate Holterhoff (37:21)
willing to give you permissions to see everything. I feel like that could be, you you always hear stories about folks who get a new job and then takes them forever to actually get in the systems that they need to be productive and actually contribute. That wasn’t an issue.
Chris Williams (37:37)
So here’s the ironic part. As a consultant being dropped into these areas, you would get more access faster than ICs that had been there for years. of them, it’s a very strange situation. You get hired in to a company as an IC, and you’re put in, you get access, you do the things, you start making your recommendations. Okay, sure, Yeah, Chris, we’ve heard this from the other people that have been here for…
10 years, we’ll get to it when we get to it. You come in at 10X, the price point as a consultant, talk to those same people, have the exact same conversations and say the exact same words to the leadership board. Genius, let’s do it. Signed up. It’s so frustrating for those ICs and I empathize with them and I say that when I’m talking to them. I’m like, tell me the words, explain to me the problems, tell me the words that you’ve used.
and I will say them slightly differently. It’s gonna be very frustrating for you and you’re gonna hate me when this is all done, but we’re gonna get the problem fixed. And then we do.
Kate Holterhoff (38:44)
I’m having feelings for these folks. This is…
Chris Williams (38:48)
See, this is therapy. Let it out, let it out. Let’s breathe through this together.
Kate Holterhoff (38:54)
no, because, there’s a vindictive part of me that just struggles with this.
Chris Williams (39:00)
Yes, let it out. Do you need a tissue?
Kate Holterhoff (39:02)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think I’m gonna be okay. I’m gonna power through. But my heart goes out to all the ICs who have felt this in their own lives and, watch their good intentions just, you know, be spoken by the Chris Williams of the world.
Chris Williams (39:16)
Oh, me too. No, I was there for 20
years. And then for the last 10 years, I’ve been on the other side of it. And I’m like, it’s just human nature. It really is.
Kate Holterhoff (39:28)
Yeah.
All right. Well, I say we’ve had a good long chat on this stuff. am, you know, let me…
Chris Williams (39:35)
None of this content is usable.
They’re gonna get like a five minute blurb.
Kate Holterhoff (39:40)
Absolutely not. This is all usable. This is all the quality conversation that folks come to the MonkCast to enjoy. this is great. I feel I’m looking at the questions that I have lined up here about like data center to cloud transitions. mean, all of this is, this is all good questions. Instead, we just talked about like dinosaurs at Universal Studios, which is, I feel like that’s pretty par for the course for you and I.
Chris Williams (39:49)
I love it.
For the thumbnail for the show, you use that picture that I love so much?
Kate Holterhoff (40:13)
think about it. I will think about it, Chris. I’ll consider it. So, as we wrap up, where are you most active on social media? Are you a big like Discord person? Where can folks find you online?
Chris Williams (40:14)
Okay.
So you can find me most online on LinkedIn these days. That’s where I spend a lot of my time. I am terrible at Instagram. So like if somebody messaged me on Instagram, might maybe will see it years later. I apologize for anybody that’s done that. I’m great on LinkedIn. I try to do Mastodon and Bluesky, but it’s tough. just, I want to pick one and stick with it. I’m very upset that Twitter is gone.
Kate Holterhoff (40:31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Chris Williams (40:56)
But yeah, so LinkedIn is the best way to find me. We are trying to reinvigorate the vBrownBag Slack, but that’s literally new news that I was thinking about this last night. So we’re going to reinvigorate the vBrownBag Slack and start getting some more activity in there. But LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the way. mean, I have tons of slacks, I have tons of discords, but LinkedIn is the best way.
Kate Holterhoff (40:57)
Yeah, tears.
I know.
in the place.
Yeah, and also come find you at all the conferences, right? You’re the tallest guy in the room.
Chris Williams (41:27)
It’s not hard to go to the expo hall floor and just look up and there. That’s me. There I am.
Kate Holterhoff (41:32)
All right, that’s it. With those words of wisdom here, I will sign off with the cloud therapist. Yeah, indeed. All right, so my guest today again has been Chris Williams. My name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at Redmonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
Chris Williams (41:39)
Words anyway.
