Our guest on the podcast this week is David Egts, Chief Technologist, North America Public Sector at Red Hat.

We discuss how to translate customer pain points into product requirements when the customer is the government. David’s role at Red Hat is to make it easy for the government to use open source technologies. With open source, if you are not actively participating in the community it is hard to have your requirements heard. That is a challenge for governments and the public sector. They often have exotic requirements and require highly regulated environments. But they can benefit from open source technologies, so it is important to bridge the gap. Interestingly, governments have a reputation of being laggards when compared to other industries. But in cybersecurity, the government leads the way. They outpace the commercial cybersecurity industry with their security policies.

We also look at modern cloud careers and how to transition into the industry. It used to be important in IT to have general skills, but today knowledge of specific tools and specific tools are much more important. To survive in the technology industry you have to care about where the puck is going. The price of software used to define what developers would be able to learn. Now, with open source technology, there is no excuse not to learn because of the access. To be attractive to a future employer, it’s not just about consuming open source technologies, it’s also about living the open-source lifestyle and contributing to its communities. In the end, do not wait for your employer to train you in something you want to be doing. Spend years working on it for free so that you can learn and craft the career you want.