Brain Refactor: Optimize Your Internal Code To Thrive in Tech & Engineering with Dagna Bieda

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About this DevOps Toolchain Episode:

Welcome to another fantastic session of the DevOps Toolchain podcast! Today, we have a genuinely transformative episode lined up for you. Dagna Bieda joins us; an engineer turned career coach who shares her journey from coding to guiding tech professionals toward impactful career transformations.

In this episode, Dagna reveals her unique approach to identifying and bridging skill gaps. She mainly focuses on the often-overlooked yet pivotal soft skills imperative for career advancement in roles like staff engineer, architect, and CTO. We'll delve into her strategies for tackling burnout, overcoming impostor syndrome, and setting essential personal boundaries derived from her personal experiences and coaching expertise.

Dagna also sheds light on the art of self-marketing for developers and redefines it as an honest form of educating others about your value. She introduces concepts from her new book, “Brain Refactor: Optimize Your Internal Code to Thrive in Tech and Engineering,” showcasing how psychological insights can help reprogram your mindset for success. This episode is packed with valuable tips, from outlining practical steps to restructure your mental ‘code' to sharing actionable techniques for receiving and handling feedback constructively.

Join us as we explore how refactoring your brain can be the key to unlocking new career heights.

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About Dagna Bieda

Dagna Biedad

DAGNA is an Engineer turned Coach for Engineers and ambitious professionals in tech. With 10+ years of coding experience and coaching since 2019, she’s the tough love, “been in your shoes” kinda Coach. Her clients' backgrounds include a spectrum ranging from ICs to CTOs, from small startups to FAANG+ companies, from 2 to 20+ years of experience, and from self-taught devs through career-changing Bootcamp grads to college grads and PhDs. She helps her clients reach their potential and exciting career opportunities by refactoring their brains.

Connect with Dagna Bieda

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[00:00:01] Get ready to discover some of the most actionable DevOps techniques and tooling, including performance and reliability for some of the world's smartest engineers. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the DevOps Toolchain Podcast and my goal is to help you create DevOps toolchain awesomeness.

[00:00:19] Joe Colantonio Hey, do you want to know how to refactor your brain in advance to your DevOps engineering career? If so, you're in for a special treat. Today , we have Dagna joining us to talk all about her new book, Brain Refactor Optimize Your Internal Code to thrive in tech and engineering and get more success, fulfillment, money, opportunity, impact and growth. That's a large, large promise. But she delivers. So you want to listen all the way to the end to find out more. If you don't know, Dagna is an engineer turned coach for engineers and basically works with ambitious professionals in tech. She has over ten years of coding experience in coaching since 2019. She takes the tough love approach where she's been in your shoes kind of coach. She has a lot of great reviews for you. Check her out and her coaching as well. The stuff they're interested in. We'll definitely have links for that down below as well. And she helps her clients reach their potential and reach more and more exciting career opportunities by learning how to refactor their brains. Really interesting book and concept. You don't want to miss it. Check it out.

[00:01:18] Joe Colantonio Hey, Diana. Welcome to the Guild.

[00:01:22] Dagna Bieda Hey, Joe. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:24] Joe Colantonio Great to have you. Really curious right off the bat, how did you get into coaching? Because obviously, you're a coder. You probably love doing it. But do you still do coding and how did you get into this coaching piece then?

[00:01:38] Dagna Bieda Yeah, so I don't code anymore unless I need to tweak my website. The reality is that I loved solving problems and chasing bugs, figuring out why things didn't work. And now I do the exact same thing just in a different domain. Before I used to dive into written code that was somewhere on the computer. Right now, I dive into code. That's part of the mental legacy code base in my clients. So it's kind of the same thing. And I still do what used to excite me. But in that realm of software engineer career, the reality is I burned myself out. And back in 2019, it was this kind of difficult moment where I ended up having a conversation with my manager. I burst into tears and figure out, okay, this isn't working anymore. My job used to bring me a lot of satisfaction and that kind of faded away and I felt like a cog in the machine. I feel like what I did, that it mattered. I didn't want to wake up in the morning. And then on top of that, there were some other issues I was dealing with at the time, and I ended up in talk therapy. And within a couple of months of having conversations with someone who got me, who got my issues, I like to kind of compare that therapy setting to debugging sessions because that's exactly what we did. And I saw how much my lies and my perspective changed and I slowly started getting back that motivation to waking up in the morning, to being alive, to getting things done, to looking for meaning and purpose. And so I realized like that's when it clicked, my entire career I chased impact, and after I worked with that therapist, I was like, Whoa, this is the kind of impact I want to have on other people's lives. And that basically solidified my transition out of the engineering into the coaching.

[00:03:37] Joe Colantonio Love it. Love it. And you actually have a chapter on overcoming burnout that we're going to go over soon. But before I do, it's about to follow up on. Do you find that a lot of people want to switch careers but they have guilt about it for some reason? Like they feel almost like I'm stuck. I'm a coder, I'll always be a coder. There's nothing else I can do type deal.

[00:03:57] Dagna Bieda I mean, that's part of the reason for sure. But let's look at engineering and tech in general. Like that's a cushy job with great benefits and I like to kind of compare it to golden handcuffs. It's really hard to let that go, especially, if you are providing for a family or you have kids or you have elderly parents that you're taking care of. You are in a situation with other people depending on you. And it might feel too risky or scary to kind of jump into different waters or test out like a different career. However, as we're going to talk about probably in my book, what I talk about, it's really about the programing of your legacy mental code so you can reprogram the models of what is risky or what is beneficial or what it is that you truly, really want outside of the expectations of your family or society or your own expectations from the past. Whenever you can refactored that thinking, you start seeing things differently. And so you start things differently and your world potentially could change. When I was transitioning, I am a pretty risk averse person. And one of the things that I did with my husband is we saved up money and invested into rental properties, so that way we would have some income while I was figuring things out and had the kind of runway to experiment, establish my business, that was back even before Covid hit. But that was really helpful to have those that kind of site income that was fueled by that golden handcuffs job. I hope that makes sense.

[00:05:45] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And if you start in 2019, you're at the five year mark. So most businesses don't make it that far. So obviously, what you cover in this book actually works. So let's dive into it.

[00:05:54] Dagna Bieda That's right. Let's go.

[00:05:56] Joe Colantonio I think the book is broken into two main parts, and it's an 8 chapter. I thought maybe we'll do a teaser for each chapter so people definitely can get the book and the link down below and then see where it takes us.

[00:06:06] Dagna Bieda Awesome. Okay, let's do that.

[00:06:08] Joe Colantonio Cool. So the first chapter is the source code of the mind. What would you say this chapter is mainly about?

[00:06:16] Dagna Bieda It's part of part one. Part one I explain how the human mind is basically similar to computer software. And as you know from your own experience, Joe, whenever we have any sort of code base, any sort of project and something's not working, what do we do? We dive into the code and change what's not working. I took the psychological concepts and theories that are proven that work, and I just reframed it. And I used the programing speak, the one that resonates with engineers because a lot of the time when I work with clients and I got to on it, I was just like that too. When there was a situation that you had to like, analyze your emotions or feelings, it's like, I don't want to do that. Let's talk about that, right? Because that's the language of our analytical mind. What I did is I translated what I know works from psychology realm, but I put it into programing speak the engineering speak, the one that resonate with our analytical minds that are fact based.

[00:07:24] Joe Colantonio All right. Another thing you cover in this chapter is refactoring. How does refactoring apply to this chapter?

[00:07:31] Dagna Bieda Whenever you dive into any legacy code base, let's imagine you're a new engineer. You're hopping on into a new code base. You have to kind of figure out how everything works, how things are connected. And your first thing is fixing a bug. You go in, you start fixing things, and noticed that there are some lines or files or classes or objects that need to be updated that need the refactor in order for you to be able to fix the bug. And in terms of the mental legacy code, it's basically instead of files and lines of code, we're talking about memories, we're talking about your thoughts, we're talking about your beliefs because that's where that mental legacy code is stored. And a lot of the time. If you think about it as code basis of all what happens, there are bugs. We sometimes patch things up just so the business side is happy and things work again. But that patch comes back to bite us and is no longer serving the project anymore and is causing more issues. The same thing applies to the mental programing. Let's say, when you were a child, you had an older, louder sibling that scared you. You like to hide and like just be out of their way so they wouldn't bother you or pester you. And that kind of a patch worked very well in that particular time frame of your life. But now that you grew up, you need to be seen in order to be recognized as a professional that you are. And so it's very critical to refactor that kind of patch, that kind of inefficiency, that kind of a code smell, right?

[00:09:12] Joe Colantonio Yeah.

[00:09:14] Dagna Bieda That could be causing your issues, obstacles like not being able to get promotion. That's kind of how it works.

[00:09:23] Joe Colantonio Love it. All right. So once someone like, goes over their source code, they get an understanding of maybe things that they may be struggling with. How do you know it's not real? But how aware are actual people to how they perceive themselves and how others? I think in chapter two, you then go over to coding feedback from a programmers perspective, so you have things like feedback and peer review. How does someone take what they learned in chapter one and then actually validate whether or not, based on feedback from their peers, it's in line or jives of what they think they need to work on? I don't know if that makes sense.

[00:09:56] Dagna Bieda Yeah. So in the very first chapter. We kind of lay out the theory. In the second chapter, we start getting into some actionable advice because if you think something's not working, if there's an obstacle or challenge in front of you, you perhaps have not been open to receiving the feedback that was being thrown at you at all times. And I can guarantee that you did receive some sort of feedback that was beneficial, but you were just not paying attention. And the reason I can say that, and I'm so sure of it is because I've been in the exact same situation. When I moved from Poland to United States because of my Eastern European upbringing and a different cultural communication style, I would move here to the southern part of United States. I'm in North Carolina and people would tell me that, you sound rude, mean, aggressive. And I was like, you're just being sensitive. Okay. Right. Because in my mind, that kind of communication style served me my entire life that I lived in Poland. And there was no issue with that. And I did work as an engineer in Poland as well, and there was no issues with that particular setting. It's only after I moved in non immediately I realized that that cultural impact and communication impact was critical to me having an obstacle in my career in not getting promoted. And I mean, that makes sense when I look back at it because I came across as a mean person. People did not want me to be their team leader or their manager or their leader because they were like, I don't want to have mean person to be my boss. Not really. And I can see it now. But back then, because my ears were closed off to feedback, number one, the words that I was told. Number two, also the situation that I was in, not getting the promotion, that was feedback in itself, but I didn't see it back then.

[00:11:56] Joe Colantonio That is a great example. How do you receive feedback without getting offended then? I have thin skin? So if I get feedback, sometimes I feel like I'm being attacked, I don't know why. Some sort of mental issue that I probably need to work out in this book. But how do you take that feedback and use it not to be offended, but to make you grow?

[00:12:14] Dagna Bieda It's important to understand how the mental configuration of the mind works, right? The fact that you perceive it as an attack, it's part of your configuration setup that's really created by the evolution. Back in the day, if someone attacked you verbally, your standing within your tribe could have caused you to be kicked out and then you would have no resources to survive, right? So it's a kind of survival mechanism. And in order to understand why your defenses are coming up, it's good to kind of keep in mind how our minds evolved and the fact that there's a lot of that. Did the modern times, right? We want feedback to grow, but our brains are optimized for survival, not really for growth. Does that make sense?

[00:13:04] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. Love it. I guess then the next chapter is the brain refactor algorithm.

[00:13:10] Dagna Bieda yeah.

[00:13:10] Joe Colantonio Where you then kind of can work on a new response maybe than what you're used to. Maybe a little background with this chapter and we'll dive in a little bit.

[00:13:19] Dagna Bieda With this particular algorithm that I outline in the book, there's five steps plus a caveat that explains merge conflict. And the thing about the book is that the following chapter 4, 5, 6, and 7, they essentially take the brain refactor algorithm and put it into a particular use case of my own in case of burnout. And then my former clients who have applied the right factor algorithm and outcomes that they got. Here are the five steps that you want to take whenever you're refactoring your brain using the algorithm. Number one is you want to identify root causes, you want to understand why things are not working. And this is where we get after we have accepted that there are things that are not working and that we are actually receiving feedback that will allow us to grow. And step number two, we plan out the risk factor, so we start replacing things just like you said, Joe, we are going into okay, I'm getting my defenses up when someone gives me feedback to how would I rather be an act? What would I rather feel in that moment? Why would I rather think in that moment? And that's part of your planning phase in step number two. In step number three, we want to script, know responses. These are the kind of responses that you could think of basically as scripts that will interrupt what your OS is currently kicking off in the background completely subconsciously. You might be noticing. Okay, Dagna, Joe, we're having a one on one that Joe is noticing. Dagna is being a little mean. She's leaning into her Polish side and being to the right and you start noticing maybe your breath is getting more shallow, maybe there's tightness in your chest. Maybe you start noticing that your body language is trying to like, protect you and you're shrinking physically. And if you're able to essentially capture that in your conscious mind and interrupted and be like, No, no, no, no. I know you have good intentions. I know. It's just her lack of skill. I know she means well, and this will help me grow so I can take a deeper breath and relax. This is your new script, and you have to manually execute it until it sinks in. And step number four, we want to build libraries of evidence. And then step number five, we want to continuously execute. And I know we were talking you in your intro you were talking about the DevOps toolchain, and we love to think about deployment. But in terms of the legacy mental code, unfortunately, deployment is more of a continues execution. It's not really a one and done kind of thing where you deploy the code and it's already out there.

[00:16:12] Joe Colantonio What is interesting about legacy code, a lot of times you want to touch it, but in order to get better, you're going to have to. How do you do that? I guess therapy would help, but anything else?

[00:16:24] Dagna Bieda Yes, absolutely. Therapy and coaching are phenomenal. And the main difference in therapy and coaching are the how do I call it? The main difference between therapy and coaching would be the focus Therapists are educated to bring you from, if you were to put your mental performance or health or mental state on a scale of -5 to 5, therapy is bringing you from -5 to around 0. That normal, quote unquote healthy state. While coaching is more interested about bringing it to your peak performing self. Taking you from that zero normal, regular healthy state to your potential, the +5. In that sense, they're complementary and they are great ways to improve that. Now there are ways that you can improve your hardware too, with brain, some things that improve the hardware of your brain, like the actual physical structure would be diet would be exercise. There's this new thing coming up called Neurobics which is type of exercise for brain in order to make it better, more efficient and whatnot. But my favorite way of updating the hardware of the brain is actually doing a neurofeedback training. It's this also called QEEG biofeedback training, and it's this relatively new ish way of training your brain that improves its hardware. And it's super easy as a client. You essentially go into your meeting and watch TV and your brain improves itself on a hardware level.

[00:17:55] Joe Colantonio Wow. That's cool. That's something that you would as part of coaching of someone to take coaching with you, they learn these type of techniques that you just mentioned?

[00:18:04] Dagna Bieda Yes, absolutely. And I recommend it to all my clients. This is not something that I do, but I've tried it on myself and it works tremendously. I recommend it.

[00:18:14] Joe Colantonio Very cool. All right. So next chapter, I think is once again, I don't know if it's just engineers or maybe just some in engineering. I just see it more people deal with imposter syndrome.

[00:18:24] Dagna Bieda Yeah.

[00:18:25] Joe Colantonio So chapter four goes into debugging imposter syndrome. Maybe a little background around this chapter. Why you put it in here, Why it's important?

[00:18:33] Dagna Bieda The four chapters that we're about to dive into are the four common career obstacles that I see over and over and over and over again. And I've seen that for my clients and myself after we were able to refactor these out then is when the promise of the book kicked in, You know, they were able to experience more success, fulfillment, more money, better job opportunities, getting finally that promotion, getting unstuck, getting opportunities and growth in their career. So it's really about getting the common bugs out in those common bugs are imposter syndrome, burnout, trouble dealing with other people and self marketing struggles. How about I read a little sneak peek from the book? Okay. In my book on the Imposter Syndrome, I talk about that imposter syndrome and compare it to growing pains because I feel that imposter syndrome is often overused in our industry. A lot of the time we feel just regular doubt or worry or we feel like overwhelmed with new responsibilities for a brief moment, and we label that imposter syndrome, but that's not what it is. Yeah. It's really the kind of routine set of routines that go into overdrive. And you could imagine while one loop getting executed in your mind, and that's the imposter syndrome. You get stuck in it. And it's really hard to get out without any great condition. Here's an example I call, I mentioned imaginary engineer, Linda, who has five years of experience under her belt, two years in her new job. And in order to draw out the difference between imposter syndrome and growing pains. Here's her story. She's been working real hard with leading her new team. It's her new role as a team lead. But unfortunately, there has been an outage and it was caused by a feature that her team has shift. The outcome has nothing to do with the situation itself. The major failure causing an outage and everything to do with how her mental programing interprets the event. Either impostor syndrome will take over, allowing the overwhelm to kick in or she can lean into the growing pains and experience a transformative growth spurt. What happens next all depends on the internal mental programing. There are strains meaning to what's going on around her. If Linda's legacy mental code is running the imposter syndrome routines, she might think. I knew I wasn't cut out for this role. I've just been fooling everyone and now it's blown up right in my face. Everyone probably thinks I'm incompetent now. I can't believe I let this happen. I shouldn't have been promoted. I am not capable of handling this level of responsibility. My luck has run out. I am not skilled enough for this job. It's clear that I don't belong here. That's how her thinking essentially looked like if we were to log all of her thoughts and print them out. That's probably how it will look like if she is experiencing imposter syndrome. However, if Linda's mental code allows her to lean into the growing pains, she'll probably think something like this. That was a major setback. But it's all part of the learning process. I just need to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. And even though this failure is tough to swallow, I know it doesn't define me, my abilities or my worth. I got to be real. I am new to this role and I haven't found my footing yet. I'm facing new challenges, the kind I haven't faced before, and failures are inevitable. But I've overcome challenges before. I'm capable of learning from those mistakes and improving. I'm going to stay focused, stay positive, seek feedback, and keep moving forward. Now notice, the event that didn't change, right? The failure causing outage happened. But the thoughts she's thinking, the meaning her internal mental code assigns to what happened is what affects her behavior and actions from that point onward, creating a completely different set of career outcomes.

[00:22:40] Joe Colantonio All right. It's beautiful, but I would think it's very difficult. For example, we tell ourselves a lot of bias stories, I think, internally.

[00:22:49] Dagna Bieda Oh, Yeah.

[00:22:49] Joe Colantonio In this dialog. I was an introvert and a friend like I was in my 40s. So how do you overcome it then? Is it positive affirmations like is that is a stages that you have to go to get there or is it just like a light bulb moment?

[00:23:02] Dagna Bieda I mean, look at you, Joe now, you have a podcast. You're a podcast host. One thing I really want to point out is being an introvert has nothing to do with the kind of skill you have. Sure you might be. It might be easier for you to acquire the people skills if you're extroverted or it might be harder for you if you're introverted. But the fact is, being introverted or extroverted, that is more about where you get the energy from rather than how your skill set grows. And you can be intentional about it. I mean, what brought you and what casting, Joe? How did you overcome being that introverted self?

[00:23:40] Joe Colantonio I want to improve my communication skills to get over it. I started the podcast just to force me to speak with people. And ten years later, here I am still.

[00:23:49] Dagna Bieda There you go. So you have built the skill. And you're still an introvert, weren't you?

[00:23:55] Joe Colantonio Yeah, absolutely.

[00:23:56] Dagna Bieda Exactly. So nothing really has changed. It's just that you are missing those skills. And if you think about it, a lot of engineering careers or education don't give us those people skills, right? I see it all the time with my college educated clients versus my bootcamp educated clients. I got into tech and are doing programing. And honestly, because bootcamp grads usually have a former career that had them more exposed to those people, skills tend to have a level of people skills and ramp up really quickly with their technical but there's a balance like they're dangerous enough with their technical skill set that they know what's going on or whom to outsource it to, or what to do in order to get things done. But they have the people skills necessary in order to keep moving their career forward with college grads. And that's me. I've been there too. I had some major struggle because of how we're being educated, we tend to overvalue that technical skill set and we tend to put it on a pedestal and it's fun and interesting and mentally challenging. And here we're often curious to just solve the technical problems because it drives us. And the people skills are just like missing from the educational agenda and we ignore them or overlook them. And unless you've been lucky to have a manager in your career or a teammate who had those skills that you could model after and learn from, you have this massive gap. One of the first things that I do with my college educated clients is to help them see the gap because it's just a skill set. And we're trying to whenever we start working together, whenever I work with my clients one on one, we are shining the light on what's really needed in order to progress in your career. And you could say, Dagna, but I don't want to be a manager, so I don't really have to care about people's skills. But hey, guess what? In order to be a staff engineer, in order to be an architect, in order to become a CTO, you have to be able to efficiently collaborate with others to lead them. And those people, soft skills are really crucial, are really critical. One way, I also like to think about it in terms of coding and legacy mental code is whatever obstacle you think you're facing, the reality is the obstacle is you and how you think about the problems that you're facing.

[00:26:26] Joe Colantonio And I love that. And I know you have a whole chapter on dealing with other people as well that probably can help people. I can talk about debugging imposter syndrome for the whole episode. I just want to touch on the final chapters here and well, I guess the one we started off with that you mentioned is burnout, Overcoming Burnout. How much of this is due to like in this industry, like the hustle culture, like not putting in all the work that you talked about, the brain refactoring and just saying, I'll just work more, I'll work harder and not addressing maybe underlining issues.

[00:26:55] Dagna Bieda Yeah, you have to dive into the code though because if you don't dive into the code, you're not going to understand why you keep doing those things to yourself. In my case, there were three major anti patterns that I absorbed just from modeling what I grew up around, right? One of the things was perfectionism, which is setting the boundary so high I could never really reach it and feel good about myself growing. It was about the destination, not the journey, which was a major flaw that caused me to stress out for no reason. And then I also had the anti-pattern code that I call hard work bias, where you tend to overvalue what's difficult or complicated or hard and sometimes what's important for your career, it's easy, it's stupidly easy, maybe like a copy paste task. But for a client who brings in millions of dollars to your business. Being able to balance that perspective and stop valuing the things that are hard all the time can be extremely beneficial to an engineer's career. And the last a really big antipattern was lack of boundaries. If you think about this in terms of DevOps, whenever you're releasing a product, you at least want to manually test that to know that in the hands of users it's not going to blow up. If you don't have any tests and you just deploy changes to millions of users, how do you think that's going to go? Right? Exactly. Like it's going to be a catastrophe. And if you don't have boundaries in place, the same thing will happen. It's exactly the same as not having any tests whenever you're deploying new features into your life. In my case, I had zero boundaries around becoming a parent, and that challenge has been really hard because for the first year, probably after I had my son, I thought, nothing in my life has changed. I just want to get back on track with my career progression, like everything's fine. I can still do everything the same, which is not true. Any expectant parents to be? Yeah, sorry about that. But the reality was that I didn't have protective boundaries in place, and with the perfectionism and the hard work bias, I'll just keep working and working and working and not really taking a moment to recover, to replenish the resources. One of the things I talk about in the book. Two is thinking about your brain as a tool that you have as your most valuable asset because at its core, engineering and entrepreneurship too, is about solving problems. And if you are running on empty, you're just in that mission or you're going to create buggy solutions and that's going to come back to bite you.

[00:29:51] Joe Colantonio Absolutely great advice. And so the very last chapter in the we'll wrap it up and this is something I see as well, as self marketing struggles where someone's just hanging on a queue back in the day, I don't know if they still have cubes. Everything's open space and they're afraid to step up or speak up. Is that something you see very often and how can people get over this? This struggle of self marketing?

[00:30:11] Dagna Bieda Oh yeah, absolutely. It's really about the refactoring of what you believe to be true about marketing. A lot of the time when I work with my clients, they see marketing. They have this marketing model in their mind that equates marketing to lying or deceiving people or being dishonest and if they believe about themselves to be a person who is honest, who acts integrity, which most of us do, then it's really hard to market yourself. If you compared the two models of yourself and the model of lying to other people or being dishonest. We update the marketing model. That's really the biggest change that can cause the most improvement is understanding that marketing yourself is more about educating other people about the value that you could potentially bring them in honesty and integrity with what you believe to be true about yourself. Another way to think about it, too, is that a lot of the time we think that other people pay attention to what it is that we're doing and they're not. Okay, so you are the center of your universe, of course. But that's true for the other person as well. They are the center of their own universe and they're not paying attention to you as much as you would think they do. Of course, you need to take time to educate them about the value that you could bring, about the value that you could provide in order to help them jumpstart that new project, new fun project that they're trying to jumpstart with the company or whatever. But I think you've got to my drift here, though, the point is that if we can change the model of what we believe marketing is, that helps a lot.

[00:32:02] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And I think it is an essential resource everyone should have. It has over almost five star reviews on Amazon. We have a link for it down below. But Dagna, if someone also wants to learn more bit more coaching, maybe a little plug for what you all do. I know you've read a book, that's fine, but actually implementing it is a lot harder. And I would assume having a coach will help you accelerate or even get through it. So any thoughts on that?

[00:32:24] Dagna Bieda Yeah, absolutely. So I am accepting new clients. So if you read my book and you're like, Yes, I want to work with Dagna. There are exact steps outlined in the book in the chapter called Next Step. At the very end, you can find the information where to find me. Usually, it's LinkedIn that's the best place, but also the email address that you could reach out to. And my website, I work with clients 1 to 1 in a four month package container, and I've seen people get incredible results just after the four months that we've been working together. I've seen people double their salary. I've seen people get next job in a half and bad economy that they thought themselves they would not be able to get a job. I've seen people get skip level promotions or get passed imposter syndrome or get out of burnout in a very short time frame because your brain is at the center of everything that you do. And if you get a fix your brain, everything else will improve too.

[00:33:21] Joe Colantonio It's a good point, though. In a tough economy like we're in now, where it's really a company can pick and choose, I think this is more important now than ever to get these skills under your belt to get that next offense for your next gig, for sure.

[00:33:33] Dagna Bieda Absolutely.

[00:33:34] Joe Colantonio Okay, Doctor, before we go, is there one piece of actionable advice you can give to someone to help them with their DevOps career efforts?

[00:33:41] Dagna Bieda The best advice I can really offer is to pick up my book, pick up the worksheet that's attached to the bug, and just go through it to re factor whatever is not working so you can accelerate and skyrocket your career.

[00:33:54] Joe Colantonio Now it's great advice. There's a link within the book for the Brain Refactor workbook, so that's a great actual piece of advice you could take away right now and do it for free for sure.

[00:34:03] And for links of everything of value we covered in this DevOps Toolchain Show. Head on over to Testguild.com/p164. And while you're there make sure to click on the Smart Bear link and learn all about Smart Bear's awesome solutions to give you the visibility you need to deliver great software that's Smartbear.com. That's it for this episode of the DevOps Toolchain Show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full-stack DevOps Toolchain Awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

[00:34:26] Hey, thank you for tuning in. It's incredible to connect with close to 400,000 followers across all our platforms and over 40,000 email subscribers who are at the forefront of automation, testing, and DevOps. If you haven't yet, join our vibrant community at TestGuild.com where you become part of our elite circle driving innovation, software testing, and automation. And if you're a tool provider or have a service looking to empower our guild with solutions that elevate skills and tackle real world challenges, we're excited to collaborate. Visit TestGuild.info to explore how we can create transformative experiences together. Let's push the boundaries of what we can achieve.

[00:35:09] Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.

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