Dissecting Popular IT Nerds

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191. Why Mentoring in IT is So Important with Matt Huffman

Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
191. Why Mentoring in IT is So Important with Matt Huffman
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Matt Huffman

Matt Huffman, AKA Huff, is the Information Technology Manager at Reinders Inc. Matt wasn’t always drawn to computers. In fact, in his younger years his only experience was with Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. He even attended school to become a firefighter. That aside, he eventually found a great fit for his personality by getting into the IT field.

Why Mentoring in IT is So Important with Matt Huffman

Matt discusses the way he approaches his work and shares why mentorship is so important to him. He also discusses his views on AI, managing security risks, and his view on the future of IT. We’ll also hear about why he’d like to see that preconception of the future change from its current form.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

Why Mentoring in IT is So Important with Matt Huffman

3 Key Takeaways

  • Keeping your end users happy is ultimately the goal.
  • There’s no hiding in the server room—you have to handle business at any level.
  • Having a mentor makes all the difference for green members of IT.

Episode Show Notes

[1:55] What’s your favourite business app?

The first thing that comes to mind is my Microsoft To Do. It’s a quick button to add whatever I need on the fly. I’m a big to-do list guy.

[3:39] What’s your preferred method of communication with colleagues?

Email, call, text—it all works. But I haven’t had a ringer on my phone for years. Still, I always try to remain accessible.

[8:06] Correct me if I’m wrong, but you have a very infrastructure-focused background, is that right?

Yeah, I kind of started as just an intern. I’m not your traditional IT person. When I grew up, we didn’t have a computer. I thought I wanted to be a movie producer, writer, or director. Then at the end of firefighting school, I decided that particular career path also wasn’t a great fit for me.

[13:34] I know you look and listen to the user’s needs and fix it how it should be done.

Part of that caveat is pleasing the right people. If I have to drop bad news, I want to do it in a way that’s easy to understand.

[19:09] If you’ve managed IT folks, you know we’re all crazy. How do you mentor and manage your staff?

The staff I’m with now are all newer to IT. They’re all green. I do weekly check-ins, give them positive feedback, and emphasize I have an open-door policy. I lead by example, even if that means digging through the work orders and sharing what I would do.

[21:04] I also saw that you actually do some coaching.

Yes. I coach my daughter’s softball team and her basketball team. I’ve also coached my son’s basketball team. I help out at my former school doing scholarship reviews. I run a local IT group and push mentoring through that, too. I’m always trying to help people and lead by example.

[26:06] Do you have any tips on documentation for keeping it up to date and sharing it with your team?

As far as documentation, it started for me in the second half of my IT career. I was going through an audit, and there was nothing in place. I started creating templates and I got feedback from the auditor. I was able to get remedial stuff in place and set reminders to update every six months.

[31:24] These days, there’s no slowing down of information. The only thing we can do is keep up, right? But sometimes things change faster than you can document.

I recently had to write a paper for class. Depending on how much you cite, you are allowed a certain degree of plagiarism. I had zero, which actually made me concerned. I thought maybe I didn’t do something right. Turns out that I actually got recognition for it. It didn’t even occur to me to use something like ChatGPT.

[34:55] How do you tackle security threats within your organization?

I try to identify different attack vectors. Auditing definitely helps with this. I always like to let the C-levels know where the latest breach was, both big and small. All we are is an IP range. If someone can get a foothold, they will keep going. It’s never targeted until it is.

[40:16] Phishing with employees is quite common still. They should be trained on security.

I went to renew my motorcycle license and the lady didn’t know what to do. She left a notebook open with all the passwords in front of me. It happens all the time.

[42:53] What’s it going to be like a few years from now in the realm of IT? With your experience in multiple areas from helpdesk to systems support and systems admin, I’m interested to hear your response.

I see a lot of young people with less training, less want, and less aptitude. It’s hard to find people who want to take the extra step. You have to be your own biggest proponent and not wish someone else will come and do it for you. People might be good at one sliver of something and think it’s enough. I’d love to see a change.

Transcript

Speaker 0 | 00:09.566

Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Matt Huffman, or Huff, Information Technology Manager at Reinders Incorporated. Welcome to the program, Matt.

Speaker 1 | 00:21.475

Hey, thank you for having me. I’m still wondering how I got picked, but it is what it is.

Speaker 0 | 00:26.939

That’s okay. Actually… I got kind of excited when I saw where your work, because I immediately thought, I know you corrected me that it was, I thought it was reindeers, but it only had one E. So maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with reindeers. But to add fuel to the fire, I actually saw that a previous job you worked at was Reinhardt, Boner, Werner and Van Duren. I’m messing up this name like you wouldn’t believe. Wait. That’s two different jobs with rain in the name. So you can understand why I asked. Do you have anything to do with reindeers?

Speaker 1 | 01:06.805

Nothing with reindeers. I guess if I was going to try to make a joke, I’d say I like to make it rain. When I look at IT, when I get into an environment, I rain. So a couple things could be put off through there.

Speaker 0 | 01:19.873

There you go. So you got more, yes, the Huff rains air.

Speaker 1 | 01:25.044

Uh, Reiner is actually a bunch of lawyers, so I don’t know if they’d really get a kick out of the boner part of that,

Speaker 0 | 01:29.748

but that was a, that was a flub on, uh, on my part. But, uh, um, you know, you, you, you say enough words, you’re going to get some wrong. So, um, uh, it’s, uh, it’s time for our icebreaker segment and we call this one, uh, random access memories. Um, I ask a question and then you respond with the answer, uh, and to whatever comes to your head first. Very, very simple. Uh, your first question. is what’s your favorite business app and you don’t you can you can answer this if you like a specific app you can put it on there or you can just say like a type of app that you want whatever which way you want to have that honestly first thing that comes to mind to me is my Microsoft to do

Speaker 1 | 02:13.096

I have it on my tablets my laptop my cell phone I haven’t I’m an Android user so I can throw it down and make it a quick quick button to add something if I need to, something that comes up on the fly. I’m a big to-do list guy. I love checking things off, getting them done. I feel like it was a long time ago I heard something came out of some school somewhere that said that people who do to-do lists are more productive than anyone else. And even if you don’t finish the list, you still did more than most people do. So to me, I love a to-do list. I like this one because emails, I can flag them, throws them right into that to-do list. I can create sub lists for any of my texts, any projects, any locations, things like that. And, um, my wife hates it cause I’ve taken over half our whiteboard with my weekly to-do list and I just go over and do it every week. And, um, there’s not enough whiteboard for me. So,

Speaker 0 | 03:10.984

you know, it’s funny cause that’s a, that is such a good app. I’ve used it before. Um, uh, I use some other things now, but when I used it, I thought it was fantastic. For being free or included in part of the Microsoft stuff, it is just such an easy thing to use and stuff like that. I got another one for you. What’s your preferred channel of communication when reaching out to colleagues?

Speaker 1 | 03:45.799

Oh, wow. That’s funny because I’ll tell my users the same thing. It’s like email, call, text, smoke signal, Pony Express, whatever you need to do to get a hold of me. I’m open to all channels. The one thing is, it’s funny, is now that I’ve kind of moved into management, I don’t think I’ve had a ringer on my phone for five plus years. So if I get an alert on the watch, I’ll take a look. If I’m sleeping and I wake up and see something, then I’ll respond. But I mean, I’m… I’m pretty much always accessible. And I think that’s beneficial and it’s helped me.

Speaker 0 | 04:24.081

No, that’s a… When you move into management, it’s 24-7 in a consultative way. Right.

Speaker 1 | 04:36.205

Yeah. I’ve been around those people that have been where I’ve been before me and you can’t get a hold of them. And it’s just like… You know, it’s… roadblocks. And it’s like, there’s no reason for that, especially on some of it. Like, you know, you’re, you’re a young tech and things are just, you think it’s a difficult, big decision. And it’s just a simple answer. Maybe a little guidance and mentorship will come with that. And they don’t do that. Whereas I, I don’t want to be that I’ve seen that. And I try to change that and be different.

Speaker 0 | 05:02.136

No, absolutely. What is the strangest computer setup you’ve ever seen?

Speaker 1 | 05:12.540

Oh, man. It wasn’t even when I was in IT. It was, I had to be 24, and I was doing furniture installs, and we had gone to this condo to an old engineer. There were so many things with this job, this one particular job. This guy had wanted just desks all the way around the whole room, just all connected. And the equipment he bought was this stuff that is like high-end IKEA. I want to say it was called like Jesper or something. So it’s piece by piece, but it’s really high-end wood. So we bought it, put it all together, and every desk had, I think they call them hutches, like the big part that goes over it on the back. Because I gave him the nickname Bobby Hutchess because every desk had it all the way around. Just the whole room was filled with them. And he had like one old computer. I don’t even know what it was at the time. And he was complaining that he could not get the computer hooked up after we did everything because the power strip that he had would not fit the little gap in the hutch. And I remember going over to him and just turning it sideways and putting it through the hole. And just like, seriously? The next day he called and he wanted us to come back, take it all down because he decided he wanted to put, I want to say like two inch, not two inch, half inch thick by maybe two to three feet wide and 12 feet long plexiglass on the floor so we could roll this across the whole floor. And I was just like, not happening. Back to do that. That was probably that. And when I worked at Milwaukee County as an intern, we did. a bunch of monitor replacements at the zoo. So going in the back of there and seeing a monitor that had to be replaced, covered with bird poop, exotic bird poop. And then when I also was at the county, I did the same project, but we were replacing monitors in the detention cells. So seeing some of those getting, hearing that they had to drill the base in because inmates were grabbing the monitors and throwing them.

Speaker 0 | 07:25.090

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 07:25.771

That was interesting.

Speaker 0 | 07:26.972

I mean, the temptation to grab a monitor and throw it sometimes when you’re in the heated moment of IT is enough. I can’t imagine in the penitentiary, right? So, all right. No, I’m actually, you made it through that. Great, great little stories of having those on there. I’m interested. I was looking at your… uh later stuff you’ve got so much different types of uh things that are going on here and and i was reading about all the different pieces and things that you’ve done i mean it uh and correct me if wrong very much an infrastructure focused um uh background right yeah i mean i kind of started as

Speaker 1 | 08:17.276

just an intern in IT. I mean, it’s funny, IT for me, I’m not your traditional IT person. Like I grew up in, you know, the 80s. And, you know, I didn’t really have a computer. We had, you know, number munchers and Oregon Trail in school. That was it. I didn’t know what system it was and couldn’t tell you anything. Early 2000s, a buddy of mine gave me a computer, maybe late 90s, sorry, gave me a computer of his and I hooked it up and I had an AOL disk. And I got online and thought I wanted to be a movie producer and a writer and a director and ended up getting on to like Kevin Smith’s chat room or something and was talking to people and someone kept giving me information. And I was like, you know, not here to talk to you, buddy. And I thought it was foul. And a couple of years later, I found out that was probably Kevin Smith. Just because I didn’t know what a handle was. It was like he had some handle and, you know, I had no clue. But yeah, it wasn’t until I was in school for, right at the end of school for firefighting, I was in my second to last class and I had to do a ride along with a local ambulance company. And my son had just been born and all through class, you know, we saw lots of horrific videos and everything was fine. It was just nothing with kids. And through the ride along, we had to do just a transport of a very young kid to another hospital, the children’s hospital here. And, you know, wasn’t worse for wear, but he just couldn’t breathe. You could see that, you know, kind of he was sad. The mother was a little worried. And these guys were just trying to get him out of there because they wanted to go to the next car wreck or gang fight. And, like, I was just like… oh my god what am i gonna do i can’t handle this like what am i gonna do if i see a kid that’s really hurt so i had to go back to school and um the next day was like hey uh i can’t do this and the counselor was like well i mean you’re almost done do you you know the other thing you could do with a firefighting degree is you can inspect buildings i’m like that is not something i want to do i said what do you want to do and i was like i don’t know i want to get an office job you know something that pays well and he He brought up computers and he’s like, do you want to do programming, coding, security, networking, all this other stuff? And I’m just like, I have no clue, man. Put me in something that does a little bit of everything. And he did. And I failed horribly that first semester. And then the second semester, I got an internship my second week into the semester with Milwaukee County. And I was able to utilize everything while I was working and just kind of just put it all together and just kind of really flourished. I. I enjoy a challenge. I like getting to the root of an issue. I like, you know, definitely I’m a people pleaser. So keeping my users happy and making them, you know, making their job easy, because, you know, we are a cost center. We don’t, you know, provide anything usually. So if I can make it where my end users are happy, they’re working really well, the equipment’s going real well. I think that that to me is just, it’s, it’s my strong suit. So.

Speaker 0 | 11:21.379

Wow. You know, it’s interesting how many people get into IT through just, you know, I fell into it or I didn’t have anything to do. So I pushed, I found this and I went into this piece. It’s an interesting piece of thing. Like, you know, in me, I always wanted to do computers ever since I was little. So it’s just it’s different. But. But I have worked with so many people and heard so many stories, very similar to yours, where they either fell in or they were pushed in from some other spot or didn’t like what they were doing and just went into this one instead. And just made some amazing, you know, head roads and stuff like that. And it’s amazing. It’s just to see that, you know, you’ve gone from, you know, going, I’m not going to be a firefighter or something like that. Instead, I’m going to be a, I’m going to just. dive into this computers and now you’re uh you know um um it manager i mean that’s that’s a it’s a great success story a great uh um a great thing to show show for it um um you know it’s interesting i used the term people pleaser and i would um what i would do is i would uh um i would look to try and change that term a little bit because um when you say people pleasing right Sometimes individuals may want something, right? And you had mentioned earlier about the guy who wanted to put that thing down so he could roll his stuff around. He wanted to come move all the equipment with that. It really doesn’t make any sense, right? So in that case, we definitely want to make end users happy. And the way I think about making end users happy is understanding their needs and giving them their needs, which I believe that’s what you meant to say. by the people-pleasing, but sometimes that people-pleasing can be thought of as just doing what the end user says, and that generally doesn’t please the end user, right? The method of making, and I want to make this correction because based on your story, I know that you’re the other way around. I know that you actually look and listen to the user’s needs. and focus on getting the needs done the right way, the correct way, maybe not the way that the user wanted, but the way that it should be done so that they’re happy later on.

Speaker 1 | 13:53.024

Yeah, and I think part of the caveat to that is pleasing the right people. But to me also, I guess the people-pleasing aspect of it is like, if I’ve got to drop bad news, I’m going to make it the bad news in a way that they’re going to understand it. I’m going to make them feel good about it. I want my users to feel comfortable because I still remember. you know back in the firefighting days you know i was still working full-time too in a warehouse just you know shipping things and pulling and picking orders but like my first laptop was a dell laptop that i bought from dell i just picked the specs i thought were good that thing went into a sleeve into another sleeve into my backpack i had no idea what it was i i just had to protect this thing you know and then a year later i’m pulling apart switched to hard drive had some ram and like i still remember like how that thing was like just a mystery to me until it wasn’t. So like I want my users to feel comfortable with the technology and know. And I think that’s part of the pleasing aspect for me. You know, I’m not going to, I just rolled out a new lock screen policy and they’re not happy, but like I am just letting them know like, hey, it’s just locking the screen. It doesn’t shut down your computer. It doesn’t shut down, you know, your applications. Because, you know, you get a couple of people right now that are already like, oh, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to ruin things for me. I’m going to lose six sales calls. Like if you’re losing six calls in a half hour, those calls weren’t doing anything anyways. You know, and just not being scared of someone who their position and their title is. So I think I heard it yesterday on another one of the, I was listening to a couple of older episodes and someone had mentioned something about like, you know, the I think it was a way to make sales or to, you know, get people comfortable. The first thing was make them smile. And I was like, I love that. That’s what I try to do. You know, and then it was the ask the five in-depth questions. And I’m like, yeah, I definitely try to get to the root of every issue and the cause. And I had one former coworker who we’d be in meetings and it’d be higher level meetings and he would, everything would be going great. People would have the right ideas. We’re going this way. And he would just this ask this question that came out of nowhere. It was just, it felt negative and it was the wrong thing. And I asked him afterwards, like, dude, do you really believe that? And he’s like, no. And he’s like, but if nobody asked the other question and nobody sees it from a different side, are we going to miss something? And I always kind of remembered that. And I was just like, yeah, okay. I get it now. Like sometimes you have to be the devil’s advocate, be the bad guy. And it’s not because you want to be the bad guy, but because you have to see it from the bad guy’s point of view and, um, and find that other thing that you might be missing. Cause you’re just so blinders on happy to run down that road. And it’s not the right road.

Speaker 0 | 16:28.620

Huff, I’m super happy you brought that up because if anyone that knows me, I’m a very, very positive individual, right? And I don’t do well at playing devil’s advocate. So I surround myself with a bunch of realists, right? And I say, listen, I don’t care what I say, right? I want you to poke holes in it every which way just so that they… Just so that I have those other opinions and stuff like that. And you’re right. I mean, you have to make sure you do that. I loved your talk about, you know, with the end users. I think what you are is you have a great customer service focus for the end users, right? And you have good direct communication, right? Those two things allows you to get stuff done without. trying to appease an end user and putting in the wrong thing. So I actually think that that is, you know, and it’s evident too, because it just shows you where you, where you got with that, right? You’re providing good solutions and being clear and concise and, and easy to understand to the end users helps move you forward in your career because it, because it makes your solution successful. And I love what you mentioned about the. you know um about having someone in the room just throwing uh um we we call it affectionately throwing wrenches you know you’ve ever seen uh what is that movie uh dodgeball again dodger wrench no and he just throws the wrench that’s what people do everyone’s like yeah this would be a great project all of a sudden throw the wrench bam right so but you need someone in the back to throw wrenches because otherwise you know you’re going to get that wrench when you go to deploy the solution or you are in the middle of getting it done and they’ll be oh you don’t want that so yeah that’s that’s an excellent insight into into all this stuff um uh you know uh um you have uh uh people how many people you have on your team uh right now i am um four to six ish okay so you got four to six people on your team i’m really interested um and i’m you know i love the i.t but i also love the management aspect of IT even more. Because if you’ve managed people, you’ve managed people, it’s always interesting. If you’ve managed IT folks, right? You know, we’re all crazy. So, you know, so it’s always a fun adventure to manage IT folks. But what do you do to manage and mentor your IT staff that you have?

Speaker 1 | 19:17.578

Well, I guess right now, the staff that I’m with now, They’re all newer to IT. They’re kind of more green. And just kind of at the moment, I do weekly check-ins. We have some of our basic questions. What have you been working on? What are you working on? What do you need help with? What do you want to do? And also give them that positive feedback of what I’ve seen or things that I need them to work on. And just let them know that I’ve always got the open-door policy, that whole same thing with the reach out to me at any time. And just… Lead by example. You know, I’m getting to a point where, like, I will dig through the work orders and just be like, this is what I would do, here’s what I’d do, and just start really showing them things like that. Other parts of me that mentor have been, I’m really big on the leading by example. Like, I don’t think that I’m too big to go change a mouse battery or to jiggle a monitor cable or something like that. Like, if I need to go do that, I’m going to go do that, help an end user and just show them that, you know, there’s no hiding in the server room. You know, if you need to go do something, you got to go do it. And it doesn’t matter if you’re level one, if you’re the sysadmin, IT manager, you know, I just. to me it’s it’s getting it done and and handling business you know that whole it brand and i i think of that old cartoon with the the guy everything going to crap and they’re yelling at the i.t guy like what do we pay you for and then the other pain the pain is everything calm and quiet and they’re like what are we paying you for so i just you know i i’d like the second half because then i’m not running around acting all foolish because we’ve handled everything and if they’re really going to question it then i should have some stuff in place um, show them what the, what, how great everything is.

Speaker 0 | 21:01.141

The, um, uh, uh, the, you know, I asked you about the mentoring, uh, because, uh, I saw that you actually, uh, um, do some coaching.

Speaker 1 | 21:12.665

Yeah, I, I do my daughter’s basketball team, her softball team. Um, I’ve coached my son’s school’s basketball team. I, I help with, uh, My former school doing, I won a couple of small scholarships, so I get to do some scholarship reviews. So I get to do that. I run a local IT group and kind of really push mentoring through that. I am a Spice buddy at Spice World. So I try to, I’m always trying to help people and push stuff and really try to lead by example. And I’m back in school again myself now and with, you know. school and work and softball and basketball like it is it’s busy but no I I get joy out of seeing kids when they you know especially my kids and you know their friends when they something happens and they it all comes together for them and it’s just like that’s what I’m trying to show you guys and just I remember you know the limited times I was in team sports how much that made me feel and um you know I I like sitting on the side but at the same time I’m like all right I’d rather just coach. You know, I want to be involved in it. And, you know, I’m not trying to live through them and force them into anything, but I am trying to show them, you know, that there is, there is fun into just really putting your best foot forward and, and trying as hard as you can, because that’s just the building block for everything else in life.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.330

Oh, absolutely. Do you think there’s any, um, uh, uh, any connections between the coaching and the mentoring that goes on at, uh, your, uh, um, at your work there?

Speaker 1 | 22:54.075

Um. possibly I can’t say that it isn’t just because over time everything starts you know I start picking up things from everything I do I still am out learning now like I’m outside of school I’ve always listened to podcasts and pick things up I’ve always you know one of my favorite most favorite things right now is there’s a podcast with two to four minutes of just as they call them jewels and it’s a iced tea daily game and I just you know all these little things and just listening to that and I picked up a mentor late in my career and he really taught me a lot. And then I really started to push. And then I saw what I got from him and it just kind of accelerated everything else I was doing. Then I really like I had done a little bit of coaching. I had done a little bit of IT, like networking stuff. But once I saw what I was getting out of him and just started really wanting to give back, you know, it’s just, you know, I felt I got more once I started giving more too. So I just really started to do that more.

Speaker 0 | 23:56.869

So great answer. I absolutely love the piece. And I got a warm spot in my heart for the coaching. In school, I did cross country and was in martial arts and stuff like that. So people that take their time out of the way to get that done, especially the teachers and stuff that I had. And then… Along the way, all the different folks that took time out of their time, time out of their day to, you know, to mentor me in IT. It’s a, you know, it’s a good thing to have. And I appreciate the fact that you’re working hard with your team to do that and working with your kids and other people’s kids, you know, and helping them out. That’s huge. That’s a really good, that’s a very, very noble and selfless thing to do. So I really appreciate you doing that. Um, the, thanks Chucks. Uh, the, um, thing i wanted to um talk to you about too is you know we we have um we’re diving this you’ve got about you said four to six people on your team uh and uh you know i’m sure there’s tons of work that they’re doing they all got their to-do’s and all working on different things uh when they get done working on things uh i’m sure they’re documenting stuff here there and everything do you have uh a um a structure to your documentation? How do you keep it updated? Because I see this all the time and I wanted to actually start bringing this question up because it’s just, it, it, it puzzles so many people because it’s, it’s such a, you know, documentation is a journey. It’s not a destination. It’s a continual like traveling along the road. And so you can get it up to date and then it’s out of date again, and then you’re working on it. And then how do you share it? So, um, I wonder if you had, for our listeners out there, any tips and tricks on documentation and how to keep that up to date and share it within your team.

Speaker 1 | 26:07.167

Yeah, absolutely. As far as a lot of documentation, for me, when it really kicked in was when I started going through SOC audits. I was brought in somewhere. That’s when I started my second half of my IT career being the sysadmin. kind of move that into the IT manager. We were going through an audit and they had nothing, nothing in place. So I started Googling things using different documents and templates. And the auditor at the time had given me some feedback on some of the stuff. And what I started to do that first year is I got a lot of stuff in place and it was real remedial. But then I would put a six-month reminder out there on Microsoft to do. And it would pop back up. And now I could go through there and just start. You know, I had my tasks as far as like going through ADD or checking software license or, you know, running my tabletop exercises. And I would start doing those and updating the documents further. And, you know, again, go back out there. Is there a better version of this somewhere? Is someone else doing something that I didn’t think of? And taking a look at that and, you know, making little tweaks along the way. And as you said, it’s a journey. You know, some of those first cell phone policies were like two, three lines. And then now it’s, you know. a page and a half and you just keep growing it and you just have to keep at it and keep doing it. Where I’m at now, we don’t have a lot of documentation that is up to date. So that’s a new thing for me is really getting it, grabbing the old stuff, taking my stuff that I had previously if I can find any templates that I had and just joining the two, seeing what I can do and just keep… It’s a living document. Every document is living. You put the footer on it, you… Make sure you have it all saved in one location. You know where it’s going to go. It’s backed up. I would even take it to a level and, you know, have it ran by the C-levels if it’s something that needs to get ran by them. So there’s not just all my approval. It’s, you know, the whole M of N kind of thing and the right people are seeing it. And especially if you want to make any changes and all that. It’s, you know, I’m not the final word, but I can make some pretty good suggestions.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.965

So. uh some documentation is better than none and uh just keep chipping away at it and uh and keep updating it as you go uh um from that standpoint is pretty much what i’m here right started with training wheels and i mean if you’re not under any kind of obligation or

Speaker 1 | 28:34.590

any kind of regulatory thing even if you they’re not asking for it just put it in place let it grow you know plant that seed and just keep going and keep keep doing it you know i did you don’t have to keep on

Speaker 0 | 28:46.494

constantly add it either because you can set the reminder and look at it in six months or look at it in a year that’s very true actually i did something the other day where i had a document and i and i was you know i’m pretty decent writer i can write something pretty quickly right so i wrote up something and i and it was and i was in a rush and i was like you know what i’m just gonna chat gbt this and see what happens and that was coming man i thought that thing was written in like two seconds i was just like okay wow all right yeah um you I always feel like at this point, you know, if you could write up something, even if it just is like garbage, like, I mean, just give me the just the data and put it out in bullet points. You know, you’ve got your own personal editor sitting right by your side now up on a website where you could just, you know, pop it. Obviously, the disclaimer here is that you should never put anything sensitive into that GPT. Right. But, or at any of the other Bard or any of the other ones that are out right now. But yeah, that’s a, I actually, you know, thinking about your strategy, that works really well now. Because, I mean, because now as you chip away and add things to things, you can just say, make this sound professional, bam, put it in there. And then you’ve got your own updated document. You can have it in five minutes. Yeah. He’s not down.

Speaker 1 | 30:12.112

True. Yeah. I mean, to me, though, there’s still there’s a part of me that has some pride in being able to do it on my own. And that’s just maybe that’s me.

Speaker 0 | 30:19.714

No doubt. Yeah, it’s interesting. tug of war that goes on and and i know in my head right as i as i put the stuff in there i’m like i could have written that but it would have taken me longer you know and you know i i don’t know that’s a good you might have stumbled on something uh here that we might want to chap out for a minute um you know in this day and age it just seems like things keep going faster and faster and faster and faster right um There’s no slowing down of information and pieces. And the only thing we can do is keep up. Right. And that’s the struggle with documentation. Right. Your stuff changes faster almost than you can document it and formally put it in there. It always seems like documentation is lagging behind, even in the quickest sense, a couple days, a couple weeks, a couple months behind the eight ball, you know, trying to get this thing up and rocking. Right. And, you know, and then so you look at you look at these new tools that they have. And, yeah, you can get there quicker. The question is, what are we sacrificing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 31:36.879

I mean, I think of recently one of my classes I had to create a paper for, you know, was a humanities class. And the school I go to is online. And you when you’re done, you have to upload it to an AI system. And depending on how much you cite, you’re allowed to have about a 30%, 10 to 30% plagiarism because of, you know, citing and things like that. I uploaded mine. It was zero. So, I mean, I took pride in that. But then I was also very concerned that, like, did I not do enough right? Lo and behold, I actually won a little bit of an excellence award for the paper. So to me, about a week later, the school sent stuff out about chat GPT. And I’m just like. Okay, well, hopefully I didn’t think I did that. But I mean, no, I, and it didn’t really even occur to me to try that and use that when I was doing this paper.

Speaker 0 | 32:31.204

Well, I, and you know, another disclaimer, right? I don’t think that anybody seriously writing papers to be published or to be put out there for education, you know, as the city of education should really use that as a platform to let something write you something. I don’t think it’s the case. Um, I think that, uh, um, you know, spitting your document into chat GPT and saying, can you identify any errors I have in this? It’s not a bad thing. Right. Um, but, uh, um, you know, you know, having it, write it for you. I mean, you know, especially in that kind of thing. No, I wouldn’t do that. Um, I look at that case, that should be your editor, right? That should be, it should be your, uh, your, your editor of that document. So I’m going to write this up now. show many glaring inconsistencies that I have that I can, that I can clean up. And, and to your point, I put something to the chat GPT the other day and it just responded back to me and said, this is great. Like I was like, I’m like, did I just win chat, a chat GPT competition? Like, I mean, I don’t know if there’s any better things like, you know, you get, like I said, you get the award for it. And then he’s like, yeah, 0%. Good job.

Speaker 1 | 33:47.091

Right.

Speaker 0 | 33:47.960

I mean, you’re like, yes, I, I thought like a computer, wait a second. No, it’s, it’s a really interesting things. I’m, we’re, we’re in a different world and there’s a lot of a lot of stuff changing right now, but I absolutely love, and I had a, I had a, a manager one day that was talking to me and he said, he goes, you know, I don’t need it to be a hundred percent accurate. Just pop it in there and make it as you know, make it 80 something percent. We’ll, we’ll fix it on the way we go. but at least it’s there and somebody can start using it. And I was like, yeah, that’s the purpose of documentation, right? I mean, yes, you want it to be accurate as much as you possibly can, but if it’s not there, then it’s zero per like, there’s nothing you can use it for and it’s not helpful. So I like your strategy, you know, little by little, put it in there. Let’s start chipping away at it. Let’s we’ll, we’ll fix it, you know, as we go and, and get it cleaned up. So that was a, it was a really, really good one. How does, you know, speaking of, um, uh you know i we talked about chat tpt and all its fun little adventures and its recent uh um uh exploit you know that that happened it’s breach um How do you respond and tackle security threats within your organization?

Speaker 1 | 35:05.917

Yeah, to me, it also goes hand in hand with that auditing and SOC background. I take a look at everything now through that. I try to identify, based on all the different things that I’ve learned and seen, just the different attack vectors. It all still comes down to, you know, the meatware. So really getting them learned and taught and the importance of it. I think one of the things I like to do is I like to always let the C-levels know, like, hey, here was the latest breach. Here was the latest breach. And, you know, seeing their kind, you know, you get the city of Dallas. Oh, that was, you know, while surprising, not surprising because it’s a city. It’s huge. But then when you hear like these little small ones. why would they go after them? Well, they didn’t go after them. They went after an IP range. That’s all we are. We’re just an IP range. And if we can get a foothold, that’s when they just keep going. Or if they find your stuff somewhere, or there’s something, someone made a click, it’s never anything targeted until it is targeted. So you can’t always assume that security by obscurity. I don’t like that. So I try to be more paranoid. I try to… Still keep the business going. I don’t want to tighten the screws so much that no one can do anything. But I definitely try to balance. And that’s where some of the education comes into, letting them know why and what. Surprising them sometimes with what can be done that they haven’t seen. And I remember it was many moons ago when I was rolling out Nova 4. That’s not a plug, I guess. I could have said any of the other brands too. One of the things we did, we showed that video that they have of on YouTube now, some young lady at DEF CON with a writer calling his phone company and getting his credentials and getting on his account. And it’s like it’s and she had like a crying baby on YouTube in the background. And it’s like it’s just that simple sometimes. And I’ve done it myself where I’ve had to call someone for something, you know, for my wife or something or for, you know, a parent who couldn’t. figure out something or get something and you just talk your way through it and you get access and it’s just it happens social engineering is is is so yeah so incredibly scary um and uh and and i saw this article the other day um

Speaker 0 | 37:32.469

and to continue on a little bit of a ai piece right um a they asked a artificial intelligence to gain access to a website and the website had a captcha And, you know, that’s the, for all the viewers here, the CAPTCHA is the little piece where you agree that you’re not a computer. And then sometimes you’re presented with like a distorted image. You need to put the numbers in and all that type of stuff. So it obviously failed trying to do the CAPTCHA. But instead, it reached out to another human. And it convinced the human that it was visually impaired. It gave it the CAPTCHA. The human. solved the CAPTCHA for it and then it turned around and plugged it in and gained access to the website.

Speaker 1 | 38:18.397

Wow.

Speaker 0 | 38:22.478

So it’s not just humans that are socially engineered by humans. It’s now AI also trying to social engineer humans.

Speaker 1 | 38:31.561

Wow. I don’t feel so bad. I just had a CAPTCHA the other day that kind of threw me off. It was like a bunch of dice and it was just like… find the two with the matching faces and i’m just like what like what none of them none of the symbols nothing matched i’m just like i don’t get what it’s saying a couple times and then finally i was like oh now i get what it’s trying to tell me so i think they’re purposely gonna start making it harder for us too yeah

Speaker 0 | 38:57.241

well now sometimes i feel like when i go to solve those things i’m like well maybe i am a computer i don’t know i uh i’m not really sure at this moment that’s a good way of looking at it i’d look at it like that like why can’t i solve this Oh, no, I agree. I agree. And it’s such a good, good point. I love that you broadcast out the breaches, you know, to, you know, to your executives. And I would just I broadcast it out to the company, you know, hey, here’s, here’s what’s happening. Here’s what you should be aware of is what you would see. It’s such a huge deal. I mean, you spoke of the Dallas one. I mean, if, you know, Dallas, everything in Dallas is huge anyway. So, you know, the breach is going to be right. So, but I mean, it’s this is this is happening everywhere. And and it’s just going to keep happening. And anybody that’s not investing in in security right now, it’s it’s you know, it shouldn’t be a sell at this point. It should be like, you know, you need to have it. I mean, you know, and I frequently see organizations that don’t even have the most basic antivirus and or anti-malware, anti-phishing setup. They’re not phishing their employees and providing them with security awareness training. This is common still.

Speaker 1 | 40:29.749

I mean, I. I once went and renewed my motorcycle license at a, the plates at a local grocery store and the lady on the counter didn’t know what to do and left the notebook with all the passwords sitting out in front of me while she went to go talk to somebody. And I was just like, wow. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 40:49.897

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, and this, this happens all the time. It’s, you know, I’m busy and I honestly, I see what’s happening is The workforce keeps getting busier and busier and busier. We’re doing more and more things, trying to get more stuff done with less people, stuff like that. Because you have this continuous workflow of people trying to work faster and faster and faster, what are you going to do, right? You’re going to sidestep the normal security procedures that might take a little while to tip that. Oh, I don’t want to put multi-factor authentication on because then I have to turn on my phone real quick and type six digits, right? And then, well… later on what what’s going to happen if you do that huff you’re gonna get hacked exactly that’s straight from the huff right there guys you’re gonna get hacked you’re gonna get hacked let’s um i want to uh jump to our our last segment uh it crystal ball um this is an interesting segment because uh you get to kind of uh daydream a little bit uh about what it would be what it’s going to be like a few years from now um in the realm of it right and i i pose this question a lot to i pose a question to everybody that i that i chat to and i get so many different uh varying pieces and stuff like that um the one that i um why i’m glad i’m posing it to you here is because um because of your experience uh you know your role experience in in multiple different spots here i mean uh help desk system support systems admin information technology manager been in the thick of it uh more so than actually uh um you know a a cio or an it director would be at some in some cases and i actually really like this uh because you’re you’re you’re seeing the ins and outs as you mentioned too i mean it’s like hey if i need to go you know you know a place a keyboard i’ll go place a keyboard is what it is let’s just get this you know keep moving in the thick of it What are you seeing and what are the trends? What are we going to be expecting several years ahead of us from now?

Speaker 1 | 43:04.452

Ooh, I have maybe a different viewpoint on this. I definitely see quality and standards going down, and I don’t like that. I see a lot of young people with less training, less want, less aptitude. less standards of their own. And it’s hard to find people that have that want anymore, I think, that people that want to, you know, I know it’s the wrong word, but you know, that people pleaser to make that extra step to really put that time into themselves. Sometimes, you know, you have to be your own biggest proponent. And I think a lot of people think someone’s going to do it for me. And that’s not the case. I do a lot of stuff. And sometimes I don’t think I’m going to get the pat on the back. But it’s like, I did it for me. You know, I didn’t do it for them. So I see, I’m concerned with a lot of stuff, you know, just, you know, people being good at one sliver of something and thinking that’s all it takes. And it’s, that’s not it. There’s so much more to this. And to me, relying on vendors, on MSPs, and not really reading the fine print and the SLAs and getting people put in bad positions. I, it’s, it’s worrisome on some level. Uh, I don’t see a lot of other people like wanting to put in the time and to be a mentor to push themselves you know i early in my career you know i would see the higher-ups going to an event and the only reason they were going to the event was because the vendor paid for it and took them you know to the ball game or to a meal and i was just like what’d you guys learn about this like oh i don’t know i was like oh really and so to me it was like i wanted to go because i might not need that system now i might not need that application now maybe i can relay it to someone else or maybe i’ll need it or want to look at it in the future. That’s part of going, but then also, yeah, to have a little fun into network. So I really put that time in outside of work for myself too. And it’s just, I don’t see that happening a lot. You know, I run a local group and we have supposedly 800 members, but I get a struggle after COVID to get, you know, 20 to show up, you know, before COVID we were, we were growing it and pushing it to the forties and fifties, but you know, it’s, it’s a whole different mentality. Now that whole work from home thing, people just want to stay. stay in their bubble. Nobody goes out. To me, it’s a whole different thing. And I’d love to see a change. I’d love to see people with that drive, like, great, you know, lead, follow, or get out of the way. And if they want to follow me, great, I’ll lead them. If they want to lead, great, I’ll follow you. Like, let’s, let’s do this. But it’s hard to see that it’s getting fewer and far.

Speaker 0 | 45:55.410

He has thrown a dystopian wrench. Into the, uh, uh, it crystal ball and shattered it. No, no, I actually, I actually, uh, love that you painted that picture, uh, because, um, the great thing about the future is it’s a, what if, uh, hasn’t happened yet. Um, and if we, uh, just like we were talking about earlier, if we think about what could go wrong and what things could go happen. uh, beforehand, it gives us a chance to change it. It gives us a chance to, uh, invest and, uh, you know, our time, our efforts into being mentors, into sharing our knowledge and sharing our insights and, um, uh, you know, giving back, uh, um, to these efforts, um, and, uh, coming up and joining podcasts like this and sharing your message out to our listeners so that they can help make changes as well in this. I think that’s huge. That’s a big deal. So it’s a well-deserved dystopian wrench that you threw at us today. I enjoy hearing that because that means that I have a chance, and so do our listeners, to turn around and change that and promote a more people-centric view of customer service. uh, um, promote, uh, documentation and standards and quality, um, promote a, uh, security and, and hearing to these standards that you, all these things that you mentioned on this podcast are extremely vital and important to the future of it. So, uh, you know, hats off to you for that answer, because it is the most unique answer I have had on this podcast. I’m going to keep,

Speaker 1 | 47:49.863

I’m going to keep, you know, I’m going to, until someone wants to get in front of me, I’m going to keep trying to go in front and lead. And, you know, I don’t want to leave people in the dirt. I want to bring people along. You know, it’s corny, the rising tide, you know, lifts all boats. You know, there’s enough of it out here for all of us. We can all do well. We can all be doing great. And in the end, like I always tell like my team and stuff, like when we get through and get all this stuff done and we get this environment, you know, just hammered down and on cruise control, like that’s when we get to a point where we’re getting, now we get to explore. Now we get to really find like those, those business cases where let’s, let’s solve a problem. Let’s find something that isn’t a problem and, and make it better. And just, you know, not in a way that costs money, but in a way, and not necessarily, it wasn’t a problem, but it’s a business use, a business case and just making it real streamlined and just really.

Speaker 0 | 48:42.657

Let’s get past the reactive and into the proactive. So we get some, right.

Speaker 1 | 48:46.698

Stop firefighting.

Speaker 0 | 48:48.039

Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. Nerds, this has been Michael Moore, host of this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And it’s been here with Matt Huffman, also known as Huff, Information Technology Manager at Reinders Incorporated. Nothing to do with reindeers. Matt, thank you so much for joining and really appreciate you having on the program.

Speaker 1 | 49:14.476

Thanks. I just want to give a shout out to the alumni. They know who they are.

Speaker 0 | 49:18.919

There you go. Have a good one.

Speaker 1 | 49:21.565

Thank you. Appreciate it.

191. Why Mentoring in IT is So Important with Matt Huffman

Speaker 0 | 00:09.566

Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Matt Huffman, or Huff, Information Technology Manager at Reinders Incorporated. Welcome to the program, Matt.

Speaker 1 | 00:21.475

Hey, thank you for having me. I’m still wondering how I got picked, but it is what it is.

Speaker 0 | 00:26.939

That’s okay. Actually… I got kind of excited when I saw where your work, because I immediately thought, I know you corrected me that it was, I thought it was reindeers, but it only had one E. So maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with reindeers. But to add fuel to the fire, I actually saw that a previous job you worked at was Reinhardt, Boner, Werner and Van Duren. I’m messing up this name like you wouldn’t believe. Wait. That’s two different jobs with rain in the name. So you can understand why I asked. Do you have anything to do with reindeers?

Speaker 1 | 01:06.805

Nothing with reindeers. I guess if I was going to try to make a joke, I’d say I like to make it rain. When I look at IT, when I get into an environment, I rain. So a couple things could be put off through there.

Speaker 0 | 01:19.873

There you go. So you got more, yes, the Huff rains air.

Speaker 1 | 01:25.044

Uh, Reiner is actually a bunch of lawyers, so I don’t know if they’d really get a kick out of the boner part of that,

Speaker 0 | 01:29.748

but that was a, that was a flub on, uh, on my part. But, uh, um, you know, you, you, you say enough words, you’re going to get some wrong. So, um, uh, it’s, uh, it’s time for our icebreaker segment and we call this one, uh, random access memories. Um, I ask a question and then you respond with the answer, uh, and to whatever comes to your head first. Very, very simple. Uh, your first question. is what’s your favorite business app and you don’t you can you can answer this if you like a specific app you can put it on there or you can just say like a type of app that you want whatever which way you want to have that honestly first thing that comes to mind to me is my Microsoft to do

Speaker 1 | 02:13.096

I have it on my tablets my laptop my cell phone I haven’t I’m an Android user so I can throw it down and make it a quick quick button to add something if I need to, something that comes up on the fly. I’m a big to-do list guy. I love checking things off, getting them done. I feel like it was a long time ago I heard something came out of some school somewhere that said that people who do to-do lists are more productive than anyone else. And even if you don’t finish the list, you still did more than most people do. So to me, I love a to-do list. I like this one because emails, I can flag them, throws them right into that to-do list. I can create sub lists for any of my texts, any projects, any locations, things like that. And, um, my wife hates it cause I’ve taken over half our whiteboard with my weekly to-do list and I just go over and do it every week. And, um, there’s not enough whiteboard for me. So,

Speaker 0 | 03:10.984

you know, it’s funny cause that’s a, that is such a good app. I’ve used it before. Um, uh, I use some other things now, but when I used it, I thought it was fantastic. For being free or included in part of the Microsoft stuff, it is just such an easy thing to use and stuff like that. I got another one for you. What’s your preferred channel of communication when reaching out to colleagues?

Speaker 1 | 03:45.799

Oh, wow. That’s funny because I’ll tell my users the same thing. It’s like email, call, text, smoke signal, Pony Express, whatever you need to do to get a hold of me. I’m open to all channels. The one thing is, it’s funny, is now that I’ve kind of moved into management, I don’t think I’ve had a ringer on my phone for five plus years. So if I get an alert on the watch, I’ll take a look. If I’m sleeping and I wake up and see something, then I’ll respond. But I mean, I’m… I’m pretty much always accessible. And I think that’s beneficial and it’s helped me.

Speaker 0 | 04:24.081

No, that’s a… When you move into management, it’s 24-7 in a consultative way. Right.

Speaker 1 | 04:36.205

Yeah. I’ve been around those people that have been where I’ve been before me and you can’t get a hold of them. And it’s just like… You know, it’s… roadblocks. And it’s like, there’s no reason for that, especially on some of it. Like, you know, you’re, you’re a young tech and things are just, you think it’s a difficult, big decision. And it’s just a simple answer. Maybe a little guidance and mentorship will come with that. And they don’t do that. Whereas I, I don’t want to be that I’ve seen that. And I try to change that and be different.

Speaker 0 | 05:02.136

No, absolutely. What is the strangest computer setup you’ve ever seen?

Speaker 1 | 05:12.540

Oh, man. It wasn’t even when I was in IT. It was, I had to be 24, and I was doing furniture installs, and we had gone to this condo to an old engineer. There were so many things with this job, this one particular job. This guy had wanted just desks all the way around the whole room, just all connected. And the equipment he bought was this stuff that is like high-end IKEA. I want to say it was called like Jesper or something. So it’s piece by piece, but it’s really high-end wood. So we bought it, put it all together, and every desk had, I think they call them hutches, like the big part that goes over it on the back. Because I gave him the nickname Bobby Hutchess because every desk had it all the way around. Just the whole room was filled with them. And he had like one old computer. I don’t even know what it was at the time. And he was complaining that he could not get the computer hooked up after we did everything because the power strip that he had would not fit the little gap in the hutch. And I remember going over to him and just turning it sideways and putting it through the hole. And just like, seriously? The next day he called and he wanted us to come back, take it all down because he decided he wanted to put, I want to say like two inch, not two inch, half inch thick by maybe two to three feet wide and 12 feet long plexiglass on the floor so we could roll this across the whole floor. And I was just like, not happening. Back to do that. That was probably that. And when I worked at Milwaukee County as an intern, we did. a bunch of monitor replacements at the zoo. So going in the back of there and seeing a monitor that had to be replaced, covered with bird poop, exotic bird poop. And then when I also was at the county, I did the same project, but we were replacing monitors in the detention cells. So seeing some of those getting, hearing that they had to drill the base in because inmates were grabbing the monitors and throwing them.

Speaker 0 | 07:25.090

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 07:25.771

That was interesting.

Speaker 0 | 07:26.972

I mean, the temptation to grab a monitor and throw it sometimes when you’re in the heated moment of IT is enough. I can’t imagine in the penitentiary, right? So, all right. No, I’m actually, you made it through that. Great, great little stories of having those on there. I’m interested. I was looking at your… uh later stuff you’ve got so much different types of uh things that are going on here and and i was reading about all the different pieces and things that you’ve done i mean it uh and correct me if wrong very much an infrastructure focused um uh background right yeah i mean i kind of started as

Speaker 1 | 08:17.276

just an intern in IT. I mean, it’s funny, IT for me, I’m not your traditional IT person. Like I grew up in, you know, the 80s. And, you know, I didn’t really have a computer. We had, you know, number munchers and Oregon Trail in school. That was it. I didn’t know what system it was and couldn’t tell you anything. Early 2000s, a buddy of mine gave me a computer, maybe late 90s, sorry, gave me a computer of his and I hooked it up and I had an AOL disk. And I got online and thought I wanted to be a movie producer and a writer and a director and ended up getting on to like Kevin Smith’s chat room or something and was talking to people and someone kept giving me information. And I was like, you know, not here to talk to you, buddy. And I thought it was foul. And a couple of years later, I found out that was probably Kevin Smith. Just because I didn’t know what a handle was. It was like he had some handle and, you know, I had no clue. But yeah, it wasn’t until I was in school for, right at the end of school for firefighting, I was in my second to last class and I had to do a ride along with a local ambulance company. And my son had just been born and all through class, you know, we saw lots of horrific videos and everything was fine. It was just nothing with kids. And through the ride along, we had to do just a transport of a very young kid to another hospital, the children’s hospital here. And, you know, wasn’t worse for wear, but he just couldn’t breathe. You could see that, you know, kind of he was sad. The mother was a little worried. And these guys were just trying to get him out of there because they wanted to go to the next car wreck or gang fight. And, like, I was just like… oh my god what am i gonna do i can’t handle this like what am i gonna do if i see a kid that’s really hurt so i had to go back to school and um the next day was like hey uh i can’t do this and the counselor was like well i mean you’re almost done do you you know the other thing you could do with a firefighting degree is you can inspect buildings i’m like that is not something i want to do i said what do you want to do and i was like i don’t know i want to get an office job you know something that pays well and he He brought up computers and he’s like, do you want to do programming, coding, security, networking, all this other stuff? And I’m just like, I have no clue, man. Put me in something that does a little bit of everything. And he did. And I failed horribly that first semester. And then the second semester, I got an internship my second week into the semester with Milwaukee County. And I was able to utilize everything while I was working and just kind of just put it all together and just kind of really flourished. I. I enjoy a challenge. I like getting to the root of an issue. I like, you know, definitely I’m a people pleaser. So keeping my users happy and making them, you know, making their job easy, because, you know, we are a cost center. We don’t, you know, provide anything usually. So if I can make it where my end users are happy, they’re working really well, the equipment’s going real well. I think that that to me is just, it’s, it’s my strong suit. So.

Speaker 0 | 11:21.379

Wow. You know, it’s interesting how many people get into IT through just, you know, I fell into it or I didn’t have anything to do. So I pushed, I found this and I went into this piece. It’s an interesting piece of thing. Like, you know, in me, I always wanted to do computers ever since I was little. So it’s just it’s different. But. But I have worked with so many people and heard so many stories, very similar to yours, where they either fell in or they were pushed in from some other spot or didn’t like what they were doing and just went into this one instead. And just made some amazing, you know, head roads and stuff like that. And it’s amazing. It’s just to see that, you know, you’ve gone from, you know, going, I’m not going to be a firefighter or something like that. Instead, I’m going to be a, I’m going to just. dive into this computers and now you’re uh you know um um it manager i mean that’s that’s a it’s a great success story a great uh um a great thing to show show for it um um you know it’s interesting i used the term people pleaser and i would um what i would do is i would uh um i would look to try and change that term a little bit because um when you say people pleasing right Sometimes individuals may want something, right? And you had mentioned earlier about the guy who wanted to put that thing down so he could roll his stuff around. He wanted to come move all the equipment with that. It really doesn’t make any sense, right? So in that case, we definitely want to make end users happy. And the way I think about making end users happy is understanding their needs and giving them their needs, which I believe that’s what you meant to say. by the people-pleasing, but sometimes that people-pleasing can be thought of as just doing what the end user says, and that generally doesn’t please the end user, right? The method of making, and I want to make this correction because based on your story, I know that you’re the other way around. I know that you actually look and listen to the user’s needs. and focus on getting the needs done the right way, the correct way, maybe not the way that the user wanted, but the way that it should be done so that they’re happy later on.

Speaker 1 | 13:53.024

Yeah, and I think part of the caveat to that is pleasing the right people. But to me also, I guess the people-pleasing aspect of it is like, if I’ve got to drop bad news, I’m going to make it the bad news in a way that they’re going to understand it. I’m going to make them feel good about it. I want my users to feel comfortable because I still remember. you know back in the firefighting days you know i was still working full-time too in a warehouse just you know shipping things and pulling and picking orders but like my first laptop was a dell laptop that i bought from dell i just picked the specs i thought were good that thing went into a sleeve into another sleeve into my backpack i had no idea what it was i i just had to protect this thing you know and then a year later i’m pulling apart switched to hard drive had some ram and like i still remember like how that thing was like just a mystery to me until it wasn’t. So like I want my users to feel comfortable with the technology and know. And I think that’s part of the pleasing aspect for me. You know, I’m not going to, I just rolled out a new lock screen policy and they’re not happy, but like I am just letting them know like, hey, it’s just locking the screen. It doesn’t shut down your computer. It doesn’t shut down, you know, your applications. Because, you know, you get a couple of people right now that are already like, oh, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to ruin things for me. I’m going to lose six sales calls. Like if you’re losing six calls in a half hour, those calls weren’t doing anything anyways. You know, and just not being scared of someone who their position and their title is. So I think I heard it yesterday on another one of the, I was listening to a couple of older episodes and someone had mentioned something about like, you know, the I think it was a way to make sales or to, you know, get people comfortable. The first thing was make them smile. And I was like, I love that. That’s what I try to do. You know, and then it was the ask the five in-depth questions. And I’m like, yeah, I definitely try to get to the root of every issue and the cause. And I had one former coworker who we’d be in meetings and it’d be higher level meetings and he would, everything would be going great. People would have the right ideas. We’re going this way. And he would just this ask this question that came out of nowhere. It was just, it felt negative and it was the wrong thing. And I asked him afterwards, like, dude, do you really believe that? And he’s like, no. And he’s like, but if nobody asked the other question and nobody sees it from a different side, are we going to miss something? And I always kind of remembered that. And I was just like, yeah, okay. I get it now. Like sometimes you have to be the devil’s advocate, be the bad guy. And it’s not because you want to be the bad guy, but because you have to see it from the bad guy’s point of view and, um, and find that other thing that you might be missing. Cause you’re just so blinders on happy to run down that road. And it’s not the right road.

Speaker 0 | 16:28.620

Huff, I’m super happy you brought that up because if anyone that knows me, I’m a very, very positive individual, right? And I don’t do well at playing devil’s advocate. So I surround myself with a bunch of realists, right? And I say, listen, I don’t care what I say, right? I want you to poke holes in it every which way just so that they… Just so that I have those other opinions and stuff like that. And you’re right. I mean, you have to make sure you do that. I loved your talk about, you know, with the end users. I think what you are is you have a great customer service focus for the end users, right? And you have good direct communication, right? Those two things allows you to get stuff done without. trying to appease an end user and putting in the wrong thing. So I actually think that that is, you know, and it’s evident too, because it just shows you where you, where you got with that, right? You’re providing good solutions and being clear and concise and, and easy to understand to the end users helps move you forward in your career because it, because it makes your solution successful. And I love what you mentioned about the. you know um about having someone in the room just throwing uh um we we call it affectionately throwing wrenches you know you’ve ever seen uh what is that movie uh dodgeball again dodger wrench no and he just throws the wrench that’s what people do everyone’s like yeah this would be a great project all of a sudden throw the wrench bam right so but you need someone in the back to throw wrenches because otherwise you know you’re going to get that wrench when you go to deploy the solution or you are in the middle of getting it done and they’ll be oh you don’t want that so yeah that’s that’s an excellent insight into into all this stuff um uh you know uh um you have uh uh people how many people you have on your team uh right now i am um four to six ish okay so you got four to six people on your team i’m really interested um and i’m you know i love the i.t but i also love the management aspect of IT even more. Because if you’ve managed people, you’ve managed people, it’s always interesting. If you’ve managed IT folks, right? You know, we’re all crazy. So, you know, so it’s always a fun adventure to manage IT folks. But what do you do to manage and mentor your IT staff that you have?

Speaker 1 | 19:17.578

Well, I guess right now, the staff that I’m with now, They’re all newer to IT. They’re kind of more green. And just kind of at the moment, I do weekly check-ins. We have some of our basic questions. What have you been working on? What are you working on? What do you need help with? What do you want to do? And also give them that positive feedback of what I’ve seen or things that I need them to work on. And just let them know that I’ve always got the open-door policy, that whole same thing with the reach out to me at any time. And just… Lead by example. You know, I’m getting to a point where, like, I will dig through the work orders and just be like, this is what I would do, here’s what I’d do, and just start really showing them things like that. Other parts of me that mentor have been, I’m really big on the leading by example. Like, I don’t think that I’m too big to go change a mouse battery or to jiggle a monitor cable or something like that. Like, if I need to go do that, I’m going to go do that, help an end user and just show them that, you know, there’s no hiding in the server room. You know, if you need to go do something, you got to go do it. And it doesn’t matter if you’re level one, if you’re the sysadmin, IT manager, you know, I just. to me it’s it’s getting it done and and handling business you know that whole it brand and i i think of that old cartoon with the the guy everything going to crap and they’re yelling at the i.t guy like what do we pay you for and then the other pain the pain is everything calm and quiet and they’re like what are we paying you for so i just you know i i’d like the second half because then i’m not running around acting all foolish because we’ve handled everything and if they’re really going to question it then i should have some stuff in place um, show them what the, what, how great everything is.

Speaker 0 | 21:01.141

The, um, uh, uh, the, you know, I asked you about the mentoring, uh, because, uh, I saw that you actually, uh, um, do some coaching.

Speaker 1 | 21:12.665

Yeah, I, I do my daughter’s basketball team, her softball team. Um, I’ve coached my son’s school’s basketball team. I, I help with, uh, My former school doing, I won a couple of small scholarships, so I get to do some scholarship reviews. So I get to do that. I run a local IT group and kind of really push mentoring through that. I am a Spice buddy at Spice World. So I try to, I’m always trying to help people and push stuff and really try to lead by example. And I’m back in school again myself now and with, you know. school and work and softball and basketball like it is it’s busy but no I I get joy out of seeing kids when they you know especially my kids and you know their friends when they something happens and they it all comes together for them and it’s just like that’s what I’m trying to show you guys and just I remember you know the limited times I was in team sports how much that made me feel and um you know I I like sitting on the side but at the same time I’m like all right I’d rather just coach. You know, I want to be involved in it. And, you know, I’m not trying to live through them and force them into anything, but I am trying to show them, you know, that there is, there is fun into just really putting your best foot forward and, and trying as hard as you can, because that’s just the building block for everything else in life.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.330

Oh, absolutely. Do you think there’s any, um, uh, uh, any connections between the coaching and the mentoring that goes on at, uh, your, uh, um, at your work there?

Speaker 1 | 22:54.075

Um. possibly I can’t say that it isn’t just because over time everything starts you know I start picking up things from everything I do I still am out learning now like I’m outside of school I’ve always listened to podcasts and pick things up I’ve always you know one of my favorite most favorite things right now is there’s a podcast with two to four minutes of just as they call them jewels and it’s a iced tea daily game and I just you know all these little things and just listening to that and I picked up a mentor late in my career and he really taught me a lot. And then I really started to push. And then I saw what I got from him and it just kind of accelerated everything else I was doing. Then I really like I had done a little bit of coaching. I had done a little bit of IT, like networking stuff. But once I saw what I was getting out of him and just started really wanting to give back, you know, it’s just, you know, I felt I got more once I started giving more too. So I just really started to do that more.

Speaker 0 | 23:56.869

So great answer. I absolutely love the piece. And I got a warm spot in my heart for the coaching. In school, I did cross country and was in martial arts and stuff like that. So people that take their time out of the way to get that done, especially the teachers and stuff that I had. And then… Along the way, all the different folks that took time out of their time, time out of their day to, you know, to mentor me in IT. It’s a, you know, it’s a good thing to have. And I appreciate the fact that you’re working hard with your team to do that and working with your kids and other people’s kids, you know, and helping them out. That’s huge. That’s a really good, that’s a very, very noble and selfless thing to do. So I really appreciate you doing that. Um, the, thanks Chucks. Uh, the, um, thing i wanted to um talk to you about too is you know we we have um we’re diving this you’ve got about you said four to six people on your team uh and uh you know i’m sure there’s tons of work that they’re doing they all got their to-do’s and all working on different things uh when they get done working on things uh i’m sure they’re documenting stuff here there and everything do you have uh a um a structure to your documentation? How do you keep it updated? Because I see this all the time and I wanted to actually start bringing this question up because it’s just, it, it, it puzzles so many people because it’s, it’s such a, you know, documentation is a journey. It’s not a destination. It’s a continual like traveling along the road. And so you can get it up to date and then it’s out of date again, and then you’re working on it. And then how do you share it? So, um, I wonder if you had, for our listeners out there, any tips and tricks on documentation and how to keep that up to date and share it within your team.

Speaker 1 | 26:07.167

Yeah, absolutely. As far as a lot of documentation, for me, when it really kicked in was when I started going through SOC audits. I was brought in somewhere. That’s when I started my second half of my IT career being the sysadmin. kind of move that into the IT manager. We were going through an audit and they had nothing, nothing in place. So I started Googling things using different documents and templates. And the auditor at the time had given me some feedback on some of the stuff. And what I started to do that first year is I got a lot of stuff in place and it was real remedial. But then I would put a six-month reminder out there on Microsoft to do. And it would pop back up. And now I could go through there and just start. You know, I had my tasks as far as like going through ADD or checking software license or, you know, running my tabletop exercises. And I would start doing those and updating the documents further. And, you know, again, go back out there. Is there a better version of this somewhere? Is someone else doing something that I didn’t think of? And taking a look at that and, you know, making little tweaks along the way. And as you said, it’s a journey. You know, some of those first cell phone policies were like two, three lines. And then now it’s, you know. a page and a half and you just keep growing it and you just have to keep at it and keep doing it. Where I’m at now, we don’t have a lot of documentation that is up to date. So that’s a new thing for me is really getting it, grabbing the old stuff, taking my stuff that I had previously if I can find any templates that I had and just joining the two, seeing what I can do and just keep… It’s a living document. Every document is living. You put the footer on it, you… Make sure you have it all saved in one location. You know where it’s going to go. It’s backed up. I would even take it to a level and, you know, have it ran by the C-levels if it’s something that needs to get ran by them. So there’s not just all my approval. It’s, you know, the whole M of N kind of thing and the right people are seeing it. And especially if you want to make any changes and all that. It’s, you know, I’m not the final word, but I can make some pretty good suggestions.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.965

So. uh some documentation is better than none and uh just keep chipping away at it and uh and keep updating it as you go uh um from that standpoint is pretty much what i’m here right started with training wheels and i mean if you’re not under any kind of obligation or

Speaker 1 | 28:34.590

any kind of regulatory thing even if you they’re not asking for it just put it in place let it grow you know plant that seed and just keep going and keep keep doing it you know i did you don’t have to keep on

Speaker 0 | 28:46.494

constantly add it either because you can set the reminder and look at it in six months or look at it in a year that’s very true actually i did something the other day where i had a document and i and i was you know i’m pretty decent writer i can write something pretty quickly right so i wrote up something and i and it was and i was in a rush and i was like you know what i’m just gonna chat gbt this and see what happens and that was coming man i thought that thing was written in like two seconds i was just like okay wow all right yeah um you I always feel like at this point, you know, if you could write up something, even if it just is like garbage, like, I mean, just give me the just the data and put it out in bullet points. You know, you’ve got your own personal editor sitting right by your side now up on a website where you could just, you know, pop it. Obviously, the disclaimer here is that you should never put anything sensitive into that GPT. Right. But, or at any of the other Bard or any of the other ones that are out right now. But yeah, that’s a, I actually, you know, thinking about your strategy, that works really well now. Because, I mean, because now as you chip away and add things to things, you can just say, make this sound professional, bam, put it in there. And then you’ve got your own updated document. You can have it in five minutes. Yeah. He’s not down.

Speaker 1 | 30:12.112

True. Yeah. I mean, to me, though, there’s still there’s a part of me that has some pride in being able to do it on my own. And that’s just maybe that’s me.

Speaker 0 | 30:19.714

No doubt. Yeah, it’s interesting. tug of war that goes on and and i know in my head right as i as i put the stuff in there i’m like i could have written that but it would have taken me longer you know and you know i i don’t know that’s a good you might have stumbled on something uh here that we might want to chap out for a minute um you know in this day and age it just seems like things keep going faster and faster and faster and faster right um There’s no slowing down of information and pieces. And the only thing we can do is keep up. Right. And that’s the struggle with documentation. Right. Your stuff changes faster almost than you can document it and formally put it in there. It always seems like documentation is lagging behind, even in the quickest sense, a couple days, a couple weeks, a couple months behind the eight ball, you know, trying to get this thing up and rocking. Right. And, you know, and then so you look at you look at these new tools that they have. And, yeah, you can get there quicker. The question is, what are we sacrificing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 31:36.879

I mean, I think of recently one of my classes I had to create a paper for, you know, was a humanities class. And the school I go to is online. And you when you’re done, you have to upload it to an AI system. And depending on how much you cite, you’re allowed to have about a 30%, 10 to 30% plagiarism because of, you know, citing and things like that. I uploaded mine. It was zero. So, I mean, I took pride in that. But then I was also very concerned that, like, did I not do enough right? Lo and behold, I actually won a little bit of an excellence award for the paper. So to me, about a week later, the school sent stuff out about chat GPT. And I’m just like. Okay, well, hopefully I didn’t think I did that. But I mean, no, I, and it didn’t really even occur to me to try that and use that when I was doing this paper.

Speaker 0 | 32:31.204

Well, I, and you know, another disclaimer, right? I don’t think that anybody seriously writing papers to be published or to be put out there for education, you know, as the city of education should really use that as a platform to let something write you something. I don’t think it’s the case. Um, I think that, uh, um, you know, spitting your document into chat GPT and saying, can you identify any errors I have in this? It’s not a bad thing. Right. Um, but, uh, um, you know, you know, having it, write it for you. I mean, you know, especially in that kind of thing. No, I wouldn’t do that. Um, I look at that case, that should be your editor, right? That should be, it should be your, uh, your, your editor of that document. So I’m going to write this up now. show many glaring inconsistencies that I have that I can, that I can clean up. And, and to your point, I put something to the chat GPT the other day and it just responded back to me and said, this is great. Like I was like, I’m like, did I just win chat, a chat GPT competition? Like, I mean, I don’t know if there’s any better things like, you know, you get, like I said, you get the award for it. And then he’s like, yeah, 0%. Good job.

Speaker 1 | 33:47.091

Right.

Speaker 0 | 33:47.960

I mean, you’re like, yes, I, I thought like a computer, wait a second. No, it’s, it’s a really interesting things. I’m, we’re, we’re in a different world and there’s a lot of a lot of stuff changing right now, but I absolutely love, and I had a, I had a, a manager one day that was talking to me and he said, he goes, you know, I don’t need it to be a hundred percent accurate. Just pop it in there and make it as you know, make it 80 something percent. We’ll, we’ll fix it on the way we go. but at least it’s there and somebody can start using it. And I was like, yeah, that’s the purpose of documentation, right? I mean, yes, you want it to be accurate as much as you possibly can, but if it’s not there, then it’s zero per like, there’s nothing you can use it for and it’s not helpful. So I like your strategy, you know, little by little, put it in there. Let’s start chipping away at it. Let’s we’ll, we’ll fix it, you know, as we go and, and get it cleaned up. So that was a, it was a really, really good one. How does, you know, speaking of, um, uh you know i we talked about chat tpt and all its fun little adventures and its recent uh um uh exploit you know that that happened it’s breach um How do you respond and tackle security threats within your organization?

Speaker 1 | 35:05.917

Yeah, to me, it also goes hand in hand with that auditing and SOC background. I take a look at everything now through that. I try to identify, based on all the different things that I’ve learned and seen, just the different attack vectors. It all still comes down to, you know, the meatware. So really getting them learned and taught and the importance of it. I think one of the things I like to do is I like to always let the C-levels know, like, hey, here was the latest breach. Here was the latest breach. And, you know, seeing their kind, you know, you get the city of Dallas. Oh, that was, you know, while surprising, not surprising because it’s a city. It’s huge. But then when you hear like these little small ones. why would they go after them? Well, they didn’t go after them. They went after an IP range. That’s all we are. We’re just an IP range. And if we can get a foothold, that’s when they just keep going. Or if they find your stuff somewhere, or there’s something, someone made a click, it’s never anything targeted until it is targeted. So you can’t always assume that security by obscurity. I don’t like that. So I try to be more paranoid. I try to… Still keep the business going. I don’t want to tighten the screws so much that no one can do anything. But I definitely try to balance. And that’s where some of the education comes into, letting them know why and what. Surprising them sometimes with what can be done that they haven’t seen. And I remember it was many moons ago when I was rolling out Nova 4. That’s not a plug, I guess. I could have said any of the other brands too. One of the things we did, we showed that video that they have of on YouTube now, some young lady at DEF CON with a writer calling his phone company and getting his credentials and getting on his account. And it’s like it’s and she had like a crying baby on YouTube in the background. And it’s like it’s just that simple sometimes. And I’ve done it myself where I’ve had to call someone for something, you know, for my wife or something or for, you know, a parent who couldn’t. figure out something or get something and you just talk your way through it and you get access and it’s just it happens social engineering is is is so yeah so incredibly scary um and uh and and i saw this article the other day um

Speaker 0 | 37:32.469

and to continue on a little bit of a ai piece right um a they asked a artificial intelligence to gain access to a website and the website had a captcha And, you know, that’s the, for all the viewers here, the CAPTCHA is the little piece where you agree that you’re not a computer. And then sometimes you’re presented with like a distorted image. You need to put the numbers in and all that type of stuff. So it obviously failed trying to do the CAPTCHA. But instead, it reached out to another human. And it convinced the human that it was visually impaired. It gave it the CAPTCHA. The human. solved the CAPTCHA for it and then it turned around and plugged it in and gained access to the website.

Speaker 1 | 38:18.397

Wow.

Speaker 0 | 38:22.478

So it’s not just humans that are socially engineered by humans. It’s now AI also trying to social engineer humans.

Speaker 1 | 38:31.561

Wow. I don’t feel so bad. I just had a CAPTCHA the other day that kind of threw me off. It was like a bunch of dice and it was just like… find the two with the matching faces and i’m just like what like what none of them none of the symbols nothing matched i’m just like i don’t get what it’s saying a couple times and then finally i was like oh now i get what it’s trying to tell me so i think they’re purposely gonna start making it harder for us too yeah

Speaker 0 | 38:57.241

well now sometimes i feel like when i go to solve those things i’m like well maybe i am a computer i don’t know i uh i’m not really sure at this moment that’s a good way of looking at it i’d look at it like that like why can’t i solve this Oh, no, I agree. I agree. And it’s such a good, good point. I love that you broadcast out the breaches, you know, to, you know, to your executives. And I would just I broadcast it out to the company, you know, hey, here’s, here’s what’s happening. Here’s what you should be aware of is what you would see. It’s such a huge deal. I mean, you spoke of the Dallas one. I mean, if, you know, Dallas, everything in Dallas is huge anyway. So, you know, the breach is going to be right. So, but I mean, it’s this is this is happening everywhere. And and it’s just going to keep happening. And anybody that’s not investing in in security right now, it’s it’s you know, it shouldn’t be a sell at this point. It should be like, you know, you need to have it. I mean, you know, and I frequently see organizations that don’t even have the most basic antivirus and or anti-malware, anti-phishing setup. They’re not phishing their employees and providing them with security awareness training. This is common still.

Speaker 1 | 40:29.749

I mean, I. I once went and renewed my motorcycle license at a, the plates at a local grocery store and the lady on the counter didn’t know what to do and left the notebook with all the passwords sitting out in front of me while she went to go talk to somebody. And I was just like, wow. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 40:49.897

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, and this, this happens all the time. It’s, you know, I’m busy and I honestly, I see what’s happening is The workforce keeps getting busier and busier and busier. We’re doing more and more things, trying to get more stuff done with less people, stuff like that. Because you have this continuous workflow of people trying to work faster and faster and faster, what are you going to do, right? You’re going to sidestep the normal security procedures that might take a little while to tip that. Oh, I don’t want to put multi-factor authentication on because then I have to turn on my phone real quick and type six digits, right? And then, well… later on what what’s going to happen if you do that huff you’re gonna get hacked exactly that’s straight from the huff right there guys you’re gonna get hacked you’re gonna get hacked let’s um i want to uh jump to our our last segment uh it crystal ball um this is an interesting segment because uh you get to kind of uh daydream a little bit uh about what it would be what it’s going to be like a few years from now um in the realm of it right and i i pose this question a lot to i pose a question to everybody that i that i chat to and i get so many different uh varying pieces and stuff like that um the one that i um why i’m glad i’m posing it to you here is because um because of your experience uh you know your role experience in in multiple different spots here i mean uh help desk system support systems admin information technology manager been in the thick of it uh more so than actually uh um you know a a cio or an it director would be at some in some cases and i actually really like this uh because you’re you’re you’re seeing the ins and outs as you mentioned too i mean it’s like hey if i need to go you know you know a place a keyboard i’ll go place a keyboard is what it is let’s just get this you know keep moving in the thick of it What are you seeing and what are the trends? What are we going to be expecting several years ahead of us from now?

Speaker 1 | 43:04.452

Ooh, I have maybe a different viewpoint on this. I definitely see quality and standards going down, and I don’t like that. I see a lot of young people with less training, less want, less aptitude. less standards of their own. And it’s hard to find people that have that want anymore, I think, that people that want to, you know, I know it’s the wrong word, but you know, that people pleaser to make that extra step to really put that time into themselves. Sometimes, you know, you have to be your own biggest proponent. And I think a lot of people think someone’s going to do it for me. And that’s not the case. I do a lot of stuff. And sometimes I don’t think I’m going to get the pat on the back. But it’s like, I did it for me. You know, I didn’t do it for them. So I see, I’m concerned with a lot of stuff, you know, just, you know, people being good at one sliver of something and thinking that’s all it takes. And it’s, that’s not it. There’s so much more to this. And to me, relying on vendors, on MSPs, and not really reading the fine print and the SLAs and getting people put in bad positions. I, it’s, it’s worrisome on some level. Uh, I don’t see a lot of other people like wanting to put in the time and to be a mentor to push themselves you know i early in my career you know i would see the higher-ups going to an event and the only reason they were going to the event was because the vendor paid for it and took them you know to the ball game or to a meal and i was just like what’d you guys learn about this like oh i don’t know i was like oh really and so to me it was like i wanted to go because i might not need that system now i might not need that application now maybe i can relay it to someone else or maybe i’ll need it or want to look at it in the future. That’s part of going, but then also, yeah, to have a little fun into network. So I really put that time in outside of work for myself too. And it’s just, I don’t see that happening a lot. You know, I run a local group and we have supposedly 800 members, but I get a struggle after COVID to get, you know, 20 to show up, you know, before COVID we were, we were growing it and pushing it to the forties and fifties, but you know, it’s, it’s a whole different mentality. Now that whole work from home thing, people just want to stay. stay in their bubble. Nobody goes out. To me, it’s a whole different thing. And I’d love to see a change. I’d love to see people with that drive, like, great, you know, lead, follow, or get out of the way. And if they want to follow me, great, I’ll lead them. If they want to lead, great, I’ll follow you. Like, let’s, let’s do this. But it’s hard to see that it’s getting fewer and far.

Speaker 0 | 45:55.410

He has thrown a dystopian wrench. Into the, uh, uh, it crystal ball and shattered it. No, no, I actually, I actually, uh, love that you painted that picture, uh, because, um, the great thing about the future is it’s a, what if, uh, hasn’t happened yet. Um, and if we, uh, just like we were talking about earlier, if we think about what could go wrong and what things could go happen. uh, beforehand, it gives us a chance to change it. It gives us a chance to, uh, invest and, uh, you know, our time, our efforts into being mentors, into sharing our knowledge and sharing our insights and, um, uh, you know, giving back, uh, um, to these efforts, um, and, uh, coming up and joining podcasts like this and sharing your message out to our listeners so that they can help make changes as well in this. I think that’s huge. That’s a big deal. So it’s a well-deserved dystopian wrench that you threw at us today. I enjoy hearing that because that means that I have a chance, and so do our listeners, to turn around and change that and promote a more people-centric view of customer service. uh, um, promote, uh, documentation and standards and quality, um, promote a, uh, security and, and hearing to these standards that you, all these things that you mentioned on this podcast are extremely vital and important to the future of it. So, uh, you know, hats off to you for that answer, because it is the most unique answer I have had on this podcast. I’m going to keep,

Speaker 1 | 47:49.863

I’m going to keep, you know, I’m going to, until someone wants to get in front of me, I’m going to keep trying to go in front and lead. And, you know, I don’t want to leave people in the dirt. I want to bring people along. You know, it’s corny, the rising tide, you know, lifts all boats. You know, there’s enough of it out here for all of us. We can all do well. We can all be doing great. And in the end, like I always tell like my team and stuff, like when we get through and get all this stuff done and we get this environment, you know, just hammered down and on cruise control, like that’s when we get to a point where we’re getting, now we get to explore. Now we get to really find like those, those business cases where let’s, let’s solve a problem. Let’s find something that isn’t a problem and, and make it better. And just, you know, not in a way that costs money, but in a way, and not necessarily, it wasn’t a problem, but it’s a business use, a business case and just making it real streamlined and just really.

Speaker 0 | 48:42.657

Let’s get past the reactive and into the proactive. So we get some, right.

Speaker 1 | 48:46.698

Stop firefighting.

Speaker 0 | 48:48.039

Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. Nerds, this has been Michael Moore, host of this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And it’s been here with Matt Huffman, also known as Huff, Information Technology Manager at Reinders Incorporated. Nothing to do with reindeers. Matt, thank you so much for joining and really appreciate you having on the program.

Speaker 1 | 49:14.476

Thanks. I just want to give a shout out to the alumni. They know who they are.

Speaker 0 | 49:18.919

There you go. Have a good one.

Speaker 1 | 49:21.565

Thank you. Appreciate it.

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