Speaker 0 | 00:01.012
All right. Well, welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Fernando Higuera joining us. Fernando, you’ve got a bit of experience in cloud-native architecture, and then you’ve done some stuff with the AI. So, why don’t you do me a favor and introduce yourself and tell us a little about… what brought you into or what got you excited about technology in the first place?
Speaker 1 | 00:33.945
Sure, I appreciate the introduction and I’m happy to be here with everybody. Well, I mean, it has been a very joyful journey to be an IT. It’s a joy of discovering and making things go, I will say. I started fiddling with things when I was in high school. The very first thing that I put my hands on, it was a soldering gun. Even earlier than that, like at junior high, I had a class dedicated for electronics. We call it mechatronics. So we created circuits. We created different… I mean, we manipulated electronic wars and just…
Speaker 0 | 01:28.032
failing with things like the spark light up sound things like that so because like my education i never had a chance to do any of the true electronics and and even in all of my studies it was more around codeine or or the visual effects versus the actual circuit boards and circuitry and and understanding the flow of electricity and how on and off does everything
Speaker 1 | 01:58.112
Right? Like the ones and zeros, how it starts, those ones and zeros, the logic in this certain board, it was just fantastic. So that piqued my curiosity and I started to fiddle with more things. So the next thing that I put my hands on was the EMV prepaid calling cards. So I don’t know, I don’t think we have them here in America anymore. I grew up in a different country, so that’s what we used to call for our parents to pick us up from school. So just thinking about it, it’s like, all right, I got to put money in this thing. So how can I do something about this so I don’t have to reload it? How can I bypass this system? How can I do, how can I fail with this? So after a couple weeks, and I think it took me a couple of months to iterate and just kind of creating a bypass on the chip, I was able to bypass the money subtraction from the account. So I will insert my calling card and it will say the hack. X number of money, I’ll make a call, and the money will never go out of my account. That’s when my interest was boomed into, like, well, I was able to do this. Then what else can I do? And I started playing around with cell phones. I turned one of those Motorola StarTAC. And for any folks in Motorola, I had the opportunity to work in Motorola for a few months. They’re phenomenal. They have great products, but I fiddled with their systems. I fiddled with their… their cell phone and using the star tag, there was a sequence of codes pressing the buttons and holding some buttons down. I turned a single star tag into a receiving tower so I could receive calls from all their cell phones, listen to those calls, disconnect their calls, do some stuff. I mean, I’m 16 years old, 15, 16, 17. I don’t know what I want to do with this. Oh, they’re not just best with people.
Speaker 0 | 03:54.092
So I look at you and I’m making a few judgments here that you’re on the younger side of where I’m at. I was thinking about it and I can see retirement, whether it’s by financial goal or by age. I wonder, do you know what the term freaking means? D-H-R-E-A-K. Freaking.
Speaker 1 | 04:20.966
No, it’s personal.
Speaker 0 | 04:22.888
So, Freaking is where hacking originated from. So the first hackers, actually what they did was they were using the phone system and they recognized that the touch tones were how the system recognized whether you put money into the payphone or not. And there was certain frequencies. So they learned to blow tones into the phones that would… then recognize the phone would then recognize that money has been added and they could make long distance calls. So the original hackers were called Freakers. And they did almost the exact same thing you did, except that they did it using like a whistle that came from Captain Crunch from the cereal because it blew at the specific megahertz that the phone companies used. So interesting little parallel there. And I wondered whether you knew that history or not.
Speaker 1 | 05:24.982
This is fantastic. I mean, you know, it’s all about curiosity. I think all of us that are in IT, we’re engineers, we’re curious minds, we want to make things go and we want to understand how things work. And that’s what took me from there. So let’s fast forward. I did my undergrad and while I was doing my undergrad, I was freelancing. Around 2006, I started, I landed a project, a very large project to create a RESTful API application or API. with one of the car manufacturers in Latin America. And they asked me, like, hey, we’re just having trouble with our inventory management system. Can you help us? And I mentioned my hands on Java, build this RESTful API, and off we go. And then I started working on some security, authentication and identification systems for a company in Argentina as well. And from there on, I mean, it was just like, this is my field. Interesting enough, while I was in high school, I landed a full-ride scholarship at Berkeley for medical, specifically in the field of neuroscience. That has been kind of like my unicorn. I love to explore how the brain processes information, how we interact, what happens after you present the user or a human data. How do we… Society can only want to know the ones and zeros in our head and how those triggers and those neurons, they just communicate to each other. But I still decided to pursue engineering. It’s an amazing field. It has its ups and downs. It’s as stressful as any other job as well. We’re humans and nothing big part of the stress comes from us humans that we just try to push too hard. Sometimes we just don’t know and we’re afraid of the unknowns. So that took my career to the auto industry. I get to put my hands on creating mobile applications. Then at that point, I moved to the full enterprise world where I get…
Speaker 0 | 07:45.303
Let me jump in for just a second. So 2006, you’re starting to do some of the stuff, the inventory management with an auto manufacturer. 2006 we’re just on the verge of um google coming out with the android phone i think i’ve known was already on scene but it was still in its infancy it was only um the the iphone what two or was it still the the original iphone in 2006. so just kind of perspective yeah iphone 2
Speaker 1 | 08:24.430
Actually, the original iPhone was 2009, and I have one of the original iPhones. It disappeared. I wronged the moves. It was very fun to play with because at the beginning, you had to jailbreak them. So you can use the data on your computers. I had to do that for a couple of times. But you can change the… Those were years. So 2012, that’s when I joined the auto industry, where I started working on it. mobile applications. It wasn’t just, hey, this is web applications. Now we’re moving into building mobile applications. The highlight of that point in my career is I get to work with the brightest minds at Hyundai. They were phenomenal people because they wanted to push the boundaries of, like, hey, this is what an auto experience is today, but we want to go further. How can we go further here. And one of the things that we did together was for the 2013 we we selected a help to select android out of auto for our automobile for their infotainment system there were key benefits for us to use it faster experience from the driver no laggy you can track things around this is before snapdragon was even that a thing on the on this gpos and cpus for infotainments But the most important part for me was like, there has to be a better experience for the driver. So I was merging two concepts, engineering, how do we create this product with user experience? How do we create a great experience for the user, not just from a technical perspective? And the outcome of this is car care. So an ability for a product owner to see the vehicle experience, what it is to have a vehicle, not knowing how to maintain for it, but the vehicle itself, care of the maintenance process. Even the maintenance, it will help you out of schedule. directly in the infotainment system. We created this two-screen experience and we put on the table an augmented reality experience where you can take your phone, they have a car care app, scan your engine and they will tell you, okay, this is the problem right here. You got to replace this air filter.
Speaker 0 | 10:42.092
Yeah, we started to finally, as consumers, we finally started to get those fault codes and the information from the ECM, the whatever version you call it but the engine control module um electronic computer module there’s i’ve heard multiple definitions of it but for us to be able to do that we didn’t have to take it into the technician and have them plug into it exactly and about that time we’re starting to get the bluetooth dongle so we can plug into the obd2 port so even if we don’t have something with with the infotainment system like Hyundai has, now we’re starting to be able to get apps mobile apps on our devices that they can start to scan and get that that information and i started i leveraged that like crazy i see that little light come on i’d like now i want to know more besides just the fact that that little check engine light came on and there were so many times i was able to do the work myself um so so you’re helping make that happen back in 2012.
Speaker 1 | 11:51.327
- So we were just laying the groundwork there. The other work that I did during that time is machine-to-machine communication. Two vehicles talk to each other. Imagine driving down the road and another vehicle that is part of this, I would say, cluster, a mobile network, tells you, like, I’m slowing down. Now it’s happening, right, with Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze. It tells you, like, what’s happening. Tesla took it to the next level, and I remember. for the early years, 2012, 2013, I was in the works with Fisker before they were re-applied. And we talked about this, about like, hey, your vehicle can communicate to the other and say like, hey, there’s traffic down here, so slow down. Or even the sensors in the vehicle can detect like, this is a rough road. So slow down because the path ahead is just terrible road. conditions or so slippery whatever it is most conditions that we can communicate without having to rely on other systems that other than the machines telling us the data and then the vehicles themselves make those decisions for help us make some decisions for us it
Speaker 0 | 13:00.906
was a wild idea um we presented different clients and the market was not ready and i totally understand we were we still don’t have it we still yeah those sensors we’ve got more sensors we’ve got better capabilities, we’ve got more data flowing or the capability for more data to flow through the systems and we still don’t have these things because I’m involved with transportation that’s my my day-to-day job and so you know I remember those early times and in the 2010s and then that realm where we were talking about our trucks being able to talk to the other trucks and use that so that they could like daisy chain that information and get it when we were out in an area that had no cellular coverage that potentially we could talk to another truck that was a little further up the road pass the data into that truck that truck would pass it to the next truck and then finally it gets to a truck that has connected and then it sends it through so you know extending that network at that time so and now that i’m looking at it and
Speaker 1 | 14:11.052
The problems that you’re talking about, like now with the technology that we have, I mean, we can easily do that with very simple IoTs, but if we don’t have that open call ID triangulating the position of those devices and help us to understand where they are, it’s magical how we can make these things happen, right? It’s just the fact that we’re not ready there. We can’t visualize it just yet, and that’s the job of the engineers. help visualize what the future like looks like and that the future ahead of us it’s it’s bright it’s it’s it’s incredible yeah it can be um now when we were doing our our pre-call you mentioned that
Speaker 0 | 14:52.672
you had run into a couple of struggles in your career. And you wanted to bring that out as a talking point. And so let’s talk about that a little bit. Tell me a little bit more of what kind of happened and led to the events in your life that helped change some of your vision of how work or the work environment. And so, please.
Speaker 1 | 15:21.368
Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. Let me take you to 2017. At this point, I moved from auto industry, I moved to telecom, then I moved to consulting. I started early in consulting as a lead for IoT. That was my initial roles. So the IoT practice was not ready yet. So they asked me, is there any other practice they would like to take on? And I took strategic technology services. specifically on e-commerce has been one of the things that I enjoy the most. So that took me on weekly trips all over the American continent, North America and South America, to help one of the largest imaging and digital cameras producers to go from a sensor idea of e-commerce to now here’s how it is fully orchestrated to go from the first we have in Japan. We’re present in those different countries and make that reality. And on top of that, help the business teams manage innovation faster than the traditional waterfall process that they had. I did my exit from there into a small company, which started as five designers, really, like just doing user experience and user interface design. My goal and my role was to build the… development practice, the IT development practice. So we had zero. I was the first engineer and the first leader in the IT department there and I had to grow this team. We landed a couple of clients. One of them was a substantial client in Latin America, Mexico. This client is a leading, it is the leading retailer in the country. We took their digital experience, their e-commerce from from we are high risk concoction SAP high risk concoction. and we brought them into Flutter, so that way we can produce a mobile application that is iOS and Android native without having to manage two different code bases. The cultural difference there is that in some of these countries, people face the harsh reality that payments are not the same as in America. You have an invoice that is net 30, you’re expecting to get that payment net 30. I, at that point, I was managing all these accounts, multiple clients in Latin America, growing IT deliveries in North America as well, and other regions of the world, growing the team. So I had a couple of meetings in Mexico scheduled. This client specifically haven’t paid the bills for over 90 days. We were at the brink of losing our whole development team, because again, this is a practice that I started in Latin America to cover people’s coverage all over. So I got people that were in the bad shape. The client was terrible to work with. I had to manage the relationship. I had to make things work. So I’m sitting on an airplane, Mexico City airport. I couldn’t get out of the plane. My ears are ringing. My mind is in a complete blank. Everybody just de-planned. The stewardess came in and said, hey, sir, you have to do the plane. I don’t remember hearing that. There was just a blank on my mind. The stress of carrying the building of this practice and the people underneath it and just trying to make it happen. And on top of that, be an engineer and then have a personal life on the other end with all the struggles with everything that happens around life. It just took me, it put me out. I was completely out. I remember just me playing, calling a doctor and I went to the doctor. Thankfully my family was in the country and I spent a couple of days just focusing on my mental health. that sort of imbalance of my brain’s ability to receive and create the happiness hormone and then i was running on pure stress um i think it’s um i’m
Speaker 0 | 19:32.899
wondering how many how many hours a day were you putting in at that point and obviously you go ahead i was putting over 12 hours a day sometimes i will put in the 20 hours a day
Speaker 1 | 19:46.736
Just to sleep on the plane. I was flying from Boston to Mexico City, it was a four and a half hours. If I could, I would sleep during the flight. Sometimes I didn’t have time, I just had to put together presentations or work on budgets or something. We had to make the business work. That’s the hard reality that sometimes when you go into leadership, you have to fix it. You don’t see that when you are handsome keyboard and you’re only focused on delivering, but when you are leading this group of people, it’s the people that they trust you that you will do what’s best for them.
Speaker 0 | 20:23.092
and that was an eye-opener for me oh my god yeah yeah because i mean that’s that’s a great point on that because there’s so you were doing that role too you were trying to do coding when you could you’re trying to lead the team you’re trying to manage them help them you’re trying to protect them so that they can focus and spend that time because because developers or co-writers as they’re working. engineers I’m sure too, they get into this mental place where they’re focused and those distractions take away from their productivity and so you’re doing your best to shield them, you’re also trying to do your best to get into that same spot and you’re also trying to sell the products, you’re trying to meet the financial burdens of developing and starting the whole thing. And 20 hours a day. Oh, my gosh. But no wonder you got to that point of just, yeah. And I don’t know about you. I’ve tried to sleep on planes, but but I find myself more tired, even though all I’m doing is sitting. And and, you know, even when I do get some sleep, it’s not restful sleep. It is. Yeah, it’s close to your eyes and just kind of.
Speaker 1 | 21:50.224
checking out for a while but it’s not real sleep absolutely i mean cortisol levels were through the roof in my life oxytocin i mean it was non-existent up to this day it’s not it’s almost non-existent because i mean this is something that one thing happens you don’t bring it you cannot bring it back it’s unfortunate sometimes and it’s case by case right in my case i need to do things different. in order to help my body to regular and to make sure that I don’t go back to the same spot because we’re humans. We’re not meant to live off cortisol. I mean, we have a balance in our system. So that struggle in my life gave me the insight that look, we’re humans and the only thing that that can protect the most is myself. If I’m not doing anything different to you, protect myself and ensure that I’m doing my best, there’s not going to be anything left over that I can use and apply to carry this team. I mean, I’m very passionate about the people that I work with. They don’t work under me. I work with them. I had the privilege to work with them, to be shoulder to shoulder and create the solutions with them. You said it right, I tried to code. I didn’t have enough time. And by the time that you are like putting 20 hours. your brain can think about the solutions you’re just doing starting at the screen and you can’t code anymore you’re just too tired so that brought me to the point of like all right i need to sit out out of this pattern we drew the business to a good position with good point we have a relationships with sap we got relationships with oracle and other big players in the industry and leverage that and just focus on the people to keep the progression and i flip the pyramid, as I normally call it in me, instead of working through all this, show them how to do it and let the people do it. Trust that they will get it. And it’s hard because you want things to move fast and in order for them to move fast, you have to do it yourself. Not really. You have to trust the people. You have to hire people that you can trust. Give me the insights. this whole up here give me the insights of how to hire people the right way how to invest in people the right way what am i looking for when i’m looking for a person that’s going to work with me it’s going to be someone that has the skills but doesn’t have the intelligence um emotional intelligence to take on the battles because i’m going to be the one taking on those battles not the person so i need them to be equal in that area so that way they can move the needle for us as a team
Speaker 0 | 24:47.500
I, you know, I, I honestly ran into a bit of the same challenge that, that change from being the doer to allowing the next generation to do and to try to help enable and empower them to do while I stood at the front trying to take all of the um the only way I can articulate it is take all of the bullets to sit there and to um take the frustration of the consumers of what we’re producing and and be able to capture that, translate that, share that with the team so that the team could then find the solution or create the solution and move forward. But to get out of that mentality of move aside, just let me fix it. And sometimes it is so hard to do that. I’ve met many people in my career that can’t do that, that haven’t, and they get to a ceiling. and they can’t pass that they can’t they can’t go beyond that because they’re they have to have that control over it and learning to let go of that control and then and then finding your happiness in doing that oh
Speaker 1 | 26:10.313
man those are some struggles those are the struggles but at the same time that’s the happy part i mean some of us we learn in the critical way like we learn in the hard way that like oh man i should have done this better um thinking about this strategy arrived my personal strategy to maintain mental well-being in a high pressure environment it takes me in this journey of ai because again all this happened in the mail um we grew the power practice we went through some i went through some of the equity that i had in the company uh of sell it to a different company and just kind of. find my way out so I can focus on the thing that I like the most. In this case, it was AI. I kind of started doing the buzzwords, AI, AI, machine learning, around 2017, 2018. And that’s when I was already into it with a micro startup dedicated to take orders. Think about a small business, right, that they don’t have the budget, the capacity of Starbucks or the big brand to create this right-to-experience. So what if we could create a direct experience that you can call whatever it is, and an AI agent takes your order, you pay for it, then you just show up, pick it up. The idea came in when I was at a coffee shop in Dallas. This person, this lady came in, she was struggling because she had two baby carriers and had a little kid with her, and she was trying to get a cup of coffee. And the struggle wasn’t real. And I’m like, there’s better ways to do this. The strategy here for maintaining mental health and well-being is that I’m in this time to discover my true passion about what I want to do here. And I want to create these new systems, but it’s not all myself that can do that. I need the people. I need teams behind me to support me and to do the things that sometimes I’ve not had enough time to do it, or the things that I cannot do it myself. They can do it with me. So one of the strategies that I empower, it really is to inspire the people. Here’s the thing though, when people feel inspired and doing what they do, they will find, they will dig deeper in themselves, not only to go above and beyond, but they will find their true meaning of the work that they’re doing, and when they find that meaning, it’s an incredible thing to see. I started seeing it with a small team that I brought to build this AI company, so we can start iterating very, very soon. We started with decision trees, then we move into the very first NLPs. So RASA, one of the first items, one of the first SAS that we started using, NLUs, and NLP stands for natural language processing and natural language understanding. In context, ChatGPT, the tool that most of us use, is NLP plus a transformer. So it understands. And then they’re adding another layer of neuro-linguistic. science and processing, so it understands the feelings that you’re trying to communicate and that you’re communicating to the machine. So we’re laying out all these elements to create. But the idea here is, or my approach was to inspire the team. Like, look, I don’t know the answers just yet, but I need you to go with me and research it. I need you to help me research it so we can do this together. That’s the strategy that I took with me in the rest of my roles. I’ve been able to meet. phenomenal developers, some incredible event-driven architects that build this insane systems for enterprise grade solutions, and they just needed a drop of inspiration to go into the wildness and create the systems that are over-reliant. Or another DevOps engineer that I got the opportunity to work with as a manager, phenomenal guy, inspiring him to just look, the future is infrastructure as code. Here’s how we do it. Take the gloves off, do it with them. teach them, show them, inspire them to use technologies and then see this part going and going into their teams and creating the processes. And now we have SREs and IECME and we have fully automation and orchestration of systems and we have developer platforms. You don’t have to create all that myself. It’s the process of inspiring them to push the boundaries, to be shoulder to shoulder of what they can do. It’s not your curriculum. It’s not where you graduated from or the places that you have been. It really is what sparks in your mind and how you make it go from zero to one. It doesn’t matter if it has zero. Just go.
Speaker 0 | 31:07.495
Right. And so I’ve kind of found that, you know, my ability is to be able to see that extra step and that next connection. I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to get from where I’m at today to where what the goal is. But when I can share what the goal is, that usually helps those people that we’re trying to inspire, like you’re talking about. Give them the freedom. Give them the freedom. Try to help give them the education if they need it. Give them the other things so that they can put all of those things together and figure out the true path from A to B. But being able to recognize B and provide that goal for them. It sounds like almost the same thing.
Speaker 1 | 31:58.064
Absolutely. You’re into the same path. I mean, it’s training them, right? Providing, not just telling them, like, this is our goal, because we can create lofty goals. I mean, we are pushed by the boarders to create these insane goals that we need. We call them stretch goals. Wildly, well-achievable goals. If you want to stretch them and achieve the unbelievable, you have to inspire them to reach deeper. And I want to make sure that I’m highlighting this, that reaching deep doesn’t mean that you have to put 80 hours each week, or you have to be working 20 hours a day. It’s not that. It really is just being strategic. Give them tools to learn, to learn files. And when they fail, when people fail, we don’t, as leaders, we don’t tell them like, well, that was wrong. I told you so. It’s okay. Look, we learn one way that doesn’t work. So let’s go and reiterate it. You’re under that. Let’s do it again. So that’s the strategy there. And the other part to keep this balance from a mental perspective is set the boundaries. Like at the end, not even at the end of the day. Like I started a ritual lately that I set on my to-do list. I got different buckets. I call it the connect time. Connect with you, connect with your wife, connect with your kids, your career, and so on. And different buckets that are important to me. Because again, they’re not a to-do list of things to do, but it’s a reminder that at the end of the day, my work to-do list, it’s insane. But if I prioritize… It’s always there. and it’s going to go with that but if you don’t prioritize those connections with the people that matter we run into the situation that we’re going to work and and that’s that’s it so prioritizing what makes you you
Speaker 0 | 34:07.458
i was going to ask go ahead keep going yeah well i was going to ask how how balanced and how do you maintain that balance today because like you know i’ve heard you talk about you exited from the environment that you were in when you found yourself in the back of the plane and just not able to even move and so you took some time to recover from that and then you realize that that this isn’t sustainable so you got away from that environment you found a new inspiration but but we have a tendency to overdo it. We have a tendency to throw ourselves fully into this thing that sparks and impresses us. And those around us, like you’re talking about family, the loved ones, the wife, the kids, the parents, we pass up opportunities to connect. Like you said, you know, the connection time. We pass up those opportunities to be with them because we feel like, oh, I’ve got to stay focused. I’ve got to keep doing this. And how did you learn to set those boundaries? And what were the things that inspired you to start making it okay for you to set that time, that connection time? How did you find that inspiration or how did you give yourself permission? Because I think that’s one of the things that we as technical people struggle with is giving ourselves permission. We get this perception of what we think others expect of us. And so we I struggle to meet that perception that I think that they have. And they’ve never communicated it to me. I’ve never asked about it. And and I have a tendency to overdo it. So how did you find that permission within yourself? How did you become OK with this?
Speaker 1 | 36:10.354
It makes a little bit cliche. Do you remember the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford? from the early
Speaker 0 | 36:21.057
2000s.
Speaker 1 | 36:22.078
That is the great equalizer. So when we find ourselves, I find myself that I miss a couple of my grandparents’ funerals. That is a great equalizer. So at the end of the day, I can work, I can deliver this crazy, amazing stuff, work on AI, work on quantum computing. the boundaries of what we thought about technology, but I’m finite. One day I’m going to die. One day my parents are going to die. One day my wife is going to need me and I’m not there. My kids are going to need me. So that is the great equalizer. That is my permission to say, it’s okay for me to step out and to focus on things that make me better, that make me human. Because if I’m not But okay, if I just keep pushing. 120, 150% all the time, what’s going to happen is everything that makes me a person is going to explode. And then I have to go back and pick all those pieces. And now I’m not able to deliver on what I was brought to do. So now you have to carry the load for me. That’s my permission to say, I’m drawing the line here. I’m going to take care of of myself so I can be better, so I can deliver on what I was brought to. I did that. not only in the next roles, I did that with the AI company. Again, we built an AI company in the property tech. I was able to sell the IP to a company in Israel, exit from there, sit on the board with them. At the same time, it’s like I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t keep being a serial investor and a serial funder and just go for the next idea and keep going. But that would have taken me away from starting a family, having time with my kids. it’s not easy you’re going into the startup world you’re going to burn the candle on both ends for at least five years non-stop and sometimes many times you have nothing to show up for and that’s the sad truth so the company the ideas will always be there ideas will always what we don’t have is us and what we don’t have is the time so we can’t that recover that so see if everybody should give that permission to say like i just need a time for me my time sometimes means like hey for lunch i’m just going to take a quick bike ride i wish it could be outside but if i just have to mount my bike on the back i know that is my time for me to push my mental boundaries and to deconstruct what makes me and push the boundaries so i can come back refresh with a new perspective and hit it and try to solve not only the problems that we had ahead but also be centered. or the people that works with me and that depend on me as well.
Speaker 0 | 39:21.440
Oh, that’s some great advice. And, you know, I’ve learned that it’s important for me to have those breaks and to set those boundaries. But taking those breaks and getting that fresh perspective or at least hitting the pause button long enough to Allow yourself to jump on the bike, to get that exercise, to… stay healthy. And it does, I’ve found that I, you know, it’s that time where those things that are percolating in the back of my mind suddenly gel. And I get some of that inspiration from I’m allowing myself to do that. But I also find joy in being able to say, you know what, eight to five, okay, it’s five o’clock, I’m done. And if I can set it aside. there’s always there’s always an emergency and and and it’s right what’s yeah what’s the real emergency and what’s somebody’s level of stress because you know when i used to manage the help test team directly the uh whatever problem somebody was bringing to us was always the critical thing to them and so for us everything was critical but it’s you know what what
Speaker 1 | 40:47.472
Yeah. You know, Mike, it’s also really reflects into the literature that you work with, because if you are cool collected, you can have good grip of the situation at the same time. But again, all that happens. It’s not just magically. It’s not just like, oh, that’s how he is. We’re all humans. We have the same hormones and we have all the stuff. systems in the arena ourselves that were equal. But when you give yourself that ability to bring your mind out of the problems and just deconstruct it and come back to yourself again, it goes back to the leadership, to other teams, and they know they got it. I got to experience that at HCR with a couple of really hard situations we got out, cybersecurity threats that we had to face. very legal system so i get the calls and i get to communicate to my peers the cfo the coo and then i get to communicate to the board of directors this is what’s happening so again being you have to be called and collect but at the same time understand that if we’re not it’s okay to say we don’t know also like by the way we don’t know just yet but being able to inject itself and know like it’s not the other world we will go get through this they will see that and they will understand like i remember that we had this scenario with a west european hacking group that apollo system and they sent us a payload of like hey this is what we see in your system and i was like it’s not good you shouldn’t be able to see that you should be able to see your code. I said this to the board. I said, like, look, how did I get here? I don’t know yet. But we will find out right now. What we did is we locked every single system down. Our teams are going to be impacted. They’re not going to be able to use the website, discover the website. So please bear with us. We will keep you updated up to the moment that everything is back to the place. And that collectiveness, and again, bringing everybody in, my team’s just shifting from… we’re developing new things too now we’re ground field optimizing help the board to say okay you guys know what you’re doing just keep us updated don’t have don’t feel that you have to rush and do this like every single hour and tell us what’s going on like we trust that you have a good hand in here that’s the point that you want to get because again if we just start jumping into the the man thinks of fire. everybody else is going to be on fire even though they’re not the ones that are dealing directly.
Speaker 0 | 43:49.730
So not only I have found that not only do I have to be okay saying that sometimes I don’t know, I’m learning, I’m figuring it out, we’re working towards a solution. But you mentioned something else that’s highly critical that helps us. maintain that trust that they provide when they say, okay, we understand you don’t know, but work on it, but communicate. Because if I don’t communicate, if my team doesn’t communicate, if we don’t share where we are, even if we have no progress since the last update, because I’ve seen that many of us in the technical fields, If we don’t have progress since our last update, we don’t want to provide a new update. And we’re afraid to say… And they just don’t recognize the progress that they’ve made because back towards the example you gave of failing at something, that’s progress. If I find a way that doesn’t work, I have progressed. I now know not to go that path more. And so, you know, it’s being comfortable with communicating that, okay, we haven’t solved it yet. And these are the five things that we did since our last. discuss it and communicating that because so many teams don’t want to they don’t want to communicate when they haven’t succeeded and and they think that success is only meaning not making progress you
Speaker 1 | 45:35.887
are spot on in there and I wanted to augment that message adding that the analogy of a faucet so communication is just water that is running but the trust in your team is the spigot in the faucet that allows you to how much water flows. So the more trust that you have and your team has, the higher your flow of communication will have, the better quality of communication. So again, it’s about the trust that you have in your teams and they have to be like, not just told, I trust you because sometimes that implies an extra overwhelming sensation like, oh man, I need to do better. truly trusting them right like giving them those degrees of freedom that they need to do the work and if they fail it’s okay to fail like that would just start that wasn’t the right way it’s it’s the trust and the communication because if they they trust you and you trust them you will have the perfectly there the right amount of communication that you need to to communicate to the rest of the industry so if you think about like oh i’m just a single just um I don’t know, like an IT help desk person, and my work is not leadership, I’m not changing posts or anything. But the level of trust that you have with your manager and your other peers, that reflects exponentially when it goes up the way to the chain and the rest of the organization, because now that trust allows us to have the right information that we need to make the right decisions and act fast or not, and impacts the rest of the company. So yes, every person is important. And that may sound like a cliche. but every single one of them is important and that’s the communication that I think technology companies can better help the people understand. And we as leaders, we need to make sure not just talk it, but walk it. Walk the line, walk what you say and demonstrate that you really trust your teams, build that trust.
Speaker 0 | 47:39.020
Yeah, because as I build that trust or as we build that trust, they…
Speaker 1 | 47:44.104
feel more comfortable and then they they’re okay with saying hey we’ve done these we’ve made this progress but we haven’t crossed the finish line yet exactly and i think that’s when we can either two concepts here of mental health with what can we do as i.t companies to support for employees mental state it really is that that part i mean we don’t need the fancy coffee machines or the coffee shops in the lobby. We don’t need to have lunch every day. Those are great. I mean, that’s fun. But what people care the most is that freedom, degrees of freedom, the trust, the ability to know like, hey, I’m inspired. They trust what I say. Like if I have an idea, my idea matters. My idea counts. I’m not just another number in Excel. So leaders, I think we need to start flipping the paradigm and don’t lead with a spreadsheet. lead with your heart because people are seeing that. I remember hearing that from a good friend of mine. It’s like, we gotta lead away from the spreadsheets and lead with the heart. That’s the message for the tech companies and non-tech companies. Like, if we talk about mental health, you don’t have to get them this crazy expensive mental health plans and systems and give them… and be afraid every day that they can do X, Y, or Z. What people really, really want is to be able to do their work, be effective and efficient, whether it is from home, from car control, whatever it is, just let them do the work, trust that they’re doing the work. And of course, if they’re not doing it, they will find out. They will find a way to normalize this.
Speaker 0 | 49:34.276
It becomes obvious and more obvious than a lot of people like to think. Do you have any thoughts or resources that people can look at? So if there’s somebody out there listening to our discussion today and they’re feeling that stress or feeling that lack of the, what did you say it was, the oxytocin. And if they’re struggling with that, where would you suggest that they start? Because, you know, I’ve had my struggles and I’ve been through my struggles. Where did you start besides? If you saw a junior member of your team struggling and you could recognize it because of your experiences, how would you start to have that discussion with them? Where would you point them for resources?
Speaker 1 | 50:39.067
The first thing that I will do is let’s go for a walk. Take them away from this tracer. Let’s go for a walk. Or if they are remote, I will tell them, like, look, life is messy. Go walk. Go take a walk. Do something different from work. Work will be here. It’s a moment. Reach. Then I will tell them, go watch some Ted Lesnar. You need some Ted Lesnar in your life. You need a positivity to help bring a little bit of balance back into yourself and others, like the Apple, Android, and whatnot. The idea is finding your positive self, because if you don’t find a positive self, everything will continue to be negative, negative. And then you kind of continue to slip. And the further you go, the more difficult it is to come back. And lastly, I always point them to understand how your mind works. There’s a lot of good system material on edX and Coursera that talks about psychology. There’s a good course from Harvard. the psychology of happiness very very very powerful message about like understanding what goes behind your brain that triggers those happy moments and how you can harness partners them in your life to make a change for good in the areas that you want so i always point them to those uh that is specific course in the last one it really is one one um documentary that I saw is a Jiro sushi of dreams of sushi, which is this person that is like very old. I think it’s like 80, 90 years old, Japanese sushi maker, an amazing craft man. After you find yourself again, back into your craft, find what makes you happy. If technology is not what makes you happy, pursue what makes you happy. Because ultimately, like if you’re not happy in this field, What does it matter the salary that you receive? You’re just being, you’re giving it away to someone else. You’re giving it away to medicines and other stuff. Find a happy moment for you. Few people that I had the opportunity to do this type of conversations, someone that they left the field, someone that they still in the field, and that’s okay. If you need to leave the field, not a big deal. There’s many other things that are as good as creating new technology. Like if you can build a home from the ground up.
Speaker 0 | 53:12.026
more power to you i can do that i can barely put together a picture on the walls so yeah you know in my industry we we’ve got the uh the guys that work on the trucks and the mechanics and they look at us and as the technology people and they’re like oh i can’t do all of that stuff with computers and i and i looked at them and i go i have the same level of respect for you because there is no way i can rebuild an engine like you’re doing let alone you know the the huge diesel and so you know and yeah that expertise and and that the thing that feeds your soul eat your soul exactly be
Speaker 1 | 53:55.439
back to yourself again let’s um think about like when you when you were eight years old what were you dreaming about and try to make a little person and he’s doing it or i wanted to be an astronaut but my announcement not really building cool stuff so that my eight-year-old self looks at me and like he’s building some cool stuff in there so that’s that’s kind of cool that’s not what i will i think that’s my my advice to everybody again just find a moment to breathe get back to yourself whatever it is if you need to go for a walk keeping it to up. go on a bike ride or just listen to some tunes. Find another closet, listen to some tunes, just get yourself into. get yourself out of the distressors and into yourself again and find the positivity on your craft and push forward be be um curious on where you can go really
Speaker 0 | 55:01.967
and and be okay with being happy it’s give yourself permission to do that and um because you know i i just i Always found myself pushing trying to meet others needs versus my own and always pushing putting other people’s priorities ahead of mine and And now that I’ve finally gotten to that point in my life where I’m like, no It’s my turn my side with and Why not find that thing that feeds the soul gives you brings you joy?
Speaker 1 | 55:40.588
You know what? I’m also kind of see an opportunity for AI to expand into that area. I think many more companies are looking into AI, as mentioned, charging defects and also combination of transformers with language processing and understanding. But now science is helping us to understand what goes behind the mind and then we can convert those ideas into algorithms that we can use into the the system. Another good class for those listening is MIT’s class on algorithms. I took that class a few months ago and it helps you look into life and everything that happens and create those algorithms of how things work. If you are into math and if you’re into the patterns of things, I think my specific pattern is the theory of chaos. Even when we think it’s pure chaos, it seems random, it seems disconnected. It’s chaos. There’s a pattern, there’s an algorithm behind it that makes it happen. So what I’ve added here is that I think AI is heading into that area of society. Many people need a way to express what’s going on in their minds. They need to have that opportunity to communicate without… overburden others. One practice that I did is before I talk to someone about like, hey, this is bothering me, is I ask them, do you have the mental bandwidth to talk today? Because if I just got to start asking what’s going on with me and the other person doesn’t have the bandwidth, all that I’m doing is just creating that friction. But AI has ability, right? I mean, it’s scalable, it’s elastic, doesn’t have feelings, but understands those feelings and can help us communicate. the potential impact on society that AI has is do we want to use them? Do we want to use them just to answer specific questions? Do we want to use them to do the job of other people? I don’t think AI is going to replace the jobs. It’s helping us to augment our capacities to do what we do best. We are the ones that put a man on the moon. We are the ones that build those rockets to go back and forth. Not AI, not machine learning. We use those tools. Those are our tools and our trade to make that happen. So use that AI as a society in areas that we’re exploring. We’re trying to upload some of the human part of us and just help me communicate. Like if I need to vent out, get out to the AI and tell them what’s going on in your mind. It’s just going to tell them like, hey, thank you or whatever it is. It’s going to analyze it and tell you like, maybe you need to go for a bike ride. Maybe you need to go on a walk. It’s not a quick design.
Speaker 0 | 58:40.278
Interesting. I had never thought of leveraging the large language models to do something like that. It’s a very interesting thought. I may have to try a couple of those queer needs or those prompts and see what the results are.
Speaker 1 | 58:58.245
There’s many companies, like mental health companies, that are invested heavily in Gen AI agents because they know we don’t have enough psychologists. and psychiatrists to have those conversations with people. We’re living in a time where we are stressed out on math, political, economic speaking, you name it. There’s any number of cases that stress us. So we have limited resources. When we train and we use AI to help us understand, I think as a society, we could have a better outlook. Because again, we’re penting up. This is all pent up. anger that keeps building and building and building. And if we are able, if we make AI even more accessible at those levels for mental health, then we could start seeing things de-escalating into more manageable situations.
Speaker 0 | 60:02.966
Wow. Okay. Again, another really interesting way of leveraging it. I didn’t know that they were… that they were working on those things and looking into that and doing that. I do see how AI would be better able to recognize more of those patterns inside of that chaos, because to the majority of us that looks like a lot of chaos, and to find the patterns in there is very interesting. What other, so here’s the moment for you to spotlight more around you in your career or anything else that you want to bring to the spotlight. Tell us, is there anything that you want to highlight and to bring to the audience’s attention?
Speaker 1 | 60:52.948
I think it’s for me, it’s more about helping the audience to also connect at that point of like, Hey, I went, I’m going through that or similar case, right? Like I see this as a, as an opportunity to break the traditional of like Here are the problems in tech, here’s the old technology, how we struggle with that, rather than where the humans behind the technology. Here’s our struggles in life. Things that I would like to bring to the spotlight again, I think we touch base on that is, give yourself permission to do things differently. If you give an opportunity to lead people, take that opportunity to inspire them. people to really create that inspiration for them and find ways to communicate that. It’s not about lying, but it really is about using the right words to create this goosebumps type of feeling in everybody that what we’re doing as a team is a significant impact in the future. It’s not just generating revenue for an organization. We’re changing things. We’re doing history. in some cases and anywhere. Like really, like if you think about it, like, well, I’m migrating from very old system. I’m migrating from Java 13 to Java 19 or Java 20. What could you do? Nothing really amazing about that. But if you peel the onion and start thinking about that, it’s like, we’re making our lives a lot easier. Java 13 is our only life cycle support. Now we’re going to Java 20. We can do better things faster. We can X, Y, or Z, right? It’s those moments that help us to stay on our toes, to stay nimble and to keep putting ourselves forward. For those listening, how can we keep our momentum going, our ideas? How do you take an idea of AI and build it? Who taught you that? Nobody. I didn’t have a mentor. I became my own mentor. it became my own self myself and tell myself like okay great now how are you going to build it how you’re going to make it happen you don’t have to have a mentor to have an idea and to build it if you have an idea for a startup company or something that you want to put together do it put it together you never know like your idea may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but if you’re waiting for validation from someone else to tell you that that’s not happening you’re competing against hundreds of thousands and millions trying to do the same so the space is saturated just execute it don’t don’t put together don’t spend your time index trying to sell the idea of the value put it in code build it up if it fails and
Speaker 0 | 63:49.280
you know that there’s that that wasn’t the way try it again and keep learning keep learning keep making progress like we like we’ve been talking about it’s not the success it’s the progress and
Speaker 1 | 64:03.876
Our journey is not over until we give our last breath. We still have a journey ahead of us. So keep sitting and look, stay hungry, find new ways to learn. For me right now has been quantum computing. AI is at its apex. Everybody’s talking about AI. Every company is trying to invest in AI. They don’t know how to leverage AI in so many cases. We don’t know yet either. We know that it’s a tool that we have at our disposition. It’s not to replace people. I want to make sure that we… communicate it clear. AI is not going to replace people. It’s going to help us do better work, faster and more efficient, but for the rest of us, in the next boundary, the next challenge. So today is AI. What’s it going to be tomorrow? I believe that quantum is going to be the next leap that we will take. We don’t know yet because the science behind quantum is too hard to comprehend. But as we are learning more about it and we’re making… we’re streamlining it and we’re making it more accessible to everybody, then the minds are going to start connecting the dots about like, oh, so now we can use qubits instead of ones and zeros to do better calculations on the possible outcomes. We can start creating better models to train our LLL Gen AI application because now we can train it on the positive and negative and in between.
Speaker 0 | 65:39.440
the great the grayscales what happens wow that is uh to consume but it is to me very interesting i mean i i love the thoughts and the way that you’re approaching this you know i i still think that we’ve got so much room to grow or so many ways that we can leverage that machine learning that ai and to do things, but the way that I look at it is of ways to take away the mundane. Let it handle the mundane for us so that I can go investigate those new interesting things. And the thought of giving it the, you know, now I’m starting to try to blend AI and quantum. And what kind of thoughts will AI come up with when we start giving it quantum? capabilities and what will we come up with when we start really leveraging that quantum capability. It’s still an exciting world. We have not run out of ideas and things to do.
Speaker 1 | 66:59.549
It’s a great equalizer when we think about the possibilities of quantum of what it could do. A quick example that I… put my hands on. I mean, Fortune 500 company, we got millions of customers and our code, it had to search for a specific pricing, contract pricing that we had for every customer. So all that it, we should send thousands of lines to our searching engine per customer. So think about it like there’s a hundred thousand lines of code for Mike, that’s another hundred with us now. hundred thousand lines of codes for me and and so on and we’ve got customers exactly the ability of quantum that can do is you tell them that this is the logic mapping the in into the quantum um mapping into the circuit this is the logic that we follow now you tell me what are going to be the different outcomes so it outpours the different results of like hey this product or for you is $900, for me is $800. Now it just outputs everything based on every single customer that we have on using the circuit and the different qubits and just, again, we went for this POC. It’s something that I took it personally and it’s just kind of creating this inside out and we start applying it in real life. I mean, it’s just a POC. Can we push it to production and then see how it starts performing because we were talking about like sub-second search now i mean we went from seconds to now sub seconds given the power of quantum to be yes no and in between very interesting um final thoughts fernando uh final process for all of us to stay stay hungry I know that there’s, we have very limited times, but I’m happy to take more conversations with anybody interested in the fields that I work on. Again, it’s information, changing the idea of this is what we have today. We don’t know where we want to go. Can somebody show us how to go forward? Always happy to set the pace there and building the next generation of leaders. Again, leadership is not about commanding. It’s about standing with the people, with you, and being hands-on and going the miles with them. the very last thing is find your happy place find your happy self make sure that you look into that eight-year-old of yourself and when he sees your life he’s like that’s quite the life that’s quite the stuff that he has been doing or she has been doing right
Speaker 0 | 69:58.472
on i love that message there too because i you know i in all honesty i haven’t looked back and talked to that eight-year-old and i need to find him and i need to dig a little deeper to find out what he thinks of where where we’ve ended up today.
Speaker 1 | 70:14.681
Like a ice cream. You’re all taking for an ice cream. I appreciate it.
Speaker 0 | 70:23.843
That sounds like a great idea. What ways can our listeners find you? How can they get in touch with you if they really want to find you and get in touch?
Speaker 1 | 70:36.026
Yeah, of course. I’m the most active on LinkedIn. It’s all published. many posts or articles, but when it comes to one-on-one conversations, I’m very active on LinkedIn. I also have my personal, like, through LinkedIn, they can find my personal email and keep the conversation going. And from there on, I mean, I think we have created some good relationships throughout the years from that network. Sometimes I will post something on X or Twitter, but not really. And if someone is very interested to see, hey, what does your normal life look like? I’m always on Instagram, too. I look at what chaos my kids get into. Okay. And I enjoy getting into the scope with them.
Speaker 0 | 71:26.463
All right. Well, we’ll make sure to share that LinkedIn profile with everybody. And, you know, we’re actually starting up a whole new environment trying to get. digital leaders like ourselves together and to have more of these conversations. And so I’d love for you to join that, any of the listeners out there to join that and take a look for it. What it is, is digital-transformation-leaders.circle.so. And so DTO, Digital Transformation Leaders. And we’re just trying to build a community for us to talk to us. And You mentioned a couple of other things that are really important like that mentorship because you had to become your own mentor. I’ve had to become my own mentor. We’ve had that experience. We can now share that experience with others. And you know what? That’s one of the things that helps me smile and makes me happy. It’s providing that chance to one, let them learn from my mistakes or to help, hopefully help them. from hurting themselves learning the same things that i did um so absolutely i think that they um what is it called the fireside chats or the bonfire chats yeah fireside
Speaker 1 | 72:51.745
chats uh they’re they’re amazing because again we don’t have to talk about all the technical situations that are going on in our lives just on you talk about being human it’s it’s okay to be human we’re where the people we find those people. scenarios and technologies and systems.
Speaker 0 | 73:09.999
Yeah. And that’s one of the things that I loved about dissecting popular IT nerds because I found my community that I could talk to technical stuff and they recognize the human that’s doing these things too. Because, you know, I’ve talked about it multiple times before. I start talking about technology, my wife’s eyes glaze over. I start talking to her about the politics. the challenges that I face with employee management and working with the executive team, then, then she lights up. She’s in on that. But when I start telling her about the zeros and ones and quantum and AI, she doesn’t, she’s not in for those parts of the conversation. So
Speaker 1 | 73:53.707
I think that my wife, when she tells me about the medical field, she’s in the medical field and tells me about like surgeries and stuff. I’m like, That sounds fantastic. I don’t know what’s going on. Some of those muscle names and nerves and whatever they are, I don’t have to even pronounce them, but that sounds amazing.
Speaker 0 | 74:14.626
I don’t quite catch what you’re trying to tell me. What are the nuances of dealing with that nerve bundle and those muscles when they were doing that surgery?
Speaker 1 | 74:25.155
I pick English and Spanish, but whatever you were talking about right now, I don’t know. Probably his last name.
Speaker 0 | 74:33.402
Oh, man. Well, thank you very much for your time today.
Speaker 1 | 74:36.507
Appreciate the time. Great conversation. Again, happy to continue this, to fire such a chance. I think that’s one thing that helps us a lot. Just bring the human side to you. Well, what’s the struggles? We’re here together. We’re nerds. We look after each other.
Speaker 0 | 74:56.069
Right on. Well, thank you very much again. We’ll send you that information for the the YouTube and be in touch with you soon. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 | 75:07.493
Thank you, Mike. Have a great day.
Speaker 0 | 75:09.471
You too, sir
