Speaker0:

[0:24] All right welcome everyone back to dissecting popular it nerds today we’re talking with seth yake it manager at das pack you guys make packages and stuff really important stuff tell me a little about it yeah.

Speaker1:

[0:41] Well if you ever go to starbucks we make the packaging right so

Speaker0:

[0:45] Oh literally you literally yeah yeah bags coffee.

Speaker1:

[0:49] Bags um potato chip bags mcdonald’s wrappers all all that stuff

Speaker0:

[0:53] That’s actually really big so let me get this straight the cheeseburger wrapper that we squeeze out ketchup packets on and dip our french fries in that’s you guys yep that’s huge uh the little pastry bags that i received my lemon loaf in from uh starbucks is that you, with the coffee bags even the coffee bags even coffee that’s massive i worked for starbucks for at least half a decade. That was a significant portion of my learning in the business world and my stepping stone into a Cisco startup, believe it or not. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot there. How did you get started in this IT world?

Speaker1:

[1:43] Yeah. So I graduated high school. I made sure to fail out of college. College i partied way too hard and uh i joined the army so um i i signed up some people don’t

Speaker0:

[1:55] Even go to college they just join the army right away they skip that portion but you to.

Speaker1:

[1:59] Waste at least fourteen thousand dollars first um uh but so i enjoyed congratulations thank you thank you um i had a lot of fun um but uh yeah so i signed up to be a cableman which is fiber optics and ethernet that sort of thing so kind of like a junior electrician type role so later uh i got to my duty station and i was pacing someone on their physical fitness test they failed the run so they said well guess what you’re gonna be our it guy now pack your stuff um and i went back to training wait

Speaker0:

[2:32] A minute let me get this straight yeah let me get this straight someone fails a fitness test and that’s what gets you the it job isn’t that usually what gets you the it job is failing the fitness test? Yeah, right?

Speaker1:

[2:43] Yeah, that should be the litmus test. But unfortunately, no, that’s how the army works. You can’t shoot, you can’t run, you don’t learn anything cool. So…

Speaker0:

[2:50] So where did they put the guy that didn’t pass the running test?

Speaker1:

[2:53] They just stayed until they passed it and they didn’t get a chance to learn how to do IT.

Speaker0:

[2:57] Let me get this straight. And I just want to… I love, you know, talking army and military tests and stuff. And I’m down, I think, 30 pounds now. So… Old, though. Old. It hurts. The body is hurting. I’ve got the itises. The itises are creeping in. My understanding is that the general, he failed the run. Isn’t the run like a mile and a half for 19 minutes or something? What is it? It’s not that bad, is it?

Speaker1:

[3:25] No, it was two miles. And they changed the test right now. But then it was like 16 and a half minutes or something.

Speaker0:

[3:31] Two miles and 16 and a half minutes. So that’s eight minute mile. That’s reasonable. Yeah i ran cross country in high school that’s not really that bad i mean i think i had a six mile yeah so is it usually due to overweight or joints or something like that or i mean just.

Speaker1:

[3:52] People just don’t want to run um

Speaker0:

[3:54] I can understand that i can appreciate that i get it.

Speaker1:

[3:56] I get it now back in my my military day that ran like a 615 mile so

Speaker0:

[4:01] Nice yeah my best my best cross-country races i think it was because there’s actually family members there running and so the first mile was like all in the open you could see everyone before you run into the woods and then disappear and you can kind of like slack off you know so i made sure that first mile i timed in at six minutes nice i remember my coach was like phil what’s going on like nice time and i was like yeah just get me into the woods okay yeah i was not i was i was like probably a lazy high schooler let’s just be honest let’s be honest there’s kids with like you know five minutes something miles it was like unbelievable so anywho you fail the it someone fails a fitness test you get the cabling job which is actually pretty cool and um yeah so crash course on on it i guess and now we’re we’re cabling what are we cabling i.

Speaker1:

[4:53] Also did fiber optics um probably the coolest thing i did is i set up a bunch of uh like remote control turrets with like they ran off of fiber it was like a closed circuit so basically you could sit in like an air-conditioned room and you had a joystick like a little joystick from like this old microsoft flight simulator with like a button that says you know don’t touch fire shoot right yeah yeah so you got the guys just sitting in the air-conditioned room with this remote control um belt fed machine gun you could probably get a grenade launcher on this thing. It’s really cool. Uh, so that’s a fun project. Um, so I got all those work and that was probably the coolest one, but you know, other just,

Speaker0:

[5:29] You know, where were said turrets? Where were these said turrets?

Speaker1:

[5:32] This was a classified. Um, Afghanistan, the capital.

Speaker0:

[5:36] Okay.

Speaker1:

[5:37] Yeah. We’re, uh, yeah, we were right on embassy row. So we were like kind of the, you know, in case something crazy happened there.

Speaker0:

[5:44] Was this during what years was this? Was this during like, um, kind of like combat turmoil? years or no?

Speaker1:

[5:53] It was kind of trailing off. So this was 16 to 17. So there’s still you know, it was still active per se, but not anything close to like 2008. Right. That’s totally different ballgame. This was not third years, but you know.

Speaker0:

[6:08] Okay so so cabling cabling turrets and i mean what do you learn about did you know anything about networks before then and getting into this no.

Speaker1:

[6:19] In high school i thought computers were for nerds and refused to learn anything about it um and then i got a bit of a wake-up call buddy you’re going to learn this here

Speaker0:

[6:29] You’re going to say yes yes yes yes yes now yes this This is why I call them popular nerds. It’s like a positive and negative. It’s like a, you know, it’s like nerd wasn’t negative. Now it’s a positive, you know, so you were popular in high school and then you became the nerd or I don’t know. Then everything you ever look down upon anyone else for usually happens to you in life. So.

Speaker1:

[6:52] Yep, exactly. Look down there. I wouldn’t call myself popular in high school, but I played sports and stuff. But yeah, I kind of think so. But yeah, no, I learned the hard way, you know, so I was there. I learned a ton, honestly, on that tour because…

Speaker0:

[7:06] How do they teach you? Yeah, how do they teach you that? Hey, by the way, this is an IP address. I don’t understand. Figure it out. Really?

Speaker1:

[7:12] Just figure it out. It’ll be fine. That’s how the army works.

Speaker0:

[7:16] We’re probably revealing a little bit that we shouldn’t reveal about how sophisticated our army networking skills are.

Speaker1:

[7:22] Well, before they let me do anything, I had to pass a little certification course with a warrant officer and stuff. So you basically had to take like basically a group of like servers and switches out of a box and create a functioning network inside of like an hour. And this is like Cisco iOS command line, right? So this is no GUI. This is typing it out. You got to get your OSPF statements exactly right. You’ve got a big like all command line.

Speaker0:

[7:50] How’d you learn it though? Ahead of time. Did they give you a course on that too? A crash course on that?

Speaker1:

[7:54] Yeah, they give us a crash course and like, well, you better learn how to do this stuff. and then off to the field you go.

Speaker0:

[8:00] And how long did that little crash course take?

Speaker1:

[8:03] Uh, like, uh, it was probably, it was a good hour, you know?

Speaker0:

[8:07] Really?

Speaker1:

[8:08] Oh yeah. Yeah.

Speaker0:

[8:09] So here’s the, here’s the, here’s the reality. Young, young people out there. Uh, wide generation people, um, Cisco certification, who cares? You just need an hour long course in a box with some wires in it and some switches and a command line prompt that you probably don’t even need anymore because there’s a GUI now. Uh, but to the 40, that sales guy could teach you that one.

Speaker1:

[8:28] All right. I would prefer the Cisco iOS command line over any GUI they’ve come out with. I look at the Cisco GUI these days, I’m like, why do you need all this? Just give me the command line, print out the configuration, and I’ll fix it.

Speaker0:

[8:42] So you’re a Cisco shop, right?

Speaker1:

[8:45] No, no, we use Unify here.

Speaker0:

[8:47] Surprise, surprise.

Speaker1:

[8:51] When I came in, it was all chaos. Most of the stuff was actually Netgear, believe it or not, from the things I should back up. So, you know, we’re a company we formed about two years ago. We were five separate companies that were all 30 plus years old, individual and our operators under kind of now a more corporate structure. So we have what we had when we started,

Speaker0:

[9:09] Right? Of course. It’s very common, very common, not uncommon to, yeah, for mergers and acquisitions and things like that in the space. And then, I mean, multiple ERPs, if you’ve run into that, I don’t know. Oh, gosh. Yeah. You came on with seven.

Speaker1:

[9:29] How many

Speaker0:

[9:31] Are we down to.

Speaker1:

[9:31] One oh

Speaker0:

[9:33] Wow how was that.

Speaker1:

[9:35] Busy busy uh so we have some really great tools we have some good accountants here that help that a lot and a lot of it is feeding it into uh some sort of system that is coagulated if you will and it’s something usable by the accountants so we can understand costing um you know production information that that sort of thing. And we use a platform called Adaptive, which is from Workday. And it really helped them out to, you know, get their arms around it. So hats off to the accounting team, really. You know, the IT people, we just migrated the database. So that’s the easy part, right? But hats off to the accounting. And really, you know, coming back to staying relevant, it’s all collaboration, right? Because anyone can lift and shift like a Microsoft SQL database, right? With a little bit of training. Maybe, maybe, maybe most.

Speaker0:

[10:29] You have to, you have to pass the two mile, the two mile run first. Then maybe. Then maybe.

Speaker1:

[10:36] Yeah. Okay. Google and chat GBT. I mean, you can figure that stuff out, right? But what you can’t figure out is what the accountants actually need and how do you be, you know, useful as an IT person, right? Because one thing to know a bunch of technical stuff, right? Like I can build a whole network in an hour on Cisco iOS command line. Great. Is that network what the business needs? Same thing with seven legacy ERPs. What does the business actually need? What format do they need it in? Do they need it on one pane of glass? Is seven acceptable? What do they need? And that’s where you just have to sit down and talk to people as an IT person.

Speaker0:

[11:16] That’s where translating IT into speaking the language of business IT, just to plug the book, my book. I don’t plug my book a lot. I probably should. Translating into business speak, but the IT person first has to have that, You might not have to have a lot of the business acumen. It certainly would help, but you have to have people acumen. You have to be able to ask like, what do you do for a job? Well, I’m an accountant. I work with numbers and there’s this thing called gross margin and operating costs. And I need things to pop out in this type of field. And I’ve got these other things that are called account codes and all these other different bags and McDonald’s wrappers have different account codes. Can you make them all into the account code I want? I’m assuming this is maybe something that happened.

Speaker1:

[12:04] Yeah. That’s pretty much how it goes, right? You got to get the data available, but you also have to understand how do I create the views that they need? You know, what, what tables do we need to, you know, make joins out of that sort of thing.

Speaker0:

[12:17] So I’ve never actually been, I am somewhat in love with accounting. I kind of, I kind of love it, but I kind of don’t love it at the same time, but I love this conversation and where it’s going. How did you translate that? How did you find out? This is a teaching moment. This is a teaching moment for people out there. So IT guys that don’t have a relationship with your CFO, how do you get a relationship with your CFO? How do you create a relationship with accounting? How does IT create a relationship with accounting? Give us some tips.

Speaker1:

[12:49] Some tips. Gotcha. So first thing you got to do, walk into wherever the accountants are at, look at the tables and ask them, what the heck are you doing all day? Take an interest in those people, right? You know, more social than people want to admit, because you can shut the door and stay in your server room all you want. Cool. Just take an interest in what they’re doing and say, oh, well, you’re pulling it this way and it takes 15 steps. What if I can consolidate that to five? Right.

Speaker0:

[13:16] And that’s how What are they doing? Can you answer that question? First of all, I would love to know what accountants are doing all day. And there are cool, they are cool people. Like there is an accountant in my jujitsu class.

Speaker1:

[13:27] Yeah.

Speaker0:

[13:27] He was… He lost a hundred pounds in three months, by the way, not, it wasn’t like fat either. It was like, he was like a big football player that came in and he tried to, he actually tried to join the Marines and they, they shut him down. He said like high blood pressure or something. So he had to lose like a hundred pounds really quick. And he actually lost a hundred pounds in three months. This was like amazing. The guy could squat 600. It was insane. And then he’s like doing jujitsu all the time. And he was eventually was like, okay, I guess I’m not going into the Marines now. And I’m an accountant and he’s like this, you know, kind of like jock accountant. And normally you would think accountant is like you know i don’t know older kind of dry personality i don’t know maybe nerdy person i don’t know they’re not maybe.

Speaker1:

[14:10] Maybe so the accountants they reformat spreadsheets i swear to god so but they look at it they can do absolute magic though uh when they go through it and a lot of it is translating uh the raw data that we give them i’m sure everyone who’s listening to this has done an expense report at least once. How do you translate that raw data? Like what can be capitalized? What’s an expense? What account does it go to? And they’re basically QCing you every day, whether you know it or not. They’re making sure, okay, that cup of coffee you got, right? Oh, did you buy it for a prospective client or did you buy that for yourself on your business trip? Because those go to two different account codes. The account codes, you you know, at the end of the year,

Speaker0:

[14:54] They get, can we answer that real quick? If I bought it for myself on a business trip and that’s a travel meal to them, I’m assuming. Yeah. And if I bought it for a client, then it’s a business lunch, something like this business expense.

Speaker1:

[15:06] But it’s going to go to a totally different account, right? Totally different charge account.

Speaker0:

[15:11] Okay.

Speaker1:

[15:12] You know, and that’s what they do all day. They, they format that and they also calculate costing because so that business expense, right. Whether it’s for you or it’s for a lunch, all translates into the cost of that McDonald’s wrapper. It all gets there somehow.

Speaker0:

[15:30] I’m just thinking about my own messed up books and how I probably need a really good accountant. I do have a really good accountant, but I just don’t pay him to sit at a desk and crawl my books all day long. I pay him monthly or something to do that. And then they ask me to do it and quit screwing around. And could you please enter things right into the right, you know, categories and expense categories and drop downs and all that type of stuff.

Speaker1:

[15:58] Yeah. Well, you know, that’s what full-time accountants do is they basically clean up your mess, right?

Speaker0:

[16:02] Okay. So how does IT translate that? And when you’ve got five ERPs and a huge mess, and you’ve got all this data that comes in from all these different things, you sat down and asked them, hey, what do you need from us? How do you need it? How do you want the data? I’m assuming something like that.

Speaker1:

[16:15] Yeah. Yeah. You sit down and like, where do you need it? Right. Because it all exists and all in these different platforms. So we settled on feeding it to a program that can help them combine it. Right. So what it does, so it holds all the tables, right? So you’ve got like ERP database one, you have your production table, ERP database two production table, they have different columns. Right. But what it can do is it helps translate those columns into to kind of like a messy join like

Speaker0:

[16:43] A weird field like we took two fields and we renamed a new field or something like that.

Speaker1:

[16:48] Gotcha yeah because you could have two different names right so you could have like run rate could be also you know run time right for example right same same data different column name and you mush those all together and what that requires though is you have to set up the correct exports you have to set up the correct jobs because you know anytime you do an mma m and And all of these legacy ERPs are still being used until you get your final solution out there. So they’re still being actively used. You have parallel time. And you have to be able to reconcile, okay, well, this is what the final solution is saying. This is what the older solution is saying. How do we reconcile the two? And how do we make sure we don’t lose a bunch of money by messing up our costing?

Speaker0:

[17:33] Superman 3. Superman 3. Like from the office. Superman 3. just fractions of a penny and then we press the button there’s a big problem in accounting, that’s basically you know and you’re like i hope it works and no it didn’t work right uh okay yeah so did you get to a day where you had to click a button click a button uh yeah like today we’re doing the migration and one two three we’re.

Speaker1:

[17:59] Live and click yeah so we always have parallel though right so you do click a button but you run it parallel and you compare the outputs right so you have at least 30 days

Speaker0:

[18:09] To make what a um yeah what a what an interesting um you know uh what do we say uh concept what what an interesting concept running things in parallel not not waterfall not you know like what an interesting concept you know i won’t participate in.

Speaker1:

[18:27] Any waterfall project i will not do it

Speaker0:

[18:30] How was that even a thing i just wondering who whoever ever thought that that was an idea it must is there can we think of it let’s just we should start this like examples where waterfall is a good idea i would love to know one there’s got to be one.

Speaker1:

[18:45] If nothing exists prior, I guess, right? If you didn’t have an ERP prior, it would be water football by default, right?

Speaker0:

[18:53] Would it? How would it? I mean, I’m just thinking, like, why would you not still do things in parallel or multiple things at one time? I mean, I guess you could go step by step, but I’m just trying to think of what example where that would be great. Anywho, I’m probably not smart enough, and I’m looking really dumb right now, and some guys in the background, like, what an idiot. I’ll tell you exactly where waterfall is great. so but the point is you you mentioned relevance and relevance is a is a word that has come up.

Speaker0:

[19:27] Quite a bit in it in my life in the past week and it’s come up because, a we’re building a new website which i’ve been talking about forever we had to fire a development team overseas, which was, again, I think another topic for a show would be, how do you find and hire a really good development team overseas? And some people are going to be like, you don’t, Phil. But no, that’s not true. You actually do. It’s just, I didn’t hire the right one. So they’re gone. Now we’re back in, you know, not overseas and it’s going great. Great. So slight delay happens. And, but the topic of relevance has come up when we’re getting ideas for, okay, so what does the new media website need to have? Well, we should have polls and we should have like, you know, what are your top three security vendors? And we should have really third-party reviews from, you know, your IT peers. And, you know, it would be great to have a, you know, a live Thursday session. We’ve got all these different things, right? And when I ask people, what’s your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern when it comes to collaborating with your peers in IT.

Speaker0:

[20:38] We get all kinds of answers. We get, oh, it’s like we went to this thing. We thought it was gonna be a great breakout session, but it ended up being a clandestine 80% of the time sales pitch. And it was like a bait and switch. And, you know, I walked out of the room. And then we get, but one of the themes that came up was relevance. We want to be with our peers in a relevant space that’s relevant to us at our senior level of, I guess, understanding. ending. And that’s what we’re trying to do on this podcast is make it relevant. And you’re talking about IT also needing to be relevant. So how do we create those lines of communication, I guess, to be more relevant in general? And does anything I just say make any sense?

Speaker1:

[21:29] Yeah, for sure. So the challenge is, right, when you talk to your CFO, you talk to your CEO, and you want to buy something, right? How does this affect the packaging that’s coming out of of the plant how do i translate that to this is going to make this company more efficient and this is why that’s relevancy and every layer you get away from packaging out the door it’s harder and harder to justify right so if i came in here and said we need to have this super expensive cyber security platform i’m not going to name any names article anyway um super expensive cyber security platform and it’s going to do this thing that’s never been an issue right how is that relevant to packaging going out the door right if it’s never been an issue and we have no regulatory compliance that states that we need this how do you sell that right um there’s

Speaker0:

[22:20] Got to be more expensive guys than than arctic wolf i don’t know dynatrace or something i don’t know there’s got to be something which.

Speaker1:

[22:26] I stand by binary defense they’re pretty good binary defense okay yeah They’re out of Akron, actually. Akron, Ohio, believe it or not. Anyway.

Speaker0:

[22:35] Congratulations, Ohio.

Speaker1:

[22:36] We got one.

Speaker0:

[22:40] Believe it or not, there’s a lot that comes out of Kentucky as well. Okay, so binary defense. Okay. I like tertiary defense. I just made that up. It’s not even a company, I don’t think. It probably is somewhere. Okay. So, all right. So what’s your point? Does that mean it’s unrelevant?

Speaker1:

[23:00] No, it doesn’t mean it’s unreliable. It means you have to say, okay, well, this is what it will do to our cybersecurity insurance renewals. You have to understand the business and say, okay, these are the business costs, and this is how my proposal affects those costs. I can drop it by 50% by spending 10%. That’s how you make a relevant pitch. Oftentimes, I see, you know, IT people going, well, they won’t buy this thing. It’s really great. It’s really awesome. Okay, but how are you relating those accountants? They don’t care, right? But what they do care is about numbers. So, how does your pitch affect bottom line?

Speaker1:

[23:39] Can you reduce headcount? Can you lower cybersecurity insurance costs? Can you, you know, reduce the rate of incidents? That sort of thing. Can you reduce man hours spent on remediation activity? What does your pitch do? And that’s how you’re relevant. And the only way to be relevant is to talk to people, you know. So we have a location here in Columbus, then we have several in California. And I go to California monthly to talk to people who have nothing to do with IT because I need to know, okay, what are you doing? Like what pain points do you have right and how can i fix those it’s like oh well the wi-fi is really bad in the back right easy to fix or i need a solution that does x y and z so when i go shopping i know exactly x y and z don’t give me don’t sell me something that says you know a b and c i need x y and z right so when i shop for a phone system for example these are the features i need these are nice to haves only these people need those nice to have so don’t spend 20 grand when you almost need to spend 10, right? You know, that sort of thing.

Speaker0:

[24:39] And we did have a great, we did have a great kind of round table discussion just in general with some of your team members. And I saw you in action and I would, I would, I’m still to this day, I still have got to do a team. I got to do a team show at some point. Yeah. And you got a lot of great praise and that’s not to, you know, praise you to your face, but the praise that you got was, that you were good at listening and listening to their problems and delivering a technology solution that helped them eliminate their problems. It wasn’t like you looked at a bunch of things and then said, well, we could just fill the gap with this product or plug this gap with this whatever, and that will fix that problem. You actually wanted to find out what’s going on, what are they doing, would this be useful to them or what kind of problems are they experiencing, as a team lead under whatever it was, whatever side of the house? Can you, is there any, I don’t know, teaching moment there? So you were traveling, you’re traveling out to California to meet with people. What was it like the very first time you did that when you came into the role? What’d you do? Say, hey, I’m, Hey, I’m going to travel out to California. And what was your kind of like first order of operations when you’re meeting new people and everything?

Speaker1:

[26:04] First, introduce yourself, be polite and take an interest in what they do all day. Say I go up to a plant manager, never met him before. Right. And I say, hey, hey, I’m Seth. I’m the new IT manager here. I’m here to help listen to your concerns, but can you show me around the plant? Can you show me what you guys do? What packaging do you make? How do the systems work? What are your pain points? And that’s how you do it. Because what will absolutely turn people off if you’re an IT person, if you show up and you’re like, does the network work? Does the servers work? Other than that, I don’t care, right? That’s not what people want to hear. That’s not helping anything. What does help is if you go out and say, I don’t care how small the issue is, report it and we will fix it. I will work with you to fix these pain points. So to be relevant, you have to know what they’re doing, right? So you have to go on the floor and you have to go out for inventory day and hang out with the guys who are scanning all the packages and say, okay, so you’re scanning all the packages. I don’t care how small of an inconvenience is. I don’t care if it’s one extra step. I’m going to listen to you. I’m going to work with you and I’m going to find a way to remove the extra step that’s annoying you.

Speaker0:

[27:11] That’s actually pretty deep. I don’t know many IT guys that would go out to a floor where you see people scanning things and you would deal with scanner issues and steps like that. Because that’s really almost, that’s almost like operations and IT.

Speaker1:

[27:22] Yeah. No, and my mantra here is if you have no idea how product gets out the door, get out of my department. Because you are not here to sit in a server room. You’re here to serve customers. I don’t care what your title is. Leave it out the door. You are here to serve our internal customers at the end of the day. That’s it. So you know head of it network engineer whatever that’s not you are help desk you have to have that mindset

Speaker0:

[27:49] Sometimes it’s it’s interesting sometimes when people get into a business a business role or they get into a professional space it’s almost like they turn human off and like they don’t know how to talk with people all of a sudden and i try to like coach my guys on this every day i’m like Like, Hey, you know, because I have guys, I have a whole team now that’s out like recruiting for the podcast and stuff and asking people and I’ll, I’ll like in the morning, we’ll spend a half an hour just going through DMS on LinkedIn. And I’ll be like, do humans talk like that?

Speaker0:

[28:25] You know what I mean? Like, like, no, I’m like, do you chat with your friend like that? Do you chat with your friend? Like, like, hello, John, I’m really appreciate, you know, blah, blah, blah. but like you don’t chat like that and you don’t, you know, like speak to people, you know, kind of like in a, in a normal fashion. And it’s almost like you have to like tell people like, Hey, relax. And let me give you some question tools. I love question tools. I’m big on like, okay, what are the three main question tools? Like how, what, why? Like if you just, I’m like, I promise you like, go ahead, fire any question at me right now. I can guarantee you, or you say something, I’d just be like, why, how, you know what I mean? Tell me more. Could you expand on that?

Speaker0:

[29:06] Um, you know, I think there’s like, like maybe like 10 tools that every human being could use and you could always, you know, fall back on, on why, and at least you would get something or like, could you tell me more? Could you expand on that? And I think when you meet with someone the first time there’s, I don’t think it’s uncommon for it people or many people in general to have social anxiety and to not know what to say or how to connect with people. I’ve always been an introvert my whole life, which is kind of crazy because I run a talk show and I used to walk through high school with my head down and being really terrified in high school. And it was only through learning different, I don’t know, mechanisms and really making sure that I can like literally like leave my body so to speak and make it all about other people.

Speaker0:

[29:57] That it was easier to connect with people so i don’t know worst case scenario seth what’s your favorite food favorite.

Speaker1:

[30:06] Food uh definitely mexican food

Speaker0:

[30:08] Yeah i would say tacos like hands down without without a doubt my entire life taco see we just made a connection i don’t know and you’re in but like you’re close to like austin or something which is the taco capital of the world nothing.

Speaker1:

[30:18] Called um outside of columbus ohio other than a plain city little town

Speaker0:

[30:22] What’s the best taco place or mexican place so.

Speaker1:

[30:26] The best one’s got to be los gauchos

Speaker0:

[30:28] Los gauchos maybe i should get on a plane is it worth the travel is it worth going all the way there columbus.

Speaker1:

[30:34] Oh yeah we actually have a very diverse food scene here um we have a lot of uh immigration uh here so you get all kinds of cool stuff i mean we have vietnamese jamaican african food mexican food you name it um they’re all here

Speaker0:

[30:49] Uh jamaican food i have a lot of jamaican friends for some reason uh hartford connecticut has like this like crazy jamaican population so i just happen to have a lot of jamaican friends so i know all about like jerk chicken and oxtail and like you know stuff that’s i mean it’s it’s, carl’s takeout in uh i think it’s east hartford or west harvard it’s probably worth a drive for many people it might be the best jerk chicken anywhere in the world it’s absolutely crazy like unbelievable people there’s a line out it’s just a little hole in the wall lying out the door all day long carl’s take out everybody jerk chicken go there.

Speaker1:

[31:28] Hey come to north market in columbus ohio

Speaker0:

[31:30] Yeah i’m down let’s do it los got los gachos followed up by um whatever the local jamaican local jamaican food um so yes i don’t know where we’re going with that we’re going with connect, discover, respond with your people and don’t ask them if the network’s working and look, I did my job keeping the blinky lights on.

Speaker1:

[31:49] The…

Speaker0:

[31:51] Which kind of gets to, I asked you one time what your dream IT super tool would be. And you said confidence. Yeah. And that’s coming from a guy that failed out of college and got into the army running cables. And because the guy failed his running test and you’ve built a lot of confidence from that. There’s a lot to be said about that. So, I don’t know. Where do you get your confidence from?

Speaker1:

[32:19] Uh confidence i mean it’s the art of not giving up uh that’s where i get it from uh you know you give me a challenge i don’t know how to do it i’m gonna figure it out i can do it you know um you understand you gotta i think back to my osi models you know you got your you know several layers and it’s like okay well it’s not the cable it’s got to be something else you know you go up down the down the list uh and you just start simple i mean you can solve most it problems by thinking of the the stupidest dumbest little thing that could be wrong and then just going up the chain from there um nine times out of ten uh it’s not anything crazy um so you just you just work at it um other thing that really helped me significantly is i actually learned about programming i’m completely self-taught i’m actually have several web apps here in both react and flask which is a python library uh completely self-taught and i learned how applications work so So when you think about it, right, so something’s broken. I have the confidence to say, okay, I know what the application is trying to do. So I have an idea of what could be wrong.

Speaker0:

[33:23] How do applications work?

Speaker1:

[33:25] Yeah, how do they work? How do they work, right? So applications really do the same basic things, right? So you have some type of authentication, hopefully. And then you go in, you’re going to view data, you’re going to create data, you’re going to upload data, or you’re going to modify data. That’s basically what they do, right? And then I guess you could argue they send data to other applications depending on what you’re working with. So our new ERP system was having issues with data flow. The connector kept failing. So I was watching it fail and I’m thinking through my head, okay, well, I can see it takes 30 seconds to fail. So it’s probably trying to make the connection, make the connection, make the connection and it times out. So I’m like, okay, so let’s take a look at our network. Can it get to where it’s trying to go and is where it’s trying to go able to accept that connection but it turns out the uh specific connector was actually connected to the wrong server so it connected it the wrong way so okay cool let’s just adjust this easy going um you know so you gotta learn how to program even at a basic level and it will help you uh really it’ll really help you in your it career um how

Speaker0:

[34:31] Long did it take you to learn to program.

Speaker1:

[34:33] Uh like it took like six months crash

Speaker0:

[34:37] Course how do you do it.

Speaker1:

[34:38] Uh you too

Speaker0:

[34:41] It’s amazing how people that fail out of college become lifelong learners.

Speaker1:

[34:45] Yeah. Hey, I’ve got an MBA. So, you know.

Speaker0:

[34:48] Do you have an MBA and not a BA?

Speaker1:

[34:51] No, no. Undergrad with cybersecurity.

Speaker0:

[34:54] Okay. And then I got my- So you went back to school.

Speaker1:

[34:57] Yeah, I went back to school. I remember the day I decided to do it. I was pulling some cable. And this was in Afghanistan, right? And like literally the sewer and the manhole where the fiber is had- decayed to the point where you had little turds in the manhole when this cable through and i’ve got like trash bags duct taped to my legs because we didn’t have the right boots i’m pulling this cable through i’m like man i do not i was 22 i was like i do not want to do this when i’m 50 this sounds awful yeah that’s

Speaker0:

[35:28] Usually what it is that’s usually what drives someone i don’t want to be doing this when i’m 50 i.

Speaker1:

[35:34] Want a desk job so went back to school learned something useful wasteful. Now I’m here.

Speaker0:

[35:44] Biggest IT challenge right now?

Speaker1:

[35:47] Right now? I would say the biggest challenge is wasteful spending in the IT world.

Speaker0:

[35:52] Really?

Speaker1:

[35:53] Oh yeah. Wasteful spending.

Speaker0:

[35:55] Oh wow. I love solving that problem.

Speaker1:

[35:58] Yeah. Right. I know you do. So people will sell you the world. I once sat through a demo where someone told me they could rebuild my active directory 25% faster than doing it manually. And they wanted $25,000 a year for their tool. I’m like, why, what, like, how did I end up in this demo? You know, like this is a total waste.

Speaker0:

[36:18] Okay. So this is great. This is actually a great point. So I’ve got people all the time that have got like, Hey, we’ve got this great thing. We’ve got this great new, whatever widget. And sometimes I wonder, Tinder, Is it the byproduct of something else that they did? Like, was that a byproduct of something else? It sounds like it was like someone did something in another organization. They’re like, hey, we could sell this.

Speaker1:

[36:46] Well, you know, it’s the startup world, right? So they inject all this cash and they want their, you know, ROI. So they jack up the price, right? Or it could be something someone came up with a tool at a large organization, decided to do their own startup and, you know, go stealth and try to make a bunch of money. I mean, it’s probably a mixture of the two. um and they probably found a large organization who got scared maybe they had ransomware whatever what have you and they paid all this money for this tool and now they’re trying to market it to everybody else um to me that sounds like what happened okay

Speaker0:

[37:21] So overspending in general so where where is the so it’s kind of having a there’s a fear in the marketplace right now there’s a fear here in the marketplace, I had a recruiter tell me the other day that IT hiring is down 60%. I bet. That the average… So here’s what’s interesting with inflation, right? So we’ve got inflation going up. We have things that cost more, but the average salary is down. It was a little bit… under 20%. So if the average IT salary was say 140, 120,000 a year, the average, right, which we know there’s people get paid a lot more and people get paid a lot less, depending on the role that it was like jobs that were paying 120 are now paying a hundred and the hiring’s down 60%. And there’s a lot of consolidation trying to make, um, people do, I don’t know, multiple roles. Like, no, we don’t need a CISO. Screw that. No, IT director’s doing that. We don’t need, yeah. Which I mean, depending on the size of the company, absolutely, that makes sense. So does that have anything to do with wasteful spending? Is this a, I don’t know, what’s going on?

Speaker1:

[38:42] I think it’s one and the same. So you do wasteful spending, right? So when we talk about 25,000 active director rebuilder, right? So someone gets scared, the cybersecurity renewal went up and they buy this product, right? For some promise that it’s going to fix their problems and it doesn’t really. And they’re like, oh, wait, why can’t we get another help desk person? Well, you pissed away 200 grand on stuff we’re never going to use, right? Or someone scared them and said, well, the rates might go up unless you sign a five-year contract, right? And then they end up not needing it, you know, three years in, right? So now you’ve got, God knows how much, you know, you’re spending that you’re not actually using. You know, I’ve seen instances like that with, you know, shutting down sites, right? Now you’re stuck paying through the contract because you overspent on it because someone got scared.

Speaker0:

[39:26] That’s like real estate too. The COVID going back to work effect and we’re paying for office space. So we’ve got to bring people back in and there’s probably more to it than that. And that’s another big debate.

Speaker1:

[39:36] Yeah, that’s another debate. But absolutely. So that’s sort of concept. I think that’s part of the consolidation and drop in IT hiring. But also too, you’d be remiss to not understand automation, right? Right. So for me, I now have three IT employees here where we have four different manufacturing sites. Right. So do the math. Right. Two of us are at one. So one guy covers three sites in California. And the only way we do that is automation, right? We have to make sure that, okay, well, the patching is automated. Our network monitoring is automated. We only get the alerts we actually need to know. And the evolution in the IT world where it’s like, hey, you know, 10 years ago, this would have been a manual process. But now it’s like, well, I just set some configuration settings and it gets done.

Speaker0:

[40:26] How are we applying AI to all of this? Because it just made me think AI. It made me think AI and the whole like, yeah.

Speaker1:

[40:32] Take this little AI concept and throw it out the door because most organizations don’t know how to use AI.

Speaker0:

[40:38] Right. That’s why I’m asking.

Speaker1:

[40:40] Yeah. I use AI. So when I’m building a web app, for example, to do like a simple task, right? So for example, if someone wants to view what they should be making in the machine, right? So we have a PDF of what should be coming out with the measurements. So they make sure it’s right. So we can do our QA. I built super simple web app shows that application. And it shows that PDF on the iPad that they’re using, right? Super basic. They can search for it. Cool stuff, right? I wrote that with the help of ChatGBT, right? No credentials, no PII, right? No, nothing like that. But it templated the app that I needed and I was able to modify it in an afternoon and produce something that really helped. It was very relevant to the business, right? Because that web app that I built with ChatGBT, generative AI, directly related to that product to getting out the door and being of quality and

Speaker0:

[41:31] I’m fascinated how do you begin how do you begin.

Speaker1:

[41:33] How do you begin yeah like you have you have to have a basic understanding of what you’re doing right you have to understand the code you have to understand how applications work and you have to know what the code is spitting out does so you have to educate yourself um you know python’s a language i know very well i also know react right so i’m using chat gbt those are are the ones that i use right because i know what it’s doing never ever ever ever ever run code if you don’t know what it does six

Speaker0:

[42:06] Months six months crash course youtube.

Speaker1:

[42:08] You’ll figure it out and you know once you figure it out and you start understanding what what it’s actually doing uh it all clicks but i think when it comes to ai and automation there’s this huge gap in understanding in the leadership level and that like ai is not going to take all of your jobs is going to replace people who don’t want to use it.

Speaker0:

[42:28] I see the biggest effect is… Is like assist, like an assistant. It’s like an AI assistant. It’s a human assistant. It’s not running all by itself. AI is taking over Skynet or whatever. It’s not Skynet.

Speaker1:

[42:48] It’s not that smart.

Speaker0:

[42:49] It’s assistance. It’s using it to assist people doing their jobs. Now, I think IT’s role might be showing other end users how to use AI to assist them in doing their jobs. Jobs well effectively and i effectively are mad scientist greg the frenchman behind the scenes.

Speaker0:

[43:10] Um he’s very good at at helping me and like every day oh you gotta look at this you gotta use this only use this from now on for searching only use this for this and and then i kind of go down this you know this is awesome by calling he’s okay how’d you start doing that i was like yeah i did what you told me to do and you know um um so definitely in the telecom world because we’re were talking about the other day, agent assistant is very live, right? It’s like, no one wants their contact center to be all AI driven robots. Like you don’t want to call a place and have it be like that. But what you do want is the agent helping you to not be just kind of lost in a moron and not being able to help you, right? Like how awesome would it be to call AT&T and the person that you get on the line already knows what you’re calling about, what circuit you have, what’s going on that it’s hopping and they’ve got like by the way the reason for outage is coming and how great would that be yeah you weren’t calling 1-800 go pound sand I’m not making fun of AT&T we love you we need you yes but I don’t want to call 1-800-257-24 option 25 to talk with whoever and then get transferred to again just that’s where it’s gonna really I think help along with numerous obviously numerous other things, um i just got lost i have no clue what we’re talking about um.

Speaker1:

[44:30] We’re talking about ai and how it affects it hiring and so i was at a large construction company when chad gbt first came out right the first usable semi-generative ai um and what i did is i had a developer on staff on my team um i was over kind of the the help desk like user assistance that sort of thing uh and as soon as he adopted it his productivity went up threefold so i’m like Like, oh, now I’ve got three developers on my team and we accomplished some awesome stuff. You know, we used to spend half a business day just on shipping hardware to people. We cut that down.

Speaker0:

[45:05] Please, I’m fascinated. I want to use this for my team. So how do I get my team to do, please help me. Yeah. Save me.

Speaker1:

[45:11] First of all, you have to understand your business and what you’re doing. Understand your business functions.

Speaker0:

[45:16] Get that.

Speaker1:

[45:17] So, you know, when we spend half a day on shipping, we’re burning half a person, half a FTE. What we did is with his development, We were able to integrate with our shipping provider, ShipStation, to the point where as soon as a laptop was ready to ship, the tickets mark complete, the label prints out, they box it up, slap it on the box, and we just drop it off at the end of the day. There’s no end of the day hemming and hawing about where does this go, where does that go. No manual writing, no guessing what the handwriting says, the laptop going to the wrong spot, none of that. It’s all just ready to go at the end of the day. Someone just drops it off. Easy peasy. And then the time spent shipping went from like four hours to like an hour, right? And then we replicate that through to the point where someone submits a ticket, then a comment gets put on the ticket that’s only visible to the agent with the top few ways that that can get resolved based on our organization, right? So someone says, oh, I can’t log into this service. Oh, make sure you’re checking their password because it’s got a different password than their Windows logon, that sort of thing. Um, so you can put those assists right there. So the agent could say, oh, shoot. Hey, did you do this? And then you take that call from five minutes of troubleshooting to 30 seconds real quick. Um, and we ultimately ended up with a 25% reduction in staff.

Speaker0:

[46:36] Crazy.

Speaker1:

[46:37] Yeah. Because you just don’t need them anymore. It’s automated. The, the back office stuff is gone. You know, like the functionary activities can all be automated. And the concept of that is automate what the agent does, not the agent. No one wants to talk to an AI. They want to talk to Phil. They want to talk to Seth. They want to talk to the listener. The agent doesn’t want to fill out a bunch of forms. So if the AI can do it for them, awesome.

Speaker0:

[47:04] Automate what the agent does. Yeah. Not the agent.

Speaker1:

[47:07] Yeah.

Speaker0:

[47:09] That sounds like a quote. That sounds like we need to do that. Automate what the agent does. Not the agent.

Speaker1:

[47:13] Yeah, exactly. and there’s all sorts of cool tools for it google actually has a really cool one contact center ai um that is awesome um it can go through like pdf documents of knowledge-based articles and it’ll do a screen pop based on what you’re talking about so yeah i think ring central can do it too but um they probably use that solution to be quite honest but yeah you’re on the phone Oh,

Speaker0:

[47:41] They have like a thousand Google APIs out of the box, a thousand is an exaggeration. Um, last piece of advice, things that people should do. Okay. Um, I want to learn, I don’t know, Python react or no. Um, what was the other one? Node.js or something like that. Right. Where am I going on YouTube?

Speaker1:

[48:11] Where are you going on YouTube?

Speaker0:

[48:12] Or do I use chat GBT to find out where to go on YouTube first?

Speaker1:

[48:15] No, no, no. Don’t use ChatGVT. ChatGVT will steer you very wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. So what first thing you need to do, find a project you’re interested in and Google how someone else has done it. It’s the first thing you do. There’s a million plus channels. FreeCodeCamp’s really good too.

Speaker0:

[48:33] Um free code camp love it i’m really selfishly trying to think of what i do with my eight kids and how do i get them to go start watching youtube and you know i’m just going to plan that they fail out of college to begin with so i won’t even do that okay so let’s just plan that they’re failing out of college to begin with and that they’re not failing the two mile run and let’s just send them right to free code camp where else should i send them uh.

Speaker1:

[48:56] Udemy’s got some good stuff um also Also DataCamp, I’ve been using that to brush up on SQL and they have some AIML courses that I’m getting into. So that’s a really good platform. I like it. They start simple, which is the right way to do it with code. You know, you have people get in there. It’s like, well, I can’t make an app within two weeks of learning how to code. So I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s like, no, you got to have, you got to manage those expectations.

Speaker0:

[49:23] Say that again. So what are the expectations?

Speaker1:

[49:26] Uh, that, you know, in two weeks might be able to write a hello world app that shows up on a browser, but the important part is the concept. Don’t just learn how to do something, learn why it works.

Speaker0:

[49:40] Love it. In your opinion, you’ve got eight children and yeah, let’s just, let’s just assume that you’ve got two. I’ve got eight. Again, I’m selfishly thinking here for myself. It’s about me, me, me, me, me. No. Um, yeah. You send them to code camp first or do you send them to, um, I don’t know, basic networking. What’s more important.

Speaker1:

[50:06] Uh, this is in a code camp for sure. Sure. I mean, who

Speaker0:

[50:10] Cares about layer one? Screw that.

Speaker1:

[50:12] Screw that. Well, here’s the thing, right? With networking these days, right? So we use unify here. Um, it’s got a GUI. That’s pretty easy to use. Um, you know, anyone who has any semblance of idea about networking can run a unify shop. Okay. Um, and you know, Cisco has made a lot. I know I gave the GUI some shit because I’m an iOS guy, but, uh, you know, they’ve made great strides. I’ve used Cisco Meraki for like remote offices at a construction firm. It’s great. They do everything for you. You really don’t have to do much with a Meraki. That kind of basic infrastructure is kind of like the electricity and power these days. I mean, you really don’t have to think about it that much once it gets set.

Speaker0:

[50:57] CodeCamp. Free CodeCamp. Anything on Udemy that would have to do with coding, I guess. Datacamp. Love it. Very, very valuable.

Speaker1:

[51:08] Don’t learn Java. Don’t learn .NET. Don’t do it.

Speaker0:

[51:12] It’s kind of like starting out in jiu-jitsu and learning the basics from day one. I’ve had two different… And there’s going to be some Gracie guys out there, some Gracie Baja guys. is going to be like, what are you talking about? You got to learn to shrimp down the mat. You got to. Yeah. Okay. Yes, of course. Yes. However, you don’t need to learn how to do a traditional armbar because everyone has seen that and people see that a mile coming now, you should probably start out with some of the more modern stuff. And I’ve had some really good jujitsu teachers and they say, Hey, look, here’s my philosophy. You’re eventually going to want to learn all this stuff anyways. And everyone already knows that stuff. So why don’t you just learn the new stuff that’s actually working? You got to learn the basics, got to know the basics, right? Yeah, yeah. But you also don’t need to learn, I don’t know, COBOL?

Speaker1:

[52:03] No. Well, unless you work at a bank.

Speaker0:

[52:06] Okay. Sadly. Or hospital, maybe? I don’t know. Let’s think of some other, I don’t know, old library. There’s got to be something.

Speaker1:

[52:17] Hey, assembly is cool, though, because you can actually break out of a Docker container with assembly.

Speaker0:

[52:22] I wouldn’t even know. no, I’m just pretending and saying things that I’ve heard in the past and I’m faking it here until I don’t need to make it because I don’t need to learn that. Right.

Speaker1:

[52:31] Yeah. Right. That’s the way to do it. Or just be the money guy.

Speaker0:

[52:34] Um, final words of wisdom. What’s your teaching moment? What’s your teaching moment for anyone out there? Um, listening, if you had some like unique thing or something like that, or something that someone can walk away with and they’ve listened for an hour and 15 minutes or however long we’ve been talking and they walk away with this one thing at the very last minute? They’re like, you got to listen to every episode all the way to the end. If you don’t, you’re going to miss this one thing. What is it?

Speaker1:

[52:58] Take an interest in your users.

Speaker0:

[53:02] Oh, care about people?

Speaker1:

[53:03] Yeah, care about them.

Speaker0:

[53:04] That’s like a life skill.

Speaker1:

[53:06] No, no, for IT though, you got to understand what they’re doing or else you can’t help them. Because if people stop coming to you with their problems, you’ve failed, right? If someone doesn’t think that you’ll ever comprehend what they’re doing, they’re not going to come to you. So you have to understand what they’re doing. You have to understand what the business does.

Speaker0:

[53:26] I would just love you to like maybe break me down for a second because I think you’d find an insane asylum. Because there’s, oh, there’s episodes in production. Oh, and there’s a website build. Oh, and there’s a community. Oh, and then there’s like, you know, staying, you know, making sure everyone’s connected and bringing everyone together. Oh, then there’s like the, how do we get the consistent message out? It’s, yeah, I feel like it’s never ending, but maybe that’s the point.

Speaker1:

[53:55] That’s the point is organizing your mess right sounds like you need monday.com

Speaker0:

[54:02] Are you being serious are you being serious about monday.com start jerry.

Speaker1:

[54:07] Start monday do click up you know you need some way to manage all this work right

Speaker0:

[54:11] Yeah uh well i well yeah so then okay so now we could go into yeah okay so coda and like the the 100 um no code low code you know know, strapped together, Zapier, let’s see, Asana. Then there’s our CRM. I won’t mention by name that we’ve thought about going to another CRM. And then there’s, you know, I personally, I think we should migrate to a full Microsoft shop now. That’s just me personally, but it’s just, you know, it’s on the roadmap, you know? And what’s interesting is for all the things that we preach and talk about all day long, here I am. I’m now in that situation as a podcast grows and we gather more people. I’m now in the exact situation that we talk about all the time. And maybe I just need a third, a third set of eyes. I need someone to care about what I do in my process. And you know what? It’s not, the answer is not monday.com.

Speaker1:

[55:07] Yeah.

Speaker0:

[55:09] You just, you should go into sales. Oh, the answer is monday.com. Turnkey done. All problems solved. Sign here.

Speaker1:

[55:15] Yeah. you need a way to organize yourself though it could be excel for care i mean it

Speaker0:

[55:21] Absolutely could be it absolutely could be big.

Speaker1:

[55:25] Fan of microsoft planner if you’re on o365 great tool

Speaker0:

[55:28] Microsoft planner let’s do a yeah we should do a youtube of that thank you so much for being on dissecting popular it nerds uh been a pleasure and uh again the it’s it’s all about the end users and connecting discovering responding and finding out really how they do their job and how you can i guess make it easier faster better yeah thank you sir no.

Speaker1:

[56:00] Worries y’all be good