What's Your Path?

Joe's Nerdy Rants #59 - The Power of Personal Branding in a Brutal Job Market, plus weekend reads and other stuff

For the last few weeks, many friends have asked how to build their personal brand outside their employer. These friends work at various companies, but the common thread is that people are wise to the reality that their jobs might disappear at any moment. Nobody is sacred, and everyone is exposed. It doesn’t matter how “good” of an employee you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual contributor or a C-level. It doesn’t matter where you went to school or where you worked. Your amazingly crafted resume? Nobody cares. You’re piled alongside everyone else with impressive resumes, all fed into an application-tracking robot. After years of training, playing the game, and “doing the right thing,” is this what you signed up for? I sense people are rethinking their decisions and realize they can only depend on themselves.

Advising on personal branding has always made me feel a bit uneasy. Unfortunately, personal branding is associated with the terms “influencer” or “thought leader,” which I despise. However, several years ago, I realized everyone has a personal brand, whether they choose to believe it or not. A personal brand is nothing more than your public reputation.

Along the way, I had another realization. Most people have excellent reputations inside their company but are rarely unknown outside it. This poses a problem if you suddenly find yourself no longer employed by your organization, which is common in tech and data today.

A significant obstacle many people have is obscurity, which I wrote about last month. Whether you’re looking for a job or an entrepreneur doesn't matter. In a job market where more and more people will be looking for fewer and fewer jobs, standing out from the crowd is key. As I say, you can shotgun a thousand resumes to many companies who will never get back to you, or you can be invited through the back entrance. Having worked in nightclubs for years, it’s far better to know the door person who can give you better treatment than the people lined up outside. Faster access and better experience. This exists in the corporate world, the same way in Clubland. A strong and visible personal brand will help you enormously and shortcut your access to an interview and, hopefully, a job. For entrepreneurship, it’s the same thing. Customers are bombarded by salespeople all the time. But if someone within an organization knows what you’re about, perhaps they’ll let you pitch your new offering to them. That’s how I made my first customers with various businesses. It wasn’t from cold calling but from building a relationship and reputation well before needing to ask for anything.

A Short Story of How I Built My Brand

Here’s the short story of how I built my brand. Though I’d blogged for decades, it didn’t go anywhere for the first few passes. I was too inconsistent. The content felt scattered. It sucked, and I gave up often. Who cares what some bro in Utah has to say about tech and data? I frequently had those thoughts, then realized it came from a place of counterproductive and limiting insecurity.

My brand as a data nerd legitimately started in my local community by hosting Python and data engineering meetups in the early 2010s. That was a great way to help grow the local data scene in Salt Lake City. And it was local for many years: local speakers, local audience. Not unlike your locale, I’m guessing. The meetups helped establish my brand at the local level. I got to know many engineers and executives at the many businesses in the Salt Lake City area. Because of these relationships, when Matt Housley and I started our data engineering consulting firm, Ternary Data, we already knew plenty of people who needed our services. And they knew and trusted us. I can’t tell you how important that was as we built our business, especially in the early days. It would’ve been far more challenging to get started without that brand.

Along the way, I continued doing the meetups, mostly because I genuinely believe in fostering communities. We eventually got speakers from big companies outside the local area for the meetup. Then COVID hit, and the world went online. We’d have hundreds of people show up for Zoom meetups. That’s insane, given our 25-75 people turnout for in-person events in the pre-COVID times. That gave me a new perspective on the possibilities of online communities. Suddenly, people from all over the world asked to speak at the meetup. The speaker roster for the data engineering meetup was insane. If you’d have asked me when I started my meetup if I’d have this caliber of speakers, I’d have laughed. But that became normal. Along the way, some of the speakers became friends. I was also getting more active on LinkedIn and building my presence there. That turned out to be invaluable.

During COVID, Matt Housley and I started podcasting. Those were the first several podcasts since we wanted to record our everyday conversations. Our first episodes were great in message but low in production value. Bad lighting, crappy sound, and anything else you could think of.

But people showed up to watch Matt and I rant. Eventually, we got guests. And guess who we could get as guests? The speakers from the meetup! The podcast started to explode. Great guests begat more great guests, and suddenly, everyone wanted to be on the Monday Morning Data Chat, our live show on LinkedIn. We kept it underground on purpose, like Fight Club. For branding reasons, we turned down everyone who tried to pay. We only accepted guests we wanted to chat with. That turned out to be wise in the long run. When you can’t be bought, you have terrific options and can say what you want and grow your credibility in an honest way.

At some point, Matt and I decided to write Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Being two first-time authors, our contact at O’Reilly told us it was a bad idea for us to write the book. I believe the world was “ambitious.” Somehow, we signed the book, wrote it, and published it. That changed everything for us. Long story short, the book blew up, and so did our brands. Because of the book’s wild success, we went from local to global in very short order. Suddenly, Utah was the last thing on our minds. I’ve been traveling the world pretty much nonstop since then.

Fast-forward to today. Matt and I are doing great and are moving on to new things. We’re closing down our consultancy, Ternary Data. The Monday Morning Data Chat ended last month, which bummed a lot of people out. It’s been a fun ride, but you need to move on at some point. Matt’s having fun doing his thing. We’re still great friends and hang out whenever we are both in Salt Lake City.

What does this have to do with personal branding? Everything. None of this would’ve happened for Matt and me if we hadn’t persisted at content and brand building for years, toiling in relative obscurity in Salt Lake City, a cultural and physical backwater. It’s not the Bay Area or NYC. On top of that, Matt and I tend to be reclusive and hermit-like by nature. But we made it work. And we kept it as pure and honest as possible, which is rare in this age of overly transactional shilling. It would’ve been easy enough to focus on Salt Lake City and build our consulting company serving that market. But that wasn’t in the cards for us.

Again, you make it work how you can. Push forward to something you believe in. In our case, writing The Fundamentals of Data Engineering and whatever came next. But we took a gamble on the unknown. You might consider doing the same.

I’m doing my thing, traveling the globe, writing a new book, and starting a new company that will be announced soon. I recently launched a Data Engineering Certificate on Coursera with Andrew Ng’s Deeplearning.ai. If you’d asked me five years ago if that was a remote possibility, I would’ve laughed and said hell no. I’m working on new stuff at a level I could have only dreamed about earlier.

What’s Your Path?

I write all this to say that building a personal brand takes time and is serendipitous. A brand is rarely perfectly predictable; it evolves. It’s not like I intentionally set out to do any of this. If I had tried, I doubt it would’ve worked. It’s like the fool’s errand of trying to make something go viral. One thing led to another, and it was all built slowly and then all at once. Each time, new opportunities arose that made the old ones look mundane. That’s how it worked for me. You will have a different path.

How do you build a strong and visible personal brand? In my experience, it happens gradually and then all at once. First, realize it will take you time. While you could achieve sudden fame, I think it’s far better to take the slower path and do it right. This means slowly getting used to getting out there. That might be a LinkedIn post, a video on YouTube, or a Substack post. Or writing a book that showcases your expertise in a subject area. Or making an awesome open-source tool. It could be anything.

The point is to build the sets and reps of getting yourself out there. The medium should be something you’ll be interested in using because you’ll be doing it a lot. I like Substack and LinkedIn because I’m more prone to writing. I also do podcasts because I enjoy talking with friends. Expect to see me doing a lot more video courses and similar next year.

Consistency is key. Far too many people quit after a few efforts because they aren’t getting any traction. Stick with it. The other day, my friend Alex Freberg posted on LinkedIn about how his first 75+ YouTube videos got almost nothing in response in 2020/21. I’m guessing 99% of people would’ve quit well before the 10th video. Now, Alex has a massive YouTube following and makes a great living as a content and course creator with his new company, Analyst Builder. I’m very proud of what he’s accomplished. I’ve got many friends who’ve had similar success. None of them will say it was easy or happened overnight.

Do you have to create course content or be active on social media? Of course not. I started doing meetups. The main thing is to get yourself out there. Your first steps don’t need to be huge. When you’re beginning, it may not be clear what your brand is or who your audience is. And it doesn’t matter because it will become more apparent as you continue. Just build the sets and reps to build your brand and visibility. Trust the process. Over time, you’ll have built a brand that will open doors you can’t fathom today.

Thanks, and have a wonderful weekend

Joe

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Cool Weekend Reads

Will A.I. Eat The Browser?

Data Science Project Failing After 1,600 Days | Blog

Chuck E. Cheese’s Animatronics Band Bows Out - IEEE Spectrum

Debanking (and Debunking?)

Stop using generative AI as a search engine - The Verge

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » The Google Willow thing

Making "intermediate+" content

What are important data systems problems, ignored by research?

Should You Ditch Spark for DuckDb or Polars? | Miles Cole

New Show & Upcoming Events

The Joe Reis Show

Freestyle Fridays - Building a Personal Brand (Spotify)

Hannes Muhleisen - DuckDB Deep Dive, The Challenges of Lakehouses, and More (Spotify)

Dave Yaffe and Johnny Graettinger - Data Integration, Startups, and More (Spotify)

Gordon Wong - Tech Stacks, Semantic Layers, and More (Spotify)

Bill Inmon - Data Warehousing Facts and Myths (Spotify)

Valentin Becerra - Engineering for Space, DJing, and More (Spotify)

Gwen Shapira - Multi-Tenant Databases Done Right (Spotify)

The Negative Net Present Value of Consulting (Spotify)

Ole Olesen-Bagneux - The Meta Grid (sneak peek) (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - The Skills Gap in Data (Spotify)

Albert Bellamy - Getting Your Job in Data (Spotify)

Tanya Bragin - Clickhouse, Open Source vs Commercial, and More (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - Obscurity is Your Enemy (Spotify)

Chris Riccomini - Building (and Writing About) Data-Intensive Applications (Spotify)

Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.

Monday Morning Data Chat

Note—The Monday Morning Data Chat is over. However, you can still find the back catalog on your podcast platform of choice or YouTube.

The Finale! - YouTube

Paco Nathan - (Spotify, YouTube)

Weimo Liu - (Spotify, YouTube)

Matthew Mullins - (Spotify, YouTube)

Ricky Thomas and Paul Dudley - (Spotify, YouTube)

Andrew Ng - Why Data Engineering is Critical to Data-Centric AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Tevje Olin - What Should Data Engineers Focus On? (Spotify, YouTube)

Rob Harmon - Small Data, Efficiency, and Data Modeling (Spotify, YouTube)

Joe Reis & Matt Housley - The Return of the Show! (Spotify, YouTube)

Nick Schrock & Wes McKinney - Composable Data Stacks and more (Spotify, YouTube)

Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)

Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)

Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Events I’m At

Data Day Texas - Austin, TX. January 25, 2025. Register here

Winter Data Conference - Austria. March 7, 2025. Register here. Use code JOEREIS-50 for 50% off tickets!

More to be announced soon…

Please note: I've traveled a lot for the last few years—probably too much for a person to stay sane or healthy. I tried to figure out how many times I’d traveled the globe. I have no idea. It’s a lot. And…

In 2025, I’m reducing my travel. For one, I'm hyper-focused on a new company I’m starting (stay tuned for details). I also want to spend more time with my family and get outside in the Mountain West. I live in one of the most incredible places on the planet and never see it. Nature calls.

Same as it always was, I only accept workshops and speaking engagements that meet my fee requirements, except for rare exceptions (we’re friends, you’re not charging for tickets, etc). You’re working hard on your event. So are the speakers. Let’s mutually benefit each other. If you’re making money, pay the speakers too.

With me, you get what you pay for and then some. You'll get a ton of enthusiastic attendees and a very entertaining and informative talk/session. Your event will be on the global map. My track record speaks for itself. Please submit a speaking request if you want me to speak or give a workshop at your event.

Thanks! If you want to help out…

• The Data Engineering Professional Certificate is one of the most popular courses on Coursera! Learn practical data engineering with lots of challenging hands-on examples. Shoutout to the fantastic people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS, who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.

• Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.

• Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.

• The Data Therapy Session calendar is posted here. It’s an incredible group where you can share your experiences with data - good and bad - in a judgment-free place with other data professionals. If you’re interested in regularly attending, add it to your calendar.

• My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted, always fun, and free of shilling.

Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.

Thanks!

Joe Reis