Talofa reader,

I’m often asked by young people wanting to get into tech, "I want to break into tech, what would you recommend I do?"

They ask about Cloud, CyberSecurity, and whether DevOps is the way to go.

Over the years, I find I'm doing two things over and over again:

1. repeating myself in terms of certs and skills I’d recommend,

2. and not providing information that, in my opinion, would be more valuable than certs and skills recommendations.

What’s more important than what certs and skills?

Understanding the corporate game.

The certs and skills you need for roles—that information is all out there on the internet.

What newbies don’t tend to get a heads-up on is the environment they will need to navigate through in order to “have a career”.

A lot of people don't understand the corporate game.

Pasifika, more so, because most of our parents didn't come up this way, so weren't in a position to pass on any knowledge. This perpetuates the trend of very few people from my community venturing out past sports and music careers into the tech world, and so the cycle of limited career and future-proof opportunities continues.

For the few Pasifika that do make it into the tech space, we’re out there individually fending for ourselves. If we’re lucky, we may come across a colleague willing to impart their wisdom of the corporate game to help us out.

Otherwise, we’re destined to learn those lessons the hard way.

I’ve learned a good number of lessons in my two decades working in tech, both nationally and internationally, as a contractor and an employee, in the office and as a fully remote engineer.

I did all that as a Pasifika person (can’t really change that, to be honest), so the lessons I learned, I’d say, are fairly unique in the tech context.

In this week's newsletter, I wanted to share those lessons, all in one place, so I don’t have to keep repeating myself—or at the very least, I know I have these receipts.

Some of it might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but rest assured, I mean every word.

Walk with me now...

What’s Stopping Us Building the Life We Want to Live? Let’s Do That in 2024.

Talofa, reader,

Happy New Year, or as we say in Samoan: Manuia le tausaga fou!

As my end-of-2023 post laid out…

…it was a year of firsts.

I’m nothing if not regularly trying new things.

Which is why the start of this year (most years actually) has me always feeling some type of way.

The new year often brings with it a sense of renewal, of energy, of conviction, and focus.

We get to planning everything and mapping out calendars and other planning notes.

When you've done as many cycles around the sun as I have, finding goals to achieve every new year is the easy part; there's a literal "whole world" of things to choose from.

The problem is paring things down to a few and driving those to a level of quality or success to be happy with.

Easy right?

There's the saying we often*"overestimate what we can achieve in a year, and underestimate what can be achieved in ten years."*

Over the years, I've often thought the problem was time management and employed all manner of technology and tools to help me achieve dozens of goals, each with their list of sub-goals.

FromToggltoNotionplanners,Todoist, and various Chrome extensions for clipping and saving websites, images, multiple Google calendars with reminders, all in an effort to achieve a bunch of goals that realistically should have spanned several years, not one.

I learned about creating “systems” instead of goals, and atomic habits fromJames Clear.

I even started usingZettelkastennote-taking and learning about a second brain because I thought maybe if I got smarter more efficiently, I could use the smarter brain to work out why I wasn’t super fulfilled with the things I was doing.

It took a long time to come to the following realisation, and not to get all "zen" on us here for the start of 2024, but I think even practically in many other respects,thisis the core reason for our lives going in the wrong direction:

If you don't know who you are, how will you ever know what you (the "real" you) want?

Obviously, the answer to that requires things way outside the scope of this newsletter (or any of my qualifications), but suffice to say, this point is central for directing you at least towards where you'd be happy.

Some call having this knowledge their "north star," or the thing that guides and keeps them on track.

When we don't have this north star, we run into trouble, even if we don't know it.

Talofa reader,

I didn't plan on an "end of year" or 'wrap-up 2023' edition for the Uncommon Engineer.

That seemed like too "common" an idea 😉🥁

One of my younger brothers turned 40 today (Boxing Day), and all five of my brothers got together for lunch. We reminisced about life growing up together and all the life events that have happened from then until today.

So, I thought, why not review the year?

Why not cast my mind's eye back 12 months and play my life forward like a fast-forwarding VHS tape to see what's happened in my life this year.

I've been around the sun for 40+ years.

I've seen this Christmas and New Year combination so many times now, it's become a sort ofGroundhog Daydéjà vu. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever wake up and it's the next day.

I've lived a semi-charmed life.

I wouldn't have thought so at any point in my life, but there's no denying, looking back, that a) I should be dead, given some of the stunts I've pulled and the trouble I've dealt with in my life, and b) I've done some pretty cool stuff that I can honestly say not a lot of people can say they've done.

Maybe that's why, once you've done most things at least once and you've done one thing for a long time, you find yourself doing something for the first time, several times, in one year.

This year was a year of firsts.

Talofa Reader,

I was listening to a podcast once, and the guest was explaining why there aren't as many "geniuses" and prodigies around now as there were in, say, Mozart's days.

The explanation was that historically, aristocracies often had exclusive access to the best education and intellectual resources. Children of aristocrats were frequently tutored by leading scholars, artists, and thinkers.

I sat on this and thought about my experiences growing up, my environment, my schools, my circle of friends, and my parents' friends. I looked at who was successful and who didn't quite come out on top.

Which led me to the following hypothesis:

The single factor, which paradoxically accounts for both the challenges and successes experienced by Pasifika, in my opinion, can be summed up in one central theme—

The limits to this access came in many forms:

environments that were hostile to learning things that would advance, and not hinder, us; whether that was at home, learning we needed to "play our role", or at school, where we were treated like we were too dumb to understand anything academically.

Teachers who weren't skilled in getting through to Pasifika kids; admittedly, were already hard-up against it, given theteaching industry's a bit shit(pay, class sizes etc), and then the Island kids are coming to school from stressed environments, hungry, wrong uniforms, etc.

If we got to school at all...

It wasn’t usually the best schools.

No offence to the teachers that made it to the schools I went to, but the rich schools got the best teachers, right?

Statistically, your parents either didn't finish school or can't really help you with your English and maths homework, and hiring a tutor is only what kids in the movies did.

So, poor communities, with poor schools, and poor teachers don't lead to a rich, knowledgeable learning outcome1.

Talofa reader,

PSA for all Pasifika: Stop Falling For AI, Crypto, NFTs and Blockchain Marketing.

New tech has always brought the promise of a better life, a better "me", a better world, etc.

So, it's definitely enticing.

Who doesn't want to only work 20 minutes a week and have an automated email campaign, “drop shipping” business automation AI, make them 48 million dollars a week in "passive income"?

But when you'reinthe tech game, you learn to be cynical,especiallyif you haveanyexperience building practical, real-world solutions with the so-called second-coming programming language, or API, or cloud service.

Because when the rubber meets the road, and you meet the rubber, it's usually not as shiny as the tech marketing makes it out to be.

We know this from experience (plus, it's our area of interest, so we tend to stay informed).

This is all fun and games for geeks and tech nerds alike; we'll give each other sh!t for our taste in Operating Systems or hardware (iPhone vs. Android will never die), and so the fun is pretty harmless.

Where it starts getting (dare I say it) "dangerous" is when the tech we're either frothing over or memeing gets out into the normal world, and those folks take it seriously.

It's like they're not in on the joke.

And the jokes stops being funny when the grifters

start influencing people who don't know any better about that tech - not usually in their best interests.

And it stops being funny altogether when folks in the industry, touted as "tech leaders", who look like us, end up being the people leading us astray.

Talofa reader,

Pasifika Have a "Technical Leadership" Issue.

Over the past few years, I've come face to face with a pretty obvious yet significant issue: the severe lack of Pasifika technical leadership in the technology sector.

And not just for making up the numbers so the business looks good and ticks the box, but for the community side of this equation that more often needs, essentially, an "ally" with technical skills to help navigate and mitigate the realities of all things technology.

Share## Pasifika Technical Leadership?

What do I mean by Pasifika technical leadership?

Pretty much what it says on the tin:

A Technical person, who happens to be Pasifika, in a Leadership position or capability.

The discourse over the last few years has been one of the following two:

1. Getting more "Pasifika into technology," a purely numbers game for bums on tech seats, OR

2. Getting Pasifika a*"Seat at the table,"*a long-tail strategy with organisations going after leadership power.

While these two things are important, I'm cognisant of a couple of things I've already seen happen.

Firstly, with the bum-rush of getting as many Pasifika hoisted over the fence into tech as possible, I've seen the casualties of the folks who could've been successful in transitioning had they been given the necessary support to succeed.

I'm seeing a new*"factory floor"*for Pasifika to get trapped in the tech industry, taking up the lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs that are cheaper to use Pasifika for than paying for LLM's on cloud.

Secondly, from the few Pasifika organisations I've seen make a play for being the spokespeople for Pasifika issues at the technology table, I'm loath to say I find some of the things I know about these organisations… unsettling?

Bar a small few, I don't have a lot of trust in the motivations of some of the forerunners in this space to be advocates for true technical leadership that will benefit Pasifika (more so than the organisation's brand power).

But we can't make everyone happy all the time, and something is better than nothing, I guess?

Anyway, back to the essay at hand.

Talofa reader,

Buckle up, this one’s a bit lengthy- but I promise it ends well.

So, What Happened?​

How come you never came back after you said the newsletter was going monthly?

My last sign-off saw me heading off into the “the newsletter is going monthly” sunset, with all intentions of finding that elusive time to sit down and write my thoughts out.

You’d think it was a forgone conclusion seeing as I actually journal most days—or at least I did at the time of my last newsletter.

Unfortunately, this practice met the same fate as the newsletter itself.

Am I here to give excuses? Of course not.

These are merelyexplanations😁

Talofa reader,

This is going to be my last weekly newsletter for now as I’m going to switch this to monthly.

Talofa reader,

I feel like the Wednesday morning newsletter post is becoming more consistent than the scheduled Tuesday one.

Talofa, Reader,

After a hectic period of work travel and exotic stress over the last several weeks, which resulted in a long post about burnout, I was fortunate enough to find the time (evenings, weekends, in airport lounges, and on crowded plane seats) to study for, and last week, pass, myAWS Certified Security - Specialtycertification.

Staying technical, even as an Architect, is important — not just to the role, in my opinion, but also to me personally.

And I don't mean "book" technical like "draw me a diagram".

I mean hands-on, build-the-thing-you're-talking-about, technical.

In an article she wrote earlier this year titled"Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery", the one & only Charity Majors laid down the gauntlet, stating that she believes "Architect" is a bullshit role.

For the most part, I agree with her.