Speaker 0 | 00:06.841
Welcome back, everyone, to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Nick Bialiszewski, who is an operating partner at Orchid Black. Welcome to the show, Nick.
Speaker 1 | 00:17.930
Thanks, Doug.
Speaker 0 | 00:18.951
Great to have you here. So, like, leading into this, of course, right before we get on, you’ve got, I mean, it’s a great Polish name, but it is… a bear to pronounce right so like i had to say i had to sit and practice to make sure that i got it right how did i do this time you did great and and i coached you through it it’s the same role i’ve been doing since kindergarten that’s right you know and my name is my last name i’m kameen but everybody wants to pronounce my name is cayman as well so i you know like like you and i are in the same a similar boat although yours is yours is uh taking the cake for for complexity um for awesome complexity so so nick you’re doing you’ve been in a lot of different roles over the years um and just for the listeners out here on the podcast i’m gonna i’m gonna give give a little bit inside baseball nick and i know each other so like we’ve worked together in in a couple of different roles uh you know doing uh some projects so so i’m i have a little bit inside baseball to know a little bit more about nick’s background than maybe the average guest we have on this podcast but Um, you, you really specialize and you love doing work in like, like lean, lean work, really, uh, you know, and, and so can you tell us a little bit about like the work you’re doing and, and where you’re kind of doing leadership in that space right now?
Speaker 1 | 01:43.422
Yeah. Uh, happy to, um, I mean, really like what I really enjoy right now is, is working with companies who are trying to meet some kind of audacious goal and, and are struggling to do it because parts of their business aren’t talking to each other. A few years ago, I was introduced to the Scaled Agile framework, SAFE, which is kind of what you were just mentioning with the lean stuff. And I was really struck by how well it provided kind of a framework and kind of like a taxonomy for the problems that we’re trying to solve today. You know, building software or organizing businesses. Strictly around in my interest right now is just like in how we convey ideas, how we manage scope. If you take a big cyber-physical product as a great example, but even something as simple as a web application, how do you break that down into what are your hypotheses about it? What capabilities are you looking for? What’s the value proposition for the product? How does that break down logically and physically into what you’re building? Scaled Agile Framework, I thought, gave some really, really cool tools for that. Kind of fell into that happenstance way. Before that, I was… doing like agile consulting and dev tools consulting um and happened upon the schedule scaled agile framework but my background is a software engineer um so i think that that’s why i like it is that it probably addresses so many of the different things that i always felt were wrong about either companies i worked for or projects that i was on um you know doing the implementation so i’m just gonna we’re gonna
Speaker 0 | 03:22.304
you know go right down into the depths of where have you where have you been working and like what have you been doing and you know so you’re in different leadership roles right now and you know you’re you’re actually i think if i’m looking i’m cheating here on linkedin looking at your profile but you’re really kind of doing two different things at the moment there’s a you’re a vp of engineering for a a retail store or a place called restore
Speaker 1 | 03:42.916
restore for retail it’s a historical retail tech software company nice so
Speaker 0 | 03:49.164
And you’re an operating partner at Orchid Black, which is a consultancy firm that does a wide variety of different strategy consulting work. So going back in the past, you’ve had different leadership positions. Can you kind of walk us through, where did you come into leadership in the IT space, in the software engineering space specifically?
Speaker 1 | 04:11.516
Well, when I was finishing my computer science degree, I was working as a network and systems admin. And And before that, I had done an internship with the Coast Guard as a software developer. And at both of those places, I had run-ins with DBAs, database administrators. Yeah. And I just, there was an aura about DBAs, particularly the ones at the Coast Guard. And it’s like, I don’t know why, but it’s just like I gravitated to the people that did like… the database stuff, the most hardcore stuff on the team, they usually kind of had this Superman-type attitude, you know, could answer any kind of questions.
Speaker 0 | 04:50.063
I feel like there’s an aura of anything at the Coast Guard. I mean, like, that seems like a really cool place to intern.
Speaker 1 | 04:58.611
It was an amazing place to intern. I will, that’s another story too, but I mean, I got that opportunity. It was the second day of a two day career fair at my university and I didn’t have any kind of interview set up. I didn’t even have a resume with me. I think I just, I went up and talked to someone and they’re like, Hey, come back tomorrow for interviews. And I’m like, okay, cool. I wrote a resume that day and got it. But no, it was, it was an amazing opportunity, um, while I was still in college. But, um, you know, that experience and, and the work that I did, uh, working in it. While I finished my degree, I really wanted to go to a place where I could do a little bit of what I did in IT, but also in the software space. So I ended up moving up. I was going to college at WVU, so I moved up to Pittsburgh. And I took a job as a DBA, as a SQL production DBA, and completely loved my job. But within a couple of months, I was given the opportunity to take over the dev team. And honestly, like being right out of college, that promotion probably hurt more than it helped.
Speaker 0 | 05:58.039
I, that is, this is going to be the first place I’m going to explore about how the, the, this is a great, because I had the same thing too, where it would happen to me. Like at 26, I was managing like 10 people. And I think about 26 year old or 25 year old, me managing 10 people at 45 year old, me managing 10 people. And I’m like, Ooh, like not entirely. I mean, I was okay, but there were a lot of things when I look back, I’m like, I, there was some things I could have, if I had only known.
Speaker 1 | 06:28.183
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like I, I feel actually ironically, like I had a lot better poker face and more patience back then sometimes. Um, but like now, like nowadays I find myself, if you catch me on a bad day, like, like, uh, like a sleepless night, you know, the day after a sleepless night, like I’m, I feel like I, I get so focused on the professionalism and the pressure of what we do sometimes that I feel like sometimes. even when I was a manager just starting out, it’s like didn’t have all the pressures of life that I have now, you know, and all the things that go on. But yeah, I mean, that’s how I got into leadership. I was given a development team probably to keep me at an organization when I was pretty young in my career. And I ended up staying there for quite a while. You know, actually that was the first place I got exposure to any kind of like automated CICD and DevOps type stuff. So it was actually, it was non… nonprofit organization. We had like 70 custom apps and I got all of those things on pipelines before we left and, you know, fixed a lot of technical problems. But yeah, the mark that I left there, I can’t say that I made people a lot better than how I found them.
Speaker 2 | 07:42.982
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Speaker 0 | 10:02.718
So now what, what types of things did you, so these are early lessons in your career now. I mean, this is, uh, you know, 15, almost still going on 20 years ago now, but not quite, you know, looking at it, but you, you, you know, you said, you’d say you leave people, you left people better than when you started. What, what did you do to, to achieve that?
Speaker 1 | 10:23.837
Well, I don’t think I did it at that place. I think what I did there was I think I set a high bar. I think I fixed a lot of problems. And then I kind of went to go find myself.
Speaker 0 | 10:35.922
I’m sorry, I misheard what you said. You were saying you didn’t leave people as great as you might have hoped now.
Speaker 1 | 10:42.144
Yeah, I was saying I think my legacy there was I think I made technical improvements and fixed the bridge, so to speak. But I don’t know that I left the passengers in any better state. And that’s where I was saying, I think that hurt more than it helped because, you know, you leave a job like that. It’s like, oh, I had this team. It’s like, I must be capable. You know, I was, you know, given a commission, you know, so to speak. But I ended up leaving there. I went to Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute where I had no team. And I was very much like the most junior person. um you know on on the group i was working with phds and you know engineers in their 50s and stuff and and my boss was an author and it was uh it was a completely different environment and um academia wasn’t industry like i get there on first on my first day and it’s like what do i do and they’re like hang on it’s just why don’t you slow down and here’s your set of textbooks you know it was like send me to my private office or whatever but um my my role there was actually on the team software process so um Basically, what this group did, all these PhDs, they could take any software project that’s going on, just say you’re two months into an 18-month project, they could estimate when you’ll finish, how done you’ll be, how big your product will be, where all the defects will be, and which parts of your process were most responsible for removing them and inserting them, injection and removal. So my role on that team was to basically understand TSP and PSP, personal software process, through and through, along with all the statistics. You know, you needed to measure things like defect density and process yield and stuff. And we would work with really hypercritical organizations where they were building software that, you know, you couldn’t necessarily patch a defect. Like, for instance, like, think about the software that runs your pump that medication goes through when you’re in the hospital. You know, it’s like the brakes on your car. or the trading engine that would hold the value to your 401k and all this kind of stuff. They cannot fail,
Speaker 0 | 12:51.732
basically.
Speaker 1 | 12:52.613
Well, they can’t fail, but it’s also like the distribution environment means you’ll never be able to update it. How are you going to update my pacemaker if you made a little issue? It was pretty cool because I learned a lot about software quality and about how to manage quality. The first thing I was asked was like, have you ever measured software quality it’s like well i’ve counted bugs and it’s like well no i’m talking about defects you know like what part of your process and what type and what reason you know is responsible for the defective nature of your yield you know and it’s like i just never thought of it this way um but that was that was probably the biggest thing that that that helped me to go and correct my mistake of what i was saying earlier about like um i left my team probably not a lot better off than when i found them that when i left carnegie mellon I joined another local Pittsburgh well-known software company. It was probably one of the better software companies in Pittsburgh called Confluence. And I felt like I was working with stallions, like nothing but stallions work there, like outstanding engineers through and through. They’d probably all laugh if they heard me talking about them this way, but I had like major imposter syndrome when I went there, even though I had run a team before, I had come from Carnegie Mellon. These guys are so good, but, you know, they didn’t really have the predictability. They didn’t have, like, the consistency. So one of the hardest things I ever did as a leader was just as an engineer on this team, you know, just a regular engineer. I got them to log our defects, you know, and some of the things they were saying is, ah, nobody’s saying that we’re not, you know, creating good estimates or anything like that. But, you know, I could tell, like, scientifically, we just had no proof of it. But what we started doing, though, was, like, instead of, like… building some software, finishing the sprint, and then releasing it. And then if we got some defects, you know, or some bugs that were sent back, you know, log them. Our process was like intra-sprint. In the middle of your sprint, if you were at a code review and you found a situation that you did not design for or something you didn’t plan for, we would log a design defect or we’d log a planning defect. And one of our quality engineers would help us review them at the end of our sprint review. Such that we were able to have every individual engineer that injected a defect, you know, was able to remove it. Meaning we didn’t release any defects. We also didn’t repeat any of the same mistakes. We went 18 months. We never missed a single release. We didn’t miss any scope we had planned for that release. And we never let a defect escape. It was 100% process yield sustained for 18 months.
Speaker 0 | 15:33.155
That’s pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 | 15:34.917
I’m still extremely proud of that. And then. After that, I spent a decade in consulting and I’ve never seen another team get that close. So, yeah, that was an example of just like, you know, you don’t have to be the boss to be the leader. But, you know, and it’s not even saying that was the home run. Like there were a million other metrics of success for that product. But I’m really proud of how we approached and managed the quality very professionally.
Speaker 0 | 16:04.157
Mm hmm. So now when you are leading the teams in these places. And I’m going to draw a contrast to one versus the other because you’ve highlighted it. Early on, you feel like you technically led well, but maybe didn’t, you know, empathy lead well, if you will, you know, or the variety of like the human factors related to leadership. But you learned and you adapted and you changed your approach and your tactics and you felt that, you know, then you went on this. were on a part of a team that had an 18 month run of of zero defects uh you know but you know producing it at such a high level what wasn’t i’m gonna ask unless it’s two-sided what didn’t you do well like back before you know and i’m more specific like not just like a general well i didn’t feel like i treated the team really well but like what what would you know so like people are listening to this podcast and they’re saying like if i can see this in my actions and what i’m doing in a leadership level i know that’s like that’s probably a red flag
Speaker 1 | 17:06.327
Actually, I’m glad I’m talking to you about this because you’re helping me realize I’m learning this lesson all over again today. You know, it’s like, you know, with that, the restore for retail role is that my issue between job one and job three in this case is there’s a difference between taking responsibility for something that you want and being given responsibility. I think in the in the former role, I was given the responsibility and I. You know, I looked at that like, okay, I’m anointed to make these kind of choices. You know, I didn’t realize it until after and I thought, well, what’s the big deal? It’s technology. But my team hated that I put in place like five or six different tools over the course of a year and, you know, kept changing them out when I saw that they wouldn’t meet their needs. You know, eventually we settled on the right place, but it’s like, I didn’t understand change management. I didn’t understand getting buy-in. Um, I was actually, I was complaining to that boss that I didn’t have enough technical training, which I was almost laughed out of his office. He said, you don’t need technical training. I was sent to Dale Carnegie training, which honestly was outstanding. One of the best things that was ever given to me in my career. But even after that, um, the real difference, I think with, with taking responsibility for this problem was, um, it was something I cared about. Um, and it wasn’t something that I could just go off and do. I couldn’t configure it away. I couldn’t, I couldn’t just iterate on it. I literally had to take responsibility for the issue by just being in the suck of it with, with the other engineers. And I think that that was the difference is like, um, first place I worked, you know, I was, I was making changes and doing things, you know, both as, uh, somebody who could, you know, I started there as the DBA. I was still the production DBA when I was dev teams boss, but, um, I had to do it as a member of the group. Um, you know, when, when I was working as an engineer and I implemented some of those, those quality things. Um, but yeah, it really just meant going through and, and, and training and teaching and supporting and, you know, being, being willing to have conversations about, well, is this a defect? Is this not a defect? And, and not just, um, not just shouting over like what my opinion should be or feeling right in it. Even, even though I had, you know, more training and stuff in that background, it’s like, I really cared about getting the data that we needed to be able to. to show what we were doing. So I feel like that was the difference.
Speaker 0 | 19:35.568
Yeah, I think from, yeah, in my case, like I think back to, you know, 25 year old me as a manager, in the one, there’s this one situation that sticks out in my head, where I would have staff meetings, you know, weekly, and we would sit around the table, and we, you know, would kind of review the things were, you know, here’s what’s going on for the week. And, you know, here’s what I, you know, why I’ve taken, we need to focus on these things, or whatever the case may be. And we were a consulting firm, so at the time, we were taking care of IT needs, servers, and that type of stuff. And this is the early, mid-2000s. And one of my staff people, he didn’t want to do something. And, and like, it got like contentious where I essentially challenged him openly in front of everyone else. And I’m like, well, you’re going to do it. And he’s like, what if I don’t want to do it? And I’m like, well, you’re going to do it because I told you, you can do it. You’re going to do it. Guess what? I’m the boss. And that’s how it works. You know? And like, I would never do that now. You know, like, like I, I, I, you know, you, you learn like an understanding of, of. where the reservoir of authority actually comes from and it’s not in sitting at the end of the table and pounding your fist on it and being like you’re gonna do it you know yeah you know jerk because i’m the boss because guess who’s the real jerk in that situation it’s not the person you’re calling the jerk uh and and like i can you know unfortunately i’ve had enough time in my life to you know this past to be able to you know tell that story without what with understanding that you know everybody grows and changes and it sounds like you’ve had a journey that, you know, in, in, in your way has, has done that, you know, you were, you’re focused on these like metrics and like, if I only get the deliverable or not only get the deliver, but if I, if I get the deliverables, the rest comes behind it no matter what. And it doesn’t, and it maybe doesn’t matter how we get to the deliverable. If, you know, if I need to ride the team way a versus way B it, you know, that, that choice is really inconsequential as long as the deliverable gets met.
Speaker 1 | 21:39.788
Yeah. And you know what, though? You describing that, I get a parallel type memory of this thing. Because for me, it was never about deliverables. I’m from the Rust Belt. My parents are always losing their jobs. And I guess I always worried about, no matter how good I was, it’s just I knew I could always lose my job and that there were 10 people in line to replace me. Maybe there weren’t. Yeah. But. I think I was just always driven by being the best. And I would always try to seek out who the best people were. And I would, you know, idolize them in a way and try to figure out what made them the best, you know. And I think for me, it was probably being a little bit more motivated by, this is how I see the world, you know, in terms of I’m here, here to work, super professional, you know. It’s like, and I… I don’t think that I was old enough yet to see that not everybody sees work that way. And hey, it’s okay for other people to not see work that way. Honestly, now I don’t even always see work that way.
Speaker 0 | 22:47.059
Some people are just showing up. That’s right. Some people are just showing up and they’re there for the paycheck. And that’s okay as long as they do good work.
Speaker 1 | 22:54.564
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 22:56.345
And recognizing that as a leader is really an important… I’ve always found that to be an important lesson. Because if you can… you know there was a earlier episode that i interview i did on the podcast where somebody you know highlighted and these are all things that i you know we’ve all heard before different things like not everybody needs to be the team captain you know and you shouldn’t have the expectation that everybody needs to be the team captain sometimes you’ve just got you know people that you
Speaker 1 | 23:22.741
know they’re the pinch hitter and they’re really good at being a pinch hitter and that’s totally fine but that’s how you feel the team you you’ve got people that can play well in those different positions yeah I feel you.
Speaker 0 | 23:36.088
So, you know, we just talked about things that you did wrong in leadership. But today, you know, you’ve had the benefit of time to develop, you know, kind of like a more holistic idea about leadership. What are you doing today to lead teams and bring to the table there? What do you try to do to influence those groups?
Speaker 1 | 24:01.055
Number one thing I really try to do is just. I try to be an umbrella for them. I liken it a lot, too, to like, I don’t know if you like to ski, but like if you…
Speaker 0 | 24:10.888
I love skiing.
Speaker 1 | 24:11.849
If you go out west and you drive to the mountains, you know, you’ll often see like no stopping next half mile or how long, you know, it says avalanche zone, you know. And sometimes, especially technology teams, you know, they’re living in avalanche territory all the time if they’re in a reactive state. And maybe this is just relative to what I’m doing right now. But today, what I like to do is really… try to learn from what I’ve done before. And it’s that I cannot be the individual expert, you know, pinch hitter, team captain, you know, do everything, play all positions. My job is here is to make them look good. And my job is to execute. They are really kind of the two things that my mentors have taught me that I’ve been keeping in my mind lately. And that being said, it makes my job a lot easier sometimes because I don’t have to worry so much about being creative or always being visionary. I just I need to figure out, like, how do I advance this idea? How do I mitigate this pain point for my boss? How do I support everybody? You know, so I find myself actually that’s that’s where my mindset is tactically where I am. I’m doing level two support some days, most days, you know, reporting defects. you know, analyzing budgets. I’m doing all of the mundane things, but, um, they’re, they’re all, they’re all done in service of the team. And, and I find myself proud to do it. Whereas, um, back in the day, I would have been like, well, I should be doing strategy. If I’m, if I’m in a leadership role, it’s like, that’s what you should do. And it’s like, can’t really do that. And if you’re not in the weeds, at least that’s what I find.
Speaker 0 | 25:48.531
Yeah. And I mean, there’s different scale. I mean, like we, we work in the mid market space, uh, and, and I would, I 100% agree with what you’re saying, because like, I found that the best way to motivate teams, you know, is to, is to let them feel that you not just understand where they’re at, but you’re willing to get down in with them once in a while and, and participate and do the work that’s there. And that’s, that earns you respect and it earns you, I like to say it earns you grace. So that like if something goes wrong, they’re not like, like, oh, my gosh, like, you know, darn that Nick guy. You know, my boss, he doesn’t know what’s up. They’ll be like, oh, man, Nick’s been working with us hard, but like he’s, you know, he’s all right. He’ll figure it out. And, you know, and perhaps as you go to scale the larger businesses, you know, if this is we’re talking to the, you know, a software manager at a company that’s got 5000 employees and 200 developers like that may not work. You know, that model may not work for them. But I know in our space, that’s definitely like you often have to be active in the work. You can’t look like you’re ruling from on high, if you will.
Speaker 1 | 27:04.183
Couldn’t be more true.
Speaker 0 | 27:06.024
So can you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing with this Restore for Retail? This is a software development. This is an application you’re developing. It’s a platform. What’s a little bit to do with this?
Speaker 1 | 27:18.986
Well, long story short, Restore for Retail is not a new product, but it is new to the U.S. market. And really what we’re helping retailers do is kind of streamline their kind of like I call it like the local loop of operations. I use the IT colloquialism here. You’ve kind of got how do retailers, you know, with a huge amount of stores. communicate with all of the associates who tend to be you know either seasonal employees or part-time employees um and and get that kind of consistency on the store floor um i used to see this when i i actually worked for rei for a little bit while i was um working as a production dba so i could number one make make some friends with uh climbers because i didn’t know a lot of climbers in pittsburgh i didn’t meet a lot of climbers in pittsburgh um but i got some pretty cool gear discounts which is great but um i remember that I would go to our climbing department, you know, and it’s like you go into any retail store and it’s like the shelves usually look a certain way. And it’s like, I’d go into the climbing department and it’s just, it’d be a mess, you know? So being the climber, you know, I’d put all the chalk bags where they were supposed to go, you know, I’d size all the runners and put all the carabiners, you know, with all the other white carabiners, black diamond with black diamond camp with camp. And nobody ever told me how to set up that store. You know, I have no idea if I did it right. What our product does in Restore is you can basically set up a questionnaire, you could set up a planogram or something that you’d like these associates to use on the floor. You can use Restore to distribute the whole thing, and then you can also use Restore to get that information back to your HQ. And it’s really cool in the way that it does it. Associates have a mobile app that can go on their in-store device, or it can go on an iPad or an iPhone. And they basically just use it to answer survey questions, take photos of things in the store. Sometimes they’ll take videos of the store and then submit them. And then you get this social media stylized gallery of all the pictures and stuff that are coming in from your store and contextualized to the information that you need to know about it. So it’s pretty cool. I guess it’d be like the retail operations version of DoorDash leaving, taking a photo of what they put on your… on your front porch but uh what we’ve what we’ve done with that the last 18 months i’ve been with them i guess actually no it’s longer than that it’ll be a year next month um we’ve we’ve completely re-art we reshored the dev team uh we brought it here to the us we we did some re-architecture um and and just honestly like a lot of growing um you know like i said it was it came from australia so uh we brought it to the us market and um And we’re finding a lot of success with it.
Speaker 0 | 30:07.927
Nice. So I’m glad we talked about this because I want to ask you about leadership with a multinational team. You know, so like you mentioned you brought some of this back, but, you know, you’re having to work with whether it’s Australia or other resources internationally. There’s there’s. That type of leadership is can be a little different, you know, because you have to make different considerations and stuff like that. What’s what’s different about leadership in that space?
Speaker 1 | 30:37.414
You’ve recognized it’s it’s super different just because like now you’re getting into like a bunch of different cultures, you know, like the number one most superficially different thing in this situation is dealing with the reality of time zones and the number of hours of overlap that you have each day to get certain things. on people’s radar or to get decisions out of them. Another thing can be difficult too is if you’re in a reactive state and you need to work with people that are going to be across the place globally, it’s pretty hard to do things unless you can have some synchronicity. Like for instance, I work with product people and customer success people on another continent and it’s like some of the things that they’re… they’re struggling with are, you know, you could say that’s a practice issue or you could say, well, that’s a technical issue. And the only way that you’re going to get closer to figuring out what to do about it is to have some synchronicity and get together, you know. So one of the things we implemented over the last couple of months was just like a comprehensive new set of meetings, you know, that came out, you know, in accordance with that. And here’s the org chart, you know, here’s what everybody’s role is. Here’s how the integrated process works. between like all of these different departments, all different departments, all these different people. So really everybody right now knows where they have to be, you know, at a certain time of day, you know, like for our backlog grooming, for our specification workshops, for our standups and our sprint planning. And I mean, you seem like very basic, but when you’ve got people in one part of the organization that have always built product one way and you’ve got another group that builds it a different way and, you know. everybody’s got strong preferences and strong personalities um bringing them together can can feel like an impossible task but um we’ve actually found that even though people were kind of fighting uh you know the process and stuff that we’re putting in place no one ever wants to talk about process but the reality is it’s like um how good would a band be if you went to a concert and and nobody everybody was playing everybody else’s instrument you know and you can tell that nobody had practiced they’re not tight they’re not in tune they can’t agree on anything that’s a lack of process so um i guess you know just trying to harmonize it it’s just like we we needed people to understand it’s like if you don’t have those things ready by this date we’re not going to be able to go with this stuff um so it was a lot of that is a lot of education but um i don’t know sometimes i don’t know how you can get to the the end state without going through what you go through what i would say
Speaker 0 | 33:16.060
hmm interesting so i’m gonna i’m gonna just dive off on a uh you know here and you know now i’m gonna go to some more humorous or fun questions so yeah you mentioned you you interned at the coast guard but before that like where i i we asked this question in part because it kind of tells a little bit about what era of technology you came up in um so What was your first big technology experience that you remember? Computer system, video game, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1 | 33:52.795
This is a pretty funny story, actually. There’s a guy who used to babysit me. I think he was a construction guy out on workers’ comp because I think he had lost a toe or something. Interesting guy. He was a gun collector. He was actually a grape farmer in western New York. The short of it is when he wasn’t taking me out to do guns and stuff.
Speaker 0 | 34:13.643
He was a babysitter.
Speaker 1 | 34:14.632
is it yeah so he’s missing a toe he’s a construction worker and he’s got a stack of guns and yeah dude he’s your babysitter of course i mean i i learned how to shoot an ar-15 from this guy very very much responsibly of course this guy was he was actually a wonderful gun collector um but no he he he let me on his computer to play uh pac-man and it was like you like old school like dos pac-man from back in the day yeah um and of course he said you know if you want to quit the game that you use this keystroke to get out of it i can’t remember what it was but i’m like okay i know this keystroke i would always play it on on his computer sometime in the near future i go to somebody else’s house and i’m playing some game and then i do the same keystroke on their computer and it like doesn’t uh doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do it does it’s it said something about the boot record is all i can remember now now that i’m older i can understand But I remember it freaked these people out, like, oh, you broke our computer and all that. that was actually like those are the earliest things i remember about computers my first computer actually i didn’t get until more than 10 years later um you know and when i was in like ninth grade um i got an hp pavilion um and it was it had a 20 gig hard drive and
Speaker 0 | 35:34.608
i remember it had it this is like the early 2000s yeah hard drive yeah it had a
Speaker 1 | 35:39.850
4x cd burner yeah i i remember like Because I knew so little about computers, even in ninth grade, my English teacher was saying, you need to turn in your homework on this floppy disk. And I was like, but I just got this computer that I can save things on CDs. And it was like some other student had to explain to my teacher what it was, how ironic I became a computer scientist.
Speaker 0 | 36:01.945
So did that experience, were you just always set on the path of being in technology essentially from that point forward? Or was your plan to go do something else?
Speaker 1 | 36:13.732
I grew up wanting to be a neurosurgeon. And I have no doctors in my family or anything like that. But I just, I knew it was the hardest and that’s what I wanted to do. I ended up getting into technology kind of by happenstance. It’s like I never really cared about it all that much. I mean, I played my Game Boy, you know, and I’d sit at a computer and do stuff. But it’s like I… I was no savant technologist at an early age or anything like that. But I had a friend, I think it was my freshman year of high school, soon after I got my computer, that made websites, made music, did photo editing and design and stuff. Basically all the cool stuff that you could do on computers back then, he would do it all and I learned from him. um then my school got a um a cisco networking uh uh program at their vo-tech and i ended up being like the first class that signed up for it and the the the moment actually that i really wanted to go into technology was when i learned how a virtual circuit was created in a switch um you know like what makes a switch different than a hub you know in terms of it doesn’t just like you know, share that connection and split it. You know, it was explaining like how it multiplexes and literally switches between, uh, the different connections that are sharing the upstream pipe on that. And I’ll be saying this all the wrong way now, but I, I went on and I earned my CCNA certification, you know, right as I was graduating high school. And, um, you know, I was so enthralled. I loved networking so much. I was like, I’m going to go all the way to CCIE and then professionally. And honestly,
Speaker 0 | 37:57.802
I thought one of those guys showing up at the time, but like, When you did the CCIE at the time, you had to go to a certain space, and they’d walk you into a room with a pile of network equipment that you had no idea what it was. And they’d be like, here’s a problem on a piece of paper. We’ll come back in three hours and see what you’ve got. And that’s how they evaluated if you were a CCIE or not. You just were thrown some random problem in that you had to figure it out. It was tough.
Speaker 1 | 38:22.780
You’re not kidding about it. I mean, I actually, freshman year of college, I went home. And I drove all the way to Akron, Ohio for some Cisco event or something because there was this guy who was a double CCIE who was going to be there. And I’m shy. I never go talk to strangers. I actually went up and introduced myself to this guy who was 18 years old. And I asked him, I said, how did you become a CCIE? And he said, well, I went to school for electrical engineering. I was just like, I was turned off after that. I was like. It’s totally never going to do anything with regard to electrical engineering. But it was great to meet that guy and just see where he came from. But I remember soon after that, I actually bought a Cisco 2500 series router on eBay for like 50 bucks. And I would use it to mess around with stuff. And that was fun.
Speaker 0 | 39:15.485
I’ve set up a lot of Cisco 2600 series in my day. And yeah, all the early catalysts. Because I also, I too had a CCNA back at that time. And that was part of the IT consulting work.
Speaker 1 | 39:29.398
Now I got to ask, can you still tell me the pinout for an Ethernet cable?
Speaker 0 | 39:34.562
Orange, white, orange, blue. No, I can’t do it. I could start it and end it.
Speaker 1 | 39:39.906
Orange, white, orange, green, white, blue, blue, white, green, brown, white, brown. That is how hardcore I got into it. And I bet if I tried, I could probably still subnet an IP address. But I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 39:53.799
Ironically, I live in that a little bit now because I’m on this advisory board for the American Register for Internet Numbers. And our, you know, like Aaron, as it’s called, literally handles. handing out ip addresses like the the place that’s designated for north america to do it so like and i do policy work for them and and in that process like i’ve had to become reacquainted with you know you know classes internet domain routing and subnetting and all this stuff like that and i mean they work at the more routing level like bgp and those types of things like big big time routing stuff yeah um some of the there was somebody who uh she’s on the advisory council with me and he gave a presentation at uh a conference that i was at recently on a new what i would call it’s not new but it’s widely used now in big data centers called uh clone networks and he you know at one point he was like oh so you know if you remember back when you did your ccna in like 2005 you know you would you would set up a network with you know spanning tree and multi multiple links and this is how the failovers would work and stuff like that but here’s all the here’s all the ways that that like the clone network which was invented like you know 80 years ago to really for the bell system uh at the you know the 1940s and 50s for physical connections and it fell out of favor when packet switch networking came into play because the you know the the like things like spanning tree protocols and stuff like that took over as the preferred way to build redundancy but then as the data centers got bigger again that that model doesn’t scale And so then all of a sudden, like the clone network, people were like kind of rediscovered the clone network topologies. And now that’s now it’s back. So I’m like watching this thing and I’m like, oh, man, I know stuff like I am smart.
Speaker 1 | 41:48.411
It’s just like fashion trends. It’s like, you know, people’s needs change and they’re probably cyclical.
Speaker 2 | 41:54.876
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Speaker 0 | 44:14.768
Well, I’m going to keep going down the, the, the, you know, the rabbit hole of things that are not a work related here. What can you tell us something about you that, um, not technical that people. may not otherwise know and i’ll just i always give an example because i have a list of things so people randomly learn about me i guess in this process too but uh i once i once dj’d a wedding i’m not dj but i did once dj a wedding it was nice but what about like what what cool or interesting thing it doesn’t have to be a single thing it could be something you do i’m just you know um probably the you
Speaker 1 | 44:52.792
Even if you looked at my LinkedIn profile right now, you’d probably know what I do for fun. But I don’t know. Only if you work with me would you know that I play guitar because I don’t have anything online that you would know about it. But I don’t really.
Speaker 0 | 45:06.023
You are literally talking to us from an awesome recording studio.
Speaker 1 | 45:08.945
Yeah, with all my babies around me. But no, I don’t like just play. I taught myself when I was 13 and I’ve never gone a week in my life without playing guitar. i’ve never gone more than five days maybe once um but no i’ve i’ve got a huge collection of uh mesa amps which is uh it’s what uh metallica likes to play through um and uh all my guitars are left-handed so i’ve never had a lesson um love writing and recording my own stuff but it’s uh it is something that’s weirdly and deeply personal um i don’t share it with anybody um so
Speaker 0 | 45:49.584
nobody besides like my family and friends really get to hear my music oh but now on a podcast there’s going to be a bunch of people who will know this stuff that’d be like even you really might not hear what you produce they’re going to be like you know somebody’s going to be like hey i heard you on this podcast i’m
Speaker 1 | 46:05.635
i’m working on an album but i’m never going to say on this podcast that it’s uh going to be done soon i’m finishing it up because that’s not true but i am working on it i mean in in the studio of course you know you sound
Speaker 0 | 46:18.644
you sound great on this podcast. And part of it is because you’re in a studio and you have like the mixing board. At one point you tell, I think it is some other beat that you had mentioned that like the soundboard that is run through is like the same one that Metallica would use.
Speaker 1 | 46:32.009
Well, the secret sauce here is, so I use an Electro-Voice RE-20 microphone. It’s not even an expensive microphone, but it’s well known for broadcast. And then I have it running straight into super analog channel two of my SSL solid state logic six mixer. And this thing is a very small version of what you would find in like a big professional studio. And even the channel strip that’s on this mixer has a simplified version of like a full SSL EQ and compressor. But I think it sounds excellent. I plug that thing straight into my my converter which is a universal audio apollo x8 um i’ve had other musicians laugh at me that it’s like wow you’re running an x8 at home but yes so uh yeah that that’s what runs everything and um i love it since i since i can’t play music all the time while i’m working i can at least uh least
Speaker 0 | 47:36.341
uh enjoy this kind of stuff while i’m on my calls yeah but you can and then you sound you you have
Speaker 1 | 47:43.404
do you want the casey casein voice when you talk right now with this i i am a big believer especially like um you know working in professional services it’s like you know if you’re working remotely um the number one thing i think you can do aside from just being very good at what you do and having a great reputation which i hope i’ve done both of those um get yourself a good camera um with like i use a dslr actually that’s that’s mounted here um on my desk with a nice wide angle lens And get yourself a good microphone and a good interface, meaning get yourself good conversion from analog to digital going into your computer. I think those are the two biggest things that you can do that would set yourself as like a stand apart from everybody. If everything else is equal, we’re talking on Zoom and Teams calls all the time, just upgrade your AV.
Speaker 0 | 48:36.112
Nice. So we’re coming to kind of the end here. And one of the things I always just. I always make sure to kind of close with our guests is, you know, you’ve been a leader. We’ve shared some lessons about things like where you felt you failed and maybe, you know, warning signs to somebody else. But what advice would you give to people out there that are listening? And in our market, our people that are listening, our listeners are most often, but not exclusively, you know, people who are. you know, directors of IT, CIOs, managers of large teams and, you know, like DevOps teams and stuff like that. What would you want to share with them about leadership lessons that you’ve learned that you would give somebody as advice? Dramatic pause.
Speaker 1 | 49:23.236
Well, that’s the question. I take it seriously. I want to think about it, but no, I’m really thinking about like, it was so much easier for me to keep myself in check when I worked on a team. And now that I’m a leader, you know, in an executive role, like I find myself alone a lot of the times. And if you’re a fan of Saving Private Ryan, you know, gripes don’t go down, right? They only go up. So you can’t always gripe to your boss. You know, my COO doesn’t always want to hear what’s bothering me. In a way, I would say the biggest thing that I would caution anybody else to do is make sure that you’ve got some downtime, some rest time, and a sounding board. For me, my healthy day-to-day is playing some guitar and using that to reflect on things. The other thing that I need is a regular time in the wilderness on my raft on a river. I guess that’s my long way of saying you need your own special way to recharge and only you are going to know what it is. And it’s really, really important to regard your own needs as important, especially when you’re a leader and you have so much that you’re responsible for. Taking care of yourself is something that’s easy to not do. So I think that that’s what I would say, because anytime I feel like griping to somebody. It’s probably just because I need to take care of myself a bit.
Speaker 0 | 50:56.879
That is some sage advice, and that is awesome. I am so glad you shared that. So, Nick, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
Speaker 1 | 51:07.528
My pleasure.
Speaker 0 | 51:09.149
So 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.
