Jeffrey Snover

Howdy. Today I'm going to talk to you about three things.

I'm going to talk to you about transitions, the role transitions play in your career. I'm going to talk about the role transitions have played in my career, particularly around taking the Windows out of Windows Server, or command-line interfaces and PowerShell.

And I'm going to talk about this big transition that's happening in the industry, digital transformation, and how this provides you an opportunity to supercharge your career. And that's my goal. My goal is to help you get this dynamic in focus so that you can make some changes and supercharge your career.

So I'm Jeffrey Snover. I'm a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. I am the Chief Architect for Azure Storage and our Cloud Edge work. I'm also the Chief Architect for Azure Stack. But most people know me as the inventor of PowerShell.

I work for Microsoft. Microsoft has about 120,000 employees. We have $90 billion in revenue, and we are in a race to become the first company with a trillion-dollar market capitalization. So, pretty big company.

Now, I want to do a survey to get my audience, okay? So how many of you believe in the hype of digital transformation? I'd like you to raise your hands.

Okay. Now keep your hands up.

Everybody else, how many of you plan to retire in the next three years?

Okay, if you have your hands down, you should pay attention. Seriously, you need to pay attention to this talk.

Okay. There are two types of jobs. The way I think of it is there's stair jobs. Stair jobs: during normal periods, you climb up the stairs of your career slowly. There's somebody in front of you, and then every now and again, things go wrong. But slowly but steadily, you'll advance in your career.

And then there are these periods of disruption where everything changes, and it's an opportunity for your career to advance or to, as we saw in the previous slide, go the other direction.

And these periods are what I call the elevator jobs: a period of time where, for some reason, things line up nicely, and you're able to go up one, two, three levels of your career in a relatively short period of time. And I know that there are a number of you in the audience who've experienced this with your DevOps journey, so it's really quite exciting.

So basically, the point I want to make is that there are these transitions, and with a transition, it can really be the wind in your sail. It can help you a lot. Or not.

Transitions can be tricky. Again, the key point is that during a transition, there are new winners and there are new losers. So you want to get this in focus because there's a difference between those two. And you want to be the guy in the previous thing.

All right. So you all heard of Facebook. Well, it turns out there was a Facebook before Facebook.

I once took the family on a winter vacation down to San Diego, and we were walking around SeaWorld when all of a sudden, I heard this big booming voice, "Hey, Jeffrey!" I looked around, and it was Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, one of the richest guys in the world, and he's shouting out, "Hey, Jeffrey," at SeaWorld.

It's like, what the heck's this?

And he comes over, and we have this long talk, and it's like, oh, that's great. What the heck just happened?

And I mentioned it to someone afterwards, and he said, "Yeah, because you're in his Facebook."

I said, "What are you talking about?"

And he says, "Well, Steve has a three-ring binder next to his bed with a page for all the key people in the company. And it's got your picture, and it's got what you're working on and your background, and it's his Facebook. And every night he looks through that and sees all the people moving his business forward. So you're in his Facebook."

I was like, "Wow, that's odd. I didn't know that."

Now, being a Technical Fellow, I get to participate in the review of the performance and the reward conversations for a lot of senior people. And the conversations typically go like this: Who are the people moving this business forward?

We identify those people, and then we ask a next round of questions: How are they doing? Are they secure in the socket, or are they loose? Are they happy? How do we reward them? How do we keep them in the boat?

And guess what? We compensate them. At Microsoft, we compensate them very well. But like everyone else in this room, we have a budget. And when we take a big bunch of money and we hand it to the people who are moving our business forward, it comes from somewhere. And it comes from the people who aren't moving the business forward.

So guess what? You want to be one of those people moving the business forward.

Now I'm going to take a shift and talk about transitions in my career, and how that has helped me, and some times when it didn't help me.

I started off as a Unix developer. This picture is oddly accurate. It's not me, but it could well be, with the exception of the hair. I actually had worn pants like that for many, many years.

So I was a Unix developer for many, many years, and I went to work at Digital. And at Digital, I had a stair job. Unix was not critical to the success of Digital, and I was doing fine.

And then at some point, Digital got involved with NT. Microsoft's invented NT, and Digital got involved in it, and I was all in. I was very thrilled about this technology. Fantastic, real operating system by Dave fricking Cutler. Dave Cutler has worked with these guys, producing NT, but running on PC economics hardware. Incredible.

So I went all in on this transition to NT. I read everything. There was nothing you'd written about NT that I didn't read. I evangelized. I went around the company telling people why this was important, what they needed to do, helped them get their projects started.

And at some point, we had one of the biggest NT projects the company had. We were partnering with IBM to port NetView to NT, and they tapped me on the shoulder, and they say, "Hey, we'd like you to be the architect for that project."

And I grabbed that, and we just had a blast. It was fun. I worked my butt off. This was not a period in my life that I would call work-life balance. No, not at all. But I was just having a blast. We won a number of awards, et cetera. And this was my elevator job.

Okay? Because in fairly quick order, we released that. Took a while, but released that, and then things worked out very well for me. I became a Digital Consulting Engineer.

This is a big deal, okay? These are some other Digital Consulting Engineers: Dave fricking Cutler, Bill fricking Laing. In fact, if you go take a look at the Wikipedia page on Turing Award winners, a shocking number of Turing Award winners have all been Digital Consulting Engineers. This was really quite an elite club in the industry.

Now, whereas that transition was doing very well for me, the industry was also going through a big transition, and the industry was transitioning from a vertical integration industry into a horizontal integration industry. Okay? By the way, that's interesting because the industry's, in fact, moving back to vertical integration, but that's the subject of another talk.

Digital did not survive this transition. In fact, it was Bill Gates who said, "Most people get the decline of DEC all wrong. The reality is that Digital declined because they were excellent at something that no longer mattered."

They were excellent at something that no longer mattered, and therefore they died.

Part of dying took many years, and they sold things off one by one by one. They took my division, the management division, they sold us to Computer Associates. I met with Charles Wang, decided he was insane, and did not want to work for him.

So instead, I cold-called their competitors, a company called Tivoli, and I said, "Hey, why don't you hire me? I'll take my product and my team, and we'll go compete against these guys."

And that's what happened. And so I worked at Tivoli for a number of years, where I ran their network management development effort for a number of years.

That was very successful, going along great, till one day. One day, the CTO of Tivoli asked me out to lunch. Went to a barbecue place. We're having a nice conversation, and he said the following:

"Jeffrey, you're one of my hardest-working, smartest guys. You're doing great. I love it."

I said, "Okay."

He says, "But here's the issue. You're working on a product that every time I sell it, I earn $15,000."

I said, "Yeah."

He says, "You're not working on the product that every time I sell it, I earn $2 to $20 million. So I just have one question for you, Jeffrey. Do you want to be relevant?"

Wow.

I had what I think the alcoholics call a moment of clarity. Okay? Because I was passionate about my technology, right? It was NT. I was passionate about it. I went and did this incredible thing, won all these awards, took my product and my team, did this crazy-ass play. I moved to Texas to work on my project, and here he's telling me I'm not relevant because I'm not moving the business forward.

And at the end, I decided, well, actually, impact mattered more to me than technology, so I took that job, and that went very well. Eventually, I got put on this guy's radar screen, and I got the call, and I went to work for Microsoft as the lead architect for all their management technology and products.

At the time, Microsoft was heavily focused in on the GUI. GUI. If I can make it about the GUI, I win, so let's make it about the GUI.

That was great, except I could see that there was going to be a transition to very large data centers, and a GUI-centric world was not the right thing to do there. You needed automation. You needed lights-out automation. And so I wrote down the Monad Manifesto. The Monad Manifesto was the basis for Windows PowerShell.

This was a fundamentally new approach to automation, and I was in. I was totally in. I was going to do it again.

Now you've seen this org chart of Microsoft. I was, as they say, an industry hire. Bill Gates sponsored hiring me. Came in at a high level. I decided I was going to be all in on this automation technology to take advantage of this transition, and was demoted.

Yes, I was. And that lasted five years.

Okay, so now you've heard of this thing called Vista. So fine, I was demoted. I didn't care so much because, again, I get very passionate about technology, and I just knew this was the best technology I'd ever come with. Again, moment of clarity. I had a moment of clarity. This is the right way to do automation. The other ways are wrong. This is right. I'm going to pursue this. There's a pony here.

And I did.

So while that was going on, there was something called Windows Vista. Does anybody remember Windows Vista? Yeah. Not our finest release.

Now everybody knows it was not our finest release, but they forget that Vista was the save. Vista was the save.

It was the save of what? Something called Longhorn.

Longhorn. Bill was on this jihad to get everybody to transition to .NET. .NET. And a bunch of people were like, "Well, Bill says .NET," and did incredibly stupid engineering decisions, like trying to get .NET into the kernel and replacing the Open dialog box with .NET.

So Notepad would go from 15K working set size to, when you say Save As, it would then balloon to 15 megabytes as .NET got paged in. Just crazily bad decisions. So it was a disaster.

And the people got pretty angry, not at themselves for making stupid decisions, but they decided, "I'm so smart, it must be this .NET technology." And so within the Windows organization, there became this "never, ever use .NET." Those application guys can use it, but us OS people never use .NET.

And basically, everyone abandoned .NET, and they produced what we called the seven rules for using .NET in Windows. And these were incredibly hard, incredibly draconian rules that you had to overcome in order to get .NET into Windows or to use .NET in Windows.

Now, I said everyone abandoned .NET. That's not true. Everyone but one. I did not abandon .NET. I knew it was great technology. I knew it was the right technology for the problem I was solving. And so I withdrew from the Windows product, developed this on the side and--

Oh, sorry. That began a difficult period.

While I was still working on this, they found out, this guy's working on automation, on command-line interfaces. It was the most miserable two or three years of my life. You cannot imagine how miserable they made my life.

I had executives say things like this: "Admins don't want command-line interfaces."

I said, "Yeah, what'd you do before you came to Microsoft?"

"So I came here from college."

I said, "Yeah, I knew that."

I had one executive literally pull me aside and say, "Jeffrey, exactly what part of effing Windows is confusing you?"

It was a very difficult period, but I was absolutely convinced that I was on the right path, so I stuck with it. And basically, if they weren't going to fire me, I was going to get this technology out the door.

So what did I do? I found the coalition of the willing. The Exchange team had the problem. They understood the problem. They saw the light of what I was doing, and they became our partner.

And every time they tried to kill me, I'd say, "Well, let's talk to the Exchange guys." And the Exchange guys would say, "Hey, I'm betting my multibillion-dollar-a-year business on this technology. What are you trying to do?" And people would back off.

So that provided me some protection.

But then, it was time to get back in Windows. Remember, there were the seven rules of getting .NET in. And I'm telling you, these were Herculean things.

The heck with that. I'm in. Each one of these things, I nailed it.

"Hey, what's the status of that?"

"It's green."

The heck with green. It's got to be greener than green. You don't understand, man. They don't want us in. We've got to meet these things by a wide margin so there's unambiguously we are going to get in.

And we did it. Every single one of these things we solved, we solved it well, we solved it by a wide margin.

So we knocked on the door, and we said, "We're bringing PowerShell and .NET into Windows."

And that's when I found out that there were eight rules to using .NET in Windows, and you only find out about the eighth rule when you've got past the first seven.

The eighth rule, you guessed it: no .NET in Windows.

But the reality is that there was this transition to large data centers, that people were able to see it. They saw it there. And so the owners of the server business said, "Hey, wait a second. It's time to go revisit this conversation."

And ultimately, that was successful, and I shipped Windows PowerShell in Windows. Hurrah.

And that's me. Yeah. It was a pretty happy day.

Okay, so I became a hero. Happy days. I eventually got my promotion back. So it took me five years.

At some point, we had an executive before some event pulls me aside. He says, "Wow, things have really changed for you."

I said, "Yeah, they have."

He says, "You were a pariah for years."

I said, "Yeah."

He says, "Well, we were rooting for you."

I said, "Really? I never knew that."

If you ever are rooting for somebody, please do them a favor: go tell them. It really would've helped.

Anyway, so remember this, performance evaluations, what do we do? We take all the money, and we give it to the people moving the business forward. Well, guess what? For five years, I was not viewed as the guy moving the business forward. So this effort cost me a lot of money.

But eventually, I got my position back, and then people are like, "Yeah, this is great stuff. This is really important to our business." I got promoted to Distinguished Engineer, and then I was the Chief Architect of System Center, and then the Chief Architect for Windows Server.

Chief Architect for Windows Server.

Let me tell you, that's what you put on the front of your tombstone. On the back, you might say, "Oh, yeah, he was a loving father and husband," and we go, whatever. But on the front, you put Chief Architect for Windows fricking Server. This is a big deal.

Now it turns out at Microsoft, there've only been three Chief Architects for Windows Server: Dave fricking Cutler, Bill fricking Laing, and me. Now, I have no idea how I got on that list and that club, but I'm in it, and I'm owning it. This is a big deal.

Eventually, I became Technical Fellow. Now that's the top of the rung. My joke is I can no longer be promoted. Indeed, of 120,000 employees, we have about 11 Technical Fellow individual contributors. So this is a big deal.

So as to paraphrase Garrett Morris: large data center transition been very, very good to me.

Now, again, the point is, when there's this inflection point, sometimes you go up, sometimes you go down, and if you get the timing wrong, sometimes it goes down before it goes up.

So just because it's a transition doesn't mean that it's going to help you, and it doesn't mean it's going to happen on the timeframe you think it's going to happen.

Now, big transition. In fact, I think this is the biggest transition we will see in our careers. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure of this. And this is the transition that Marc Andreessen identified in his paper, "Why Software Is Eating the World."

If you have not read this paper, you should read it, but here's the gist of it. He says, "Software is eating the world."

One, it's eating traditional businesses. Traditional businesses are being replaced by software businesses: bookstores by Amazon, ads by Google, telecom by Skype, recruiting, LinkedIn, et cetera.

But even for the industries that software is not replacing, software is responsible for a large and growing share of the value of the product. So cars are a great example. We got one in the lobby. It's not a piece of code, but there's a lot of code in it.

Cars today have somewhere between 10 and 100 million lines of code in the car. They do things like safety and engine control. They do entertain passengers. They do navigation. They do connectivity. Software comprises a lot of the value of the physical object, the car.

These are the two key dynamics. He said, "Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming."

Now, here is a list of the top companies in the world ranked by market capitalization in 2017. The highlighted ones are businesses whose value is primarily driven through software. That's over half.

This is that same list in 2011, when Marc Andreessen wrote that document. The highlighted ones are the ones whose business are primarily driven through software.

So he pointed out the phenomena, and this was the world, and now, a few years later, over half the top companies are primarily driven by software.

This is the largest transition we will experience in our careers.

Yeah, whether it's banking, retail, or automotive, each one of the major players are all figuring this out. They're figuring out they're not looking at their traditional competitors. They're looking at the disruptors. They're looking to Silicon Valley for the potential threats to their business.

Microsoft bought LinkedIn. Last week at our staff meeting with Satya, he said that LinkedIn, we do a lot of recruiting, we found that more jobs for developers are going to the industries outside of technology than inside of technology.

More programmers being hired outside tech than inside tech. That's crazy.

Great. Now, you've heard of Moore's Law, doubling of CPU transistors every year, one of the foundations of our industry. I'm here to tell you: not so important. Not so important.

There's another Moore's Law. This one is really important. This one is Geoffrey Moore. And Geoffrey Moore's Law is more important to the next 20 years than Moore's Law was for the last 20 years.

Geoffrey Moore said every business participates in two activities: core activities and context activities.

Core activities are those things you want to invest in because they deliver differentiated value to your customers, and you can charge a premium for them. Context activities: everything else.

Let me give you an example. Microsoft, our core is software, okay? Software that helps people do more. So we invest. We try and find the world's best talent to help us do that. We scour the world looking for people that help us do that. We invest very heavily in that. We make sure that they are happy, et cetera.

Context: in order to do that, we have to have receptionists, we have to have cafeterias, we have to have shuttles. We have no Technical Fellow of the cafeterias, no Distinguished Engineers of the shuttles, no Vice President of the receptionists.

We want these things. We need these things. We pay a lot of money for them. But Satya Nadella has never held a senior leadership team to discuss the menu for next week, the lunch menu, right? We focus all of our energy here, but we do things, we just write checks there.

Now, there's an interesting complication, and it's a complication that the people in this room are going to succeed or fail on, and that's this idea of mission-critical.

Now, the definition of mission-critical is, screw up, you're in big trouble. Like, you can't screw up. But notice it's on the horizontal plane.

So how could you have mission-critical core? Of course, that's great, right? That's where you want to focus. But there's also this mission-critical context, like what's that about? And the answer is that's where the risk is, right?

And Geoffrey Moore called this the killing field of once-great companies. Because once you have that core mission-critical, over time, and you're making a lot of money, over time, the market will respond. It'll have a substitution. Other competitors will come in. There'll be a different play. And you are no longer able to charge a premium for it.

So it's no longer core; it becomes context. But it's still mission-critical. If you screw it up, you're in big trouble because you still get a lot of your revenue from it.

Now, because often to get in this first square, you incur a lot of technical debt, people continue to invest in mission-critical context activities, and that's where they die.

So the challenge is in managing that mission-critical context so you can invest in mission-critical core.

I'm going to tell you how to do it, right? And by the way, I know a lot of you know this story, but I've found as we talk about digital transformation, a lot of your peers don't, and a lot of the literature on it, I find, is not particularly helpful.

I have found this framing of the digital transformation to be very effective in helping people, your peers, get through the knothole and understand the world, understand what's important.

Okay. So you got to do two things. You got to create bandwidth. You got to invest in innovation.

How do you apply the other Moore's Law? You transition from the way the world is to the way the world's going. The world's going to the cloud, both on-premises and off-premises.

And you want to create bandwidth by using software as a service, by doing lift and shift. Just by running your VMs in a cloud, you gain bandwidth because those environments deal with all the hardware management. They have management tools.

And then you do some lift and modernize. Put some of these things in containers. Small amount of work, nice benefit.

But then you invest in innovation. Don't be confused here. This is a separate, distinct activity. You invest in innovation.

And when you invest in innovation, you really want to go cloud native. The difference between cloud native and some of these other things is that cloud native has a better portion of your energy focused in on what matters: the conversation with the customer to gain insight, to translate into a feature, to be delivered as quickly as possible, and again, and again, and again.

So when you're messing around with a virtual machine that needs to be patched, and a registry key, and a config file here, blah, right? Things like serverless functions make a ton of value. They do more of the work for you. So when you're investing in innovation, you really want to use these new cloud models.

Okay. So what does that do to IT spend? Shifts it from context to core by buying infrastructure, software as a service, and automating, and investing.

You invest in innovation, and you automate. You automate on one side to create bandwidth. You automate on the other side to have repeatable processes that can get better through every iteration.

The heart of digital transformation is this: build the things that differentiate you. Buy the things that don't. Build the things that differentiate you. Buy the things you don't.

This transition is going to need new heroes. You are those heroes.

So here is a set of starts and stops, okay?

Start. Stop clicking Next. If you're just clicking Next on a dialog box, you are not adding any value to your company. Stop it. Learn how to automate. It's tough. Tough. Do it.

Number two, stop crafting no-value-add solutions. Look, if you run Exchange, stop it. Honestly. If you're in the airline business, can you get more people in your planes because you run mail better than the other guys? No. No.

Now, it's mission-critical, so can't screw it up, but there are people who'll run Exchange for you. There are a lot of software as a services that you're not adding any value to. You're just getting up and running. If you can buy them from someone else, it costs you money, but it frees up your people, frees up your talent.

Stop building snowflake servers or snowflake clouds, right? Embrace DevOps.

Stop using low-leverage architectures and leverage the cloud. Learn these new architectures that allow you to focus more of your team on the customer conversation and less on the technology.

Here's the deal. This is all hard stuff. Nobody's confused about this, and uncomfortable is the new normal.

Every single day I walk into the office, and I'm afraid I'm going to get fired. I'm afraid I'm going to bring out my badge and instead of turning green, it's going to turn red because I have no idea what the heck I'm doing.

But you just keep doing it, and you know what? Next day is better than the day before, and the next day is the day. And then you start to get comfortable, and they'll say, "Oh, guess what? There's this new thing."

Oh, God.

And the pace of things are such that you're always going to be uncomfortable. Live with it, learn to embrace it, learn to push through it.

Lastly, stop dialing it in, right? Invest in your career. Okay? You're here, you're investing your career, that's great.

So you want to be this guy, where transitions are putting the wind in your sail. And you don't want to be this guy.

Because remember, when it comes review time, and it comes reward time, we pay attention to the people who are moving the business forward, and we reward them. And there's a fixed budget, so the rewards for those people come from the people who are not moving the business forward.

Every transition has new winners and new losers. So I hope you can use this knowledge to navigate changes in your career.

I'm Jeffrey Snover. Thank you very much for your time.