Speaker 0 | 00:00.480
By the way, everyone out there listening, we’re speaking with Eric Johnson today on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, strategic technology leader, definitely a Microsoft guy, I hope, in the oil and gas industry at Atlas. Oil and gas, you know, been around for a while. It has. You guys aren’t doing batteries yet, are you?
Speaker 1 | 00:21.055
So we are actually owned by a large conglomerate, I say large, by Simon. actually founded by a man named Sam Simon. And so he owns a holding company, which owns several other holding companies. And so ours is specifically focused on oil and gas. But one of the holding companies is looking into kind of alternative power solutions, right? The belief that I’m of the belief oil and gas has got a long way to run. Me too. But Sam is very much, you know, I want to make a company that exists for my great grandchildren. And so if that’s the game, I need to be prepared for that.
Speaker 0 | 00:54.767
Legacy. legacy what what’s up with oil and gas what’s up with your it career in oil and gas is that is there i mean you were at loves that was um let’s just go back in time let’s go back and what was your first computer uh it was an at&t based on an x86 processor
Speaker 1 | 01:11.432
so that was at the time my aunt uh worked at at&t and so it was an actual at&t branded personal computer that’s crazy i don’t know how long they were in the in the pc business i get i get the feeling not not very long I don’t even remember what the chipset was, but yeah, then I remember two 86, three 86, 46 DX. At one point I think I had one that had the turbo button on it. Yes. Right. So you can get that way. You could, if you had the legacy games that were only designed for the three 86, cause they were just off clock speed. And so if you didn’t throttle it back, right, the game ran so unbelievably fast, you, you couldn’t play it.
Speaker 0 | 01:46.785
So you had to unclick the turbo button. So it wasn’t really a turbo button. It was unclick the turbo button. I used to remember like, you know, I’m having to get the slow button. Yeah. auto-exec bat and like move memory around to get games to play and then you know windows wouldn’t load so you’d have to go back in and like you know moving around again to load windows you had to be like you know cd backslash you know whatever win.exe you
Speaker 1 | 02:09.138 2:20
remember that yeah and the multiple floppy drives right where you would get things on five and a quarter floppy actual floppy floppy drives yeah if you had both yeah both that’d be weird yes yeah it was cool it’s a lot of fun so how did you end up in technology I have always liked technology. So I didn’t know I liked technology. My grandfather was a general contractor. And so always kind of liked doing things and understanding how things work and why did this work. And so I think that was probably my first realization that I liked understanding things.
Speaker 0 | 02:41.263
I wonder if a lot of IT guys fix their own house. Do a lot of IT guys you think fix their own stuff?
Speaker 1 | 02:45.707
I think there’s a certain amount of, there’s still that curiosity for a lot of IT guys.
Speaker 0 | 02:51.148
I get frustrated with my, like, with like a lot of contractors. I have, I have a horrible, horrible batting average with picking good contractors. And then I just ended up doing it myself. I’m like, but I do it because I don’t have, I don’t feel like I have the time, you know? So I’m like, Oh, I could do better with my time rather than, you know, I don’t know, drywalling all of this and framing this out and stuff. And then three contractors later after they all fail or something happens or they don’t show up to work or whatever. I just have a horrible contracting batting average in Connecticut. Maine was much better. But, um. So shout out to Maine, I guess, for, I don’t know, general contractors or regular electricians and handymen and drywall people. Connecticut, oh, it’s horrible. Man, I don’t know what’s going on here.
Speaker 1 | 03:32.041
Yeah, Houston’s got quite the abundant supply of contractors, you know, but I think, and some of that I think is a function of, you know, it hurricanes, floods. So I think there’s always a steady stream of work. So I don’t think you can last very long in Houston. I think word gets out pretty quick.
Speaker 0 | 03:47.873
Well, it’s Texas too, so, I mean.
Speaker 1 | 03:50.632
Yes. Yeah. We’re just coming off in Houston, a pretty, a pretty epic rainstorm for the last couple of days. So yeah, it’s been messy.
Speaker 0 | 03:57.375
Okay. So, so anyways, you always love technology, but it wasn’t a thing back then. It wasn’t really a thing. It was just like, I was the one step above the AV guy in the, in the high school that would roll in the, like, you know, the AV equipment or something like that. How’d you end up actually in technology? Would, did you go to school or anything? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 04:14.262
I did. So, uh, I thought, I don’t know why I thought. I guess I liked numbers and figuring things out. So I thought I wanted to be an accountant.
Speaker 0 | 04:22.005
Why is that so common? That’s becoming more, I’m hearing that answer more and more. I’m hearing like, I wanted to become an accountant. Then I was like, oh, that was a joke, but I was playing on the computers. And then I just kind of flew into this role. But anyways,
Speaker 1 | 04:32.850
keep going. So I went to University of Iowa. I thought I wanted to be an accountant. They made everybody, so I have a degree in MIS, which is management information systems, which is kind of the precursor to a lot of that stuff. So I took that class and then realized like, oh, I can. I like computers and this is a job that will pay me to, you know, in my mind, pay me to play. So changed majors pretty quickly, decided accounting was not for me. Computers were where it was at. Got a summer job working the help desk at the University of Iowa. This was back when computer labs were a thing. Yeah. Yeah. So ended up being kind of the student, the student manager of the help desk at the business school. And so just all of the, you know, Windows NT for it was it was back in that era, little work groups.
Speaker 0 | 05:17.419
What were the tickets that came in? What do you do back then on the help desk?
Speaker 1 | 05:20.340
Primarily either password resets. A lot of students needed help. I don’t understand how Excel works.
Speaker 0 | 05:25.784
What do you mean? I don’t. What do you mean? I don’t understand how Excel works. How do you type in a in a cell?
Speaker 1 | 05:31.007
Yeah. Like how do I make these two cells add together? I mean, this was 98. And so, you know, I don’t think they, Excel wasn’t a thing that was taught in high school, right?
Speaker 0 | 05:40.770
We still have that problem. I still don’t think it’s a thing taught in high school because I’m realizing this, that we need like a school of hard knocks, like a common sense type of school. Like I would open up a school that was like the school of common sense, like things you need to know how to do. I don’t know if kids coming out of high school know how to send a calendar in. based on the last couple days i would agree with you i would think that is weird no but like i’ll find kids like they don’t know how to do powerpoint or they don’t know how to use excel they won’t you know like yeah i think i could you know enter in 100 addresses and names and numbers like it’s easy you just what do you mean you just you guys figure everything else out you got a you’re you’re holding a smartphone in your hand you know how to like change all your settings on instagram and and link it through api with you know a zapier thing to do this or something like that like what do you mean you can’t figure out excel or powerpoint You just click around.
Speaker 1 | 06:27.047
Yeah, I think it’s just, yeah, they just don’t want to, right? They want to figure out Instagram. They need, well, in their mind, they need to figure out Instagram because that’s where their friends are. So I think there’s just a little bit of lack of that. And then I would say a large percentage of the tickets. So I was in college when Napster was a thing. So the ever-ending number of PCs needed to be reformatted, rebooted. So we actually used a program called Ghost. It would do like a Wacom boot off the three and a half and download an image across the network. And so we re-imaged all 200 works, well, PCs at that time, all 200 PCs every week because just the viruses that came in, you know, and this was pre-Windows Defender. There was no IPSs. There weren’t any IDSs, right? I mean, we just didn’t have the level of control. I mean, some of these machines ran Windows ME, Windows 2000. So just almost no ability to control those machines. So that was the… the solution was just blown away every week.
Speaker 0 | 07:25.540
So yeah. What kind of virus? So, so every week you’d have a bunch of viruses and just like, ah, screw it. Reformat everything.
Speaker 1 | 07:32.325
Yep. That was the, that was the solution.
Speaker 0 | 07:35.267
Remember those days? Remember those days? Ah, screw it. Just, just format the hard drive and, you know, make a new partition or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 07:43.933
Yep. Yeah. We had a little hidden partition. And so ghost would either pull up across the network or it would just try and reload off the hidden partition, right? The.
Speaker 0 | 07:52.019
the canned image that the university of iowa had decided on so a weekly a weekly formatting of every that’s i wonder how many other people did that you think that was common practice i do i and the technology i just don’t think was really there uh
Speaker 1 | 08:07.307
to stop a lot of that stuff right yeah i mean you know i never really thought of that and you had to have most people had to have i don’t think we had admin accounts um you know domain controllers weren’t really a thing microsoft active directory so our windows pcs were just logged into the network at all times, right? With a user account that wasn’t logged in.
Speaker 0 | 08:28.520
You just move your mouse around. That’s so true.
Speaker 1 | 08:30.701
Yeah. Screen paper would go away and then…
Speaker 0 | 08:32.823
You’re bringing back all his memories now. They’re like repressed or something. I think they’re repressed.
Speaker 1 | 08:37.346
Zip drives and burnable CDs. And it was an interesting time.
Speaker 0 | 08:42.009
Okay. So what is it? What’s your job? What’s your daily job look like right now?
Speaker 1 | 08:46.672
Yeah. So daily job right now is I have responsibility… for all of IT at Atlas. So that’s everything from all of our infrastructure, which we’re in a bit of a hybrid right now. So a bit of on-prem, a bit of cloud to supporting our enterprise applications. So we are actually in the middle of a fairly substantial project. We are upgrading our existing ERP solution. So we have a fuel dispatch business, a logistics business. And so the company was originally founded by… by a man named Sam Simon. And so Sam got a start because he took out a loan and bought a truck, the big trucks you see driving down the road that deliver gasoline. And so we have a business that if you own a gas station and you need some gas, you can call us and we will go get gas for you in the big truck and drop it off on the tanks in the ground. So that business is undergoing an ERP upgrade. And then we also have a supply and marketing organization, which is the oil and gas term for traders. So we have a fairly sizable trading organization and that business is undergoing an ERP implementation. And then in the oil and gas business, what’s known as an ETRM or CTRM implementation, which is energy trading and risk management or commodity trading and risk management. And so that’s the software that keeps track of all of our all of our trades. So how much did we buy? Who did we sell it to? What’s the anticipated profit? You know, how much does it cost us to move? At least for us, we do. some financial deals to hedge some of our risk, right? So there’s always this risk of I buy it today, a dollar, I move it down the pipeline and I’m going to sell it to you for $2. But what if the market moves on me? And all of a sudden, that trade is no longer financially viable. So it’s also the system that keeps track of all of our hedges. So we basically will, it’s insurance, right? We pay insurance. We take out a hedge and say, hey, If this bad thing happens, this financial instrument is then in the money and that offsets any potential loss on the sale down the pipeline a week from now.
Speaker 0 | 10:52.563
I get it. It’s like me buying my oil for a year in advance or something. I may do well. I may not do well.
Speaker 1 | 10:57.465
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 10:57.805
And so we take out- From a very simpleton standpoint, the oil and gas guys would probably just be making fun of me. No, it’s much more complicated than that. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 11:07.449
That’s basically it.
Speaker 0 | 11:09.390
Okay. So that’s quite the, those are quite the projects. I understand. Any words of advice for the ERP implementation people are going through that, I don’t know, many would describe it as paper cuts and lemon juice type of thing, herding cats to a new platform and these types of things? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 11:29.766
I think on the business side, we have a tremendous amount of business buy-in. Our existing legacy systems really cause the business pain, so much pain. they actually are looking to expand into new markets and the senior leadership team has put the brakes on that and said no we are not going to expand into new markets the the current system doesn’t do what you need it to do today there’s no way we’re going to expand into new markets with a system that doesn’t do what you do today let alone do what you need it to do tomorrow so business buy-in for me has has always been huge right getting that true support that engagement pretty rigorous project management i wouldn’t say i micromanage But we have a pretty strong set of gate and phases. So it’s very, you know, these are the 10 things that have to happen before we move into the next phase. And so we will meet, discuss those 10 things. Do we have them done? You know, we may only have nine done and we may decide to move to the next phase. But that’s a decision that’s made amongst myself and the senior business leadership team. So we can say, hey, here’s, you know, I don’t want to stop the project. But if we move forward, here is the potential consequence of moving forward without this thing defined. We have brought in consultants. for most of the implementations, really just around the project management support. A lot of that’s a function of, I have a small team, it’s eight, including myself, and we have almost 400 employees.
Speaker 0 | 12:52.295
Eight to 400, that’s good. You’re double the average. If I took, we did a survey a couple of years back and I surveyed mid-market IT, so companies that would have IT directors, VP of IT. but maybe a cto maybe a cio so companies 200 employees upwards of 10 000 but i think the survey probably hit 2000 and under the average end user ratio to it staff was one to a hundred so you’re doing one to fifty that’s much better that means you guys value technology that means you’re that means your executive value technology would i that’s how i the correlation i can see to whether a company values technology or does not you anything under that one to a hundred ratio, I personally would say they value technology more. One to 50 is great. But my argument always to executives around the world and the globe is, have you ever been to a class in college where you sat, you were one person in the class of a professor and it was a hundred students in the class? What are the chances that any of the students getting any type of personalized support or being very successful? So one to 50 is good, even less would be better. you know, at least one to 50, there’s a chance that your professor knows who you are, but one to a hundred it’s, you know, it starts to get watered down a lot. So that’s really cool. Would you say that in general, stereotyping your industry, would you say that the oil and gas industry tends to be more old school or behind the times or ahead of the curve when it comes to technology?
Speaker 1 | 14:23.691
So I think, and I get to see both sides of it. I think it depends on the kind of a segment inside the oil and gas business. So if you looked at our transportation logistics business i think they value technology less really for them okay just about it’s because it’s just it’s just moving product right i pick a thing up here i put it over here i just when i take transportation and logistics i think the amazon effect and
Speaker 0 | 14:49.463
i do i know so many people in transportation and logistics and i know so much is going on right now at this point maybe in the last year that they’ve really had to upgrade really they’ve been they’ve been investing more in technology as of recent than mainly due to the not only the amazon effect but the covet effect and numerous different things like that that really made a big change in the atmosphere but keep going yeah so um i think on the on the trading side
Speaker 1 | 15:17.392
technology is front and center of that business. We have a few, three, two, two or three young guys who do nothing but write R and Python and they’re scraping websites. And because that really is a business based on speed, right? If you can get a tenth of a penny cheaper than the other guy, because you’re faster to make the deal,
Speaker 0 | 15:42.242
we move-I would say you guys are ahead. But me personally, I would say you guys are ahead of the curve, just based on talking with you and the things that you’ve said and knowing some of the other oil and gas. I would say that you guys are well ahead. So congratulations on that.
Speaker 1 | 15:58.247
Thank you. Yeah. So I will say, though, that on the transportation side, to your point, I do see that moving. I think they’re moving to be more on the forefront of technology. I think some of that is just a generational shift. Yes. People were fine with writing basically a bill of lading, right? So you go pick up gas and you would literally just get a piece of paper that says, you know, fill loaded 5,000 gallons of diesel at this price at this location.
Speaker 0 | 16:26.998
With a carbon copy. With a carbon copy. Yep, with a carbon copy. A white, a yellow carbon copy.
Speaker 1 | 16:32.421
Yeah, you would write your ID number on there and say, this is what I picked up. I think there’s a generational shift going on in the oil and gas business, right? The oil and gas business has been graying for a while. It definitely took a hit. you know, where we didn’t see a lot of new people entering the business. And so that has really picked up, I would say, over the last five to 10 years with the increase in the price of oil. And so now I think generationally people are, to your point, it’s the Amazon effect. It’s what do you mean? I can’t go online and just tell you I need gasoline. I have to like call somebody. I have to call a dispatcher and they have to route it. Like, I don’t want to do all that. I don’t, I just want to be able to go to your portal and say.
Speaker 0 | 17:08.422
I have to manually call you with my credit card number. I have to get you to do. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1 | 17:13.804
So I think as the generations have shifted the expectation, I think a lot of it is the consumerization of technology, right? So we are being pushed by Amazon because I can go online on Amazon and buy anything and it shows up, assuming it’s prime today, maybe tomorrow. I don’t want to call one of your dispatchers. What do you mean I have to call customer support?
Speaker 0 | 17:34.436
One of the wildest things that we’ve seen happen. I mean, think about that. Think about 286 days compared to now. Do you have any kids? the change is amazing do you have any kids i do uh i have a six uh six and a four four and a half okay so um i have some kids that age too i have a five-year-old and a nine-year-old but i also have a 20 year old um and a whole slew of kids in between that but um yeah when i think about it just still blows my mind that they grew up in an age like yeah this is just it of course like what do you mean you can’t order something on amazon like that was so i mean you had a you had an at&t computer it just still blows my mind well you used to go i remember going to the i mean i just think when i just think back about going to the whatever a grocery store with my mom or whatever it was back in the day you used to go to the mall and people had crazy credit card books with like 20 credit cards in it and they used to slide the credit card thing back and forth and it was a bunch of paper receipts and it was like when i start to think about the the operations nightmare of that process and how many people had to get just the paper alone and if you lost a piece of paper i mean who knows what that meant i mean we just lost the charge i don’t know you know when you think about how you had to keep track of everything it’s kind of wild the bank book where you used to write the bank book or they would put take your little bank book and put in a little print machine it would tell you your new balance now you just go on your phone you’re like oh that’s my balance well how much do i money to have in my bank account you wouldn’t do that back in the day you’d be crazy so are we losing probably lose some money nowadays for that for not having being as i don’t know as my mind goes off on
Speaker 1 | 19:09.060
tangents yeah no i couldn’t tell the last time i personally balanced a checkbook like you were crazy if you didn’t do that back in the day yeah and now i don’t think anybody balances checkbooks i’m sure there’s something every now and then i have to write a check i’m like where are they like
Speaker 0 | 19:26.114
honey where are the checks do we have any checks do you have a check what do you mean you’ll take a check who takes a check it’s a piece of paper you write on like that’s worth some people yeah i’ll take a check like are you serious or Venmo you or I mean yeah cash app uh cash app you know Payoneer you know some what how many other apps do we have that we need to do can I wise it to you you know yeah yeah there’s got to be a better way but I’m with you still still amazes me every once in a while I have to write a check what’s the uh end game for IT guys sail off into the sunset everything’s on autopilot uh sit back kick up I don’t know
Speaker 1 | 19:59.060
I don’t I mean I no one knows so hard to it’s so hard to predict the future you know 20 years ago when I first started I think it was clear, right? There was a, you know, the organization just kind of got bigger. There was a, I don’t know that it was a straightforward, but there was a path to the top to CIO. It’s interesting to see. I mean, obviously people will need to continue to manage. the bots. And so I think there will always be this supporting role for technology. But, but to your point, you know, the rise of citizen developers, which I still have not fully seen come to fruition. We’ve looked at some software that has promised, you know, it’s development without the involvement of IT. I’ve yet to really see any of that I would say it’s gotten kind of visual basic ish, but really any kind of complex. operations still end up, you know, if you’ve got a table and, you know, you’ve set up a connection to the app, right? And a person wants to just read from that table and move some columns around. Yeah, that’s doable. You know, like the Power BI stuff, but as soon as you get anything complicated, I have yet to see a true developer who is, well, a true business user who is able to write, you know, or make those apps do what they need it to do. So I think there will always be this need for IT guys. to just be able to manage the even with cloud i mean we have a we have a resource who manages our cloud infrastructure right that didn’t i mean his job is less complicated as we move more and more well it’s less complicated it’s depends on if you’re less it depends on if you’re reading microsoft azure um hieroglyphics um different um line items that come through on your bill or not or is it or is it aws that might be easier we’re azure um but yeah so i I think you’ll continue to see people move up in the value chain, for lack of a better term, right? Where instead of worrying about disk space and RAM, and do we have enough? But in the end, we are responsible for our tenants inside Azure, right? We’re responsible for making sure that they’re not running when they don’t need to be running. They are running all of those things.
Speaker 0 | 22:12.386
Cost containment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 22:13.526
Yeah, we do. Yeah. For us, a lot of cost containment. We’re still a relatively small organization with plans to grow, but the oil and gas trading business, and even to some extent the logistics business, is a pretty cash-intensive business. It requires a lot of capital because you buy and then you sell, but there’s a gap in the middle there where we’re floating those costs.
Speaker 0 | 22:38.522
Switching gears, what’s your favorite IT story or biggest nightmare? You have any good IT stories? We had someone. that hr tried to charge a bunch of um tablets and the idea was i’m going to drill a bunch of holes in these shoe boxes and we’re going to put all these tablets in the shoe boxes and the charging cords are going to go through little holes in the shoe box and then we wake up the next day and have the building burn down i shouldn’t laugh at that it is kind of like you know things overheat by the way um yeah there’s gotta what’s the biggest nightmare story or um yeah we decided to uh plug in this new um i remember there was another one it was a telecom company i worked for back in the day and they were doing a router upgrade on like an edge router or something and they thought they were just doing a router upgrade on just that one like router and it set some like catastrophic series of events that like went from one router to the next all through the entire network and then so the entire like the entire north american network shut down like i don’t know how many feet or in a mile like whatever it’s like five whatever it was it was like 40
Speaker 1 | 23:47.012
000 customers like blip just down just went down you know i don’t want to talk with like the ccto and he was like yeah that was the worst day of my life he was like but we learned a lesson i was like yeah i think for me it’s we had somebody who brought in a device uh and their device they had rather than dhcp had had it set to a hard coded ip and that ip address was the ip address of our dhcp server um We just had IP conflicts. And of course, nobody knows, right? IT can’t figure it out. All of a sudden, nobody’s leases are getting renewed because they are going to this other device, right? That is trying to… People are asking for IP addresses and it’s saying, I’m not a DHCP, sir. I don’t know what you’re doing here. Go away.
Speaker 0 | 24:33.512
Yeah, we had that happen. I had that happen with another guy with a smart TV. Smart TV. They could not find the device forever. They’re like, yeah. And then eventually someone thought like, is it possible that maybe… one of these devices. It’s like, anyways, keep going. So how’d you guys figure it out?
Speaker 1 | 24:48.324
So we finally figured it out because, so it happened and then it stopped happening when they left because they took the device with them. Right. And so what the, like, it just, it just stopped. That’s incredibly odd. And then it started the next day again. And I was like, okay, this is, this has got to be a thing. Right. Like, so we’re trying to figure out, do we have a virtual machine that’s turning on? Is there a bash job? And no, it was just, I mean, it was the incredibly simple answer of somebody kept. bringing a device from home that had a hard-coded IP address. It probably worked great at their house. And so I think it was a business user who thought they knew a lot about technology and or maybe they had had their home network set up by somebody else and so this thing had a fixed IP. And it just kept colliding with ours. And so we finally, on about day three, figured out like, this is weird. It happens roughly about 830 in the morning, every morning, right? But it was looking at batch jobs, just trying to look what is going on in the IT side. And the answer was, it wasn’t an IT function. It wasn’t an IT issue.
Speaker 0 | 25:43.173
That’s actually pretty cool. How did you find the person? Did you eventually walk to him like,
Speaker 1 | 25:46.616
shit,
Speaker 0 | 25:46.996
did that?
Speaker 1 | 25:48.777
Yes. Yeah, we had a good sense of, you know, because I think everyone… as those business users who are fairly logically savvy. And it was like, it’s got to be one of these guys. It has to be one of these guys. And so I was like, hey, can you, good question, can you unplug that real quick? And then the network came back to life. And I was like, can you plug it back in one more time, just real quick? And the network cratered out and was like, that is.
Speaker 0 | 26:13.988
How long did it take?
Speaker 1 | 26:15.148
Almost three days.
Speaker 0 | 26:16.569
Oh gosh.
Speaker 1 | 26:17.910
It’s a simple answer, right? But when you’re in it.
Speaker 0 | 26:21.392
Really? Not really. I mean, it’s kind of like a needle in the haystack. Haystack type of thing. That’s excellent. Advice for people, advice for youngsters out there in the world coming up in IT. Anything? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 26:33.196
I think curiosity to me is the thing that we really look for when we’re hiring, when we’re looking at interns or even just hiring experienced hires. The world changes so fast in IT that if you are not up to date on technology as well as trends in the industry and inside IT, it’s… I think it’s incredibly easy to get left behind, you know, and just to see that that value that you have to the organization to diminish. You know, it would be great if organizations had a training plan and said, you know, here’s the plan to keep Phil up to date. Right. This week, he’s going to take this class and next week he’s going to take this class. It’s a great I think it’s a great desire. It just doesn’t seem to happen. Right. You know, as Microsoft releases new versions of SharePoint, there’s got to be if you’re if you’re the SharePoint person, there’s got to be that that curiosity of like. Like, why did they do this? And what did they do? And how does this work now? And what does this change for the business? What does this change for IT? So to me,
Speaker 0 | 27:30.139
that’s- How do you find that? How do you find that person? Can you teach it?
Speaker 1 | 27:34.421
I don’t know if you can teach it. I think a bit of that curiosity is just built in. And so I tend to ask a lot of questions that are maybe not specific to IT, but about just their curiosity, right? What was the last learned? What was the last interesting article you read? Why did you find it interesting? Some of those kind of- questions because I think, I mean, there are curious people everywhere in every part of the organization. And for me, those are the people that you see tend to rise to leadership positions, right? It’s this never ending, I don’t understand. Why does that do that? Can you explain this to me? What happens if I do this? And I think to me, it’s curiosity.
Speaker 0 | 28:12.131
Let’s go through some of those questions real quick. Okay. So what was the last article you read? What else do you have?
Speaker 1 | 28:17.612
And then for me, a lot of it’s why, you know, because some people say, oh, I just, I read the Wall Street Journal every day. That could be an indicator of curiosity, but not always, right? So why, you know, how does that, how do you, how is that relevant to your life, business, right? Because it may be, oh, I read an article in this camping magazine and it sparked my curiosity around this thing. So kind of articles, why, how, or did you put any of it into practice? Because to me, it’s not just enough to be curious, but you’ve got to look to then take that curiosity and do something with it. Yeah. I asked questions about, you know, what was the last big issue you had at work? You know. give me an example of a problem you solved or a problem you had, how did you solve it? You know, and I, I personally like to, to see and hire people, uh, who are willing to spend some time figuring it out. Right. If the answer is I had this problem and then I called my buddy cause he’s this guy. And so he fixed it. It’s great that you got the problem solved, but, but I don’t think you as a person grew from having the problem.
Speaker 0 | 29:13.874
Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 29:15.354
Your, your buddy is now smarter, but, but I’m not, I’m not sure you, you grew to me. That doesn’t show me a ton of
Speaker 0 | 29:20.958
of curiosity yeah no no i got it like i i searched uh youtube i figured out how to reset this and do this like uh my dad’s uh old massive xerox laser printer that he got given to him somehow that’s the size of a washing machine that sits on his desk that he loves to have and i had to replace some weird part on it so it was like the xerox guy on youtube you know and then like i was like okay i’m like pulling the front of the machine off and like okay pull this thing out okay hit this little switch move over here put this thing in here and then like i replaced me he’s like you’re a genius like how do you do that i’m like i just uh googled it and then it took me to youtube or youtube they are they are a face uh fortinet guy fortinet guy by the way yeah uh anyways fortinet guy someday we will meet somehow and we should trade uh podcasts or something like that because people keep talking about fortinet guy but he’s just the fortinet dude like if you need to make some you You need to know something about Fortinet. You know, you’re a Fortinet guy on YouTube. It has been a pleasure having you on the show. Any final words of wisdom or anything for listeners out there or anyone in IT? You know,
Speaker 1 | 30:23.196
really, I think it’s, to me, I have always tried to be… humble and hungry. I think those are the keys to a successful career. I think, and honestly, probably it doesn’t matter the industry, it doesn’t matter the profession, but the ability to say, I don’t know, but I will go figure it out. I think it’s probably one of the most important outlooks on life that if you want to succeed, you can have.
Speaker 0 | 30:45.087
Yes. Well, Eric, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Was truly a pleasure.
Speaker 1 | 30:51.391
I appreciate it. Thank you.
