Merging Skills Sets: An Interview with Branden Goldenberg, Covering the Unspoken Path from Athlete to Developer, Unofficial PhDs, and Some Cool Advice
For this piece, I (Portia Curlee) sat down with my colleague at Silicon Mountain, Branden Goldenberg, with the initial goal of asking him how my (possibly annoying) teacher lens had affected his work here as a developer. But the conversation took some unexpected paths, touching on our shared experience in career changing, Branden’s pretty cool past as a competitive skier, and finally coming around to pedagogical strategies in technology. Below, my questions and comments are in bold.
You’re currently a full stack developer with an Atlassian Certification in Jira Management…do I have that right?
I couldn’t tell you what my job title is, so that sounds good to me!
Lol. OK…well, what’s your college degree in?
Mechanical Engineering.
Wow…you’re not using that!
Not at all, although there is some crossover. I can’t turn my logic brain off, I’m always curious to figure out how things work. A large part of engineering is thinking like an engineer and that certainly helped me transfer into software.
How come you’re not using that?
Culture, mainly; I was sick of being held back on my career progression because I was young. For example, I was working as a CAD technician, and it was my job to make the drawings for construction that the engineers were marking up. I was catching errors that the engineers weren’t catching, so they had me do the red lines myself–but they wouldn’t give me the promotion to engineer. Rather, they gave me more engineering responsibilities. I saw that at two jobs: I received more responsibility rather than more recognition and promotion. Like I should be proud to be working 2–3 promotion levels above my pay scale. It seemed like an industry thing, so I switched to software, which has a significantly more inviting culture. There’s a theory in software: the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know anything. Because of that, a junior who doesn’t know that much can still be a really valuable asset. An environment where learning opportunities are endless and the only thing stopping you from taking advantage of them is yourself.
So you were frustrated. What was your path to getting where you are now?
Yes, super frustrated. You have to keep in mind the fact that my ski career delayed my entering into the workforce, and also gave me a false view of how good life can be. I lived the dream. Skied 6 days a week through high school, traveled all over North America to ski both in winter and summer. I recognize that I can’t live that life sustainably as an adult, but also that doesn’t mean we should all stay at draining jobs just because the money is good.
My current position is my 3rd job out of college. I did CAD design for a telecom company until I realized there was no future for me there and decided to move on for various reasons. My next step was to work at a railway communications company as CAD design/Engineer for nearly two years, again realizing that I would never be given the opportunity to grow there, I took a leap of faith. I entered myself into a coding boot camp, and three months later I was looking for entry level jobs all over again. I do consider myself lucky to have landed where I am today as I switched to software engineering.
I can relate to career switching. It takes a lot of courage. But you actually have an entire background we haven’t discussed yet! In fact, you have some “teaching” in your background, because you have experience as a coach, right?
I coached little kids; I worked for the Steamboat Winter Sports Club and for the Winter Park Competition Center as a freestyle mogul skiing coach. I coached four seasons–two in Steamboat and two in Winter Park.
So…to coach, you had experience in the sport?
I love to jokingly say that I have a PhD in the sport, yep (as seen here)! They paid me $12 an hour and told me I should be happy with what I got. They actually had to lie on my paperwork just to get my pay that high. Actually, this is funny: my very first experience, I just called the head of the program, and said I wanted to coach, and he replied, “you’re hired!” He didn’t even give me any tips, advice, or training–just a group of kids on the mountain. He knew I was ready to go.
For me, the crux of being a ski coach is convincing people that they are capable of doing something when they’re unsure of themselves. Not being confident that you are capable of doing something is a scary feeling. All of the “what if” thoughts start to pop up. “What if I fall? What if I hurt myself?” It’s hard to turn that negativity into something more powerful: what if you land it? How amazing would that be?!
So, for example, a kid is unsure that he can complete a 360. But I know as a coach that I have given him the tools he needs, he has practiced the skills he needs, and he can definitely land it, or at least get super close (the first try is always free). So as a coach, it’s my job to convince kids that they can put it all together when it counts.
And looking back on it (you always make me reminisce on these old times in my life): being on the other side of that coin is challenging. You don’t think you’re good enough. You don’t think you have the skills to do these things. I had a coach who used to tell me: “Hey, Branden: you’re a bad-ass m*therf*!@er!” It was his intro, every day. And one day I started believing that, and just that belief gave me the confidence that I could actually do these things. That maybe I could be the best…
That coach was amazing, I think anyone who was lucky enough to spend some time with him would agree that he earned his nickname of Dan the Man.
Skiing isn’t really a sport about skiing. I mean, sure, don’t get me wrong: skiing is the best thing ever. It’s one of the few things on earth where when you’re doing it, everything else simply disappears, like magic. Skiing is a flow state sport, an activity that takes so much focus that your brain literally can’t process anything else. But to me, as someone who grew up in the sport, it’s about overcoming fear, mental barriers, stress, and pressure. It’s about believing, with certainty, that you do something, even if it’s your first try. And when it doesn’t work out as planned, because we all know it won’t always, it’s about also being able to persevere through until you succeed. These are the life skills that I was unaware I was learning as a child.
I’m starting to see why you had the confidence to change careers.
I try to stay modest about my past. I don’t talk about it much, it usually takes someone prying it out of me. I almost feel elitist when it comes to this topic, which is a shame, really, because I did live the coolest life ever for a bit and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world. But yes, I knew deep down that I could do it if I worked for it.
For our readers, can you explain exactly how you get a PhD in freestyle mogul skiing?
You ski 120+ days a year for 10 years straight. Plus 10 years before that. I started skiing when I was 3 and competed for 13 seasons. There is a famous principle called Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Rule. The principle states that in order to become world class in any field, you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Let’s just say I started considering myself a PhD at age 18, so everything after that was icing on the cake.
So, you’ve got a degree in engineering, a PhD in skiing, and developer credentials. But, in addition, you also hang out with a lot of teachers these days.
Yes, yes I do. My girlfriend is a teacher–she teaches 4th grade; many of her best friends are teachers. The craziest part about hanging out with teachers all the time is seeing the “non-classroom teacher.” As a student, you think, yeah, yeah, my teacher grades stuff. You don’t have any perspective on what goes on behind the scenes. It’s a lot more than standing in front of the class and grading student work (even though that’s the part you get paid for). It is rather interesting how their thought patterns and practices wear off on you.
And then SMT hired a teacher and now you’re forced to work with one, too…
Yeah. “Some teacher.” (Note from Portia: Branden, I’d like to think “lovingly,” refers to me as “some teacher.” This is because I haunt his developer lifestyle with things like “checks for understanding” and “lesson plans” and, in point of fact, this very article.) We have a good time working together. We each get to grow and learn from each other along the way, as we merge tech skills with classroom practices. Which by the way, is something the tech world is lacking greatly. All developers out there know what I’m talking about. Think about all the horrible documentation you have had to read through just to figure out a simple task. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were easier?
So let’s talk about tech and education together. In the educational world, teachers are encouraged to begin each lesson with a learning standard; some schools and districts require it. It shows up in varying formats–usually something along the lines of “students will be able to,” followed by the learning standard the lesson meets for the day. Full disclosure: as an educator, that was my least favorite part, for a wide variety of reasons. However, at SMT, we’ve started doing something similar by including a “Bottom Line Up Front” or “BLUF Statement” at the top of our learning modules, tutorials, etc. Do you think that makes a difference?
For adults: yes. I think adults have the educational wherewithal to decide what they need to know and what they don’t need to know. It’s like having an abstract at the beginning of a 80 page scientific document. Why read all 80 pages when I can read a paragraph to find out that it isn’t what I was looking for?
I think they’re way less effective for kids. Kids probably don’t care. It’s not meaningful for them. Most kids think they are at school because they have to be. They don’t see the inherent value of the education process yet.
My challenge for writing my own BLUF statements is that I don’t know what, really, the BLUF statement is until after I’ve created the lesson plan! Or at least in any way that’s meaningful to someone who would read the words. Many times I think a process is so simple, then when creating documentation I realize it took 12 steps. It’s hard to encapsulate that work in a BLUF statement before I forced myself through the process with a teacher’s lens.
Do you think it would help to frame a lesson with a BLUF before-hand?
Yes and no. Technically, we do have a BLUF before creating a lesson; for example, when I check my work for the sprint, I might have a ticket that tells me what lesson to create (we call it acceptance criteria for completion of our work ticket). But if I wrote a BLUF saying “you will learn how to create and manage a board,” it wouldn’t quite be enough for a user. There is a lot more nuance to the process than just doing it. As I create the lesson, I see a lot of detail in how to create and manage a board that probably needs to be pulled into the BLUF.
Since about October, we’ve also gone through a process of developing lesson plans for some of our material–like teaching our customers how to get around the Launch Verification Database in Platform One Jira, and an entire curriculum for teaching our customers the basics of Platform One Confluence and Jira. Has developing lesson plans changed your perspective of your work as a developer, or your role in working with customers as a developer?
Not necessarily as a developer; the traditional dev role is an implementer where a manager tells a dev what work to do, and they do it. A designer will choose the layout and colors, the dev simply makes the design a reality. But it’s definitely developed my role in working with customers. Knowing what questions to ask to have the right information to create a work ticket is immensely valuable. Now a manager doesn’t have to sit in every meeting, allowing for many more discovery discussions and opportunities.
As a dev, it’s easy to talk tech and work through things without ever writing anything down. (Or at least the simple problems, and hopefully you have done the pre-work of breaking complex problems into many bite sized simple problems.) Working with customers shows me that I can’t work that way; I have to write things down, which helps me to remember to speak it all out. For example, there’s a huge difference between knowing something and verbalizing something. Engineers have a really hard time putting thoughts into words, especially technical thoughts.
Creating a lesson plan forces me to walk through the ‘step-by-step’ of a process, which is a huge aid in verbalizing a process to a customer.
We’ve also developed a lot of training materials–some extensive, some short, step-by-step tutorials. Have you added a “teaching lens” to your view as you’ve developed those?
I spent a lot of time last week revising some of the documentation we created, and I thought a lot about how we created it originally versus the best way to make it digestible. How would it be best presented so that our users can learn it? How can they best access the material?
My developer brain works with dry, bulleted or numbered lists. My newly forming inner teacher, on the other hand, suggests fancy colors and pretty pictures. Putting things in columns to help visualize things, providing links to extracurriculars, and trying to move away from pure scientific writing to make it a bit more engaging.
Oh my gosh. As a high school teacher, I used to make fun of my mom for dressing like her bulletin boards…but we’re essentially both embracing the aesthetics of the elementary school bulletin board.
Yeah, well, you know that stuff you have to cover up in testing (do they still call it the CSAP)? There’s a reason rooms aren’t just black and white. (Portia’s note: no, LOL, they are not still taking the CSAP–that was like, 100 years ago, Branden. Get with the times!
Anyone interested in which standardized testing students in CO are participating in can check this link. Branden and I both grew up and tested in CO; Branden’s girlfriend teaches in CO. If you’re interested in testing in your state, check with your state’s Department of Education.)
Is there anywhere else you’ve added the lens of a teacher to your day-to-day activities?
The teaching lens doesn’t appear so much in my day to day. I’m still very much an engineer/software person, where I still get to be curious about the world, investigate, and solve problems.
But it has impacted all of my interactions with customers.
With customers, I check in to ensure they know the vocab we’re using, and provide more of a demo than I thought was necessary or than what they asked for; it helps avoid repetitive meetings. I still struggle with providing vocabulary, because it is so easy to forget that not everyone works in the same systems as I do every day, but I am getting better at looping back after I say things that may have gone over some viewers’ heads.
In my opinion, you’re one of our excellent trainers at SMT–more so even than me, because you know the tech side so well. Why do you think you’re so good at it?
It’s experience: I’ve been training since I was 20, been in situations where I’m in front of kids, on the spot. Knowing how to roll with the punches is extremely valuable. I’m also good at the topics I am teaching about. It’s much easier to think of quick answers to unexpected questions when you know the material inside and out. I’m also not the standard “awkward” engineer that doesn’t like to talk to people.
It’s probably also a confidence thing, which comes with experience…
So we owe some of it to your coach, who convinced you you’re a badass.
Yeah, hard not to attribute my success to my coaches. You fake it till you make it. The first time I was thrown into a training, I was nervous, but I knew I had support to keep me from falling on my face.
Back in my younger days, I used to be really scared of jumping. I got really hurt one year by not committing to a jump, and then got carried down the mountain in a sled. Ever since then, I just go for it; hesitating and not giving it 100% only ends up in disaster.
What’s your advice to developers working with customers?
Patience.
As a developer, you have so much background knowledge. It’s really hard to grasp that not everyone knows what you know. So it’s helpful just to go slowly and make sure everyone is on your page before moving forward. This seems like it will only extend your dreaded meeting, but believe me, it will save you immeasurable amounts of time moving forward.
What’s your advice to people considering a career change, or people grappling with fear/struggling to trust themselves?
Changing careers is difficult, mostly on a mental level. If you’re thinking about changing careers it’s probably because you’re unhappy where you are. Leaving a place of comfort is hard, but ask yourself: “Is it really that comfortable?” Use the skills you have, take steps to learn new ones, and take the leap. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but it is greener on some sides. Keep jumping fences until you find a nice lawn to call home. Imposter syndrome is real, but remember that everyone starts somewhere. I worked for a ski camp owned by an Olympic athlete who didn’t even ski for the first time until he was 16. You can do it. Believe in yourself.
What’s a lesson skiing has taught you that you’d like to leave us with?
There are a few actually.
First, if you tell yourself you’re going to land it, chances are, you’re going to land it. Skill can only get people so far. Confidence is what gives skills the grounds to stand on. Believe in yourself, even if nobody else does.
Second: use positive feedback. Your brain only really processes the end of statements. Saying something like “don’t look down” to yourself only implants the idea of looking down into your head. You can have the desired outcome by saying something like “look up” or “look forward” instead. In a moment of panic, your brain reaches out for whatever it can get its hands on. Increase your chances of success by ensuring that the branch it grabs onto is a positive one.
Finally, I just want to verify that it is true: if you work hard enough for it, you can be anything you want. Set big goals for yourself, and smaller goals along the way. Make sure those goals are achievable, and when you reach them, set new ones. Never stop striving to be your best.
