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Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:01:39] Duke: All right, Corey, what are we doing today?
[00:01:41] CJ: Duke. First of all, extra special to be back together again. It's been a minute.
[00:01:47] Duke: It's been a bit. Yeah, we took a, , for those of you who don't know, I decided to, , move. so, , there was a few weeks there where just too much logistics going on to do an episode. But I finally moved, finally settled in, and, gosh, it's good to be back.
[00:02:02] CJ: absolutely. And today we're talking about labor day.
[00:02:07] Duke: Labor Day, the day we celebrate work by doing none of it. Laughter.
[00:02:14] CJ: Absolutely. That's the Batman. That should be the subtitle for Labor Day.
[00:02:20] Duke: So, a bit of an abstract episode though, right? Because we're going to talk about, how to do good work, the joys of work, but also the joys of rest and all that kind of stuff too.
[00:02:29] CJ: Cause look right. Well, what we do is work. This podcast is about work, you know, even though it never feels like, and we don't, maybe not always are explicitly talking about it, but. I mean, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about service now to service that ecosystem, how you can be a great consultant how you can be a great architect, all those things.
What we're talking about is how you can do good work. Right? So, this is our holiday.
[00:02:53] Duke: Yeah man, yeah.
[00:02:54] CJ: All
[00:02:55] Duke: we are winging this a bit too, so.
[00:02:57] CJ: Yeah, no, absolutely. And we'd never do that. Right. We've never done that before. So, so we're going to try this out one time and see if it works.
[00:03:08] Duke: the giggles, right? 100 and some episodes, we gotta try it at least once.
[00:03:11] CJ: Got to try it at least once you can move away from my strictly regimented format. All right. So why don't you kick us off?
[00:03:19] Duke: Let's talk about What is doing good work?
[00:03:24] CJ: Yeah.
[00:03:25] Duke: there's a lot of work that goes down in the ServiceNow ecosystem. Just look at ServiceNow community, right? Always trying to build each other up and everybody sharing their knowledge. And everybody seems to care a lot about knowing more and advancing and stuff like this.
Yet we still have. so much work generated every year, which is essentially recovering from bad work.
[00:03:47] CJ: Yeah, let's go away. I'm putting it.
[00:03:49] Duke: Like, how do you know if you're doing good work or not? be something worth talking about.
[00:03:52] CJ: , I completely agree Duke and, as I've gotten a bigger reputation in the ecosystem, that question has become exponentially more important to me. when I was just starting out, nobody knew who I was, right? Like I still cared about the word product that I delivered.
Right. I always have. But as I have now obtained a name in this ecosystem and people know me just by CJ and by site, and I get clients who hire me, , just by hearing my initials, right? It weighs on me. It creates a different level of responsibility, I think, and a different level of weightiness.
For me, when I sign up that I deliver good work, Because they don't feel like they were taking a chance on me, right? Like, you know, you know what I mean? Like
[00:04:42] Duke: to reward their confidence? Yes.
[00:04:44] CJ: Yeah, I want to. Yes. Yes. I love that. I want to reward the confidence, right? Because early on in your career, you get hired, right?
And , everyone should think that they're good, , and you do good work and you feel like those still that, hey, I got this job. There were probably other people competing with me. But it's the responsibility of rewarding that confidence, I think, by doing good work that weighs a lot heavier on me now.
And so I always want to make sure that when I step away from a project, , when it concludes that the work that I delivered is something that I can be proud of, that it met my own internal standards. And that it aligned with what the client wanted, even if they didn't necessarily know what they wanted when we started the project.
[00:05:28] Duke: Yeah, needed needed
[00:05:30] CJ: Yes. Need it. Yes. Yes. So that's how I look at doing go, at least that's the start of how I look at like doing good work. What about you?
[00:05:39] Duke: I don't know. I've just been spending a lot more time, especially with our joint client. Right? Like, what are the properties of good work? So you could break it down and make it more of an equation. You know what I mean?
[00:05:52] CJ: Okay. You want to do some math on
[00:05:54] Duke: yeah, yeah. Or at least some like analysis. So, does everybody understand what is needed? Does everybody understand what is needed? What's going to be built? Does everybody understand when it's going to be built? is everybody walking in lockstep? That's kind of the, good work, bad work paradigm that at least I've been living in lately. somebody has a need. It's got a lot of political priority behind it. And so when we get into that paradigm, like C suite wants this now,
then what do people usually do? Jam on the gas pedal. It's speed and speed and nothing else.
[00:06:31] CJ: Yeah. Speed without thought often. Right?
[00:06:34] Duke: what's the, yeah. And it's just. Speed and and put everything under a microscope at the same time. So we're like, going to emails. Now, let's look in the microscope and what itty bitty part of this. Are you doing right now?
[00:06:45] CJ: can I extend that metaphor? You just think, yeah, because you said, because you said, yeah, we're going 80 miles an hour. Right? But what happens when you need to go somewhere, right? , and you got a destination you want to get to, right? You want to get there quickly, right? Do you get in the car?
And then what's one of the first things that most people do? They put the address in the GPS and they get the fastest route, right? And then they drive. And so,
[00:07:09] Duke: which like clarity of destination. The path to the destination, understanding the path to the destination,
That just made me think, and I'm not sure how well it matches the metaphor, but you know, those times where, you know, exactly what you're going to do, like , we did a, an access request thing recently. It's in a healthcare system. And these doctors might work at multiple hospitals, but their information might be different hospital hospital, and so the customer said, we need a way to Enter, multiple different phone numbers, multiple different addresses, business names, at once.
And so it's like, I knew exactly the components you needed,
[00:07:44] CJ: Okay. Yeah.
[00:07:45] Duke: it had to have a multi row variable set. It needed to have a flow that basically did tasks per item in the multi row variable set. It needed to have testing from three different parties. And so that's like your GPS metaphor right there.
You know, the exact path.
And it was a difficult thing to get across the finish line in a very happy place. cause it had that C suite visibility. So every single day it was like, Oh my God, like what tiny little things did you do today?
[00:08:13] CJ: Yeah. Did you start at the car today? is the gas tank full? what part of the journey are we taking today? Right. Okay. Now tell me the exact route in the exact streets through the small towns we're driving through, you know, and what's the speed that you're going to take on each one of these.
Right. And it's like, well, just, you know, We gave you the destination. We told you when we're going to be there, right? And everyone agreed that that's, it's the right destination is the right path to take, and it's the right timing in terms of when we're going to arrive. just let us do our thing, right?
Like call once a week and say, Hey, did you make it to Colorado? I know you're on your way to new Hampshire, but were supposed to be in Colorado by today. Did you make it there? Yeah, good. We're on track. All right.
[00:08:55] Duke: I think we've talked about this before. Remember the, getting better at communication episode and how it's like the cure to micromanagement is like reverse micromanagement
[00:09:03] CJ: Yes, absolutely.
[00:09:05] Duke: manage them, don't let them manage you. And so maybe twice a day you send it like versus them checking in on the hour, twice a day, you send them something proactively.
[00:09:15] CJ: Yes.
[00:09:16] Duke: And I think the more I did that with this rollout, the easier it got.
[00:09:20] CJ: Yeah.
[00:09:20] Duke: Because if they don't hear from you, it's like, Oh, is anything getting done?
[00:09:24] CJ: Yeah.
[00:09:25] Duke: like in some client sites, that's the norm. Things not getting done.
[00:09:28] CJ: yeah, because they've become accustomed to that, right? They become accustomed to unless they're on your shoulder, right? And I was going to use a different word than shoulder, but unless they're on your shoulder, then nothing gets done. And then, so what happens is you condition your management to always be on your shoulder.
So sometimes, micromanagement gets created by the folks who are not doing good work.
[00:09:52] Duke: and so I guess if you're one of those that care about doing better work, maybe take a listen to that communication episode that we did to learn more about that. Because , I don't think there's such a thing as over communicating. Yeah, no, there is. There's definitely things of over communicating, but just think about you being the GPS. On something with, it's got high political impact, just say, okay, listen, I know for a fact, we need all these components. Even if you don't have a PM, you know, no matter what work paradigm you're working through, just map it out. I know I need a multi row variable set. I know I need a flow that does these, that processes the multi row variable set.
I know I need to do a few rounds of internal testing. Then we got to talk to the customer, make sure it's okay. Here's the check boxes. I want them to check off and just map it all out and then, use your judgment, but every day, every half week, whatever, every couple of days, like send that back to the stakeholders.
So they know that the progress is being done on it.
[00:10:49] CJ: Absolutely, because if you're telling them, they don't have to ask you, And if they're not asking you, and that also builds trust. And trust us what you want. If you don't like being micromanaged and you trust yourself to deliver on the work that you're being assigned. So yeah, man, we went deeper on that one than I thought we'd get.
And I love it.
[00:11:10] Duke: The other paradigm that made me think of is you're going to a place. Where the GPS can't help you for whatever reason,
[00:11:18] CJ: Oh yeah. Laura Wacker.
[00:11:20] Duke: and 773 know exactly what we're talking about with lower Whacker.
[00:11:29] CJ: Absolutely. Yes.
Yup. You know, when you've made the wrong turn, your GPS doesn't know, but you know, it's
[00:11:49] Duke: Okay. I mean, what I'm
[00:11:50] CJ: the daylight.
[00:11:51] Duke: Is, the agile project I'm working on
[00:11:54] CJ: Yeah.
[00:11:55] Duke: we're taking a team that works on, Azure dev ops, and we're bringing them on to service now on the agile 2.
0 app, and it's such a difference. It's not like we just say, Hey, check all these boxes and we're done because. You're moving platforms. It's like taking them out of a, out of a compact car and putting them into, a box truck is just like the rules don't apply anymore.
So it's just a different thing. And so how do you get from point A to point B then iteratively is how I'd say it.
[00:12:25] CJ: Yeah.
[00:12:26] Duke: we're doing like small A agile to deploy agile. And I find that's another place where we've got to over communicate too, because the product owner is like, what else do we have to do?
And it's like, Hmm, how do you describe what there is left to do? Because the comfort isn't there yet for them to make the transition.
[00:12:45] CJ: So they're still thinking through the old paradigm of work. And even while we're trying to build a new one, so it's funny, right? you really described that well, the agile process. But you're trying to deliver the agile process through the old process and bootstrap the agile process as small, they agile, right?
Like to get there. , but that's harder than it sounds. And it sounds hard. Um,
[00:13:09] Duke: feels natural while you're doing it. Right? how do you do this in your old world? Well, let's show you and they show you and there's like, well, this is what we're going to do it in our world. There's like a linguistics element of it.
[00:13:19] CJ: yeah, it's always project vocabulary, right? Always got to set that.
[00:13:21] Duke: vocabulary. We talked about that in the communication episode as well.
And there's, there's a lot of different ways to do it. Like the mechanics of it, right? Like where, what am I dragging to? What, interface am I using? even in the ServiceNow world, sprint planning works differently. Interface wise than a normal service. Now, form list, whatever,
[00:13:41] CJ: Yeah.
[00:13:42] Duke: it's a completely different way of doing it.
And so, I don't know a better way to deploy it than having several, several instances where we experience it together and we gather feedback and figure out where the rough spots are. Like, it took us 3 iterations of working of working sessions. Before we clued in that, hey, listen, we really got to think about the products, right?
The products that we support because they're very, the team in question is very team centric. Like, they think 80 percent of their thinking is done around which team is this work going to? And I'm like, well. We really have to think about the products we support too.
[00:14:23] CJ: yeah, and, you know, I think that's where, And take a shot, right? I think that's where CSDM comes in, when you start thinking about the applications, Or the services, right? That you support, but also. which team is going to handle that work, right?
I think the CSDM exists to do that mapping.
[00:14:42] Duke: Yeah. Somewhere it's stored, but this other team has, had such a paradigm of working in their world, they got to used to things. However it was that they did them,
[00:14:51] CJ: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
[00:14:53] Duke: And their own linguistics. So they work in this world where it's like, you put in an Epic, you put in a feature and then you put in a story and you have to have all three.
And then how do you move that to service now? When in their world, Epic. Was a product
[00:15:07] CJ: Right.
[00:15:07] Duke: epic is where I put the name of the product that I'm doing. I'm like, okay, but in service now, it doesn't even mean the same. And so we're, we're doing this weird world where it's like, okay, allow your epics are now products.
Your, your features are now epics
[00:15:24] CJ: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:25] Duke: your stories are stories. And then, you get more and more iterations in, and you find out that the top two layers were just things that they were forced to do. So they made up their own paradigm. And it doesn't really have any, hard definition around it. So you look at their products that they call epics and there's like ticket numbers in there and dates.
And you know what I mean? It's like, are these really things you can point to in your environment? things that have licenses, could you class them? No, they're just vague descriptions that we had to put in. okay. And so now we're teaching them about products, but you don't even this is not something I think there's just times where there is no GPS for it. You have no choice but to say, here's our paradigm. How does that match to yours? So that you can discover the trouble areas that you're going to need to reconcile.
[00:16:16] CJ: So you're saying you dropped from the GPS down to the compass and you're just wandering around broadly in a direction,
[00:16:22] Duke: Yes. Yes. And every few minutes you're stopping and checking, right? You're like, you go five minutes in this direction, Stop. Check your compass again. Five minutes in this direction. This is exactly what you're doing.
[00:16:36] CJ: Yeah.
[00:16:36] Duke: You're like adjusting as you go.
[00:16:38] CJ: Because the, the ultimate, like the destination is known , the origin is known, but , the actual route is shrouded in forest and mountains. Right. And, and you don't know what's under that tree cover. you don't know what's under that tree canopy.
You don't know if you're going to run into a stream or, if it's going to be an impassable hill that you're going to have to walk around, or maybe you might have to go grab some dynamite and blow a hole through it. Right. Like, you don't know any of those things because the road hasn't been traveled and it hasn't been made.
Right? And so you're just using the compass to get to the destination and you are tackling each one of those obstacles as you encounter them on the road there.
[00:17:14] Duke: so the whole point of those 2 metaphors together, I guess, is just. To do good work, you have to be comfortable in a couple of different modes of work. One, we know how to get there. And so make that clear. So your customer knows too, and then over communicate as you go down that path. So they know how far we are from destination.
The other mode of work is less, less known and more of like an adventure to get there. You gotta be, you gotta be, you gotta be comfortable in both.
[00:17:45] CJ: yeah. And I think communication plays heavy parts in both of those. . Especially , when you don't have that route. . And you're working with each other, you work, you're collaboratively working to find it. Right. You got to be able to communicate back and forth with each other. So you have that trust so that you don't have like 1 group feeling like they're trying to take the entire team off on a tangent somewhere.
That might not be where the project is supposed to go. 100%.
[00:18:08] Duke: All right, that was 2 of mine, man. That's 15 minutes. Let's do 1 of yours,
[00:18:11] CJ: When I think about, , folks getting exploited in the market, right?
, that's one of the things that I've actively. My entire career intentionally tried to avoid and not only try to avoid. Okay. So let me take a step back on this, right? Because I think this is a really important topic because I've seen folks, languish and careers, , folks with skill, folks with talent, right?
Language and careers because they've become comfortable being exploited by
[00:18:42] Duke: Okay. Okay.
[00:18:51] CJ: mutual best interest. And I think no 1 teaches you, when you enter the workforce.
That the old paradigms of labor are gone, at least for most of us, right? I think there still exists for folks who are in some of the bigger unions, right? Where you go in and, and there's a lot of protection and there's a lot more known, but in places like it, no one is teaching you that you got to self advocate.
No one is teaching you that your skillset is valuable and that other people will hire you. Right.
[00:19:23] Duke: there's like, pros and cons to that, right? So the pros of working in tech is that there's a lot more room than you can imagine to self advocate and get a better deal out of it. Right? Right.
[00:19:36] CJ: Yes.
[00:19:36] Duke: but that comes at a cost of things like traditional union protection. I remember I was in like a grocer's union I worked grocery in high school, it didn't matter how good you were at the job.
Right, you could be 10 times the productivity of somebody else, but it was like, you came into this title, you get, 874 per hour period,
[00:19:56] CJ: right, right,
[00:19:58] Duke: nothing about how, ambitious you were, or your ability to learn new skills. Could move you from courtesy clerk to grocery stocking.
You had to have some blessing from the union that you would take in the right course and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, before you could move to that. Like, I hate that about the hardened unionized world, you know, like I know there's benefits to be reaped from it, but. I just think that how difficult it is to navigate our world.
Sometime. It really is a blessing that you can self advocate and rely on different skills to get ahead. Sorry. I totally took us off topic
[00:20:33] CJ: No, man, but I think it's relevant. Right. And, and yeah. Because you're absolutely right. Like, you know, when you're going to union depends on, and I'm not familiar with every single union, , my night job, you know, I do negotiations with the unions. but what I will say is that you're absolutely right.
there are typically these, steps and ladders, I think are what they call them. And you got to have a certain amount of experience and a certain type of certification sometimes to go from one step to the other, or to get on a different ladder or something like that.
Right. And all of that. comes at a trade off of, if you are really good, but you don't have these other things, you still have to stay in this other spot where maybe you're not making that same level of a salary that you could make if self advocacy was a thing, you know, in it, right?
Like self advocacy is a thing. And what that means though, is that the flip side to self advocacy is that skillset is also a thing. And so you have to, , if you put the work in to make sure that you are, that you have the talent necessary, then you can go and you can self advocate in your internal organization and say, Hey, you know, I'm good.
Right. I've been kicking butt here. You know, the set last 10 projects you assigned to me, 8 of them came in earlier, the early, the other 2 were on time. We got, , I don't know, 10%, you know, of whatever in terms of like, post implementation defects or whatever, whatever the measurements are. Right? Like, you can go in there and you can go in and say, look.
Yeah, , I've killed it, right? I've killed it for the last two years and my raises have been cost a living and I'm better than that. And let's talk.
[00:22:03] Duke: And let's take a moment to just, We're still in the stage where the industry isn't completely saturated.
[00:22:11] CJ: right.
[00:22:12] Duke: And so there is room, for a competition. there's still a war for good talent in the ServiceNow world.
[00:22:17] CJ: yeah. there's definitely always a market here right now, right. For good talent. And so that you should always have in your pocket when you enter those conversations. And so when you have that conversation, when you do that self advocacy work and you know, you don't like the outcome of that, well, then you need to start, picking up the virtual phone or the, , the keyboard, right.
And start just looking around and seeing where the market might have you. And then you can start making some decisions, but don't sit. and I mean, too many people sit unhappily in jobs, right? Too many people sit. and in anger and stew in and to think, you know, this place didn't take care of me and there's nothing I can do about it.
It's like, no, this is a market and in the market you have opportunities, right? So explore the market opportunities and figure out if that place where you are is still the best place for you. Sometimes it's not. And sometimes, you know, you need to come, you need to present, you know, your current employer with, you know, a little bit of evidence, let them know, Hey, If you really do value me, like you're saying, this is what the market values me at. are we ready to have this conversation? And look, never, ever, ever feel like you can't have this conversation with your employer because you think you're going to get fired. Because if you're, if you, look, if your employer is going to fire you for asking for a raise. You probably, right?
[00:23:47] Duke: you probably there's other signs to,
[00:23:51] CJ: Exactly.
[00:23:52] Duke: yeah. But if you're looking for a soft way to say that, you can be like, this is what I think I could get out there. What's the pathway for me getting that here?
[00:24:02] CJ: Yes. I love that.
[00:24:03] Duke: You know, and that's like a soft way of saying it and it's just nobody feels threatened by that.
[00:24:08] CJ: Right.
[00:24:08] Duke: Hey, I'm like. I have some self confidence and I can, but I want to stay here. So let's figure out the map here, but that kind of makes me think about, I know that there's some partners that do a great job of, great internal company bonding and whatever, a pseudo family, if you will, but there's this appendix of the technology workforce is, is this idea of loyalty.
[00:24:33] CJ: Yeah.
[00:24:34] Duke: But loyalty is an appendage that doesn't, function anymore,
[00:24:38] CJ: Yes.
[00:24:39] Duke: for both parties. Right? Like loyalty was a thing when Hey, in, in 20 ish years, you're going to give me a gold watch and a pension.
[00:24:48] CJ: Yeah.
[00:24:49] Duke: You know what I mean? And today we're like, There's a whole generation that's never heard the word pension. And make no mistake, even companies that love you can say, Hey, listen, things aren't working out. , we love you. It's nice knowing you, but this here's two weeks and you're out
[00:25:06] CJ: yep.
And it's happened to people.
[00:25:08] Duke: believe that you have that power too.
[00:25:10] CJ: I love how you brought that in there, right? Because I think that's incredibly important, Is that you acknowledge the power that you have in the situation, you're not lucky to have a job. They're lucky to have you as an employee. and at the same time, right, if it's a great place to work, then, you know, maybe you can also say, and, you're lucky to work there, but this is a two way street, make sure that, that you are reaping the rewards of the relationship as well as the other party. And I think all too often we're focused on ensuring that our employer loves us. But we're not taking the time to focus on making sure that we love our employer.
Right. And, doing something about it when we don't. And that something isn't always like, well, I'm going to test the market. Often that's something is having conversations. With your manager, with their manager, whatever that kind of process internally, it looks like it's surfacing those, issues in conversation casually in that output device.
so that it's not a surprise. And you're not waiting until you're literally ready to step out the door and then telling them you're unhappy, and also on the flip, so that you're not telling them that you want a promotion the day before, , you're not giving them that ultimatum, like in 24 hours, you're going to give me a promotion or I'm leaving, right?
Like you should be having these conversations with your management structure continuously. Once you step in the door, okay, what's my three month plan? What's my year plan? What's my five? You know what I mean? Like you should be saying, hey, in two years, right? If I'm kicking butt, I expect to see whatever the next level looks like.
[00:26:43] Duke: that's a great thing about self advocacy because I think a lot of people I did when I was young, you know, when I was a kid, I thought that companies did that automatically.
[00:26:52] CJ: Yes, and they used to.
[00:26:55] Duke: yeah, isn't that what performance reviews are for? And then then I had my first few big corporate performance reviews and i'm like, oh This is make believe Like we're playing house as adults is what we're doing Okay, you pretend that you had these objectives 12 months ago and then write something about how you perform them And i'll pretend that we just didn't agree on this five minutes ago, and then we're not going to give you a raise And you're going to pretend to have you happy about that.
All right, great You We'll see you in 12 months.
[00:27:24] CJ: Yes. Yes.
[00:27:27] Duke: So the self advocate is basically going to be having their own trajectory in mind and making sure that they are, , being evaluated and progressed like, Oh, I hate to say it too. Because there's a lot of hard workers out there, but I know so many people in our space, Corey, who have accelerated very quickly, very quickly. but only because they were having these conversations constantly, like, as soon as they got in and started doing well, they're like, okay, but this is where I see myself at this company. How do we get there?
[00:27:59] CJ: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:00] Duke: And those people have, consistently elevated their stakes. I'm not going to name names to make them uncomfortable or whatever, but , nobody's going to do that for you.
[00:28:10] CJ: Yeah. Nobody will. . And you need to really take charge of your career because to your point, Duke, right? Like way back in the day, this was a thing that, companies did, right? Like they approached you. At least that's what I was told, right? I didn't live there in those times, but I was told like, , companies approached you and during your performance reviews, like, yeah, and we're going to give you that promotion.
. And, but you didn't have to ask for it. Like you just heard that you were up for a promotion. Yeah. Right. Remember that,
[00:28:34] Duke: yeah, yeah.
[00:28:35] CJ: you know, like, I don't even know what that means to be up for a promotion. Right. And every time I've ever been promoted or attained a raise, a significant raise that was in excess of like cost of living or significant bump to my bonus, I had to advocate for it.
Right. I had to go in and I asked for it. Right. And that doesn't mean that, my management structure didn't care about me. I think I worked for really good people. Right. I just think that's how this works now. I don't know. I, you know,
[00:29:03] Duke: Yeah, for real, cause when you have a great boss, they somehow take on the advocacy for you. Like, I remember, I was making a certain amount of money, and I had aspirations to make more, but I didn't wake up every day saying, I gotta get to the next pay grade.
Right. All of a sudden I got a decent raise and I'm like, what's this? And my boss was like, well, you just been putting in the work and on top of things. And so I advocated for you to get the raise this year.
And I'm like, great. But that was an accident. If I had an okay boss, you know what I mean? If I had an okay boss, it wouldn't have happened.
[00:29:32] CJ: right.
[00:29:34] Duke: So you have to have like great boss and upward in order for that to happen on autopilot.
[00:29:39] CJ: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:29:41] Duke: most of the significant increases I've gotten in my life has been because I've maxed out here,
whether or not I've had a conversation with people, I loved working for that company because, when it was time for me to leave. it was kind of, you know, having open, frank conversations and they were like, we love how you think about this product, but we're happy where we are right now. And so , your position is going to be a lot less aspirational and more just, keep it going.
[00:30:07] CJ: And if you've got aspirations, that's the last thing you want to hear,
[00:30:10] Duke: Right, right. And so it was like, at least everybody knew where things were at.
[00:30:14] CJ: Yes. But that's the important part. I actually just last weekend, , went golfing with a bunch of folks. I used to work with and, my former, CTO showed up. . And he's a great, great person. And one of the things I told him, and I tell them this one, tell him this whenever I see him, right.
It's like, I really appreciate it working for you because you are always candid with me. I always knew where I stood always. And there was a time where I wasn't standing in a great space. Thanks. And he was very honest with me about that. this is where you are. And these are the choices that I see that you have.
One of those things was the first thing was like, you can leave. Right. And you'll likely make more money somewhere else. And because I don't think that this place that you're in represents your skill set, right? Because I've seen the work that you do just some political stuff, right?
What's happening. So you can leave, you can make more money. You might even, you might be happier or you can stay, right? And that's going to be the easy path. He's landing you or you can stay. Right. I'm not firing you. I think you do work. You're going to be fine. Right. You, but you can stand and you can rebuild.
That's going to be hard, but if you stay here and rebuild those opportunities will open back up for you and you can't ask for anything better than that, man.
[00:31:29] Duke: Yeah. True man. True.
[00:31:32] CJ: Right. , and a lot of that came through again, self advocacy, right? Having those conversations with him and, you know, I prompt it, the conversations, right? And whenever I had those conversations with him, because I was in like the management chain or whatever, we just talked all up and down the career. Right. And he gave me that, , feedback and , long story short, I stayed, I kicked ass, got promoted a bunch of times. When I finally did leave there, you know, was offered a promotion to try to get me to stay.
but none of that would have happened if I didn't have that conversation with him and didn't know where I stood and didn't decide. That I didn't want to go out like that
get off topic there somehow, but I think,
[00:32:09] Duke: No, I don't think so. I mean, I think we're just talking about labor. Right. And so there's the, how do I do good labor and how do I make sure that I'm not in the exploited category of labor?
[00:32:20] CJ: yes, how do I make sure. That I'm not in the forgotten category as well, because that goes hand in hand with ensuring that with that self advocacy point, you're making sure that, the folks there with power know that you're thinking about these things.
And so that means they're now thinking about them as well. And they're thinking about you, which is always important.
[00:32:40] Duke: Get time for a quick one.
[00:32:41] CJ: Yeah, we got, yeah, let's do it.
[00:32:43] Duke: Okay. Literally people get ready. Cause I'm going to beat a dead horse to death.
[00:32:48] CJ: Oh man. I'll just go get the saddle off
[00:32:50] Duke: That's right. I need a bigger stick. one thing that I have loved about this ecosystem since day one is everybody trying to build more like. How do I do more stuff in service now? Like the execution part of it, right? How do I get smarter? How do I give myself a broader range of tools to build the thing on service now, and I've loved that about our space for so long, but man, it's, we're so far in and one of the basics is still, it's still such a weakness in our space is that we don't leave. documentation, we don't memorialize the stuff we build
[00:33:41] CJ: Yeah.
[00:33:42] Duke: and it's not good enough to just say the stories log what we built, you need to be making documents that articulate you've done especially for consultants, but also for customers to, you just have no idea the tax, the tax on labor, that you incur by not documenting your work.
Imagine. If every day, the decisions you were making today added five more minutes to your commute every week, you know what I mean? So that's 10 minutes a week in six weeks. That's an extra hour of commute. you're only getting paid for the labor that you perform once you get to your work, but you're spending all this extra labor.
To get to work, and that is what not documenting your code does in the ServiceNow world is you make somebody else take a longer commute to work. It takes longer to get everything done. Even if the excuse was documentation is hard. Even if that was true at some point, it's still worth it imagine you get the C suite and say, Oh my God, we have this, very important onboarding thing that we need to get done.
It's literally stopping us from earning revenue. You would better get that up in the catalog, like in a week. . And you have this great idea. You build out the catalog item. The customer loves it. And the frigging thing keeps reopening itself or closes early.
And you're like, what the heck? And so what do you do? You spend an extra day that week researching why, and it's because somebody built custom business logic around rhythm closure. You know what I mean? And it's just like, nobody wrote it down. You're not like, but in a perfect world, we could just say like, okay, I'm at a new site, I got to build a catalog item.
Let's pull up the architecture. history and see what's happened on rhythm. what things have we added to baseline functionality? It should be that easy. And when the C suite is telling you to build a catalog item, brother, they do not care what obstacles in your way.
[00:35:43] CJ: no, absolutely.
[00:35:44] Duke: it's your fault.
So the stuff you're not documenting today, you are actually sowing somebody else's future with landmines that they get to step on. Like, it didn't work because Because I didn't know you'd change the system this way.
[00:35:58] CJ: Why would I know that? Why would I expect that? Why would I think that? Thanks.
[00:36:03] Duke: that somebody But it happens all the time! Sorry, I didn't mean to yell. But it happens all the time.
[00:36:08] CJ: It does happen all the time, especially on platform, right? That's what we do, right? We call you can call it customization, call it configuration, call it whatever you want to do. Right? But that's what we do. We change the platform in order to align it closer with what the business is asking for.
And sometimes, ? That leaves landmines behind for somebody else who wants to come and engage with that process or build a completely different process that somehow, takes into account. Something that should be standard. That is no longer standard,
[00:36:36] Duke: you got to start writing this down. we did an episode on, documenting. You should probably take a listen to that, but I'm on a, on a mission this year to figure out how we can improve this at scale.
[00:36:48] CJ: man.
[00:36:49] Duke: this is labor that is so desperately needed.
And I think people avoid it because it is so fricking laborious,
[00:36:59] CJ: Yeah.
[00:37:00] Duke: that it's not as laborious as think about all the labor intensive jobs that have ever been right. There's still. Merit in the work, somebody still needs to do it. And gosh, darn it. Somebody does do it.
[00:37:12] CJ: Yeah.
[00:37:13] Duke: And we, owe them a debt. We owe them a debt of gratitude. The people who built our roads, the people who built our railways, the people who make sure that our sewers operate fine, people who make sure our subways operate fine. The people out there on the oil rigs, the people growing the wheat for our bread, like, these aren't glamorous jobs, but somebody's got to do them and documentation is that for our ecosystem.
Silence.
[00:37:46] CJ: elevate the folks who do it, Because it is not , the bright and shiny. It isn't the, we've just built a new flow and it's really kick ass.
Like, or we just built all these really weird flips and kicks and everything. And look how cool that is. . Documentation is not that documentation is building more efficient roads. So, like you said, so the next time you walk, you go to work, right?
Like you're not adding five minutes on the commute, you're subtracting it. and to your point, if someone is not building that documentation, everybody else will be doing that work over and over and over again, and it will just be harder, It will be more difficult, more rigorous, more annoying,
[00:38:23] Duke: Yeah,
[00:38:24] CJ: Because now you have to discover all this stuff that somebody else knew and just didn't write down. Think about it. Those write it down.
I'm a hundred percent what you do. I don't think we can beat this dead horse enough, because honestly, I
[00:38:34] Duke: dead yet. I don't
[00:38:35] CJ: yeah, well, that's the thing I was gonna say, it's still alive, right?
Because every time we, parachute into, If there's not an architectural standard stock, if there's not like a, notice of change doc, , if those things aren't in, in existence, then. , we're, we obviously haven't talked about this enough.
[00:38:53] Duke: Yep. All right. That's 45 minutes.
[00:38:56] CJ: Yeah. So the last thing I want to say on this episode is labor day is for rest. So unless you're out there on the grill rest,
[00:39:04] Duke: uh, truth, man. Truth. All right. Thanks so much for listening, folks, and we will see you on the next one.
[00:39:10] CJ: bye bye.