Speaker 0 | 00:00.512
Today on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’re talking about soul-crushing IT with Peter Saliga.
Did I do it right? Oh, yeah. You did it right. I got the last name right. Peter Saliga. And that’s the
sound of soul-crushing IT. How do we get out of it? How are you ever a part of soul-crushing IT
and maintained? What do you learn from that? And I think what we learn is how to not… get
involved in soul-crushing IT, and the more that we persist and fight through life and take on, I’m
a big fan of responsibility. And I have this, the thing that carries the most stress with me in my
life is the fact that I feel really responsible for not letting people down. I don’t know, it’s very,
very, maybe it’s because I have eight kids and I’ve just, you know, I just, I have this, and you
can’t You can’t do everything for everybody all at once. So if you have this really high level of
responsibility where you feel you need to do everything right all the time, I don’t know, there’s
some kind of word for it, like a stress overload or something. When you give your people too
much responsibility that they can’t handle. There’s some, I think some Toyota, Japanese… term
for it, something like that. And there’s got to be some kind of level of balance or something like
this. So I think soul crushing IT comes with a lot in the mid-market space when an IT leader has
so many responsibilities and so many things to balance in this feeling of real imposter syndrome
that no one can avoid, you end up in the soul crushing IT zone. And then if you also have a
politically broken, driven, pecking up to the hierarchy, C-level organization, then you add an
extra layer to the exponential power of soul crushing. And somehow you’re still here. Maybe you
can tell us a story. Sure. I mean, we’re starting off with the glass, definitely glass half full, like
positive mindset today.
Speaker 1 | 02:21.735
Well, well. I’ll say that what I’ve learned in my career is definitely more positive than that start.
Because when you start with that, you can only go up. You can only improve from there.
Speaker 0 | 02:38.729
Oh, that’s a good point. There’s the positivity. See, this is why you have been successful. You
have taken a soul-crushing situation and looked at it in a way that’s like, well, I can only get
better. It can only get better from here. I could quit and just get another job at a better place.
Speaker 1 | 02:57.244
It’s taken me 25 years of working in technology to figure that out.
Speaker 0 | 03:02.568
Oh, I’m at like year 23. So I have something to look forward to in two years from now when I turn
51. I make it. Yeah, keep going.
Speaker 1 | 03:14.698
Yeah, I mean, I’ve I think what you just said about, you know, the feeling. of wanting to try to do
everything, want to try to do everything right. And you couple that with imposter syndrome and
you conjoin that with the fact that when you are an IT leader, there’s a lot of expectations put on
you. And I remember seeing an internet cartoon on one of my coworkers’cubicles at a job. And
it’s a two-frame cartoon. In the top, it’s a… manager running into a cubicle farm yelling ateverybody saying everything’s broken what do i pay you guys for and in the bottom it says
everything’s working fine what do i pay you guys for and with uh with it i think it’s it’s usually one
or the other um there’s usually not this like calm methodical approach um like like you might see
in other disciplines um but uh yeah that’s true
Speaker 0 | 04:18.844
That’s why I used to tell MSPs, like, if you actually do your job for the small business owner
who’s constantly trying to, like, I don’t know, cut your monthly bill by 10 bucks or leave you for
the next MSP that, you know, like, yeah, it’s like when everything’s working, what do we need IT
for, right? Because, like, so you guys need to break some things. Like, can you just break some
things periodically, you know? That would be unethical.
Speaker 1 | 04:41.759
Yep. I’ve seen people do it. I’ve seen people do it.
Speaker 0 | 04:46.303
So. Non soul crushing means you’ve fixed it somehow you’ve fixed the of course My phone
rings in the middle of this and I forget to turn things off. I keep that live Keep that one in there.
Don’t edit that out. So make some more live
Speaker 1 | 05:02.024
This is real.
Speaker 0 | 05:03.484
Here’s what’s real. CrowdStrike and getting killed by that and getting your soul crushed, but you
don’t, but it doesn’t happen if you’ve got, I don’t know, tell me your CrowdStrike story. It’s a good
one.
Speaker 1 | 05:16.551
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 05:17.852
Who’s CrowdStrike? Who is CrowdStrike anyways? What do they do?
Speaker 1 | 05:22.454
CrowdStrike is an EDR vendor, Endpoint Detection and Response, and they provide software
and both. agent-based and cloud-based software that keeps the bad guys away. And because
of the nature of EDR software, they have all the keys to every system that they are installed on.
And so I was on vacation. I remember it was Thursday night because at my company we had a
major launch test operation. I currently work at a rocket company, so we had a major operation
scheduled for the following day, the following evening. And my boss called me up. It was, I think,
9.30. And he said, you need to get online right now. Something major is happening. And as
soon as I did, I started noticing that all of our alerting was going off. And my team was excited.
we were all on a team’s call those of us who still had functional computers and then uh one byone you know we started losing uh our endpoints yep blue screen blue screen left and right and
and the blue screen the blue screen was very kind to uh tell us that there was a crowd strike uh
system file that was the cause of it so it was obvious that it was crowd strike but My first thought
when I see CrowdStrike is causing a blue screen is CrowdStrike has been compromised. And
we have been compromised by some kind of attacker. So we were all kind of in panic mode of
what was going to happen. And we were, excuse me, very fortunately saved by the Twitter
community who started posting, Hey, we’re in New Zealand. Is there any… anybody getting this
error hey we’re in france is anybody getting this error and so big collective sigh of relief as we
realized this was a global problem and not just us uh because global problem to me indicates
you know it’s it still could be a malware thing but it’s not something that we’re being targeted as
and so it’s
Speaker 0 | 07:43.428
step one i mean yeah so step one in um security what was that i’m trying to think of that uh
security imposter syndrome, we’ll just call it that, is check Twitter. Step one. Step two.
Speaker 1 | 07:59.250
Step two.
Speaker 0 | 08:00.851
What the heck is going on? I don’t know. Check Twitter.
Speaker 1 | 08:04.672
At some point, you know.
Speaker 0 | 08:05.533
We know what’s weird is it makes sense. Now we just have to be like 15 AI guys that call us or
are in my LinkedIn box tomorrow like, hey, we got an AI system for checking Twitter and doing
all that. We should do all this. By the way, I’m taking a few minutes to just, I’m going to selfishly
advertise something. We’re building a new IT community specifically exclusive for mid-market IT
leaders. And this would be like a perfect, this would just be a perfect discussion group and like,
you know, CrowdStrike stories and comments and who wants to write a paper on it and lead a
presentation on it and all that type of stuff. This would be great. When the IT brethren. like
yourself see this, it’s, it’s a truly one of a kind of very excited about it. You know, my whole day
was very, very stressful this morning and it is, it has come, it has gotten a lot less stressful just,
just doing the podcast and talking with, talking with the people, the people, the people being you
and, you know, just realizing that, yeah, there’s a. uh how did we start this off uh your soul
doesn’t have to be so soul crushing we can come together we can be together we can be
together we don’t have to be alone i was alone i was alone and stressed out and now i’m not
alone anymore so anyways keep going crowdstrike crowdstrike and how how not to be uh you
How your 25 years of soul crushing, hopefully it wasn’t 25 years of soul crushing IT and all the
failure and learnings and what not to do and everything led to a successful CrowdStrike failure,
failure reinvented, flipped upside down to a success story, which I’m assuming it’s a success
story. Blue screens. Are we getting hacked? Is it this vendor that doesn’t know what the heckthey’re doing? Why would they not put something in a test environment? It’s all planned. And
now we can go to the conspiracy theories of CrowdStrike. And I don’t know, it’s really a
BlackRock thing. I don’t know. Keep going.
Speaker 1 | 10:15.453
yeah so you know we we eventually um that my my team as soon as we saw that it was a crowd
strike thing and soon as we saw it was a global problem uh we had probably 10 or so people
who were online on a team’s meeting at that point and and people started spitballing ideas like
maybe we should try this we should try that we should restore from backup let’s try to get this
back up and running and My suggestion, which I, fortunately, you know, people agreed with it,
was that we should, we should just kind of pause and we should try to call CrowdStrike. You
know, of course, they weren’t responding because they knew they were having an outage, but
that we, we can’t, we couldn’t jump the gun and try to start fixing this ourselves without any real
information. You know, we knew we had a problem. We identified the source of the problem, but
we had no. inkling as to what the solution was. So restoring from backup, who is to say that if
we restore it from backup, it wouldn’t happen again? And if we actually did take that course, it
would have happened again. It would have gone right back to blue screen. So we made the
decision to wait and we tried to do as much as we could in terms of understanding the scope of
the problem. So the team, I work with an amazing team and everybody just kind of immediately
went to their piece. of expertise. So the system engineers kind of went to just looking through
logs and trying to find out what happened. The project managers went through, let’s start
building out a plan for communications. The managers started aggregating information and
everybody just kind of fell into their roles, which was both really helpful and really inspiring to
see that people knew what they should do. And there were little tweaks in direction here and
there, but I think that was the thing that made it immediately not soul-crushing, was everybody
just getting to their job.
Speaker 0 | 12:22.723
Yeah, I’m glad you said that, because I was going to say, this is the soul-inspiring aspect of IT.
So how do you go from soul-crushing to soul-inspiring IT, where your whole team comes
together and supports you? So the question to ask is… And I know the answer to this, but I’m
going to ask you to be open and not worry about, I don’t know if IT leaders, if they don’t promote
themselves enough. I don’t think that IT leaders promote themselves enough because we come
from a zero trust environment and we have trust issues and we have deep. psychological,
whatever the psychological issues that are going on with IT around trust and imposter syndrome
and needing to be exact and solve problems and all of these things, that it prevents many of us,
you would have to tell me if this is an accurate assumption or not, from promoting ourselves
enough. And so my guess here is that the team showed up because of you, not because… uh
the company right people follow people they don’t follow you know logos and companies and i
guess you know there’s probably a couple companies out there where people are like diehard
apple people or something like that you know whatever it is like i work for apple and i love it you
know or microsoft and but i have a lot of friends who work for microsoft and you know it’s it’s
about like you know the community and the team and everything and the people so what have
you learned over time to help build a team that gladly shows up and takes you ownership in theIT success story. Meaning they showed up, they wanted to be successful, they all worked, they
all worked together because of the comradability of your team. Sounds like comradability. Is that
the right word?
Speaker 1 | 14:22.320
Camaraderie. Well, I feel like you just made a new word. Camaraderie and compatibility.
Speaker 0 | 14:28.602
I think it works. Comradability. How do you… Sorry. Someone stole it.
Speaker 1 | 14:35.444
You heard it here first, everyone.
Speaker 0 | 14:38.124
Domain just been bought. How do you do that? How do you build it?
Speaker 1 | 14:44.206
Yeah, I will give my answers that I have right now. But I want to start with saying this is
something that’s probably the biggest area of learning for me through my entire career.
Speaker 0 | 14:59.610
Put in the time, guy. Put in the years of suffering. Suffer for.
Speaker 1 | 15:05.236
I think it’s just, it’s all about the context that you get and you have to be humble through each
step in your career and you have to. You have to learn from your mistakes at your previous jobs.
Anybody who doesn’t do that is never going to improve. And I have had, when I look back, I’ve
had long sections of my career where I did not do that. And I think that the tendency is, I started
my career on the technical side. I was building network cables. I was troubleshooting printers. I
was doing all the quote unquote. frontline work,
Speaker 0 | 15:46.109
the grint work.
Speaker 1 | 15:47.710
And because of that, I still have that knowledge and I still know what it’s like to do that, whereas
some leaders never have that. I think doing the work that you are leading people to do, when
you do that yourself, you don’t have to, but it gives you so much more credibility and it gives you
so much more context that you wouldn’t otherwise have. So for IT leaders out there who have
not
Speaker 0 | 16:14.605
done that you can’t say you know go back in time and build network cables for five years um
well it’s also unrealistic to to to be a an expert in every area like one of the themes that comesup on the show a lot is like it leaders are generalists right like they’re not like the pen tester and
they’re not the data center builder and they’re not the uh windows every version um and mac
and Linux, I don’t know, whatever, you know, operating system, expert system, it’s an
impossibility. But the fact that you’ve done any sort of time in the trenches anywhere means
something.
Speaker 1 | 16:55.044
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And, and I think that the, the challenge as a leader is that you, you
might start being the expert of something, or some set of things. And as you grow, especially if
you like being a generalist. I loved being a generalist. I worked at an MSP for a while. That was
a huge boost in technical knowledge in my career because I got to work on everything. And I
think I developed a lot of confidence that when I got promoted into higher and higher leadership
positions, that turned into arrogance. I thought that what people needed as a leader was for me
to come in there and show them how smart I was at everything so that they would want to be,
quote unquote, be as smart as me. And that was the worst thing I could have done.
Speaker 0 | 17:56.812
The arrogance curve exists for a lot of people that grow in their career and gain success. So
you’ve got this like… I grow, I grow, I grow. Oh, I think I’m awesome. I’m at the top. I think I’m
awesome. Wait, no one’s telling me what they really think about me. Oh, wait, I just found out
what everyone really thinks about me. Oh, I got used by this company. Oh, then I got fired. Oh, I
got to start over. Oh, I’m not that awesome. Oh, the arrogance curve, but I still have the
knowledge that I learned. Is that sound something familiar like that? I mean, I don’t know. You
know, it could be any number of scenarios, but yeah, we should call it the ego arrogance curve
or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 18:45.116
I think the biggest indicator to me was when I started noticing, kind of talking to myself and
saying at the end of every kind of meeting or coaching engagement, I would just have this
thought of. why can’t this person be more like me? And when I look back at that, I just think,
man, no wonder people didn’t like me at the job.
Speaker 0 | 19:10.328
Wow, that’s actually pretty insightful. That’s pretty crazy. Why can’t they be more like me? Why
can’t everyone be like me? That’s pretty scary, actually. We’re going to clone everybody. Grow
the matrix.
Speaker 1 | 19:27.555
And I think that as I… progressed and as I realized that and as I got feedback from you know
people like my wife uh of you know stop treating people like that um I I realized that you know
that’s it is not your job as a leader to make people uh more like you it is your job as a leader to
make people themselves uh and and to help bring out more of that and develop them on where
they want to go. So I think that, that was my biggest breakthrough, which was, you know,
relatively recently, unfortunately, uh,Speaker 0 | 20:09.501
as I’ve got another two years, like we said, I’m 40, my 40, once I hit 50, I might have that break.
Speaker 1 | 20:16.166
I mean, I, I, I think,
Speaker 0 | 20:17.106
why don’t you have a beard? I’m, um, honey.
Speaker 1 | 20:23.609
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 20:23.829
Why aren’t you 49 with a beard? Why aren’t you the, okay, let’s break this down.
Speaker 1 | 20:30.272
And it’s hard.
Speaker 0 | 20:31.492
It’s hard to get down.
Speaker 1 | 20:32.173
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 20:33.593
What are some, let’s help some people not have to go through, uh, 23 years of, um, of soul
crushing. Let’s help some people. Let’s help some people. Let’s help, help, help, help me. Okay.
So give me, what do you think the big deal is? What do you think it is? And when I think of my
own team, I think of some people that are the complete opposite of me. They’re like really good
at what they do. And I’ve had, and I’ve got some people that do the same job. in some aspects,
like sometimes your jobs overlap and you share responsibilities or something like that. And you
might be doing literally the same exact job and you are the completely opposite personalities,
everything. And then when I look at how they do the job, I’m like, oh man, that’s why they were
successful with this person and I wasn’t. Because it’s a different personality, it’s a different
dynamic. outcome might the outcome that being achieved might take a completely different
route the outcome still the same success so i’m really a huge huge believer in teamwork makes
the dream work um but how do we do it give me something yeah
Speaker 1 | 21:53.371
um well like i said i’m still uh i i’m definitely not an expert at this but uh i i can share what i have
Speaker 0 | 22:03.438I guess, yeah, share. How do we step out of that? Why can’t other people be more like me?
Step one.
Speaker 1 | 22:10.102
Yeah. I mean, I think step one is maybe steps one and two are remember that everybody’s a
person for one. You know, take away all the work and everything. It’s very easy to forget that
when somebody leaves. work they go home to their their friends their family their hobbies their
things that don’t define them at work and that that is who they are you know some people
choose to make their career their life but not everybody does that and regardless when they
were five years old they weren’t they weren’t born a system administrator they weren’t born a
network engineer um they they have a humanity under them and and i think that When you don’t
recognize that, like truly internalize that, that is when you start to treat people like tools and not
like people. And no matter what words you use or what tone you use, if you really think that your
employees are a tool, you will not treat them with respect. And they will feel that.
Speaker 0 | 23:24.416
And then you will experience soul crushing. Yep.
Speaker 1 | 23:27.877
Because they will not be there for you.
Speaker 0 | 23:29.717
Soul crushing leadership. Here’s some tips, and let’s just kind of, what do we call this, brain not
working, spitball some ideas around this. Here’s some things that I’ve done that help me not
self-destruct and implode, crashing into the ground. Remind people to remind you. Tell people,
please help me help myself. I’m a crazy person, often ADD. running a million miles of a second,
I have just the same stresses and anxieties. And I realized that you do as well. And that we’re all
trying to do the same thing in life, which is maybe not, not live to work, but work to live and go
back to our families. And we all have different competing priorities and passions and everything.
Maybe sit down and actually ask them why they do this job to begin with, connect to discover,
respond, and find out what they really love and want and what really drives them. Some people
want. money some people want recognition some people want to be a part of something you
know some people just love they just some people love just being this the system admin and
they’re like I don’t ever want to be the in the IT director and it’s probably important to know that
and I have to remind my team constantly please just tell me when I’m being a jerk like for real
like you just got to let me know when I’m too crazy talk me off the cliff please remind me And
then write down little cards that are in the mirror. Like, please, just thank your people for being
there today. Thank your people because you’d never be anywhere without the people that
surround you. Yep. You wouldn’t have clean laundry. This sounds very chauvinistic. You wouldn’t
have clean laundry, Phil, if your wife didn’t do it for you and fold it. I tried folding and she doesn’t
allow that. She doesn’t allow anyone else to fold it. Let me ship that stuff out. Let someone else
do the laundry. I’ll pay for it. No, I must hold this way. You mentioned it’s when we were like, you
know, chit chatting earlier weeks ago that it’s important to be non-threatening. And I think
sometimes the leader or the boss is like, I’m not threatening. What are you talking about? I’mlike, I’m easy going, man. You can come talk to me anytime you want. Open door policy, blah,
But the reality is a lot of people are walking around wanting to do a good job. They want to get
promoted or they don’t want to do their job bad or anything. And as leaders, sometimes we walk
around like, hey, we got to get this done. We got to blah, blah, blah, KPIs and this, that, and
everything else. And I think we might not realize that we’re being threatening. And you
mentioned it’s important to be non-threatening. How do you do that?
Speaker 1 | 26:11.648
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 26:12.388
So bullet point two. Bullet point two. Well, I guess, you know.
Speaker 1 | 26:16.430
be non-threatening yeah yeah um i i think that part of that is recognizing that there there’s part
part of the aspect of being threatening is just inherent in your title um and that’s something that
no matter how many times you tell people so you know in in recent jobs uh people have told me
well you’re a director so people are going to be uncomfortable around you and that just was
baffling to me um but i think that that’s something that you just have to acknowledge you know
somebody who maybe just started in their career if they’re meeting or talking with a director they
might think oh well it’s a director because they don’t know any differently so um just
acknowledging that there may be that starting point of
Speaker 0 | 27:11.047
They would be stupid not to treat you with respect. It would be like meeting the president of the
United States. If you meet the president of the United States, you’re not just like, hey, what’s up,
bro? But it’s the president’s job from a leadership standpoint to make you feel comfortable and
dissolve that. You wouldn’t go up to… You might greet Kim Jong-un a little bit different than the
normal other person. Nah. I’m not making any judgments on any of this. Maybe someone’s
going to psychologically analyze this now. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s kind of the leader’s job to
lower the curtain or whatever that is.
Speaker 1 | 27:53.657
Yep. Yeah. I mean, some of the things that I’ve tried that maybe have worked, maybe they
haven’t, but they haven’t made things worse.
Speaker 0 | 28:02.200
Look, they showed up for CrowdStrike, by the way. They showed up for CrowdStrike, so they
worked. Again, as IT leaders, we need to, because we get stuck kind of in the middle
sometimes, we get stuck between the boardroom table and the IT team that we manage, and
it’s lonely at the top, and that’s why we got to come to the community and all get together and
not be alone, but not be afraid to say, yeah, no, my team was awesome. It was all about them.
And yeah, I have put in 25 years of pain and suffering, but yeah, I know what I’m talking about.So go, keep going. Yeah. So you were about to say like, do this, that this works or asking for
input or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 28:47.515
Yeah. I think small things like starting out meetings with just asking people how they’re doing
and talking to people about. what’d you do this weekend you know how are how are your kids
doing how you know did you did you do anything fun for labor day um and then and then you
know if people are uncomfortable with that sharing stuff about you you know people people will
not feel comfortable being open and vulnerable with you unless you show that to them first so
you know i’ll sometimes start a meeting with hey here’s a here’s a silly picture of one of my kids
of what they did this weekend. Because that says, I’m not just an IT director. I’m a parent. I’m a
partner. I love my kids. These are things that are not work-related about me.
Speaker 0 | 29:40.313
Sorry, guys. Sorry, guys. I just got into a huge fight with my wife because I tried, I don’t know,
folding the clothes or the identity or something. You know what I mean? I’m pretty miserable
today. How do you guys? How was the weekend?
Speaker 1 | 29:55.222
yeah let’s start off with some donuts and burritos um keep going uh doing doing one-on-one
meetings outside of the office uh this is something that i’ve really embraced in the last year go
for a walk somewhere yeah go for a walk with one of your employees and pick there’s there’s
always going to be times when you need to talk about work but pick a one-on-one here and
there where you just don’t talk about work where you leave it completely unstructured there’s no
meeting agenda just go for a walk get a coffee and the conversation goes at an old idea but it’s
great it’s no yeah and and it’s uh it taking both of you out of the work scenario immediately will
remove a stressor and an obstacle between
Speaker 0 | 30:42.042
two people connecting you just made me think we should do some crazy like like i’m my
nickname and i’ve told people people well people my my friends call me pot phil over the top like
so i’m they’re like oh why is it always these extreme examples phil why are you so extreme you
know because like you immediately made me think of like yeah we should do outward bound
and like you know we should you know scale like down this thing and swim across here and
what you know i’m thinking like crazy outside of work, you know, team building extreme.
Speaker 1 | 31:13.835
I mean,
Speaker 0 | 31:14.095
that’s good. And let’s go, you know, this, that, and everything else. You know, let’s take it to the
next level over the top.
Speaker 1 | 31:20.957Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 0 | 31:22.297
And then the last,
Speaker 1 | 31:22.737
I think the, the, the last thing that I can think of off the top of my head is when, when you ask
people, it’s usually not enough to ask people for feedback. Like it’s tons of leaders say, Hey, I’m
open to feedback. Give me some feedback. Tell me how I could. I’ve done this policy man.
Speaker 0 | 31:45.643
Anytime. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 31:47.044
People, people who are already feel threatened or nervous around you for whatever reason are
not going to respond to that. They’re not going to treat that as an invitation. So I’ve found that
when you ask more pointed questions, uh, asking for feedback that you’re more like. to get a
response so rather than saying hey i felt like uh when we had our last one-on-one i was telling
you uh i was trying to tell you what to do did you like that you know people or did that work for
you people might just say well yeah sort of i guess it worked but asking the question of hey
when i came into that meeting i was stressed and i was stressed about this and that and i feel
like i kind of put that stress on you when we were talking is that how you felt Because that’s how
I feel. Or if you say, hey, I was trying to guide you on how to troubleshoot this wireless network,
and it seemed like you weren’t really that interested in what I had to say. If I had asked you what
you had tried first, would that have been a better approach there? Because I was thinking about
that, but maybe I decided not to do that. Would that have been better or would that have been
worse? Yeah. You’re kind of kickstarting the feedback.
Speaker 0 | 33:06.518
process you’re kick-starting the the ability for them to give you the feedback and that can open
the floodgates yeah i did an exercise years ago as i’ve mentioned this on a handful of shows
and i’m just going to rewind it here and say it again because repetition um and reminders breed
execution and the book that everyone should get is uh first break all the rules the the follow-up
books you don’t really need now discover your strengths and all that stuff first break all the rules
you And I took my staff, which back in the day when I was a young leader and probably doing all
kinds of things wrong and creating, you know, gossip chains and whatever. I learned a lot. The
first year was very painful and soul crushing. But towards the end, once you go through all the
soul crushing and sleepless nights and, you know, you know, I don’t know, questioning yourself
and reality and really putting a heavy load of responsibility on yourself, you come to a clarity.
And that’s called growth, by the way. Yeah, no pain, no growth, no pain, no gain, all of that type
of stuff, right? We can all just sit around and just keep doing things as we will. And that’s what
80% of society is. But the top 20% or whatever are going to be on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds,
and they’re the ones that went through the pain and suffering. So congratulations. A big deal. It’s
a really big deal. Super big deal. Huge. Huge. The thing that I did was take that like do that onsteroids, which is you come up with like the questions, like feedback for Phil, right? What’s your
biggest feedback for Phil? What’s your biggest feedback, you know, whatever for blah, blah,
blah, the team and you know, what could he do better? And what are some suggestions for him
to fix? And you put the team in a room with a bunch of papers and pens and you let, you put a
team lead in front of a, and you just let them like brainstorm and. talk trash about you and all the
pain and suffering and everything that you’ve caused them and what they could do better and
where they see the improvement. And then one person types it all up into a… anonymous letter
of delivery, puts it in a vanilla envelope and puts it in your inbox. That’s an eye-opening
experience.
Speaker 1 | 35:23.630
Oh, I’m sure.
Speaker 0 | 35:26.191
Yeah. That is a, no one will hold back anything. No one will hold. If you really want no one to
hold back, get 12 people in a room to talk about you and have someone take notes and deliver
it anonymously.
Speaker 1 | 35:40.620
I think I might need the anonymous airing of grievances.
Speaker 0 | 35:43.961
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a Festivus for the rest of us. And then they have, we need some kind of like it
poll or something. What would we have? Yeah. Yeah. The hub of the hub of grievances. This is
a 10, 100 switch where we all connect. Uh, your input fill is the 10 part. The, the, This has been
beautiful. We had so many things to talk about. We didn’t, but this is more important than what
we’ve just talked about, which is building a team. You know, we had the things like, we should
talk about the, you know, the way to see, to talk with, and, you know, end users is a whole
nother thing. Like, you know, how do we talk with these end users that have literally no
technology? You know, well, we shouldn’t say that. Some of them are smarter than us, but we’ll
never admit it because of, because of whatever that was. Yeah. Imposter syndrome. Let’s finish
with CrowdStrike. We started with CrowdStrike. The crowd has gone on strike. The crowd, the
irony is the crowd has officially gone on strike after the crowd, after the strike, after literally like
the hit, like as in hitting the strike has many meanings, right? Like I struck him. Yeah. They
struck us. We went on strike the crowd. It’s an interesting name. Now that I really think about the
deep psychology of that. What happened? How’d you guys beat it up? How’d you come out on
top? How quickly did the crowd strike you guys? How quickly did the crowd strike you? And
when did you decide to come off striking?
Speaker 1 | 37:22.924
Yeah, well, I will say that we worked. It started around 9.30. We finished all of the
Speaker 0 | 37:33.827
9.30 what? PM California. Oh,Speaker 1 | 37:37.248
sorry. 9, 9, 9 30 Pacific,
Speaker 0 | 37:40.631
9 30 Pacific. 9 30 PST. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 37:43.053
Just beginning our nights.
Speaker 0 | 37:45.075
Uh, I didn’t have an episode of 24. Remember that show? And the 24 just starts ticking. Right.
Right. Crowd strike. An episode of 24. Uh, keep going. Sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 37:55.363
So we, we, um, we wrapped up the final checks of all of our mission critical systems at around
10 AM the next day. So we were about. 12 hours through the night to get to a point where we
were confident that we could proceed with our um our test operations the next day so um give
me a little just tell me a little story like well so what’d you guys do what happened how’d you
bring it back up like how’d we go no blue screen what what yeah yeah so so as soon as uh i
think actually somebody had was playing around with a test system that had been impacted And
they found that if you just deleted the file that was identified in the blue screen, that everything
came back fine. And so we kind of knew that that was an option. And eventually CrowdStrike,
well, a combination of CrowdStrike and the Reddit Twitter community kind of came out with, hey,
this works. So as soon as we found that out, that was when we even, we just pedal to the metal
started working. So, uh… By that point, we had already gotten a manifest of all of the systems
that had been impacted. And we had a shared spreadsheet going so that people could
collaboratively be working on it. We had, thank God, I will say, thank God for people that were
on Macs and Linux systems that weren’t impacted. Because those were our only entry points
into our environment to get in remotely. So the people who fixed our domain controllers were the
people that had Macs and Linux systems. So, lesson learned. Always have a non-Windows
system just in case of emergency. For those people that don’t, you’re at risk.
Speaker 0 | 39:39.438
Or you could take it a step further and have no Windows. Don’t say that to him.
Speaker 1 | 39:45.059
No Windows at all.
Speaker 0 | 39:46.059
He goes dead the next day.
Speaker 1 | 39:50.441
Some places do that. They’re successful.Speaker 0 | 39:53.641
Marketing agencies.
Speaker 1 | 39:55.302
Yes. Yes. Not rocket designers.
Speaker 0 | 39:59.363
Maybe.
Speaker 1 | 39:59.723
We all split up. Our roles, some of us handled communication to the organization to say, Here’s
what’s happening here, the updates. We communicated up to the executives to make sure that
they were aware of what was happening, what our timelines were. And then we just had people
working and we were all kind of once we all started to become zombies in the team session
around, you know, three or four a.m. We we started paging people to wake up. So at the
beginning, we had already staged. Here’s who’s going to be working. And here’s who’s going to
go to sleep right now so that they can wake up in the morning and be ready to pick up. So we
actually specifically chose these are the people that should be working. These are the people
that should be sleeping right now. And so then we paged the people who were sleeping around
4 a.m. And we started doing a handoff of here’s where we are. Here’s what needs to happen.
And that that was the most exciting moment to me was being part of that handoff meeting and
seeing these.
Speaker 0 | 41:03.954
fresh eyes fresh brains coming on and just assimilating all this information and them saying
okay now everybody just go to bed we got i got it i got it i’m out it’s like the long road trip
switching driving seats where we are always in ohio are we in ohio exactly we’re in iowa yeah
iowa so what my computer is not working uh uh uh peter it has been It’s been an absolute
pleasure having you on the show. And I would love to start this long crowd strike. I’d like to go
on strike. Most people are still paying their bills. And congratulations to your success of coming
out of soul-crushing IT to soul-inspiring IT. Because some people don’t ever make it out and
they just leave. And good for them. Maybe they’re in an RV driving around somewhere living the
dream. But we’re still here. And that’s what matters. Yep. Any final words? Any final words of
inspiration?
Speaker 1 | 42:11.075
Yeah. I just I’ll say that the my last job here, the job that I’m in right now, when I interviewed, I
very specifically went into the interview saying I was not going to put on a show because I think
that. One of the contributors to soul-crushing IT is trying to be somebody who you’re not in the
interview to get the job. But then when people expect that, you end up being in a job where you
feel forced to not be yourself. And if you can be bold or risky, or if you want to call it reckless
enough to just be yourself in an interview and not try to put on a show, if they like that, if they
offer you the job.Speaker 0 | 42:56.766
then you know you found a place that likes who you are and they want who you are and then
you don’t have to put on a show and it’s much easier to work when you’re just being yourself
rather than trying to play somebody else yeah living an authentic genuine life is great and that’s
going to trickle down to your people too so then they feel comfortable being being authentic and
genuine as well and i think that might be the whole theme of this whole thing i think you just
nailed it i think you nailed it you be genuine as a leader being genuine and authentic and
vulnerable will allow your people to feel comfortable being genuine and authentic and vulnerable
so that you can all work together as one unit, which they clearly did for you. And it’s a great
story, man. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity Nerds.
Speaker 1 | 43:42.953
Yeah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
