Eric Burns Online — Page 14 of 15 — My Virtual Take on Tech

Job Candidate – We All Get The Same Pay . . .

July 5, 2018 Hiring Process Startups No Comments

I’ve worked for startups that have ranged in size from 5 people to a few hundred. (Yes, technically those shouldn’t be labeled “startups” but this is a different kind of economy.) At the smallest I actually signed on part-time for just health insurance and equity in the beginning. The next…

SE Candidate – Keep Organized During The Search

July 3, 2018 Hiring Process Sales Engineers No Comments

So one thing that is different about being a Sales Engineer in the tech space is that there is often true career stability. While other technologies or industries will grow or shrink, an SE that can adapt and learn will always be of value. When I look at my history,…

So What Am I Looking For?

June 27, 2018 Attitude Getting Hired Random Notes No Comments

A common question I get either from recruiters or hiring managers is “So what are you looking for?” I’ve been on this journey long enough that my priorities have distilled down to 4 clearly defined goals – beyond just doing something related to Sales Engineering. And if you are in…

SE – You MUST Know Layers 8 & 9 of the OSI Model

June 25, 2018 Sales Engineers No Comments

As a Sales Engineer one often knows a variety of disparate technologies and details. And any with network knowledge are already wondering about the title. Some readers already know the joke. You see the OSI model describes the conceptual layers to a network, and there are actually only 7 layers…

So You Get the Need for Performance – but How Do You Improve It?

June 13, 2018 CDNs High Level Tech Intro Monitoring No Comments

There are some eyeopening metrics out there about the correlation between performance and revenue. It has been 12 years since Amazon published their research that 100ms of delay cost them 1% in sales. And in 2013 Intuit published how each second of improved load time from 15 down to 7…

SE – Conference Booth Duty Is Your Friend

June 7, 2018 Sales Engineers No Comments

One of the responsibilities of a Sales Engineer is booth duty at various conferences. I must have 2 or 3 dozen badges hanging on the wall in my office from the past 7 years. Yes, there are some badges in there for Sales Kickoffs and other events, but the bulk…

Hiring? PagerDuty Knows How To Do It

June 4, 2018 Hiring Process Sales Engineers No Comments

So I’m a few months into my search for a new role and of course have had a few hiccups along the way. When I joined Compuware/Dynatrace I didn’t know what a Sales Engineer (or even APM) was, and it was a life changing experience. As for Fastly, CDNs sounded…

SE Candidate, the Technical Exercise Should Be Your Friend – Part II

May 29, 2018 Hiring Process Sales Engineers No Comments

It’s been two months since I wrote Part I on how the technical exercise, if done correctly, is good for all parties involved. During those two months I’ve had an opportunity to do several more exercises plus a handful of “technical” interviews. I’ve gotten to see some impressive ones as…

Collaboratively Improving Collaboration – or the Simple Genius of Slack’s Block Kit Builder

May 25, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

This week I attended Slack’s Spec conference. They showed off some new features and one of them was brilliant in the simplicity of the UI. It allowed the beauty of Slack to be self-perpetuating in a powerful way. I am sure there was a lot of development work and thought…

The Ease of Making Your Site Faster on Fastly (an Amazing CDN)

May 17, 2018 CDNs High Level Tech Intro No Comments

Performance is king. Despite that I’ve got this blog on some pretty ancient under-powered equipment. The first server was a 10 year old HP desktop with 2 gigs of RAM sitting in my garage. The new one is pretty old too, although a bit more powerful. That being said I…