August 16, 2022

Clay Alvord - Organizing and managing the work to get done

27 minutes

Highlights of my conversation with Clay:

What does a full stack DevOps Developer do

Managing SW engineers as a non-SW engineer

Engaging your employees to maintain a high degree of performance and innovation

Helping people stay focused on their core competencies

Managing different types of engineers/skillsets on a team

Being transparent about your own weaknesses with the team

Making sure that everyone can see a path forward for their career

Survey your team quarterly with their technology comfort level to see gaps in your team

Planning work with the entire team and not just with the senior people

Each person driving the project will create and maintain their own wiki (Confluence) page

Driving personal ownership of the project plan will help increase the quality of the plan

Meet: Clay Alvord, a Bay Area native, got his start in IT helping his dad out at Fry's electronics doing low voltage work. From there, he got a job as a sys admin at a startup that eventually sold to Oracle. At that point, he moved into hardware and data centers like Apple and VMware. Clay eventually landed as the Senior Data Center Engineer at Box and eventually became the Global Data Center Manager, managing data centers across the planet for Box. With a passion for infrastructure and automation, Clay built a tooling team to enhance and better scale the management of Box's physical infrastructure. As a Senior Manager, Clay now runs 2 DevOps teams that build software and tools to effectively manage Box's on-prem infrastructure and its vast public cloud presence.

If you have any questions for Clay, please feel free to reach out via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayalvord/

I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

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