Speaker 0 | 00:06.860

All right. Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Justin Miller, IT Manager at Impulse Space in the Los Angeles area. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Speaker 1 | 00:18.768

Great. It’s nice to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:20.309

Great to have you. So right before we got on, Justin and I, here we are coming out at IT Leaders Podcast, and I mess up setting up the link. for the audio channel. And then we get on the call and you’re like, I’m like, I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. And what ended up happening for you? What was the problem again for you?

Speaker 1 | 00:39.985

So I’ve got these really nice, fancy headphones that have the boom mic where you lift it up and it mutes yourself. And the case of being double muted is one of those things that great technology exists, but it can also hurt you if you’re not paying attention. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 00:56.214

here we are. We’re the IT leaders. This is what we’re doing. We can’t get ourselves unmuted, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:02.997

Yeah, it’s great. I’m in so many meetings. It’s like being in all those meetings where everyone’s like, can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Like the old Verizon commercials you used to have. It’s hilarious watching these meetings go down, especially when it’s tech people.

Speaker 0 | 01:19.384

I know. Everyone loves watching the tech guy or the tech person have the challenge of the moment. They get to be like, yeah. Yeah. See, it’s not just me, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:31.309

Yeah. We’re trying to share a screen and it takes like 30 minutes to make it work.

Speaker 0 | 01:35.311

Absolutely. All right. So, so dive it into meat and potatoes here. So, so Justin, you’re, you’re leading, you’re leading a team at a place called Impulse Space in Los Angeles now, but, but you’ve been, you’ve been a leader in a couple other places before this. Can you tell us a little bit about like, just, just a little bit about your history as a leader and, and, and what you’re doing?

Speaker 1 | 01:56.779

Yeah. So. Really, I got my starts when I was 18 doing IT contracting. And I say it’s IT adjacent, really, because I would do point-of-sale work in big box stores like Walmart, Kmart, Target, and things like that. And I would go in with a team of 10 or 15 people, and we would go into a store right before Black Friday when they’re doing all the upgrades. And we would just spend 8 to 10 hours. in a store upgrading all of their logic units, flatbed scanners, hand scanners, doing all of these things.

Speaker 0 | 02:31.458

Right before Black Friday.

Speaker 1 | 02:32.839

Right before Black Friday, right? Because that’s when the…

Speaker 0 | 02:35.200

This does not sound like, this sounds like it could go bad.

Speaker 1 | 02:38.621

Yeah, because, you know, really the biggest, like, part of work for these, you know, big box retail stores is right before Black Friday. So everything works on Black Friday. So they can let a hand scanner or a flatbed scanner, you know, be broken the rest of the year. But on Black Friday, or at least back in the day before everything was online only, that was super important. This stuff had to work. So you would go in, and especially in cases like Walmart, you can’t start before 7 p.m. You can’t have anything on the floor before 7 p.m., and you have to be off the floor by 6 a.m. So you’ve got your list of things that you have to do. You walk in there. Everyone has their marching orders, like you’re doing And you as the person in charge have to make sure all your ducks are in a row. And I’ve moved from that, and I’ve done help desk leadership. I’ve been very fortunate in my role that I’ve been some form of leadership adjacent at every part of my career. So leading the help desk and learning the fundamentals of IT service management and why that’s so important from a user perspective and from a business perspective. Up until, you know, going into systems and being the lead individual, actually working on and managing and building cool systems up until point where I am now, which is, you know, everything IT and IT adjacent.

Speaker 2 | 04:04.946

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Speaker 0 | 06:24.648

Now, I’m going to zero in a little bit on what you mentioned about being a help desk lead. And the reason I want to zero in on that is because so many folks that we talk to here on the podcast, there’s a lot of IT directors, and I know that’s the space you’re doing now. But the specifics of being a leader on a help desk team has its own unique set of challenges. And I’d love to kind of like… one a little bit of that of those depths and and and find out some lessons that you learn from that i mean like i’ve i’ve i’ve just been exclusively a a supervisor of help desk teams but from what i understand and i know you’ve got the people that are there are different if you will and i don’t mean like in a bad way or anything else like that but like your network admins and your help desk people really have different skill sets and they take different management styles in order to get the most out of them and to be an effective leader in those teams. So I’m curious what kind of tactics or understandings that you bring and you think you could share from that experience.

Speaker 1 | 07:29.953

Yeah, no, I definitely what I know now is much different than what I knew back then. And one of the things that’s important is, and you can’t really teach this, you have to find people who have this, you know, at their core as a core principle is that you have to have empathy, right? You have to put yourself in the place of the user. And… When you’re working on a problem for a user, yeah, it may be something trivial to us, a technical-minded individual. But you have to remember that all of these individuals across the business are specialists in their own thing. I can’t come up with some fancy accounting practices, and I don’t expect them to be able to understand the intricacies of boom mics, like on headphones. It’s a little complicated sometimes.

Speaker 0 | 08:14.094

It’s difficult to unmute them.

Speaker 1 | 08:16.035

Yeah, yeah. It’s the whole double muting thing. It gets a little insane. And one of the things that I have really learned across my career is that people just want to work. They want to come in. They want all of their computers to work. And they want to be able to do their job with minimal friction. And it’s really and ultimately the help desk’s role. is to reduce that friction as much as possible for the end user. And sometimes that’s as simple as resetting a user’s password. Sometimes it’s as complicated as debugging why their fancy Excel add-in isn’t working. And it takes time and effort to get through those. And every company is different. Every help desk is different. Some much larger companies have help desks that are very siloed. While your smaller companies or help desks are going to be, you know, kind of multi-tools that are doing things like, you know, resetting passwords, creating user accounts. While other companies, that’s just something that only admins do.

Speaker 0 | 09:23.370

So now motivating that team is different. Yeah, because they, I mean, they’re really on the front lines of your computer infrastructure. You know, you just talked about how it’s important to do that. People people want to have this frictionless experience and that they helped us is really the front lines and removing a lot of that friction. Motivating those people is its own. It’s just different. Like, you know, you could I maybe I’ll speak from some of my experience and we can kind of compare notes here. But I feel like when I’m motivating the people on my systems administration team, I’m motivating them based on the idea of what. Things like, this is going to be simpler when we’re done. We’re going to implement this new system, and it’s going to really take away some of these administrative drudgery that you’re having to currently tackle. Or the system’s going to back up in half the time that it did before. Something like that. We’re trying to accomplish some very specific goals, and it’s usually product-oriented. But the help desk people, I think what motivates them and motivates a good help desk person isn’t particularly stuff like that. It’s… the things that you see the the interactions that they get from from the the people you know that they they have to help um satisfying somebody’s problem rapidly and quickly and easily and getting that affirmation that they’ve done a good job uh is it like like in building building a system that helps those folks do that type of stuff effectively really helps you be able to to give that type of motivation to that type of a team. So I’ll let you contribute here.

Speaker 1 | 11:04.662

Yeah, no, absolutely. And one thing that I stress to my help desk people is that, you know, you’re the face of the IT department, right? It doesn’t matter how efficient my infrastructure is. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve been able to save over building, you know, one, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure over another or how much more efficient we can be by leveraging cloud technology. technologies versus this other technology at the end of the day from the user’s perspective none of that matters because it’s all ones and zeros and very complicated words and they don’t care right somebody cares people who pay the bills they care but the users they don’t care and if the user’s experience is really bad that’s always going to come back to it so one of the things you know that i stress to to my help desk staff is like it doesn’t matter what I do or what my administration team does or anything like that, if a user on day one has a bad user experience, then they’re going to perceive our IT department as incapable of providing good service. And that’s something that we want to avoid because every amount of friction that the user gets on the experience level makes it more difficult from a management and a leadership perspective to go out to the rest of company leadership and say, hey, look, Give me this budget amount so that I can purchase the system to solve these problems because the user experience is already impacted by, well, why are we having all of these other problems and you’re wanting to solve these new problems? And it’s very hard to say that, well, the problems that you’re actually experiencing, they’re not real problems. I could go for days and days and days.

Speaker 0 | 12:52.080

There’s air quotes going on here, just so everybody on the podcast can see. There’s air quotes around that, so let us set a jest.

Speaker 1 | 12:59.726

Sorry about that. From a user perspective, it doesn’t matter if I’m using nice Juniper switches or Aruba switches or Cisco switches, or if I’m using UniFi, or even if I’m using Netgear switches that I bought on Amazon for $5. All a user cares about is, can I come to the office and connect to the internet? Does it work? Yeah, can I get to the network file shares? That’s what matters to them. And the help desk is ultimately the ones that, you know, is, do you need something that you didn’t have before? Okay, I’ll get it for you, right? It doesn’t matter if they have to reach up to the systems administrator and say, hey, Mr. Administrator, Ms. Administrator, can you send this to the user? Or, you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s something that we have to buy and there is a process for that. Like the help desk should be the people leading the charge, being the advocate.

Speaker 0 | 13:48.559

for the user making things happen and um you know at the end of the day that’s all the user cares about yeah i i know i try so hard in my space to empower my help desk folks to solve as many problems as possible you know so like this idea that you know oh that needs to go to level two well that needs to like as much as humanly possible i want problem to be able to be resolved by the first person that call because as soon as you hand off even if the next person does an amazing job at helping them like just the fact that they had to get handed off can can leave it creates a friction point that people become frustrated with for like oh man like like i talked to i talked to joe and joe you know joe actually couldn’t solve my problem so he handed me off to you know to jane here you know because jane’s a sad man and jane knows more than joe did in this particular case and sometimes that’s necessary and you can’t you can’t get around that but like it’s So getting that first call resolution really nailed down, it’s a challenge, and it requires a lot of planning and effort to get it right.

Speaker 1 | 14:56.553

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I do in my organization is the help desk owns every ticket, regardless of who’s actually resolving the ticket. So if it’s a ticket that they can’t resolve and they have to send it to the administrators or myself, it is still their responsibility to make sure that I’m resolving the ticket on behalf of the user. So the metrics at the end of the day reflects on the help desk staff so that we can provide a good user experience for our users across the board. And we don’t always hit the mark. You know, we’re a startup and everything is moving super fast. But at the end of the day, like that’s that’s the goal. Like help desk owns everything because we’re the face of IT.

Speaker 0 | 15:34.560

Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a great way to do it. And it’s really sage advice to give to our listeners out there about how you’re owning that help desk. So, you know, your tickets to help us people become the internal advocates because they care. They don’t just pass the ticket, throw it over the cubicle wall and be like, well, that’s Justin’s problem now. You’ve really created a sense of accountability for all of them in there. And so I’m going to transition here because you brought it up about your current role. And so we talked a little bit about being in the help desk, managing help desks and the things that are there. But you’ve really transitioned to your new leadership role is in a startup. And. What’s that like being an IT manager and a leader in a startup?

Speaker 1 | 16:26.510

It is an experience unlike anything I have ever experienced before in my life. And I had no idea what I was getting into. So I’ve had the privilege in my career to be in, like I said, leadership or leadership adjacent roles pretty much since the very beginning, which is pretty much unheard of for almost anyone ever. But one of the really cool things. that I’ve never really had to worry about is, how do you build something from nothing? I’ve come in and there were always people smarter than me that built these things. They built the systems, they built the help desk ticketing system, the processes. I just came and took over what they built. But here at Impulse, I’ve had to build everything from the ground up and figuring out, okay, what’s my budget? How much do I need to spend? Who do I need to hire? When do I need to hire them? All of these things that I’ve really never had to think about because I’ve just walked into positions where everything was already there. And now after doing this, I realized that it’s not just the building of the things that we’re doing. We’re building things very fast. I went from zero infrastructure. well, a single unified network switch. When I started here less than two years ago, and now we have cloud infrastructure in Azure, we have cloud infrastructure in AWS, we have on-premise hyper-converged infrastructure, we have data centers, networks, multiple sites. We went from 26 employees, now we’re almost at 100, and we’re looking to grow even more throughout this year. That’s amazing. Yeah, and… Look, in less than a year, we’ve built a factory. We went from a 6,000-square-foot building to a 60,000-square-foot factory that is designed with modularity in mind because we knew we were a startup and we’re going to grow. So I’ve got IDF cabinets where you don’t have to run an Ethernet cable more than 70 feet from any given location. And that means I have a bunch of network switches. And it’s… been this really cool adventure because we’ve built this factory. We built our spacecraft into this factory. We launched our spacecraft and performed successful mission operations with our brand new spacecraft all within less than a year. And every single part of that in some capacity has touched the things that I helped build or my team has helped build along the way.

Speaker 0 | 19:10.440

Wow. So… for the for the benefit of our listeners here because you mentioned you just mentioned spacecraft and i’m sure a bunch of people are listening you’re like wait a minute what what does this guy do what does this company do so tell us a little bit about your current employer and what they’re doing yeah so impulse space is a space logistics company and

Speaker 1 | 19:30.006

we’re really looking to help accelerate access to anywhere in the solar system that you know companies want to go Right now, one of the paradigms of putting things into space is there’s two interesting problems that you still have to really solve for efficient space transportation. One of those problems is, you know, if you want to get to a specific orbit as a CubeSat, so CubeSats for the sake of anyone who’s never seen one, very, very small satellites. that start out as like 10 centimeters by 10 centimeter cubes. And they go up in scale depending on what the cube set needs to do. But if you want to go to a specific orbit, the way that this works is you have to find a rocket launch provider, which there are a couple, but the main one right now that’s always in the news is SpaceX. You have to find a specific launch provider that’s taking you to that specific orbit and can drop you off. But that gets very cumbersome and complicated because wait lists for these things can get years out. It’s very cumbersome to deal with the rocket launch providers and organize all of these things. So where we come in is we provide what’s called an orbital transfer vehicle. So you can pay us and tell us that we want to take your satellite and put it here in this orbit, wherever that orbit may be. And we provide all of that infrastructure needed for you to get from point A to point B. You know, it’s kind of like Uber for space, you know, you know, instead of instead of having to pay, you know, a big rocket launch provider, you’re just paying, you know, impulse space to do this. And then we have a second product offering. That’s a what they call a kick stage. So it essentially functions as a third stage to an already manufactured rocket that’s able to deliver a massive amount of tonnage into. space from like uh low uh low earth orbit into like geosynchronous orbit so one of the the main providers and please don’t take me for a space um expert because i’m the i’m the it expert at a space company i work with the space experts um maybe you can sleep at a holiday in and gain some knowledge right yeah exactly um But one of the things is if you’re a launch provider or if you’re a satellite maker and you want to put a satellite into geosecretness orbit, you have to essentially throw away an entire rocket to do that because there’s no way to get the rocket back. There’s not enough fuel in the rocket to come back. So instead of throwing away an entire rocket, it’s like, why can’t we build a specially made vehicle that can go from the rocket in low-earth orbit so the rocket can still land and be reused? And then we can take you to geosynchronous orbit, right? And that’s what we’re looking to build. And then we want to take it a step further and be like, well, we’re going to create gas stations in space with, you know, partner organizations. You know, we’re teaming up with a company called OrbitFab that is, you know, literally trying to do that, build gas stations in space. So if we can build in-space gas stations, then we can have a logistics network of vehicles that are always in space, grabbing things, moving things, refueling, coming back, doing it again. And that’s…

Speaker 0 | 22:55.628

ultimately where we want to be oh my god that is that is so ridiculously interesting yeah and to your credit that was an amazing explanation it flowed it was spot on it like you know i’m following everything that you’re sharing and it’s it’s super interesting and and that’s that’s got to be an incredible experience and place to work uh to come to uh every day essentially yeah it’s it’s absolutely fascinating working with

Speaker 1 | 23:22.972

all of these super intelligent people that make you feel very humble, you know, especially as someone who is, you know, just feels like they stumbled their way into this role. And you’re working with all these people. I mean, our, our, our founder of the company is, is, you know, employee number one, co-founder of SpaceX. So, um, you know, being able to work with all of these, you know, really just genuine, like experts in their field, uh, top of their, their field individuals. Really puts in perspective how much work goes in to doing really cool things as a startup. And it’s been a very interesting two years, that’s to say the least.

Speaker 0 | 24:06.261

I would make the analogy, it’s like riding a rocket ship. Perhaps you actually are at the time. What is it? You have to watch out for the rapid, unscheduled disassembly, right?

Speaker 1 | 24:18.570

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s like, how many individuals have ever had the privilege of figuring out how you’re going to put IT infrastructure in the middle of the desert with zero power, right? So we have to bring our own power. We have to build solar panels. We have to build battery arrays. We have to, you know, we’re building essentially what is a mini data center in a shipping container and putting it in the middle of the desert so that we can do our test operations to, you know, test our engines. It’s very fascinating.

Speaker 0 | 24:46.455

Wow. This is an incredible story. We could probably talk for the next hour on this alone. But I want to shift this again. And I want to… I want to explore your history a little bit. So, you know, we talked about your work history, you know, you shared you’ve been in leadership and leadership adjacent positions for the majority of your career. And I’m going to go on a limb and say you’re on the younger side as a leader. And I think that’s a really interesting perspective here. You know, so I’m a tail end Gen Xer myself, but I’m not sure where you land. I’m going to guess millennial. But yeah, so. Are you a middle or late millennial?

Speaker 1 | 25:27.194

You know, I don’t even know when that, I’m pretty sure I’m a late millennial. So I’m 29 years young. 29,

Speaker 0 | 25:33.538

29 years young. Okay. I mean, if you want to share, I’m not going to, I’ll just, I give generalizations. But so at 29, you’re like, you’re like among the youngest millennials. And that’s, so this is, this is, this is great because you’ve got this really great experience. that you’re going through in your current role. And it’s a really great experience that you’ve had in the past. And I think that the people who are here listening, there’s probably some really great lessons that you can share. So, so many of the people we get are like my age. You know, I’ll just be honest, I’m 45. You know, so, and it’s great that, you know, I’ve got 25 years of experience in the field and everything else like that. But you’re going to have a different perspective on some of these like leadership things than I will. So I’m going to… I’m going to just dive right in and I’m going to say some of this is going to be fun questions. Tell me about your first computer and your first technology experience. Okay. What was it?

Speaker 1 | 26:28.567

I started working on computers when I was 12 years old. Okay. And I was lucky enough that my dad and mom, you know, gave me a computer. It was a Windows XP or no, it was Windows 98. And what we would do is we would find old computers, me and my dad. And so, you know. credit to my dad he helped me get here um but we would find old computers at yard sales because you could do that back then and we would upgrade you know the the ram and we would install windows xp on it and then we would resell the computers and

Speaker 0 | 27:02.852

you put the fanciest

Speaker 1 | 27:04.393

52x cd drive in it too right yeah yeah i don’t think we did that like like it was literally people just wanted to browse the internet right back then

Speaker 0 | 27:13.276

I’ve been trying to, I’m just trying to pick out some technology that’s very anachronistic for today. It is left behind, but you know, maybe, maybe that a zip drive, right.

Speaker 1 | 27:21.758

You know? Yeah. Zip drives. We would, we would upgrade them to floppy drives. You know, like we, it was still back then. Um, you know, we would, yeah, we would install CD burners. Cause people wanted to burn their music. They downloaded off limewire. Right. Um, and we, I got, I started doing that. Yeah. And I discovered, um, as I got a little bit older. I discovered that I really love computers and making computers do things. One of my favorite things to do as a young kid was I figured out a way to adjust the lock screens of Windows XP to change it. You change the background and everything. So I caught my mom in my room one day, and I had my lock screen all dressed with a CIA logo. And I made her think that I had hacked into the CIA and lost it. Never. Never able to actually become a hacker in the true essence. But I actually, I would say my start really came, I don’t remember what year this was specifically, but I had discovered that there was a version of Linux called Backtrack. I think now it’s called Kali Linux. And there was a utility. This is back when everyone used web encryption for their Wi-Fi. And I discovered that I could use a utility called Aircrack NG. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I and I packed the school.

Speaker 0 | 28:42.918

That’s still a tool you can use.

Speaker 1 | 28:44.419

Yeah. And I hacked the school’s Wi-Fi at my school. And I also discovered the very ingenious way that I could get around the school’s firewall by just directing everything to HTTPS. Right. Because there’s back then the firewalls couldn’t do HTTPS decryption. So I become the de facto like, hey, how do I get this website while you’re at school? And I become that guy. So but instead of the school, you know, getting on to me and me getting in. lots of trouble. The technician that actually worked for our school took me under his wing. And he was like, I’m going to put you to work. So I got to work on the school computers and help teachers with their IT problems. And it was really interesting because I would literally be in a class and I would get buzzed from the office that so-and-so teacher in so-and-so class needed to be in there to go help with their computer. Because I was always at the school, whereas the technicians in our small county schools. Um, you know, we had like one technician that served two or three different schools throughout the County. So they weren’t always at our school.

Speaker 0 | 29:44.845

This wasn’t at Los Angeles. I’m taking it.

Speaker 1 | 29:46.726

No, this is in, in, in rural Tennessee.

Speaker 0 | 29:49.167

Tennessee. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 29:51.427

Yeah. So rural Western Tennessee is where I’m from and it’s not very big, you know, perspective. My graduating class had 26 people in it.

Speaker 0 | 30:01.379

That’s how small we were. Yeah. That’s that. Now, I interject for just a second to share that during the time that you’re talking about here, within a few years of that, I was a network administrator for a school district. And so I was one of the people setting up those firewalls that you would have been circumventing. You would have been my arch nemesis. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 30:26.373

I think it was continuous. There are even a few instances of me actually putting BIOS passwords on the computers. So even the technicians couldn’t mess with them. Yeah. I was not the nicest student looking back on it.

Speaker 0 | 30:38.957

I remember kids doing stuff like that to the computers. Like the high school computer lab, where you’re like, ah, these darn kids. We’ll show them. We’ll go set all these group policies and everything else and block them all out and everything.

Speaker 1 | 30:51.540

Yeah. No, it was very interesting. And I would get paid by friends and friends. And such a family, you know, of my parents and they would pay me to, to reinstall windows on their computers or, you know, they lost some family photos and I would help them, you know, try to retrieve them. You know, to what extent, you know, a, you know, a kid can. And eventually I become one of the first students in my school to dual enroll with a trade school. And so I got to go to trade school my senior year. I was actually dual enrolled with the local technical college, not too far from where I grew up. And it was a really interesting experience because I got to learn there. Most of the training there is about CompTIA A+, Net+, Security+, and then we learned about server essentials. I think it was back then Microsoft had the Certified Systems Administrator or something like that.

Speaker 0 | 31:52.114

At MCSA. Yeah. I am at MCSA.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.997

Yeah. Yeah. So I never actually took the certification exams, but I got the knowledge because I ended up leaving school because I wanted to do contracting. And one of the things that my instructor, so my instructor is a super smart guy. Respect him endlessly. And we were talking about starting our own businesses and things like that. And one of the things that I brought up is like, I’m not certified. I don’t have certifications. How can I start a computer repair company when I’m not certified to do anything? Because there are. are plumbers that aren’t certified. There are mechanics that aren’t certified because you just have to do a good job and be good at it and have the knowledge. And so I took that to heart and I went and started my own, you know, computer repair service and, you know, it didn’t do too great because it, you know, it does take effort and time and money to invest to actually build a business. But then I moved to contracting and found contracting to be, you know, much better because I didn’t have to do much of the legwork. I had to, you know, just convince some people to give me a bunch of money to go do a project they had already planned to work for. So that become much better. And the lessons that I learned doing that actually got my foot in the door working at a local factory. And this factory wanted me as an intern. And one of my philosophies throughout getting my career is, I’m not going to college to do these things. I’ve got no intention on going to college, and I don’t think I have to go to college. So what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to take all that time that I would spend going to college. learning these things and I’m just going to take whatever job I can get to make my resume look as nice as possible right or to put me in contact with people much smarter than me because if I’m the smartest person in the room I’ve got to find a bigger room so I went to to this company and I was working as an intern working four hours a week and they eventually I you know impressed them good enough that they hired me full-time to be on their help desk. And the position was a help desk coordinator. It was the actual job title. And the role was just that, just run the help desk. It was just me and an intern on the help desk. And it went from there. And one of the cool things about the manager, the director of IT that worked there was, his response was, if you want to own something, tell me you want to own it and tell me how you’re going to own it and then do it. And that’s what I was able to do. I just. get it. And, you know, I’ve never been told no, right? It’s always, hey, I want to do this thing. Here’s why I want to do this thing. And here’s, I’m going to do it. And they just let me do it.

Speaker 0 | 34:30.957

And that’s, that’s a really powerful way to be, to experience the leadership of others is they’re putting their trust in you to be like, hey, you know, you might, because there’s a risk that you could fail. too right like they have to they have to you could do something maybe you did a couple things that didn’t really pan out as well as you hoped and stuff like that but they still had the faith in you to to let you move to the next step and that’s probably that’s probably empowering of its own right

Speaker 1 | 34:58.444

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been extremely lucky in that regard because, you know, who in their right mind would let someone fresh out of school, you know, build policies for how a help desk is supposed to run. But they did. You know, I, I jumped at the book. I was like, well, you know, some people smarter than me have had to have already figured this out. And that’s where I discovered, you know, things like Eitel, you know, and I was like, well, let me, you know, learn Eitel. And then I learned Eitel and like, I discovered. the principles of IT service management and design and delivery and things like that. It’s like, well, how do I implement it here? So I would read an article or read a book or whatever on Monday, and then I would immediately start implementing it on Tuesday. We’re moving fast. And sometimes it was like, Justin, you got to slow down. This is too much. You can’t do this. We’re a company. We have to think these things through. And other times it was like, oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it.

Speaker 0 | 35:55.531

Nice.

Speaker 2 | 35:56.952

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Speaker 1 | 38:40.186

Hey,

Speaker 2 | 38:40.566

it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call… contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember, it will never cost you a dime.

Speaker 0 | 38:53.010

So another kind of just plumbing the depths of your background and your history as a leader here. Is there something about you that people wouldn’t expect? You’re in IT. And I’ll give an example. When I was a kid, I was in the Macy’s Day Parade. you know like i actually was in a marching band and i was in the macy’s day parade you know so like but for you for you what what kind of cool or interesting thing would somebody not expect about you or just like a cool tidbit you know like maybe you know six languages and nobody realizes that i

Speaker 1 | 39:31.054

love i love writing stories um and i’ve been slowly learning how to build a novel um which is very interesting you know learning the the intricacies of world building and creating scenes and dialogues between two characters. All that stuff fascinates me. I’m a huge science fiction fan. I consume a ton of science fiction audiobooks. I think I’ve got 350 audiobooks in my library right now. And I’m just constantly consuming these audiobooks. And it’s been a very fun experience learning to write because writing is an art. But there’s methodologies behind how you write and how you frame your story. Are you going to create a story where you’ve got the hero’s journey or what other methodology of writing that you’re creating?

Speaker 0 | 40:27.188

Hmm. Now I’m going to tie this right back into this podcast, which is leadership. How do you think what you’ve been learning there, how are you thinking that’s going to, that’s translating or has helped you develop and grow as a leader?

Speaker 1 | 40:41.660

Yeah, it’s definitely, um, I would say like the most that I’ve learned is that like everyone has a perspective on certain things. And one of the things that you, you know, learn when you’re writing a story that involved like multiple characters. You have to develop like, okay, not every character is one dimensional and they’re not all the same dimension, right? So I may care about the same thing as you, but we may care about it for completely different reasons, right? Like I make like a technology stack because this technology stack is so cool. I can do so much with it so fast. I can automate it, whatever, right? But you may like it because it’s cheap and efficient and affordable, right? And it’s scalable or whatever. That may be right. Everyone has a perspective and learning to understand other people’s perspectives, I think, is pretty imperative into being an effective leader.

Speaker 0 | 41:34.120

Awesome. So I’m thinking, again, coming back to leadership and ideas that we share, you know, as far as listeners here on the podcast, we’re talking about, you know, we’re all dissected popular IT nerds and we like to kind of get into the depths of what it is that makes you a leader and what why that is. I know we’ve talked about a ton of stuff here. As a takeaway, what leadership things, and I really want, I find this really interesting because of you’re younger, you know, you’re a younger leader. You’ve got a lot of great leadership experience, but really you’re bringing a younger perspective to this. What key things of leadership advice would you want to share with somebody? Things that you’ve learned, things that you know, things that you always live by, whatever the case may be.

Speaker 1 | 42:20.635

Never stop learning. I consume new knowledge every single day. And even as the person leading IT for Impulse, I still have consultants that I talk to, people who have done this exact thing that I’m doing, that I can send a text message and say, I’m having complications understanding this ask from the executive team. Or I don’t understand how to address this thing pertaining to a user or a problem. And they can give me advice based on their… actual experience because as much book and technical knowledge that I may have, I don’t have experience in some things. And I have to understand that that is, you know, it’s not a weakness as long as I’m adequately looking for people or looking at knowledge written by people that have done these things that I’m trying to do.

Speaker 0 | 43:14.014

That’s awesome. Thank you. Now, humorous question, Star Wars or Star Trek? You mentioned your sci-fi, so.

Speaker 1 | 43:21.980

Oh, Star Trek all the way.

Speaker 0 | 43:23.240

Oh, yeah. That’s that. You and I are buddies right now. Just so we’re clear.

Speaker 1 | 43:28.862

Yeah. I’m a huge. So I like the, I don’t want to say utopian future, but I like science fiction that’s good. It’s like humanity is doing something great. And because we’ve built great things, life is better and easier. And. you know like like you know star wars it’s so dystopian you know like it’s just i can’t i’ll watch it right don’t get me wrong i’ve seen every movie i’ve read some of the extended before before we get we all before both of us get blamed here right like we’d like star wars it’s not that we don’t like star wars it’s just that if i’m choosing i’m

Speaker 0 | 44:09.566

gonna choose star trek yeah yeah exactly all right justin uh you thank you so much for investing the time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 44:20.336

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a blast.

Speaker 0 | 44:22.658

Absolutely. All right, everyone, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 0 | 00:06.860

All right. Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Justin Miller, IT Manager at Impulse Space in the Los Angeles area. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Speaker 1 | 00:18.768

Great. It’s nice to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:20.309

Great to have you. So right before we got on, Justin and I, here we are coming out at IT Leaders Podcast, and I mess up setting up the link. for the audio channel. And then we get on the call and you’re like, I’m like, I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. And what ended up happening for you? What was the problem again for you?

Speaker 1 | 00:39.985

So I’ve got these really nice, fancy headphones that have the boom mic where you lift it up and it mutes yourself. And the case of being double muted is one of those things that great technology exists, but it can also hurt you if you’re not paying attention. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 00:56.214

here we are. We’re the IT leaders. This is what we’re doing. We can’t get ourselves unmuted, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:02.997

Yeah, it’s great. I’m in so many meetings. It’s like being in all those meetings where everyone’s like, can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Like the old Verizon commercials you used to have. It’s hilarious watching these meetings go down, especially when it’s tech people.

Speaker 0 | 01:19.384

I know. Everyone loves watching the tech guy or the tech person have the challenge of the moment. They get to be like, yeah. Yeah. See, it’s not just me, right?

Speaker 1 | 01:31.309

Yeah. We’re trying to share a screen and it takes like 30 minutes to make it work.

Speaker 0 | 01:35.311

Absolutely. All right. So, so dive it into meat and potatoes here. So, so Justin, you’re, you’re leading, you’re leading a team at a place called Impulse Space in Los Angeles now, but, but you’ve been, you’ve been a leader in a couple other places before this. Can you tell us a little bit about like, just, just a little bit about your history as a leader and, and, and what you’re doing?

Speaker 1 | 01:56.779

Yeah. So. Really, I got my starts when I was 18 doing IT contracting. And I say it’s IT adjacent, really, because I would do point-of-sale work in big box stores like Walmart, Kmart, Target, and things like that. And I would go in with a team of 10 or 15 people, and we would go into a store right before Black Friday when they’re doing all the upgrades. And we would just spend 8 to 10 hours. in a store upgrading all of their logic units, flatbed scanners, hand scanners, doing all of these things.

Speaker 0 | 02:31.458

Right before Black Friday.

Speaker 1 | 02:32.839

Right before Black Friday, right? Because that’s when the…

Speaker 0 | 02:35.200

This does not sound like, this sounds like it could go bad.

Speaker 1 | 02:38.621

Yeah, because, you know, really the biggest, like, part of work for these, you know, big box retail stores is right before Black Friday. So everything works on Black Friday. So they can let a hand scanner or a flatbed scanner, you know, be broken the rest of the year. But on Black Friday, or at least back in the day before everything was online only, that was super important. This stuff had to work. So you would go in, and especially in cases like Walmart, you can’t start before 7 p.m. You can’t have anything on the floor before 7 p.m., and you have to be off the floor by 6 a.m. So you’ve got your list of things that you have to do. You walk in there. Everyone has their marching orders, like you’re doing And you as the person in charge have to make sure all your ducks are in a row. And I’ve moved from that, and I’ve done help desk leadership. I’ve been very fortunate in my role that I’ve been some form of leadership adjacent at every part of my career. So leading the help desk and learning the fundamentals of IT service management and why that’s so important from a user perspective and from a business perspective. Up until, you know, going into systems and being the lead individual, actually working on and managing and building cool systems up until point where I am now, which is, you know, everything IT and IT adjacent.

Speaker 2 | 04:04.946

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Speaker 0 | 06:24.648

Now, I’m going to zero in a little bit on what you mentioned about being a help desk lead. And the reason I want to zero in on that is because so many folks that we talk to here on the podcast, there’s a lot of IT directors, and I know that’s the space you’re doing now. But the specifics of being a leader on a help desk team has its own unique set of challenges. And I’d love to kind of like… one a little bit of that of those depths and and and find out some lessons that you learn from that i mean like i’ve i’ve i’ve just been exclusively a a supervisor of help desk teams but from what i understand and i know you’ve got the people that are there are different if you will and i don’t mean like in a bad way or anything else like that but like your network admins and your help desk people really have different skill sets and they take different management styles in order to get the most out of them and to be an effective leader in those teams. So I’m curious what kind of tactics or understandings that you bring and you think you could share from that experience.

Speaker 1 | 07:29.953

Yeah, no, I definitely what I know now is much different than what I knew back then. And one of the things that’s important is, and you can’t really teach this, you have to find people who have this, you know, at their core as a core principle is that you have to have empathy, right? You have to put yourself in the place of the user. And… When you’re working on a problem for a user, yeah, it may be something trivial to us, a technical-minded individual. But you have to remember that all of these individuals across the business are specialists in their own thing. I can’t come up with some fancy accounting practices, and I don’t expect them to be able to understand the intricacies of boom mics, like on headphones. It’s a little complicated sometimes.

Speaker 0 | 08:14.094

It’s difficult to unmute them.

Speaker 1 | 08:16.035

Yeah, yeah. It’s the whole double muting thing. It gets a little insane. And one of the things that I have really learned across my career is that people just want to work. They want to come in. They want all of their computers to work. And they want to be able to do their job with minimal friction. And it’s really and ultimately the help desk’s role. is to reduce that friction as much as possible for the end user. And sometimes that’s as simple as resetting a user’s password. Sometimes it’s as complicated as debugging why their fancy Excel add-in isn’t working. And it takes time and effort to get through those. And every company is different. Every help desk is different. Some much larger companies have help desks that are very siloed. While your smaller companies or help desks are going to be, you know, kind of multi-tools that are doing things like, you know, resetting passwords, creating user accounts. While other companies, that’s just something that only admins do.

Speaker 0 | 09:23.370

So now motivating that team is different. Yeah, because they, I mean, they’re really on the front lines of your computer infrastructure. You know, you just talked about how it’s important to do that. People people want to have this frictionless experience and that they helped us is really the front lines and removing a lot of that friction. Motivating those people is its own. It’s just different. Like, you know, you could I maybe I’ll speak from some of my experience and we can kind of compare notes here. But I feel like when I’m motivating the people on my systems administration team, I’m motivating them based on the idea of what. Things like, this is going to be simpler when we’re done. We’re going to implement this new system, and it’s going to really take away some of these administrative drudgery that you’re having to currently tackle. Or the system’s going to back up in half the time that it did before. Something like that. We’re trying to accomplish some very specific goals, and it’s usually product-oriented. But the help desk people, I think what motivates them and motivates a good help desk person isn’t particularly stuff like that. It’s… the things that you see the the interactions that they get from from the the people you know that they they have to help um satisfying somebody’s problem rapidly and quickly and easily and getting that affirmation that they’ve done a good job uh is it like like in building building a system that helps those folks do that type of stuff effectively really helps you be able to to give that type of motivation to that type of a team. So I’ll let you contribute here.

Speaker 1 | 11:04.662

Yeah, no, absolutely. And one thing that I stress to my help desk people is that, you know, you’re the face of the IT department, right? It doesn’t matter how efficient my infrastructure is. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve been able to save over building, you know, one, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure over another or how much more efficient we can be by leveraging cloud technology. technologies versus this other technology at the end of the day from the user’s perspective none of that matters because it’s all ones and zeros and very complicated words and they don’t care right somebody cares people who pay the bills they care but the users they don’t care and if the user’s experience is really bad that’s always going to come back to it so one of the things you know that i stress to to my help desk staff is like it doesn’t matter what I do or what my administration team does or anything like that, if a user on day one has a bad user experience, then they’re going to perceive our IT department as incapable of providing good service. And that’s something that we want to avoid because every amount of friction that the user gets on the experience level makes it more difficult from a management and a leadership perspective to go out to the rest of company leadership and say, hey, look, Give me this budget amount so that I can purchase the system to solve these problems because the user experience is already impacted by, well, why are we having all of these other problems and you’re wanting to solve these new problems? And it’s very hard to say that, well, the problems that you’re actually experiencing, they’re not real problems. I could go for days and days and days.

Speaker 0 | 12:52.080

There’s air quotes going on here, just so everybody on the podcast can see. There’s air quotes around that, so let us set a jest.

Speaker 1 | 12:59.726

Sorry about that. From a user perspective, it doesn’t matter if I’m using nice Juniper switches or Aruba switches or Cisco switches, or if I’m using UniFi, or even if I’m using Netgear switches that I bought on Amazon for $5. All a user cares about is, can I come to the office and connect to the internet? Does it work? Yeah, can I get to the network file shares? That’s what matters to them. And the help desk is ultimately the ones that, you know, is, do you need something that you didn’t have before? Okay, I’ll get it for you, right? It doesn’t matter if they have to reach up to the systems administrator and say, hey, Mr. Administrator, Ms. Administrator, can you send this to the user? Or, you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s something that we have to buy and there is a process for that. Like the help desk should be the people leading the charge, being the advocate.

Speaker 0 | 13:48.559

for the user making things happen and um you know at the end of the day that’s all the user cares about yeah i i know i try so hard in my space to empower my help desk folks to solve as many problems as possible you know so like this idea that you know oh that needs to go to level two well that needs to like as much as humanly possible i want problem to be able to be resolved by the first person that call because as soon as you hand off even if the next person does an amazing job at helping them like just the fact that they had to get handed off can can leave it creates a friction point that people become frustrated with for like oh man like like i talked to i talked to joe and joe you know joe actually couldn’t solve my problem so he handed me off to you know to jane here you know because jane’s a sad man and jane knows more than joe did in this particular case and sometimes that’s necessary and you can’t you can’t get around that but like it’s So getting that first call resolution really nailed down, it’s a challenge, and it requires a lot of planning and effort to get it right.

Speaker 1 | 14:56.553

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I do in my organization is the help desk owns every ticket, regardless of who’s actually resolving the ticket. So if it’s a ticket that they can’t resolve and they have to send it to the administrators or myself, it is still their responsibility to make sure that I’m resolving the ticket on behalf of the user. So the metrics at the end of the day reflects on the help desk staff so that we can provide a good user experience for our users across the board. And we don’t always hit the mark. You know, we’re a startup and everything is moving super fast. But at the end of the day, like that’s that’s the goal. Like help desk owns everything because we’re the face of IT.

Speaker 0 | 15:34.560

Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a great way to do it. And it’s really sage advice to give to our listeners out there about how you’re owning that help desk. So, you know, your tickets to help us people become the internal advocates because they care. They don’t just pass the ticket, throw it over the cubicle wall and be like, well, that’s Justin’s problem now. You’ve really created a sense of accountability for all of them in there. And so I’m going to transition here because you brought it up about your current role. And so we talked a little bit about being in the help desk, managing help desks and the things that are there. But you’ve really transitioned to your new leadership role is in a startup. And. What’s that like being an IT manager and a leader in a startup?

Speaker 1 | 16:26.510

It is an experience unlike anything I have ever experienced before in my life. And I had no idea what I was getting into. So I’ve had the privilege in my career to be in, like I said, leadership or leadership adjacent roles pretty much since the very beginning, which is pretty much unheard of for almost anyone ever. But one of the really cool things. that I’ve never really had to worry about is, how do you build something from nothing? I’ve come in and there were always people smarter than me that built these things. They built the systems, they built the help desk ticketing system, the processes. I just came and took over what they built. But here at Impulse, I’ve had to build everything from the ground up and figuring out, okay, what’s my budget? How much do I need to spend? Who do I need to hire? When do I need to hire them? All of these things that I’ve really never had to think about because I’ve just walked into positions where everything was already there. And now after doing this, I realized that it’s not just the building of the things that we’re doing. We’re building things very fast. I went from zero infrastructure. well, a single unified network switch. When I started here less than two years ago, and now we have cloud infrastructure in Azure, we have cloud infrastructure in AWS, we have on-premise hyper-converged infrastructure, we have data centers, networks, multiple sites. We went from 26 employees, now we’re almost at 100, and we’re looking to grow even more throughout this year. That’s amazing. Yeah, and… Look, in less than a year, we’ve built a factory. We went from a 6,000-square-foot building to a 60,000-square-foot factory that is designed with modularity in mind because we knew we were a startup and we’re going to grow. So I’ve got IDF cabinets where you don’t have to run an Ethernet cable more than 70 feet from any given location. And that means I have a bunch of network switches. And it’s… been this really cool adventure because we’ve built this factory. We built our spacecraft into this factory. We launched our spacecraft and performed successful mission operations with our brand new spacecraft all within less than a year. And every single part of that in some capacity has touched the things that I helped build or my team has helped build along the way.

Speaker 0 | 19:10.440

Wow. So… for the for the benefit of our listeners here because you mentioned you just mentioned spacecraft and i’m sure a bunch of people are listening you’re like wait a minute what what does this guy do what does this company do so tell us a little bit about your current employer and what they’re doing yeah so impulse space is a space logistics company and

Speaker 1 | 19:30.006

we’re really looking to help accelerate access to anywhere in the solar system that you know companies want to go Right now, one of the paradigms of putting things into space is there’s two interesting problems that you still have to really solve for efficient space transportation. One of those problems is, you know, if you want to get to a specific orbit as a CubeSat, so CubeSats for the sake of anyone who’s never seen one, very, very small satellites. that start out as like 10 centimeters by 10 centimeter cubes. And they go up in scale depending on what the cube set needs to do. But if you want to go to a specific orbit, the way that this works is you have to find a rocket launch provider, which there are a couple, but the main one right now that’s always in the news is SpaceX. You have to find a specific launch provider that’s taking you to that specific orbit and can drop you off. But that gets very cumbersome and complicated because wait lists for these things can get years out. It’s very cumbersome to deal with the rocket launch providers and organize all of these things. So where we come in is we provide what’s called an orbital transfer vehicle. So you can pay us and tell us that we want to take your satellite and put it here in this orbit, wherever that orbit may be. And we provide all of that infrastructure needed for you to get from point A to point B. You know, it’s kind of like Uber for space, you know, you know, instead of instead of having to pay, you know, a big rocket launch provider, you’re just paying, you know, impulse space to do this. And then we have a second product offering. That’s a what they call a kick stage. So it essentially functions as a third stage to an already manufactured rocket that’s able to deliver a massive amount of tonnage into. space from like uh low uh low earth orbit into like geosynchronous orbit so one of the the main providers and please don’t take me for a space um expert because i’m the i’m the it expert at a space company i work with the space experts um maybe you can sleep at a holiday in and gain some knowledge right yeah exactly um But one of the things is if you’re a launch provider or if you’re a satellite maker and you want to put a satellite into geosecretness orbit, you have to essentially throw away an entire rocket to do that because there’s no way to get the rocket back. There’s not enough fuel in the rocket to come back. So instead of throwing away an entire rocket, it’s like, why can’t we build a specially made vehicle that can go from the rocket in low-earth orbit so the rocket can still land and be reused? And then we can take you to geosynchronous orbit, right? And that’s what we’re looking to build. And then we want to take it a step further and be like, well, we’re going to create gas stations in space with, you know, partner organizations. You know, we’re teaming up with a company called OrbitFab that is, you know, literally trying to do that, build gas stations in space. So if we can build in-space gas stations, then we can have a logistics network of vehicles that are always in space, grabbing things, moving things, refueling, coming back, doing it again. And that’s…

Speaker 0 | 22:55.628

ultimately where we want to be oh my god that is that is so ridiculously interesting yeah and to your credit that was an amazing explanation it flowed it was spot on it like you know i’m following everything that you’re sharing and it’s it’s super interesting and and that’s that’s got to be an incredible experience and place to work uh to come to uh every day essentially yeah it’s it’s absolutely fascinating working with

Speaker 1 | 23:22.972

all of these super intelligent people that make you feel very humble, you know, especially as someone who is, you know, just feels like they stumbled their way into this role. And you’re working with all these people. I mean, our, our, our founder of the company is, is, you know, employee number one, co-founder of SpaceX. So, um, you know, being able to work with all of these, you know, really just genuine, like experts in their field, uh, top of their, their field individuals. Really puts in perspective how much work goes in to doing really cool things as a startup. And it’s been a very interesting two years, that’s to say the least.

Speaker 0 | 24:06.261

I would make the analogy, it’s like riding a rocket ship. Perhaps you actually are at the time. What is it? You have to watch out for the rapid, unscheduled disassembly, right?

Speaker 1 | 24:18.570

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s like, how many individuals have ever had the privilege of figuring out how you’re going to put IT infrastructure in the middle of the desert with zero power, right? So we have to bring our own power. We have to build solar panels. We have to build battery arrays. We have to, you know, we’re building essentially what is a mini data center in a shipping container and putting it in the middle of the desert so that we can do our test operations to, you know, test our engines. It’s very fascinating.

Speaker 0 | 24:46.455

Wow. This is an incredible story. We could probably talk for the next hour on this alone. But I want to shift this again. And I want to… I want to explore your history a little bit. So, you know, we talked about your work history, you know, you shared you’ve been in leadership and leadership adjacent positions for the majority of your career. And I’m going to go on a limb and say you’re on the younger side as a leader. And I think that’s a really interesting perspective here. You know, so I’m a tail end Gen Xer myself, but I’m not sure where you land. I’m going to guess millennial. But yeah, so. Are you a middle or late millennial?

Speaker 1 | 25:27.194

You know, I don’t even know when that, I’m pretty sure I’m a late millennial. So I’m 29 years young. 29,

Speaker 0 | 25:33.538

29 years young. Okay. I mean, if you want to share, I’m not going to, I’ll just, I give generalizations. But so at 29, you’re like, you’re like among the youngest millennials. And that’s, so this is, this is, this is great because you’ve got this really great experience. that you’re going through in your current role. And it’s a really great experience that you’ve had in the past. And I think that the people who are here listening, there’s probably some really great lessons that you can share. So, so many of the people we get are like my age. You know, I’ll just be honest, I’m 45. You know, so, and it’s great that, you know, I’ve got 25 years of experience in the field and everything else like that. But you’re going to have a different perspective on some of these like leadership things than I will. So I’m going to… I’m going to just dive right in and I’m going to say some of this is going to be fun questions. Tell me about your first computer and your first technology experience. Okay. What was it?

Speaker 1 | 26:28.567

I started working on computers when I was 12 years old. Okay. And I was lucky enough that my dad and mom, you know, gave me a computer. It was a Windows XP or no, it was Windows 98. And what we would do is we would find old computers, me and my dad. And so, you know. credit to my dad he helped me get here um but we would find old computers at yard sales because you could do that back then and we would upgrade you know the the ram and we would install windows xp on it and then we would resell the computers and

Speaker 0 | 27:02.852

you put the fanciest

Speaker 1 | 27:04.393

52x cd drive in it too right yeah yeah i don’t think we did that like like it was literally people just wanted to browse the internet right back then

Speaker 0 | 27:13.276

I’ve been trying to, I’m just trying to pick out some technology that’s very anachronistic for today. It is left behind, but you know, maybe, maybe that a zip drive, right.

Speaker 1 | 27:21.758

You know? Yeah. Zip drives. We would, we would upgrade them to floppy drives. You know, like we, it was still back then. Um, you know, we would, yeah, we would install CD burners. Cause people wanted to burn their music. They downloaded off limewire. Right. Um, and we, I got, I started doing that. Yeah. And I discovered, um, as I got a little bit older. I discovered that I really love computers and making computers do things. One of my favorite things to do as a young kid was I figured out a way to adjust the lock screens of Windows XP to change it. You change the background and everything. So I caught my mom in my room one day, and I had my lock screen all dressed with a CIA logo. And I made her think that I had hacked into the CIA and lost it. Never. Never able to actually become a hacker in the true essence. But I actually, I would say my start really came, I don’t remember what year this was specifically, but I had discovered that there was a version of Linux called Backtrack. I think now it’s called Kali Linux. And there was a utility. This is back when everyone used web encryption for their Wi-Fi. And I discovered that I could use a utility called Aircrack NG. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I and I packed the school.

Speaker 0 | 28:42.918

That’s still a tool you can use.

Speaker 1 | 28:44.419

Yeah. And I hacked the school’s Wi-Fi at my school. And I also discovered the very ingenious way that I could get around the school’s firewall by just directing everything to HTTPS. Right. Because there’s back then the firewalls couldn’t do HTTPS decryption. So I become the de facto like, hey, how do I get this website while you’re at school? And I become that guy. So but instead of the school, you know, getting on to me and me getting in. lots of trouble. The technician that actually worked for our school took me under his wing. And he was like, I’m going to put you to work. So I got to work on the school computers and help teachers with their IT problems. And it was really interesting because I would literally be in a class and I would get buzzed from the office that so-and-so teacher in so-and-so class needed to be in there to go help with their computer. Because I was always at the school, whereas the technicians in our small county schools. Um, you know, we had like one technician that served two or three different schools throughout the County. So they weren’t always at our school.

Speaker 0 | 29:44.845

This wasn’t at Los Angeles. I’m taking it.

Speaker 1 | 29:46.726

No, this is in, in, in rural Tennessee.

Speaker 0 | 29:49.167

Tennessee. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 29:51.427

Yeah. So rural Western Tennessee is where I’m from and it’s not very big, you know, perspective. My graduating class had 26 people in it.

Speaker 0 | 30:01.379

That’s how small we were. Yeah. That’s that. Now, I interject for just a second to share that during the time that you’re talking about here, within a few years of that, I was a network administrator for a school district. And so I was one of the people setting up those firewalls that you would have been circumventing. You would have been my arch nemesis. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 30:26.373

I think it was continuous. There are even a few instances of me actually putting BIOS passwords on the computers. So even the technicians couldn’t mess with them. Yeah. I was not the nicest student looking back on it.

Speaker 0 | 30:38.957

I remember kids doing stuff like that to the computers. Like the high school computer lab, where you’re like, ah, these darn kids. We’ll show them. We’ll go set all these group policies and everything else and block them all out and everything.

Speaker 1 | 30:51.540

Yeah. No, it was very interesting. And I would get paid by friends and friends. And such a family, you know, of my parents and they would pay me to, to reinstall windows on their computers or, you know, they lost some family photos and I would help them, you know, try to retrieve them. You know, to what extent, you know, a, you know, a kid can. And eventually I become one of the first students in my school to dual enroll with a trade school. And so I got to go to trade school my senior year. I was actually dual enrolled with the local technical college, not too far from where I grew up. And it was a really interesting experience because I got to learn there. Most of the training there is about CompTIA A+, Net+, Security+, and then we learned about server essentials. I think it was back then Microsoft had the Certified Systems Administrator or something like that.

Speaker 0 | 31:52.114

At MCSA. Yeah. I am at MCSA.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.997

Yeah. Yeah. So I never actually took the certification exams, but I got the knowledge because I ended up leaving school because I wanted to do contracting. And one of the things that my instructor, so my instructor is a super smart guy. Respect him endlessly. And we were talking about starting our own businesses and things like that. And one of the things that I brought up is like, I’m not certified. I don’t have certifications. How can I start a computer repair company when I’m not certified to do anything? Because there are. are plumbers that aren’t certified. There are mechanics that aren’t certified because you just have to do a good job and be good at it and have the knowledge. And so I took that to heart and I went and started my own, you know, computer repair service and, you know, it didn’t do too great because it, you know, it does take effort and time and money to invest to actually build a business. But then I moved to contracting and found contracting to be, you know, much better because I didn’t have to do much of the legwork. I had to, you know, just convince some people to give me a bunch of money to go do a project they had already planned to work for. So that become much better. And the lessons that I learned doing that actually got my foot in the door working at a local factory. And this factory wanted me as an intern. And one of my philosophies throughout getting my career is, I’m not going to college to do these things. I’ve got no intention on going to college, and I don’t think I have to go to college. So what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to take all that time that I would spend going to college. learning these things and I’m just going to take whatever job I can get to make my resume look as nice as possible right or to put me in contact with people much smarter than me because if I’m the smartest person in the room I’ve got to find a bigger room so I went to to this company and I was working as an intern working four hours a week and they eventually I you know impressed them good enough that they hired me full-time to be on their help desk. And the position was a help desk coordinator. It was the actual job title. And the role was just that, just run the help desk. It was just me and an intern on the help desk. And it went from there. And one of the cool things about the manager, the director of IT that worked there was, his response was, if you want to own something, tell me you want to own it and tell me how you’re going to own it and then do it. And that’s what I was able to do. I just. get it. And, you know, I’ve never been told no, right? It’s always, hey, I want to do this thing. Here’s why I want to do this thing. And here’s, I’m going to do it. And they just let me do it.

Speaker 0 | 34:30.957

And that’s, that’s a really powerful way to be, to experience the leadership of others is they’re putting their trust in you to be like, hey, you know, you might, because there’s a risk that you could fail. too right like they have to they have to you could do something maybe you did a couple things that didn’t really pan out as well as you hoped and stuff like that but they still had the faith in you to to let you move to the next step and that’s probably that’s probably empowering of its own right

Speaker 1 | 34:58.444

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been extremely lucky in that regard because, you know, who in their right mind would let someone fresh out of school, you know, build policies for how a help desk is supposed to run. But they did. You know, I, I jumped at the book. I was like, well, you know, some people smarter than me have had to have already figured this out. And that’s where I discovered, you know, things like Eitel, you know, and I was like, well, let me, you know, learn Eitel. And then I learned Eitel and like, I discovered. the principles of IT service management and design and delivery and things like that. It’s like, well, how do I implement it here? So I would read an article or read a book or whatever on Monday, and then I would immediately start implementing it on Tuesday. We’re moving fast. And sometimes it was like, Justin, you got to slow down. This is too much. You can’t do this. We’re a company. We have to think these things through. And other times it was like, oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it.

Speaker 0 | 35:55.531

Nice.

Speaker 2 | 35:56.952

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Speaker 1 | 38:40.186

Hey,

Speaker 2 | 38:40.566

it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call… contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember, it will never cost you a dime.

Speaker 0 | 38:53.010

So another kind of just plumbing the depths of your background and your history as a leader here. Is there something about you that people wouldn’t expect? You’re in IT. And I’ll give an example. When I was a kid, I was in the Macy’s Day Parade. you know like i actually was in a marching band and i was in the macy’s day parade you know so like but for you for you what what kind of cool or interesting thing would somebody not expect about you or just like a cool tidbit you know like maybe you know six languages and nobody realizes that i

Speaker 1 | 39:31.054

love i love writing stories um and i’ve been slowly learning how to build a novel um which is very interesting you know learning the the intricacies of world building and creating scenes and dialogues between two characters. All that stuff fascinates me. I’m a huge science fiction fan. I consume a ton of science fiction audiobooks. I think I’ve got 350 audiobooks in my library right now. And I’m just constantly consuming these audiobooks. And it’s been a very fun experience learning to write because writing is an art. But there’s methodologies behind how you write and how you frame your story. Are you going to create a story where you’ve got the hero’s journey or what other methodology of writing that you’re creating?

Speaker 0 | 40:27.188

Hmm. Now I’m going to tie this right back into this podcast, which is leadership. How do you think what you’ve been learning there, how are you thinking that’s going to, that’s translating or has helped you develop and grow as a leader?

Speaker 1 | 40:41.660

Yeah, it’s definitely, um, I would say like the most that I’ve learned is that like everyone has a perspective on certain things. And one of the things that you, you know, learn when you’re writing a story that involved like multiple characters. You have to develop like, okay, not every character is one dimensional and they’re not all the same dimension, right? So I may care about the same thing as you, but we may care about it for completely different reasons, right? Like I make like a technology stack because this technology stack is so cool. I can do so much with it so fast. I can automate it, whatever, right? But you may like it because it’s cheap and efficient and affordable, right? And it’s scalable or whatever. That may be right. Everyone has a perspective and learning to understand other people’s perspectives, I think, is pretty imperative into being an effective leader.

Speaker 0 | 41:34.120

Awesome. So I’m thinking, again, coming back to leadership and ideas that we share, you know, as far as listeners here on the podcast, we’re talking about, you know, we’re all dissected popular IT nerds and we like to kind of get into the depths of what it is that makes you a leader and what why that is. I know we’ve talked about a ton of stuff here. As a takeaway, what leadership things, and I really want, I find this really interesting because of you’re younger, you know, you’re a younger leader. You’ve got a lot of great leadership experience, but really you’re bringing a younger perspective to this. What key things of leadership advice would you want to share with somebody? Things that you’ve learned, things that you know, things that you always live by, whatever the case may be.

Speaker 1 | 42:20.635

Never stop learning. I consume new knowledge every single day. And even as the person leading IT for Impulse, I still have consultants that I talk to, people who have done this exact thing that I’m doing, that I can send a text message and say, I’m having complications understanding this ask from the executive team. Or I don’t understand how to address this thing pertaining to a user or a problem. And they can give me advice based on their… actual experience because as much book and technical knowledge that I may have, I don’t have experience in some things. And I have to understand that that is, you know, it’s not a weakness as long as I’m adequately looking for people or looking at knowledge written by people that have done these things that I’m trying to do.

Speaker 0 | 43:14.014

That’s awesome. Thank you. Now, humorous question, Star Wars or Star Trek? You mentioned your sci-fi, so.

Speaker 1 | 43:21.980

Oh, Star Trek all the way.

Speaker 0 | 43:23.240

Oh, yeah. That’s that. You and I are buddies right now. Just so we’re clear.

Speaker 1 | 43:28.862

Yeah. I’m a huge. So I like the, I don’t want to say utopian future, but I like science fiction that’s good. It’s like humanity is doing something great. And because we’ve built great things, life is better and easier. And. you know like like you know star wars it’s so dystopian you know like it’s just i can’t i’ll watch it right don’t get me wrong i’ve seen every movie i’ve read some of the extended before before we get we all before both of us get blamed here right like we’d like star wars it’s not that we don’t like star wars it’s just that if i’m choosing i’m

Speaker 0 | 44:09.566

gonna choose star trek yeah yeah exactly all right justin uh you thank you so much for investing the time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 44:20.336

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a blast.

Speaker 0 | 44:22.658

Absolutely. All right, everyone, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode. Thanks for joining us.