Speaker 0 | 00:07.457
everyone out there listening you’re listening to dissecting popular it nerds one of your hosts phil howard original starter this this podcast actually started it’s it’s funny and we’ve got steve um chico on the line and if you and if you screw with him he becomes steve psycho not really what we’re talking about is uh the number of linkedin invites that we get I’m hounded with on a daily basis. I do believe that people should at least try a little bit harder on their invite. Like people, I, I get 99% of the time people really like my invite because it’s like, Hey, I knew you wanted to connect with another, um, bearded, uh, uh, technology, um, dude. So here I am. And, and people tend to, people tend to like that one. But when I get like, Hey, by the way, I don’t know what it is. You just get like a whole long paragraph of people, a paragraph in your inbox. I’m like, you do realize human beings don’t speak like that.
Speaker 1 | 01:05.733
No. And I frequently question their their grasp on the buzzwords that come within the invite. So, you know, you try and parse through and weed out the good ones. Yours was was a good one or actually who I heard from from your podcast. So so happy to be here. Happy to be talking to you.
Speaker 0 | 01:23.488
Yeah, my boy Darren. Yeah, so it is a struggle that we have because there’s a lot of pay-to-play models out there. Gartner, Magic Quadrant, no other thing. But we do need to use them for some things. And so yeah, that’s one of the struggles that we have trying to find good IT directors to be on the show is because they’re like, what’s the catch? Like, there’s no catch. We just want to talk about how you crawled out of the server closet. And we don’t have to slide pizzas under the door anymore to clean off our mouse rollerball. So, yes.
Speaker 1 | 01:56.261
I do make a conservative effort to put a little personality behind the IT facade and let people know that sometimes we have personalities. Sometimes, dare I say, even a sense of humor.
Speaker 0 | 02:08.690
Yes. Yes. It’s much needed. So, here’s the thing. Let’s start off with an oldie but a goodie. What was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 02:20.601
Oh, oh, well, let’s see. If we’re breaking out computers from gaming consoles, I’m guessing it was the Apple IIc. I think we probably had a Commodore before that, but I didn’t really. My dad used the Apple as a computer, and we also used it for video games. Shout out to original Castle Wolfenstein and Below the Root.
Speaker 0 | 02:42.693
Wow. So just so if I remember this correctly, because… And make sure we’ve got the right model here because I had at first computer. Well, now first computer was Texas instruments, Bill Cosby special. And if you remember, he was like the main marketing, marketing, marketing legend for the, for the Texas instrument, but Apple to see also a five and a quarter floppy disc in the side, right side.
Speaker 1 | 03:05.492
Yeah. Green tilted up like the green screen.
Speaker 0 | 03:08.314
Yes. Very good. Very nice. I think man, Wolfenstein, they had that on that.
Speaker 1 | 03:14.952
The old school, like you talk to so many people today and they think of the first person shooter, but this is like you walking through the castle trying to pick the locks. You could get the uniforms that made you disguise. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 03:29.801
Freaking awesome.
Speaker 1 | 03:32.623
Very old school, hardcore Gen Xer here.
Speaker 0 | 03:35.644
This is excellent. This couldn’t go any better right now. So, yeah, but. For any new listeners out there, somehow we’ve grown to the 11th ranked technology podcast. I have no clue. I have no clue. I think it’s just because we keep doing it and we don’t give up. And maybe there’s some level of, I don’t know, insanity in my voice. We like to talk about most likely we didn’t land on the moon. That’s what I say. Everyone gets really mad when I bring that one up. At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one’s patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you. How we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate. the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short. We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. Thank you. and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. So yes, very genuine IT leadership, peer-to-peer, because like you said, and you mentioned before we started doing this, when you get to a certain level, I don’t know, certain things start happening. You get unsolicited requests quite often. But the other thing is, and other people have said this before, is that IT leadership, and I think… more specifically in the mid market space, 200 end users to say 10,000, it can be lonely at the top. Do you find that to be a true statement?
Speaker 1 | 06:57.993
Well, and I don’t know how much we get into specific companies, but the company I work for, they’re their own company, but they’re a very small piece in a much bigger organization. So it’s a real gray area for me about like, how many end users do I really have? Because the company… above all of us is hundreds of thousands. The people I work with, you know, probably, probably 50 to a hundred, maybe, maybe less than that. And it’s, and we’re spread out. So I’m an IT director. We have other IT directors out there. I’m in North America. So I for sure wouldn’t say I’m on the top, but as you get up there and I guess what I was thinking about with those unsolicited things is I’ve been with the same company my whole career. I graduated college in 2000, started working for one company, transferred to their subsidiary, and have been there since 2005. And what I’ve learned over the years is really to be self-sufficient, where we can do everything in-house, whether it’s design, development, testing, implementation. And it’s tough for me to get… these requests whenever I’ve worked really hard to be self-sufficient. And what gets difficult as you start getting these titles associated with yourself, manager, senior manager, director, and it’s like, well, should you really still be doing development and architecture? And I kind of feel that whenever you have the business knowledge and you can kind of set that strategy, I feel very fortunate to still be able to do the architecture and the development because we have like a relatively small organization and a lean IT infrastructure or a lean IT force. So I want to be able to do everything without having to worry about vendor agreements and contracts and you know we have gone down that route before and it has not ended up well where we’re not going to be able to impart year five, 10, 15 years of business knowledge into a vendor and have them understand what it is that we’re looking for. So I think whenever you do find vendors, it’s really important for us at least to make sure that they’re long-term partners, not just some random LinkedIn person that says, I’m here to offer you AI guidance, or I’m here to offer you cybersecurity advice.
Speaker 0 | 09:34.155
This is very unique. This may be one of the first times we’ve had this on the show. This you you actually are the first person i’ve ever had on the show we’re nearing 300 shows We might be over 300. I don’t even know what’s in the queue right now because now we’ve got we’ve got three other hosts, too Um, we got the two mics and we got doug Uh and myself I don’t think i’ve ever had someone that’s been at the same company I’ve had someone that was at the same company for like 30 years and can you imagine how much it’s changed in that? I’ve had that but you’ve been at the same company since day one
Speaker 1 | 10:04.345
that’s something that i feel like an asterisk it was it’s my hr record does go back to 2000 it’s
Speaker 0 | 10:12.371
2000 it’s year 2000 it’s it’s it’s barely post y2k barely post y2k so and that’s i’m saying that so people are like what are they what are you talking about what’s y2k everyone knows everyone knows yeah if you’re in it you know right there is kind of there is probably like a division but And you’ve had the good blessing to have been involved in numerous projects and strategy. And what you’re saying is, I don’t even know how to describe it because it’s the, I have the keys to the castle. I need to hold on the keys to the castle. There’s no way I’m giving those keys to the castle away to a vendor, especially when what we’ve built might be so unique and so interesting. And there’s this… weird apis and we’ve built custom software to make something do something why would i turn that over to a vendor over after a a maybe at best three one-hour meetings yes yes so just tell me please i want to know one aspect of some kind of strategy thing that um and i say it selfishly because we’re at a point in this weird podcast life cycle which i don’t even know where we’ve got All kinds of weird, we’ve got tons of data now, and I’m stuck in this weird middle ground where the podcast started out. I’m being very selfish right now talking about myself. I don’t do this that often, but maybe you can give me some advice because you’ve been through this since, for 24, 23 years. We’re in 2024, I guess it’s 23 years. So you’ve seen a lot of change, and you’ve seen a lot of technology change. We started out me recording a podcast on a cell phone because I was late to the podcast in a Starbucks drive-thru. I literally started recording one of the first podcasts in a Starbucks drive-thru. Now, we’ve got four hosts. We’ve got 10 employees. We’ve got development overseas. And I built the original website kind of like bootstrapped. And then we redid it again. Then we redid it again. And now we’re at the point where we have so much data. And we really want to have a turnkey website. We want to take all the episodes and break down the data and turn it into have different people writing valuable articles based on whatever. This particular juggernaut that you have been so fortunate to be involved in. So what I found is there’s no… There’s either design your own website and use outsourcing kind of thing, or there’s pay some firm 20 grand plus tons more money to do it yourself or be so fortunate to pay a full-time employee to come do your web development. There’s no in-between. Ever run into a problem like that? No in-between. We either have massive spend or do it yourself in-house, and we’re kind of sick of it. We could do it in-house ourselves, but we need more headcount. We probably don’t have the budget for that. I don’t know. I’m just… Yeah, I’m like psychology. This is like me. I’m sitting on your psychology, IT psychology couch right now. I don’t really know what to I have.
Speaker 1 | 13:20.104
Like you said, I have starting in 2000. I have seen so many changes. And it for your particular situation. I know everybody’s busy. But when I’ve been faced like something like that, it’s a challenge for me. Like I my bread and butter for probably the first five years of my career was VB six and sequel 6.5. And I thought that I had the keys to the kingdom knowing those two things. Fast forward into a long stint through an operational technology like the shop floor automation. And just over the years, it’s now Python, it’s PLCs, it’s MySQL, it’s just all of these different things get added to the tool belt. So web development, funny enough, is one of the things that after classic ASP, shout out to… to old visual interdev um is one of the things that i have a basic understanding of whipping something together in dot net but but as far as like putting something out there um is is not something that i’ve worked on but in your case i would look at that as oh my god this is my weekend project and i don’t know if this is your guys full-time gig or not but um the name of your podcast like it nerds that is me so when i’m not doing stuff like this i’m working on raspberry pies, home automation. So if I had your empire and the ability to now handcraft it to be… My own thing where I don’t need to rely on anybody else. And that’s just like the front end design, but then getting into the back end of, um, in what I’ve been doing the last couple of years after I got out of that operational technology role is business intelligence. So all of the data that you must have about where your listeners are, what the demographic is, um, as an,
Speaker 0 | 15:13.528
how about just hours and hours and hours of show and data all transcribed all into, I mean, like. just pain points from real people, from real people struggling with real issues, how they overcame and how they got a seat at the executive round table. I mean, every day I get so excited every time I see it and I see all the stuff that comes up and I’m like, all right, what are we going to do with it? And it’s just like, oh, it’s like a mountain to climb.
Speaker 1 | 15:37.964
Well, and that is a problem that I face too. And I put the responsibility on myself where I’ll present something to the business and- I think it’s like, this is everything that I think they need to make data-driven decisions. And I quickly realized like, this is too much. You have to figure out how to break this into more digestible. And this is me talking to business people. It would be a different story for you and your IT like-minded coworkers. But like you said, I can only imagine how much data you have. And as an avid podcast listener, I have often wondered. what the data model is for podcasters. This is so dumb. I try to be as accurate as possible as a podcast listener. And I’m always curious, if I’m just not interested in a podcast, I make sure that I remove it instead of doing Marcus played because I don’t want to provide false data for the podcaster because I don’t know if that… if the data behind it, how it captures what people are doing. Does it capture if they listened to it, if they removed it from their queue, if they deleted it before? And it gets my mind spinning about if I ever got into podcasting, I would love to understand how the data for it is structured and how I could use that to be a better podcaster.
Speaker 0 | 17:09.680
Yeah, it’s interesting. I see followers, new followers. I see… episodes downloaded i see average listening time um i definitely see spikes in certain episodes which probably has to do with who shared it and and that type of thing um yes i think followers would probably i’m always shocked when i have someone i hear from somebody and they’re like yeah like i regularly listen to your show on the way to work i’m like really that’s pretty sweet i don’t know you know like you regularly yeah like i actually like feel like I’m part of a community of other it directors and, you know, like together, I’m like, that’s awesome because I mean, we’re just sitting here talking. I just hit record. I didn’t really have any agenda to talk about with you. Um, maybe we should, maybe we should have something to come out of this. Um, so I’ll be,
Speaker 1 | 17:59.082
I’ll be happy to say that you will get added to my playlist. And I, like, I, I went for a run before this and had one of my favorite, like pop culture podcasts in my ears. So like, As a podcast fan, and this being my first time on a podcast, I do want to give a shout out to you and fellow podcasters to say, like, you really do make a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. Like being in people’s ears, whether it’s a commute, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s, you know, something. Honestly, if I’m working on something where it’s just straight coding. It’s either classical music or one of my favorite podcasts that is in my ear. So yeah, you reach a lot of people and do a lot of good.
Speaker 0 | 18:42.128
Some of us do because the average podcast, I think one of the reasons why it’s easy to be in the top 1% is because the average podcaster does five episodes and like gives up or something like that. And yes, IT leadership now being in the same role for 20 years, speaking about vendors, being, I guess, skeptical of whether they can do something. What vendors do you have that are good? What vendors do you love? Or is it more the, I don’t really like this word, but it’s actually used in my industry. Who sucks less?
Speaker 1 | 19:14.720
Well, I’ll take, this is going back to my OT days where we would build special equipment. Like these are machines to produce what it is that we do.
Speaker 0 | 19:26.704
What is it that you guys do? Because I have medical equipment, but why don’t we talk about what you guys actually do?
Speaker 1 | 19:33.894
It’s transitions lenses, the photochromic lenses that turn dark when you walk outside in the sunlight. Okay. So we’re making equipment that helps us coat these lenses. And this is just one particular example. There would have been a team of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. PLC programmers, vision system people. And when was this event? This would have been like 2010 or 2009, kind of when I was first starting to get into it. And all the programming that’s associated with this is very specific. There’s ties into your relational database. There’s a connection to the machines themselves. There’s sometimes connections to other industrial devices like cameras or RFID readers and whatnot. And you’re trying to tell this organization or this vendor to program in whatever, most often .NET, how to do all of this. And we kind of learned the hard way that we didn’t really know how to do it and they didn’t really know how to do it. And it ended up not great. And shortly after that, we said, okay, vendor, you’re good at building stuff and putting it together and then let us program. And- they would know how to build it such that it can mechanically do what we need it to do. But we left all of the programming to a handful of us in-house. And there are two vendors that come to mind that we just work with over and over. Anytime we needed a new piece of equipment, we went to them and they kind of knew what they were good at. They knew what we were good at. And it was just a really, really great relationship. I think that they still work with a handful of them. I’m not in that role anymore though.
Speaker 0 | 21:22.608
How many programmers?
Speaker 1 | 21:24.968
In this case, it would have been me doing the front end and the database stuff, a vision guy, a PLC guy, and probably like three actual programmers. But the other like the PLC person would have been part of engineering, not necessarily IT. This whole episode that you guys had on operational technology is phenomenal. It was great to hear other people talk about. IT and OT. And even though I’m not in that role anymore, it’s something that I just love. There is such a pleasure to seeing something physical happen as a result of all of your code, as opposed to like a BI dashboard that just like sits there.
Speaker 0 | 22:09.694
How intimately involved do you think executive management is with IT and OT in that fashion? How aware are they? of the fact that so many things can live and die on the vine there or that the i think by the time flux capacitor of the company could blow up at any moment if you lost some developers and you know this i guess you would call it jiving well i’ve had um some of the some of the data that i have um crunched the one of the five major pain points that IT directors mention when it comes to vendors is the ability of us to jive with the other company’s team or jive with your vendor’s team. If there’s not a jiving there or a working together type of thing, which you’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t work. So if that falls apart, then what?
Speaker 1 | 23:09.624
Back to do it yourself. And we had a situation way back when where I put a proposal together and say, hey, I think we can do all this ourselves. And they said, we don’t because of exactly what you what you said, which is a very valid concern. I do want to be clear that there are pros and cons to everything. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 23:26.391
both can blow up. Both. Yeah. I mean, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 23:29.132
And in this in this particular case, I said, you know, I think I can do this. And they said, well, we don’t we don’t want just one person like one internal employee. We want an established vendor that we can go back to. And if there’s a problem like they they have, we have an SLA with them. And we brought them in. Their quote was astronomical. They’re using all sorts of technologies that weren’t part of our techno stack. And they ended up, I got to build it myself, which was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done. And it existed until that particular plant shut down. And I’m also happy to say, like, not being in that role anymore, I get no… support calls or anything. So I think that, you know, just another one of my pillars of good IT leadership, not even leadership, just being a good IT person is build your stuff. This is nothing new. Build your stuff so people behind you can support it. And I think that, yeah, you comment it, people understand, you make it as easy as possible. The thing that’s always in the back of my head is lowest common denominator. So when I’m writing something, I’m going to do so in the least number of lines of codes. And that’s one of my pet peeves is whenever it says, oh, well, I just did something and it was like 30,000 lines of code. And it just strikes me as an odd KPI to use to try and tell people that something is a good piece of code. I’m much more happy to say, oh, that whole thing that runs that whatever is only 3,000 lines of code.
Speaker 0 | 25:18.828
It’s like speaking volumes in a single sentence type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 25:21.971
Yeah. Yes, yes.
Speaker 0 | 25:24.785
You know, like when he speaks, he doesn’t speak often, but when he does, you know, it speaks volumes. How did you get into the role that you did get into? And is it more of a human connection piece versus a making machines work and work together well? And I guess what was your hardest moment? Because I know when I went from. I love taking orders. I love taking orders. I love doing work. Somehow now I’m stuck in this other role, which is called like leadership and vision and, and mission statements and, and, and guiding people and, and feedback and, and, and then allowing people to coach you and, and be open to feedback and, and all of these other things I find to be much more mentally stressful than the old days of just do the work.
Speaker 1 | 26:21.055
Yes. And Back to what I was saying about how I feel fortunate that I can still do work. And by work, I mean like architecture development and stuff like that. But oddly enough, the timing coincided with COVID, but it wasn’t necessarily because COVID that I got transferred to this different role. And at first I was terrified because I was taken out of my world that I, in a lot of ways, built from scratch. And it’s like,
Speaker 0 | 26:52.756
and they said, what? So what was it? Hey, by the way, COVID came, uh, what, where things are changing, what we’re down inside. By the way, you’re now here.
Speaker 1 | 27:02.000
You’re now, um, you’re now business intelligence manager after being, um, manufacturing execution system manager. Um, and I, I did a brief stint when I first started in, in sales and marketing, doing it stuff for sales and marketing. So some of the stuff I was familiar with, but it’s like, how do I just completely change my mindset and start really working more with people and strategy and vision rather than a machine and operators and plant supervisors? And it was a struggle, but just like I was saying earlier with looking at your thing with the websites, I saw it as a challenge. I dove right in. They kind of gave me guidelines of what it is that they were interested in doing with particular pieces of software that I had heard of. but didn’t know about.
Speaker 0 | 27:51.736
Maybe give me a metaphorical example if you’re not allowed to speak about it, but I’m fascinated. I need to know.
Speaker 1 | 27:57.419
I don’t know if I’m not allowed to speak about it, but ClickSense in this particular case was the BI platform of choice. And it was something, something business intelligence, something, something ClickSense, something, something data-driven decision-making. And a really great thing about my company is they give you the flexibility to… kind of find your own way. They’ll kind of point you in the direction of this is what we want to go, where we want to go, but it can be up to you to figure out how we get there. And so it was- In other words,
Speaker 0 | 28:32.543
bring the results.
Speaker 1 | 28:33.904
Yeah. And so it was, I love puzzles. I love solving things and fixing things. And so in this particular case, it was, okay, well, I know what this is and- I don’t think that there’s really anybody in-house that’s an expert. So why can’t I become the expert? And that’s when you just start diving into how it works. So on the technology side, you obviously have to do some upskilling yourself to learn their architecture and syntax and whatnot. But then on the business side, and this is where working for a single company for so long comes in handy. It’s like, okay, well, I kind of know where all of the data sources are that… could turn into results, whether it’s a flat file, whether it’s a cloud database, whether it’s a CRM, whether it’s a survey company, how can I put all of that together and present it as such that is now going to give the people the data that they need? And really one of the biggest things that I see in my job, whether it’s sales and marketing, whether it’s shop floor, whether it’s logistics or finance is really just how do I take… All of this raw data. put it all together into something that is useful and present it to them as easy as possible. And boiling that down into even fewer words is, how do I make people’s jobs easier? And that’s exactly what I see. As an IT person, that is what I have always believed my job to be, is making other people’s jobs easier.
Speaker 0 | 30:08.601
So we took the data. We crunched the data. We, do we meet with people and find out, hey, What do you do for a job? What do you want to do with this data? What’s the objective? What’s the, and then, you know, once we crunch that data, then what? Then what?
Speaker 1 | 30:26.684
Then you hope that they use it the way you intended it to, which is the hardest part. Because for me, the easy and fun part is putting everything together. And I’ll be honest, there are some things that don’t really work the way I want them or aren’t used the way I want them to. And I think it really goes back to the fact that everybody’s busy. And even if you have done your best to make something with push notifications, like as soon as the data that they’re looking for, you have made this as easy as you possibly can. But I think the real challenge is getting people to understand the value of data. And that’s gonna remain a challenge, I think, for… a really long time. And I really take it to the extreme because in not just my professional life, but personal life, whether it’s banking alerts or whether it’s like I’m an avid runner and I like crunching all of the numbers from running, I don’t know how to exist without having easy access to a ton of different data. And sometimes to my fault, it’s difficult for me to understand how other people can. ignore the power and importance of easily accessible, valuable data.
Speaker 0 | 31:50.147
Yeah, because that’s humans. That’s like the 80-20 rule. And 80% of the people probably are not just crazy driven, passionate about any… They may be in one thing, but it may not be that thing. It may not be that thing. And then in general, what thing ever turns out the way that we imagine it’s going to turn out? No matter whether you went to school for the first day or whether you went to college or whatever, and you go and you do the little tour on campus and you imagine, oh, it’s going to be like this, it’s going to be like that. And then you actually go. It’s got nothing like that at all.
Speaker 1 | 32:22.239
But back to the shop floor stuff, that’s where that is nice, because it’s pretty binary where it either works or it doesn’t work. There’s not a lot of gray area in that particular part of my career, which really just stating. or just an observation, but yeah. No, no,
Speaker 0 | 32:40.045
no. What you’re saying is, is I like binary. What you’re saying is like, look, I like cut and dry. Okay. I don’t like this whole, like.
Speaker 1 | 32:47.892
It’s a lot easier to gauge your success and effectiveness in a binary world, for sure.
Speaker 0 | 32:54.137
That’s the problem that a lot of IT directors are dealing with now is we left from a binary world where we’ve got to deal with people and emotions and emotional intelligence and empathy and all these other things that are going on. And, um, Uh, for example, you mentioned personal life. You mentioned you like running. I find runners to be, can be obsessive. I used to be a big runner. I’m an obsessive person. I used to run a lot. I used to, and then, you know, I wanted to run marathons and all this stuff. And then I started running 16 miles a day and my knees started to hurt. And I was like, yeah, you know, and then I saw a jujitsu, uh, studio and a guy flipping a jujitsu sign outside. And then that was it. And then jujitsu completely engulfed my life and became a complete addiction that was even worse than running. Um, Then I picked up, then I took up surfing as well. That also became an absurd addiction to the point where I was like, you know, running is just not as fun as any of this, but running is like this adrenaline rush. And as you’re running, I don’t know if you do long runs or short runs or like, what’s your average run? Like, what are you doing? Six miles? What are you doing?
Speaker 1 | 33:52.499
Well, it’s, um, I, I did the whole marathon and a handful of ultras, but the last, now the longest I’ll do is a half marathon.
Speaker 0 | 34:01.946
So I, I would, I’m
Speaker 1 | 34:04.748
curious about the data like so what’s your average day like what do you do how do you prepare for something like do you run like six miles every day go like three miles three miles and six miles i mean like it’s a bit data back to this whole data driven thing that is it’s it’s crystal clear for me and it’s it’s difficult for me to understand like when you can put rules around your life it makes life so much easier so i have a checklist That it was from 2012 until 2018, it was 100 miles a month with at least one 10 miler. What?
Speaker 0 | 34:39.176
Miles a month. I’m writing this down because this is like Atomic Habits. Have you read the book Atomic Habits? You might love it.
Speaker 1 | 34:44.359
No.
Speaker 0 | 34:44.952
Or listen to it. Atomic Habits has been on the New York Times bestseller list forever. And I think it’s legit. Okay. I think it’s a legit bestseller. Not like one of the ones that’s like been hacked into. Like I, you know, like some people do like play the numbers, you know, and quit, get a bunch of followers on Amazon or something like that. No, this is legit. You will, you will love this book, Atomic Habits. And just download the audio. If you’re an audio book guy, just download it. You will absolutely love this. If you do not love this, I should be getting credit for this. Whoever, why can’t I remember your name? Atomic Habits guy. you should be paying me money. And he’s going to be like, how do you not know who I am? It’s like, so anyways, atomic habits. Um,
Speaker 1 | 35:20.682
let me Google it written down and we’ll check that out, but it’s just, it’s. And so then I, um, started getting slower and cut that hundred to 50 in July of 2018.
Speaker 0 | 35:32.147
But James clear, by the way, James clear. So to not offend James clear and in case he wants to sue me or something, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 35:39.010
A preemptive. Thank you, James clear for this book that I’m going to read. But it’s just when you have rules and like back to the puzzle thing, like a puzzle that I have to do at the start of every month is now I only run on the weekends and I lift weights during the week. But so only running on the weekends, knowing that I need to get to now 50 miles since 2018, but with at least one 10 miler, it’s a it’s a puzzle at the start of every month where you kind of plot out. Do I have any vacation days? I do spend a week a month in Florida. where my office is. I’m remote in Dallas. And so you have to, I have to look at the calendar and figure out like, okay, where are my 50 miles going to come from? Where is the 10 miler going to come from? In Dallas, it was 11 degrees a month ago, and it’s going to be 82 this, and it’s, you know, it’s 110 in the summer. So all of these different variables come into play of like, okay, I want to, I want my 10 miler to be as, as fast as possible. But now you have to figure out where the best place to do it is to make your numbers look good. So with rules like that, it just makes life easy. And I think that if businesses kind of put some structure around it, like this is what we have to do. This is the easiest way to capture the data to make sure that we’re doing what we said we’re going to do is just all very logical and linear to me.
Speaker 0 | 37:01.773
Hey, guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become. Fairly apparent, I’m sure all of you will agree over the years, that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I’ve seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there’s also a direct correlation to your budget. and your company’s bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don’t have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’ve put together specifically for IT leadership, and it’s on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we’re doing this in a way that will not… cost your IT department a dime. So if you’d like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company’s bottom line. What you’re going to end up with is… Number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization’s uptime and bottom line. And because you’re going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you’ll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you’ll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on-demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you’d like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it’s going to open your eyes to what’s possible. Let our back office team provide you the high-touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-GOLD-POUND-STAND for support. Now, if you’re wondering, what does this apply to? This applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you’re a Microsoft shop or a Google shop. what you might be paying for AWS, even Azure, co-location space, any of those vendors that you’re paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with. Hey, 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. What? Very, very few people have an answer to this. I think it’s just a, I don’t know, a key point to life. Don’t know what it means. What is, do you have, what is the end game? for you and i don’t believe me personally just because type of person i am i don’t believe the you know cash out on my 401k when i’m 70 that’s not that’s not the answer to me but no what is it what’s the end game for it professionals is it i live and breathe and die this every day i mean what is it for me specifically or just in okay for you for you no of course for you um
Speaker 1 | 40:43.248
Oh, I think about it all the time. I want to leave. I guess, hopefully, it’s been kind of obvious that I’m very passionate about this. And as long as I have that passion, and as long as I feel like I can build things that make the business, I don’t want to say I have catchphrases, but I say the same things a lot to a lot of people. Wake up every day and figure out This tool belt that I’ve built over the years of business knowledge and technology and programming languages and everything else, how am I going to use that tool belt to make the company a better place? And as long as I continue to do that, I will just keep working. Hopefully, anyone in charge of raises or promotions or whatever isn’t listening, but it… It stopped being about money for me a long time ago. It’s just something that I really enjoy doing. And as long as I continue to enjoy it, I’m just going to keep doing it.
Speaker 0 | 41:51.806
Is there any keys to that? Is there any keys to like, I’m sure everyone would love to wake up every day and just say, I love going to work. No, no, I love my job. I’m sure everyone would love to wake up every day and say, I love my job. I love going to work. So. What, is there anything that, any advice there for someone to, I guess, love their job more? Or I don’t know. I don’t know what, it’s just, what is it?
Speaker 1 | 42:17.925
I guess if you, if you, I just, I love finding ways that technology can make people’s lives better. And if there, if you haven’t been handed a super detailed 10 page spec with everything that needs to be done. You should be able to figure out what’s in your tool belt, how to build on your tool belt and how to do something. Like, I can’t tell you the number of projects I’ve done that were not asked for. It was, it was me more just like seeing that there was a need someplace, knowing that I had the tools in my tool belt to build something.
Speaker 0 | 42:57.541
You’re the digital transformation guy. You’re the digital transformation guy without having to, before digital transformation. Like, don’t just sit around and. press keys and turn the, I don’t know, turn the gears and cranks and, you know what I mean? Actually look at the business. And this is key. It’s look at the business, know what the business is trying to accomplish, know what your people and other people in the company are trying to accomplish and look at the technology that’s there and make it better or bring in what needs to be done to do that. And if you love doing that, if you love being creative and and solving problems with technology in a binary fashion than not, than do it.
Speaker 1 | 43:41.412
Now, one of the things that I’ve, being just with one, and I was a little nervous coming on here because I don’t know what the rest of the IT world, like I’ve been to conferences, obviously, and- Oh,
Speaker 0 | 43:55.002
look, I’ve been in the same company since 2020. I don’t care. All right, I’m doing pretty good. No.
Speaker 1 | 44:01.366
It makes me wonder what I’ve- missed out on by not getting exposed to other things. And like, uh, one of the things like around probably 2009 or maybe 2010, I started hearing this word DevOps and I’m not, I’m not a buzzword.
Speaker 0 | 44:18.521
I’ve been doing this already. Yeah. I’ve been doing demo. And so it says waterfall. That’s stupid. It is.
Speaker 1 | 44:24.045
The more I’ve found, uh, agile and scrum and waterfall and DevOps and sec ops. And, uh, I don’t know. I probably am not going to be popular for saying this, but it just, I don’t, I don’t know why you need fancy words to talk about.
Speaker 0 | 44:40.946
I’ve been saying it for a long time, guy. It’s called common sense. Okay. It’s all common sense to have someone work in parallel when you’re doing a project, to have someone else working on something at the same time. And it’s common sense to not try to do things in a linear fashion and wait for someone else to do the job. There should be someone else working on something else at the same time. Well,
Speaker 1 | 44:59.304
and it’s one of my other like coin phrases or whatever, get it done ology. Like whenever I started hearing all of these methodologies, it’s like, can we just say like…
Speaker 0 | 45:09.234
get it done ology someone had to sell a certification course and make some money and call it devops 101 and someone else there someone else out there got rich to that and now everyone else needs to get certified on it and get certified in common sense okay but we couldn’t call it common sense we need to put a big buzzword on i’m with you i’m with you 100 now i brought well i’m a devil i’m certified whatever it is okay good what not saying better or worse
Speaker 1 | 45:35.146
I have zero certifications. I graduated with a business degree with a concentration in information technology. I had no programming.
Speaker 0 | 45:44.051
We have this debate all the time. Do certifications matter? Does an MBA matter? Well, some people say, well, yeah, if you want to get a job at a company that absolutely requires you have an MBA, then it does matter. But if I was a business owner, which I am, I want the best guy for the role that has the most experience that can get the job done. That’s what I care about. If you have an MBA and you’re an idiot, I don’t, you know, is that even possible? I don’t know if that’s possible. You know, you could have an MBA, but you have no, it’s kind of like the doctor that has, I have to get my hip replaced possibly. Right. Do I want the doctor that graduated at the top of his class in Harvard that, that, you know, has done five surgeries or do I want the guy that graduated years ago from some other place? I don’t know. That’s got 20,000 surgeries underneath his belt. And. all these different unique ways and has seen all different types of body parts and sizes and I think that’s just common sense. Call it DevOps. Steve,
Speaker 1 | 46:48.666
DevOps for your hip replacement. Good luck.
Speaker 0 | 46:51.889
I don’t know. We’ll go down a rabbit hole there about healthcare and where we need you as well. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I do think it would be fun to walk. You might have just been at the right company since day one. Some other people aren’t, right? That’s another conversation for another time. It’s like, how do you pick winners when you do go to a right company? You picked a winner from the beginning. So congratulations.
Speaker 1 | 47:24.993
Thanks. This has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 0 | 47:27.554
Anything to, any words of wisdom or anything to… to, I don’t know, send out to the listeners.
Speaker 1 | 47:37.106
Wow. You hate to end with something as common as this, but if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
Speaker 0 | 47:44.212
Yes. So actually get involved and maybe be involved in the business and understand what the vision of the company is, understand what the purpose is of the company. And if you can’t get bought into that purpose, then you’re probably at the wrong place. If you are bought into that purpose, then you probably need to connect with people and find out other people that are there for that purpose as well and help them do their job better through technology.
Speaker 1 | 48:09.477
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 48:10.178
With ones and zeros. All right, man. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity.
Speaker 1 | 48:14.542
I really appreciate it. Have a great day.
