Speaker 0 | 00:07.280
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Steven Fink on the show from, well, Vice President of IT. I always wonder how these titles work too. We’ve got Vice President of IT, CTO, CIO, and we should probably come up with a what’s the difference between all of these someday, at Fenner Precision Polymers, a polymer. What is a polymer, by the way? We should start off with that.
Speaker 1 | 00:32.436
Well, you’re starting out with the hard-hitting questions. A polymer is a mixture of compounds. I don’t know the technical definition of it, but it’s a mixture of compounds that we apply to fabrics. We make hoses out of them. We make belting out of them. You know, it’s based on polymers. It’s kind of all the rage these days.
Speaker 0 | 00:55.923
Yeah. Well, cool. So… Maybe, I don’t know, bulletproof vest. Could that be a polymer? I wonder, can we do that? No,
Speaker 1 | 01:02.546
probably tires. Tires? I don’t know.
Speaker 2 | 01:06.348
Come into IT, Phil.
Speaker 0 | 01:07.229
Stop calling. This isn’t a show about polymers, Phil. If this was a show about polymers, like, look, I make sure that the machines work that make the polymers. That’s the important thing. So vice president of IT, we’ll start out with the second, an easier question then. We’ll do the second question, which is, what was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 01:29.877
Oh, an Apple II. Apple II, yeah. And then I got an Apple IIc shortly after that.
Speaker 0 | 01:36.118
Wow. Apple IIc was my first one. No, was it? No. No, it wasn’t. It was Texas Instruments. If you could count that, if you could count that as a computer.
Speaker 1 | 01:44.060
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 01:44.461
And, you know.
Speaker 1 | 01:48.021
That one didn’t bring me a whole lot of joy. The II is really kind of what got its hooks into me.
Speaker 0 | 01:52.883
Okay. So what happened? Bye.
Speaker 1 | 01:56.284
The TI, I was with an engineer neighbor of mine who was teaching me about computer things, and he had this thing, and it seemed like it didn’t ever really work as well as I wanted it to. Or him trying to keep it running for me didn’t take as much time as I thought it should. I thought it should be easier. And then the Apple IIc came out, and it just kind of worked. So it kind of got me into that. Of course, you know, War Games was coming out, so I had to write, you know, the Shall We Play a Game command prompts with the chest and the global thermonuclear war option. And it kind of went all downhill from there.
Speaker 0 | 02:36.579
Remember, what were some of the crazier movies that came out back then?
Speaker 1 | 02:42.761
I like that one. I like Sneakers. Sneakers was a great one.
Speaker 0 | 02:46.102
Weird Science.
Speaker 1 | 02:47.542
Weird Science was a good one.
Speaker 0 | 02:49.963
The old, like…
Speaker 1 | 02:51.984
i don’t even think we even knew what the the the modem coupler what was that phone coupler thing why can’t i remember what that was called did you have that yeah i had one of those a little uh was it a 14 4k bod uh i don’t know started out with like 4800 went to 90 uh was it 9600 was after that and then 14 4 was like super fast let’s
Speaker 0 | 03:13.730
keep going down this memory lane this is beautiful um so you had an apple to see well we had How do you end up in technology? Because it wasn’t a thing back then. Back then it was like, yeah, you got to go to computer class, you got to learn how to word process, save your paper, print it, rip the little things off the side of the dot matrix paper. It was a necessary thing, but was it really a thing yet? It was.
Speaker 1 | 03:39.341
Yeah, with the Apples coming out, I took AP Computer Science in high school. I was fortunate enough to have a high school.
Speaker 0 | 03:47.163
An AP Computer Science class?
Speaker 1 | 03:49.363
Yeah, believe it or not. But the strange thing was the students kind of knew more about computer science than the football coach that had picked this up for a little side gig. And so we were teaching him more computers than he was teaching us. But it was fun, man. We were all hanging out and trying to figure out how we could write different programs and getting into a little bit of graphics. And I was also getting into stereos back then. So I’d grow up. picture of a stereo and then move it around the screen and super advanced useful stuff the uh you were a cio in 1996 yeah i started a software company in uh in 96 uh started a shop floor solutions was the name of it and we were going to bridge the gap between erp systems and the factory floor Because ERP systems are fantastic for calculating and computing and crunching and dissecting data, but they are notoriously bad for collecting data and giving data people. to the people that need it when they need it where they need it so we kind of created a company to slide in there and fill that gap and uh bring that data down to the shop floor collect data straight from the shop floor and get involved in barcoding and some other stuff like that that’s
Speaker 0 | 05:11.316
um that’s super nerdy i i always thought erps were just known for just being bad period is there a good erp is there a good erp story it sounds like it’s almost like uh you know tales from the crypt or something you know yeah
Speaker 1 | 05:25.684
I think ERP systems, they get a bad rap because they’re complicated because they have to be complicated. And then because they kind of have to do everything to run an entire business and manufacturing and scheduling and invoicing and you name it, it’s got to do it. And then every company thinks that they have to do it their own specific way because that’s kind of their secret sauce. Take an ERP system that’s built to go one way, conform into a company that’s been doing it the same way for the past.
Speaker 0 | 05:54.224
x years uh you know the company doesn’t want to change conform to the erp system the erp system this system doesn’t want to conform to the company so it ends up imagine if we could do that maybe we should just change maybe that should be the mission maybe the mission should be look every company should use the erp system a certain way we’re just going to standardize it and everyone should change and do business this way and just fit your doesn’t you you’re not special your idea is special just but your but your your um i don’t know technology doesn’t need to be special you
Speaker 1 | 06:22.324
I think the more and more we get down the road, I think more companies are realizing that. I think, you know, so many disaster stories with ERPs, millions and millions of dollars. And finally, they say, well, why do we have to do it this way? You know, why don’t we just do it the way the ERP system works? Because manufacturing is manufacturing. You know, we’ve got our own special algorithms and our special special formula formulations that go into what we do. But, you know. The overarching process is still similar enough to where you can probably use it to do what you need it to do.
Speaker 0 | 06:59.446
So seeing many nightmares, I’m assuming you’ve seen plenty over the years.
Speaker 1 | 07:03.891
I’ve seen quite a few, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 07:07.934
What’s the worst one? Is there one we can talk about that is not even around anymore and doesn’t even exist, so it doesn’t matter?
Speaker 1 | 07:13.539
Gracious. The one that I like the best is when… We’re doing business putting an ERP system in for a multinational corporation that will remain nameless. And they put this system in and it’s running fabulously. And we have everything that’s being automated in all of their warehouses and all of their manufacturing plants. And then they get a new CIO that comes in and says, well, I don’t like that ERP system. We’re going to go to SAP. So they pull the plug on everything that’s working well, shove SAP in place, costs. tens of millions of dollars. The functionality is not the same. They lose a lot of the stuff that they had automated. And at the end of the day, they figure out that, well, maybe that wasn’t the best idea. And they turn around, they go to yet another ERP system because SAP was just too expensive. Nothing against SAP, but anytime you’re going to change an ERP system, it takes effort and you got to know what you’re getting into.
Speaker 2 | 08:13.840
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Speaker 0 | 10:33.624
So how does a, how does a decision like that happen? Who,
Speaker 2 | 10:38.388
who,
Speaker 0 | 10:38.508
who should be stepping in there and saying, really, really stop doing this. You’re, you’re jumping off a cliff. Really don’t do this. It’s a bad decision. How do decisions like that happen?
Speaker 1 | 10:48.457
Oh man. That’s a complicated question. I think that sometimes you get very well-meaning people that find the budget and they decide that they want to put in what they feel is the best solution for the money that they have, which that’s not a bad thing, but does it meet the needs of the business? Does it meet the needs of the users? You know, is it going to get you farther down the road and bring you value that you need?
Speaker 0 | 11:22.076
I’m just wondering if there’s questions like foresight questions that we should be asking here. There’s absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 11:27.779
So, you know, expounding on that a little bit further. I think you always have to figure out what is the impact to the user going to be and kind of start from there. You know, is it going to improve the user’s experience and then bring that value back? Yeah, spending money to do IT just because you have an IT budget isn’t necessarily the smartest long-term career move.
Speaker 0 | 11:49.577
Well, there had to have been some reasoning behind, like, we got to go SAP. Is it just because it’s a big name?
Speaker 1 | 11:56.521
It is a big name. They have fabulous marketing. I mean, they’re running a lot of the world’s biggest companies. And a lot of times what you’ll find is you’ll get smaller companies that think, well, you know, if it’s good enough for company X, It’s got to be good for my company too, when it could be overkill.
Speaker 0 | 12:15.735
Was there a problem that needed to be fixed?
Speaker 1 | 12:19.896
Not that I was aware of. Now, I have to admit that I was on the integrator side of that equation of the story that I just told. So I don’t know exactly how they wound up in that situation. But viewed from the outside, it looked as though we got a new CEO that came in who lives firmly in the SAP camp. So he wanted to go SAP and away they go.
Speaker 0 | 12:42.234
Yeah, my favorite meme is a dumpster fire where it says SAP implementation going strong.
Speaker 1 | 12:50.697
I’m not going to badmouth SAP. They’ve got a great system, but they are complicated.
Speaker 0 | 12:56.199
No, no, love it. If you can do it right, you can do it right.
Speaker 1 | 12:58.960
I think part of it, too, is you’ve got to know what you’re doing before you just say, hey, we’re going to go and just slap this thing in here without knowing everything about it.
Speaker 0 | 13:08.744
One of my colleagues, Josh Milos over at Birkenstock. He came on the podcast years ago and he was the SAP guy and he did it. He did it well. He did very, very well. And now he’s the, I don’t know, VP of IT or CTO or CIO or whatever, because he did it well. Right. So I’m, I’m, it’s, I’m always, I’m not a negative proponent of any given vendor, although no, yes, I am. I’m definitely a negative promoter of many vendors, but, but. Not in this case, in this case, it’s oftentimes it’s, it’s, there’s not, um, I guess a, a software solution or a vendor solution that is a one size fits all right. Every company is a different company with a different set of end users or the different set of goals or the different set of, you know, issues and stuff that all should be on one ERP system working this exact same way. So, uh, that’s the problem, right?
Speaker 1 | 14:07.425
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 14:07.545
That’s why we exist.
Speaker 1 | 14:09.614
Uh,
Speaker 0 | 14:10.974
so back in time again, high school advanced placement, computer science. I mean, where’d you go from there? Did you know, did we go to college and do computer stuff? And what was your first job? I mean, what was your first computer job?
Speaker 1 | 14:28.842
So I did go to a school for computer science. Back in the day, Furman had two different computer science courses. One was computer science for people who knew math and loved math, and the other was for computer science for people who liked business. And I was more on the business side, so I went to Furman for a computer science business degree. While I was in my junior year, I actually got a job working for a large construction company that’s located right up the road. I was working in their help desk area trying to take… like support tickets and things like that. So that was a little bit of fun. But then I got a job as a programmer analyst.
Speaker 0 | 15:11.683
What was help desk like back then though? Like what were the tickets like coming in? Like my printer doesn’t work. Like, well,
Speaker 1 | 15:17.008
that was pretty much it. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 15:18.250
that’s it. Right. Like, well, I mean, what could you have possibly had to do? That was pretty much my hard drive and reload DOS.
Speaker 1 | 15:27.574
There wasn’t any DOS. It’s, hey, my doesn’t work. I can’t connect to my mainframe and my printer doesn’t work. And you’re sitting in this big computer room that’s 19 degrees below zero waiting for the phone to ring. So that’s what I did as a college student for a little while.
Speaker 0 | 15:43.665
Please describe that room a little bit more. I have to know how dark this was. Please describe this layer. I must know.
Speaker 1 | 15:51.863
i’m trying to think of the best way to put it it uh i mean if you think of it it was like the high school locker room without any no no no it’s nice i mean they had lots of uh glass they had like an elevated uh floor that was nice and white uh air conditioner worked extremely well had to keep that main frame cold you know really
Speaker 0 | 16:13.554
it’s just it’s wild it’s it’s great uh meanwhile i was working at jim’s wings or something you know um you were uh uh You have varsity cheerleader on here. This is excellent. Did you have to throw people up in the air?
Speaker 1 | 16:26.709
I did.
Speaker 0 | 16:27.029
What was thrown in the air?
Speaker 1 | 16:28.849
I didn’t really get thrown in the air. The farthest I ever got was somebody’s shoulders. That’s not as far up in the air as I got. But yeah, we went to nationals, took second place in nationals. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 16:41.194
I used to be like, I’ll never marry a cheerleader. I used to say that. Now I’m married to the captain of the cheerleading team that went to all those competitions and everything.
Speaker 1 | 16:49.558
Oh, that’s so funny.
Speaker 0 | 16:51.495
She would, uh, shout out to my wife, Monique. Uh, you would appreciate this episode. We’re talking about cheerleading. This is the first, I don’t know what episode this is going to be. It might be close to episode 300, but we’re talking about cheerleading, honey. I think you’d appreciate that.
Speaker 1 | 17:05.258
I knew that experience would come in handy one day. So, uh, that’s,
Speaker 0 | 17:15.981
uh, uh, Oh, okay. I don’t even know how to segue. How do we even segue off of that?
Speaker 2 | 17:19.402
Um, how do you.
Speaker 0 | 17:21.331
I don’t know, build a good team, hire good people. What’s the key to, how big of a team you got over there?
Speaker 1 | 17:26.573
In the IT department, we got 17.
Speaker 0 | 17:29.155
Oh, that’s big.
Speaker 1 | 17:30.335
We’re spread across basically a few locations. I’ve got one guy who’s a BI guy just up the road in Charlotte. I’ve got two teams of people up in Mannheim in our corporate headquarters. The infrastructure team based out of Mannheim, and then the enterprise apps team is based out of Mannheim. We’ve got a UK team where we’ve got four people in the UK that are supporting our European operations.
Speaker 0 | 17:59.257
Excellent. What’s the key to running this whole thing?
Speaker 1 | 18:03.198
The key is your people. You’ve got to be there for your people. You’ve got to understand what they need to succeed and then help them to knock down roadblocks. Block and tackle, get out there in front of them. Make sure that they know the direction that you want to go as the leader and that the direction you want to go as the leader is the direction that the business needs. And then do everything you can to help them to succeed.
Speaker 0 | 18:32.917
How do you do that? Do you guys have like a living, breathing mission statement? Do you have like a, I don’t know, a weekly cheerleading session? What do we do?
Speaker 1 | 18:43.026
Our mission statement is the Finner IT organization exists to make it better. to do business with and to work at Fenner. So part of what we do, of course, is, you know, making sure my printer works, my computer works and things like that. But, you know, we’re really trying to make sure that we’re making an impact in our customers’ lives, in our end users’ lives. So if we can come up with solutions that make things better in their jobs, that make it easier to do business with us, then we’re being successful.
Speaker 0 | 19:16.315
Give me some examples. Like what’s some of the just, if you had a gold standards checklist or a daily routine or a thing that we would put in the employee handbook that was like the golden rules of IT, would it be like, I don’t know, meet with five end users a week and ask them what they hate about IT. And I mean, you know, what’s your biggest frustration, problem or concern when it comes to dealing with I don’t know, technology in this company and then fix it. I mean, what’s the gold standard? What would be on the list?
Speaker 1 | 19:52.052
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m relatively new in this role. I’ve been with Michelin Group for coming up on 15 years, but I’ve only been with Fender for coming up on a year, and I’ve only been the VP of IT since just before Thanksgiving, and it’s currently only March. So it’s only been five months that I’ve been in this role.
Speaker 0 | 20:11.348
So you’re drinking from the fire hose kind of?
Speaker 1 | 20:13.450
I am a little bit. Part of that is you’ve got to really kind of do your first world tour. So you go out and you meet with different leaders. You meet with all the different groups. You just wander through the factories and facilities. You introduce yourself and you say, okay, letter to Santa Claus. What can IT do for you? Uh, you don’t promise anything. You say, I’m just trying to figure out where your pain points, uh, you know, what is it that you’re frustrated with? Do you think we’re doing a good job? Do you think we’re not doing a good job? And then how do we try to build on that to, to go forward together? So, uh, you know, a lot of what we’re hearing now is people want more access to data. So we have a program in place now where we are trying to standardize our, uh, our data platform and give that access to. people democratize it make sure that people understand uh you know how to get to it you know 20 years ago maybe 30 years ago microsoft excel was used by engineers and that was about it because you know it’s like the tool for really smart people that uh needed to come in there and do formulas and stuff like that and now it’s running you know businesses around the world so bi is really the next uh wave of microsoft excel you know trying aptitude and the competencies in the hand of the people that need it so they can go find out what they need so they can make their own business decisions excellent so take this information in do the world tour um is this how
Speaker 0 | 21:42.148
does this uh translate into possibly i guess just what does it translate into does it make it to a a um like a road mapping thing or uh you know anything like that
Speaker 1 | 21:56.330
Yeah. So what I did early on is I had our, we called it a jumpstart for our IT organization. After I kind of did the world tour and tried to figure out what’s going on within the organization, I had a jumpstart and said, okay, this is Steven’s vision of where we want to go. So this is my unconstrained roadmap. And I laid out kind of everything that I thought we needed to address, knowing that we can’t do it all in 2024, maybe not even in 2025. But charting the course for where I thought we needed to go. In line with Michelin’s principles, I broke it down into three different sections. You have people, you have planet, you have profit. So for the people aspect, how is it that we can make sure that our IT people are getting the skills that they need, that they are understanding that they are a valued part of the organization. They’re not just there to fix printers. We rely on their creativity. We rely on their problem solving. We rely on their thinking out of the box and being able to come up with solutions to make the business better. How is it that we can leverage that and make sure that they keep that curiosity, that they get their skills refined, that they’re going deeper in their skills, and also that we know what they want to do? I mean, you get some people in IT and they’re happy doing the same thing for the next 20 years. They just want to do the same thing. You get other people that say, no, you know, Stephen, I want to be in your seat in 10 years or something like that. So you’ve got to figure out for each of your employees what makes them tick and where can they contribute the most. So that’s part of the people. The other part of the people is making sure that we are engaging with people outside of the organization. So making sure that we as a group are having touch points with other people from the business saying, hey, how can we help you? And every once in a while, just ask them, hey, do you have a. a process that takes you five hours every week that you wish you could be more efficient doing, have us have a look at it. If we can help you, great. If we can’t, then we understand more of your pain point. Maybe something will come to us farther down the road. So making sure that the people remain upfront and always keep them in mind to what we’re trying to accomplish. On the profit, we’ve got… We’ve currently got four different ERP systems because we’ve got so many different sites around the world. We’ve acquired different companies. You know, one ERP system was written in-house on a technology stack that’s been obsolete now for going on 10, 15 years. So, you know, you’ve got the normal IT stuff with obsolescence and upgrades and remaining current and things like that.
Speaker 0 | 24:46.043
Equated silos. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:48.985
You better have it. what you’re going to do with all of that. So that was part of it. How are we going to do that? We’ve got eight different EDI vendors. How can we consolidate that, try to streamline our support, what we have to do to support it, and also our costs. So then also for the profit segment, you’re looking at how can we help our business be more profitable in what they’re doing, expanding the use of Salesforce, expanding the use of the different parts of the ERP system that are currently underutilized, trying to expand our usage of barcoding and automation and scanners and MES in the factories and in the warehouses. These are all things that can improve the lives of our employees and make us more profitable as a company because we can do things better. We’re capacity constrained in some areas. And if we can move product through faster through automation, then then we’re really getting a leg up on that.
Speaker 0 | 25:53.022
What’s your strongest partnership in the company? Advice. I’m asking advice now, kind of like how do you, I mean, obviously I’m assuming you’re measuring KPIs and I’m assuming there’s, you know, you’re able to measure and show savings and results and efficiencies in these types of things are important. What’s your most important? partnership partnerships politically speaking right there’s there’s a there’s a part and uh and i don’t mean like politics in a negative sense i just mean like what kind of relationships and this is advice to other people listening to the show what kind of relationships should people be establishing and building uh i think that i am
Speaker 1 | 26:39.085
able to enjoy uh a certain access to people based on fenner’s uh realization that IT is important to the organization. So if I were just a CIO, it is very possible, even likely that I would not have a seat at the executive table to have all the insights and all the discussions with all of the other business leaders. We have a touchpoint weekly, we have an all day session, at least monthly, plus other workshops and things like that that we’re doing where we’re talking about business issues. where we’re talking about how is it that we can try to streamline different things, where we can either look at the process just from a process standpoint, or can we do something with computers to help this out? Can we look at technology to start helping this out? So I think that because of the vice president title, I have access to all of those business leaders. Within Fenner, we have three different product families. Each of those have their odds. their own products that they’re trying to develop. They have their own organizations. They have their own needs for reporting. We’ve also got our compliance officer that we’re working on some pretty important initiatives with them. It’s getting more and more complicated to do business the more time goes by with all of the environmental. regulations that are in place, the compliance things, you got to have all your declarations from your suppliers and your customers want declaration. It gets really complicated. So that’s a very, uh, key aspect of, uh, uh, of what we do as a business. But it also means that there’s a lot of things that we need to work side by side with them to make sure that, uh, that their needs are covered and that our business is covered. Um,
Speaker 0 | 28:32.508
it is amazing. All the things that, that are manufactured and need to be manufactured in the world. I’m on your website right now. It’s amazing. Link belts, keyless bushings, couplings, polyurethane belts, tensioners, pulleys, idlers, carriage rollers, and sprockets. Sprockets. Literally, literally sprockets. Mounting adapters, bearings, 3D printing materials, and more.
Speaker 2 | 28:56.493
I mean,
Speaker 0 | 28:57.454
the stuff that must be manufactured, just belts, just belts alone. It’s just amazing all the little things that need to be manufactured.
Speaker 1 | 29:08.148
uh in the world uh period and um yes the amount of technology behind it’s insane yeah and our product portfolio is just completely vast as you just uh as you just mentioned we’ve got uh stuff that’s made out of uh steel we’ve got stuff of uh you know rubber and polyurethane and you know advanced polymers if i can use that word again that we don’t know the exact definition of you know we’ve got literally we’ve got space age fabrics you know stuff that It can be used in space, in aeronautics, in defense. You name it, it’s all over the place.
Speaker 0 | 29:47.525
What’s the endgame for IT people? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if we really know what it is. Many of the IT people grew up in a world where it was, again, 19 below zero in the mainframe room. And you… I don’t know. There just wasn’t an end game. It wasn’t like, I’m going to go into IT and, you know, I don’t know. You were, you were the kids in class that were smarter than the football player teacher guy that came in. So what’s the end game in a space that’s so. um evolving so fast it’s it’s wild it’s really wild my kids don’t know they don’t know i grew up on an iphone you know they grew up they had iphone in their hand from day one we remember bag we don’t remember phones with cords stuck in the walls and floppy disks and like you said there was no hard drive once you had a hard drive you had a hard drive it’s just it’s mind-blowing to me it all happened in the last uh i don’t know three decades or so yeah it’s uh it’s crazy uh is there an end game i
Speaker 1 | 30:48.996
I don’t know that there is. I think that,
Speaker 0 | 30:52.358
you know, I’m going to die in the server room.
Speaker 1 | 30:54.439
Yeah, I mean, I hope not. I have better places to die.
Speaker 0 | 30:59.383
That’s what I’m saying. No, but you know what I mean. Like, that’s what I’m saying. What is the, you know, it’s like, cash out my 401k. I don’t know if that’s really like, is there really an option?
Speaker 1 | 31:10.510
I think for IT, the key for me in IT and whether that brings you success or not. is to make sure that you stay involved in something that you enjoy and if you don’t you know you need to get out uh you need to get out fast because you’re gonna be real miserable i mean you will be you’re gonna you know you’re gonna be the the kid that’s like uh you know the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn you’re gonna be uh that it support guy that’s being uh you know crungy and hey uh you stop stop using my printer you know whatever but uh no just Stay curious, stay hungry, try to stay, I won’t say current because, you know, in order to stay current, you need to pick an expertise. If you really want to be super current on something, you need to be super focused. I kind of lost that maybe 15 years ago. I went out of the, I mean, I’m going to be an expert in what I do to, I’m going to be more diverse and try to. uh understand more about everything and less about one thing if that makes any sense so no it does because if you’re going to do security like security for example yeah so uh cyber security super important uh we’ve got a couple brilliant guys in our organization that uh they work on cyber security i understand the importance of it i understand the keywords i understand uh you know some of the things that need to go on behind the scenes security we need to do it guys come on do it all right yeah you were in charge of security come on let’s go But I mean, if you say, if you said, Stephen, you know, you need to go enforce cybersecurity on this, on this network, you know, connection or something like that, I’d be like, I don’t even know where to start right now. 10 years ago, I might have, but it’s, it’s changed so much that I can’t stay current of everything that’s within the domain of knowledge of IT.
Speaker 0 | 33:07.730
No, that’s where we need our, that’s why we need strong teams.
Speaker 1 | 33:12.791
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 33:13.720
That’s why the company with the one IT guy, it’s, um, I run into it still. I still run into some companies with, oh man, what, maybe 500 end users to a thousand that still got maybe one guy running the show somehow. So it does happen. It does, uh, um, like we’re fine. We don’t, what do you mean? We’ve only got, uh, a T1 running the whole place. So we’re good. What’s going to happen? No one can hack us. They’re miserable. They’d move on to somebody else. We’re on Lotus. Lotus Notes. Shadow run into it. Lotus Notes. We should have a, I would love to find IT guy with the oldest infrastructure in existence right now. I should go on a mission to find that. I want the oldest antiquated silos that are still running.
Speaker 1 | 34:03.617
Something off of a 486 DX 266 or something.
Speaker 0 | 34:07.579
Just plenty of IBM. what do we got as400s running out there i ran into a um yeah the oldest one i ran into was a server that with the cover off of it with a fan pointing at it running and when i asked why they hadn’t changed out there i was like because there’s a physical soldering of something on the motherboard that does not allow it to be migrated to like you couldn’t like there’s like some physical aspect to the actual machine itself that could not be replicated ever i was like so what happens like when it goes down they’re like we just hope it doesn’t we lose everything we lose the database it’s like are you crazy like move on let’s hope their dr plan is up to date they need that’s where they need that’s where they need new sap guy they need to come and be like nope we’re going sap yep uh yes And let’s see, what else do we have in that one? 28, at least 28 points of failure and loopbacks into the network, causing crazy slow speeds. It was very interesting. 10 by 100 switches mixed in with 100s. Just, yeah. It was a non-profit, so it made sense.
Speaker 1 | 35:26.941
Well, non-profit means no income usually too. So you do what you gotta do.
Speaker 0 | 35:31.785
Yes, yes.
Speaker 2 | 35:33.867
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Speaker 0 | 37:54.208
Advice to people growing up in the space, new IT leaders, people moving from, I don’t know, they’re new, they’re new, they’re drinking from the fire hose. Oh yes, we do this. They need to do the world tour first. Talk with people, do a jumpstart.
Speaker 1 | 38:11.295
It’s all about connections. It’s all about understanding what is out there to be done. And then starting to try to organize your thoughts on how do you logically try to attack that? Uh, you know, you can’t eat an elephant in one bite. You can’t boil the ocean. So, uh, figure out what, uh, what water you do want to boil and what part of the elephant, uh, seems the most tasty at the time.
Speaker 0 | 38:34.838
I love that. I tell it to my kids all the time. They’re like, I’m so sick of all your like dad isms or whatever. You know, uh, what did I say? Like, and what do I always tell them? I say, you know, a, um. um an ingenuine uh smiles a lot better than a genuine frown or something like that yeah is that right is that how the saying goes something like that but then i always ask him to i asked him that huh i haven’t heard that one but i like it yeah do you know that so there’s the la how do you eat an elephant like one bite at a time right but then there’s the how do you put an elephant in a refrigerator uh that i don’t know you open the door and put it in oh okay you know i was like one bite at a time Like, oh, what do you mean? It’s not going to figure cut it up. And you’re going to like, you know, like, um, uh, we, we must have something. Uh, what, what did you do prior to the, um, when I was, uh, um, we need something. What, what’s the, uh, we need some quote or something. We need a, what’s the, what’s the quote of the day?
Speaker 1 | 39:35.490
Quote of the day. I didn’t know that was supposed to come with my own quotes.
Speaker 0 | 39:38.930
No, I’m just making this up off the top of my head. We could go with what you do outside prior to the Internet being invented. It could be favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. What do we got? I don’t know. I can be any of those.
Speaker 1 | 39:52.917
I think that people who I think people who who who who do I.T. also tend to find other passions that they like. Like one of my co-founders, he was actually an electrical engineer by trade. and then did some industrial engineering and then got into computers. But he’s like the repository of all knowledge. So if you ever need a guy. In a trivia game, you need to call him up because he knows a little bit about just about everything. But his knowledge of cars really impresses me. So I can buy a car. It doesn’t matter what kind of car. And he’ll tell me, oh, yeah, that shares the same platform as this other car, but they changed the engine to this and that and the other. And then you need to do something or other to it to make sure it’s going to do OK. True story. I bought a 1986. Porsche 944 last year and this guy has never had one. Okay. And I called him and I said, yeah, I can’t get my sunroof open. He goes, oh yeah, that’s a common problem because, you know, it’s got a switch relay that comes up through the, through the dashboard. And sometimes that connector in there, it’s got like a physical connector to get in there and make that connector. It’s like, how do you even know that? I read about it on a, on an automotive forum and, you know, just sticks in his brain. So, you know, His deal is he’s just passionate about cars and how stuff works. And that keeps him young outside of talking about computers.
Speaker 0 | 41:26.111
I wish I was that good with cars. My son-in-law, he has a master’s in electrical engineering. He’s a car guy. He’s a car guy, too. I’m remodeling my basement. He’s remodeling his basement at the same time. I’m like, yeah, I’m not doing that. I’m calling the electrician. And he’s like, I just put in a whole new subpanel. I’m like, what? I was like, is that even the code? He’s like, I got the code book. I just looked it up. He’s like, I already know how to do all this stuff. He’s like, you know, I’m like, he’s a massive like wire, like not the, like, like the wire that I’m scared of. That’s like, I don’t even know how to, I don’t even describe it’s how sick this wire is. It’s like the size of a Coke can coming into your, you know, yeah, I just rubbed this sub panel and then we did this. I’m like, what? And I’m like, yeah, that’s, I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. That’s too much electricity for me. same thing with his cars he’s very good with very good with cars and doing all that stuff too so as long as it’s mechanical all right but uh once it gets into the electrical i can’t see electrical so that uh confuses me a little bit you can’t see it true it is invisible yeah it hurts i mean great greatest invention of i would say i would have to say that’s the greatest invention it has to be electricity isn’t no that’s that’s a finding no electricity not an invention that’s a finding light bulb i guess um uh steven It has been a pleasure having you on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Any final words of wisdom, advice to fellow IT colleagues out there?
Speaker 1 | 42:52.941
I would say, remember, IT is about people. IT just, you know, to go do cool things with computers is really great and fun. But if you’re not doing it for the people and make their lives better, then you’re kind of missing the game. And stay curious. The field is huge. It’s vast. There are so many different things you can do with it. Keep at it.
Speaker 0 | 43:17.844
Thank you, sir. Thank you for being on Dissecting Public IT Nerds.
Speaker 1 | 43:20.991
My pleasure.
