Eric Burns Online — Page 15 of 16 — My Virtual Take on Tech

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…

Android Emulation, Hybrid Mobile Apps and the Demo

April 23, 2018 High Level Tech Intro No Comments

The last deal I helped win at Dynatrace before their first RIF was when I created a demo that provided all the visibility and power that a normal PoC (Proof of Concept) would have done – but integrated our UEM into the customer’s own mobile app. With any complex and/or…

Chatbots and . . . Umm . . . errors.

April 18, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

Last week I attended a MeetUp about Conversational UI. Ofer Ronen of Chatbase had some interesting slides on how to catalog errors for chatbots. And I’d argue that this way of categorizing issues can make your team more efficient as they work to improve your chatbots. When people do context switching…

Using Messaging To Reduce MTTR (ChatOps To Fix Things Faster!)

April 13, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

If you aren’t using Messaging for your teams that diagnose and repair system issues you seriously need to rethink your methodology. Having worked as a Sales Engineer since late in 2010 I have gotten to see a lot of business models that depend on IT to deliver either a service…

Job Candidate – Don’t Make The Mistakes I Made

April 4, 2018 Hiring Process No Comments

I recently have spent over two months working through the process for a job I really wanted. During that journey I’d made mistakes that I feel are worth sharing. Hopefully you can take these lessons to heart. If you are ever in a similar position you won’t repeat them.

Job Candidate – Show Me The Money (or at Least Your Last Three W-2s)

March 30, 2018 Hiring Process No Comments

Years ago I read an article advocating that employers mention that they might want W-2 forms to verify past performance when hiring sales representatives or account managers. (For those of you not in the US, a W-2 is the form our Internal Revenue Service uses to have firms report compensation…

When Founders Hold On Too Hard

March 26, 2018 Startups No Comments

The tech scene has evolved and changed a lot since I joined Next Level Communications back in 1995. It used to be that there had to be much more of a path to revenue to generate investment. Lately it takes a lot less for a firm to get investment and…

Blending Work Lessons Into Your Life

March 21, 2018 Attitude No Comments

I was going through some papers on my desk and came across a local free paper that I must have picked up while doing some physical therapy at the gym. The cover had a photo of a windblown tree and a quote by Jeffrey Gitomer of “Resilience is not what…