Speaker 0 | 00:09.628

All right. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Joe Scott on the line. We’re doing this live now, but you’re probably going to hear it later because we’re recording this. But Joe’s IT manager at BMT. Joe, welcome to the show, man. And we’ve had literally probably… like 60 seconds to talk. So we’re going to wing this as much as we can here, which is honestly maybe a lot of times how end users expect IT to work. Can I just stop by the desk and can you make my stuff work?

Speaker 1 | 00:44.350

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 00:45.191

Do you ever run into that? I’m just curious. Some people call it. All the time.

Speaker 1 | 00:48.092

We call it, well, we call them the lurkers. They’re usually lurkers.

Speaker 0 | 00:54.735

Wait, did you say they’re lurkers? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 00:57.208

Because you know they’re gonna ask something and in my office I have a window so they kind of peek in the window and kind of hang around. And if I’m on the phone, they’ll still stay there so you know they’re itching for something. And then it usually turns out to be, you know, my mouse is broken.

Speaker 0 | 01:15.425

Man, why is it always the mouse? I mean, really, it’s like, guy. I’m pretty sure we can expense that down at OfficeMax. I’m just kidding. You do not want them doing that. That’s like a shadow IT mouse thing. But hey, man, before we get into this thing, since this is kind of an IT leadership thing, there’s a couple questions, themes that have been popping up lately. But give me a little bit of a background, man. How did you get started in this craziness?

Speaker 1 | 01:46.563

Well, I was You know, I initially went to college to be a history teacher, and that’s what I always thought I’d do. But first of all,

Speaker 0 | 01:56.968

this is great, okay? Because I started off pre-med. I was a chemistry major, and I ended up going into creative writing, and now I’m in technology. But I did minor in history. So, you know, why history?

Speaker 1 | 02:12.952

You know, in high school, I felt like it was the only thing I really enjoyed. So I said, okay, well, I got to pick something. So let’s go with this and see what happens.

Speaker 0 | 02:24.855

Let me ask you this. Was it the subject that you got the highest grade in?

Speaker 1 | 02:28.976

It wasn’t. I did well with it, but it wasn’t the subject that I did the best at. I actually did better at English, which I was very surprised.

Speaker 0 | 02:40.700

Wow. And now we’re in technology. I only said that because I have to, this is my day today. I have to go in the afternoon to take my daughter to get her driver’s permit. And, you know, the teacher’s like, well, congratulations, you got a 95 on your test. You only got one wrong. She’s like, dad, I got a 95 on my test. I was like, of course you did. Because you want to drive. Like you really want to do that. It’s exciting. You know, you want to go. get your license you remember back when like driving was like now i’m just like you can drive me wherever you want that’s fine i want a personal driver you know right yeah um but you know there’s something to that so anyways um history in uh

Speaker 1 | 03:23.078

history how’d you get into like technology you fall into it like a lot of people obviously i always i kind of fell in love with computers in the 90s i’m a child of the 90s and um it was gaming back then that drove drove my curiosity into computers.

Speaker 0 | 03:40.669

Now, let’s expand on that, just because this is always fun and exciting. Sure. You know, what was gaming in the 90s? Was it Dune? What was that other crazy, like, weird Wolfenstein 3D? What was it?

Speaker 1 | 03:57.496

So for gaming for me in the 90s was twofold. You had the console era, but you also had computers. And the computer gaming was… like Ultima Online, Boulder Games, things like those types of things.

Speaker 0 | 04:14.824

Ultima Online was crazy. Yeah. You know why? Have you looked up why that blew up? Like why they failed?

Speaker 1 | 04:22.788

No, I didn’t.

Speaker 0 | 04:25.069

It’s pretty crazy because Ultima, you had the first Ultima series. You had like all the Ultimas, Ultima 8, and then like part one, part two, Ultima 9, like, you know. And then they had the Ultima Online, which they did… which was actually way ahead of its time, right? Because it was like live gaming and you could go and like kill animals and stuff. But they kind of like World of Warcraft where you could like slaughter, like, you know, you go out and just collect gold. People would go, I guess, I guess just like kill the animals. And somehow in, I guess the animals like would reproduce or something in the game. I can’t remember what it was, but basically humans broke the system. Like they used the game in a way that the coders and the software developers didn’t think that humans would use it. And they broke it.

Speaker 1 | 05:12.353

Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I think we enjoyed as teenagers. We found ways to break the game and hack the game and do things that it wasn’t intended to do. And especially with EverQuest and those games like that. And it was so much fun just trying to circumvent the things. Obviously, we know, you know, today that’s too proud to come. It was just back then, you know, we didn’t know any better. We just really thought it was cool to do stuff like that. My one friend was really into coding. You know, we were just kids.

Speaker 0 | 05:43.481

It’s still cool to do that. Yes. Just so you know. And I didn’t realize it until I was speaking. And this is probably the third episode. Again, I’m going to say this again. But I was really shocked that my nephew knew about DDoS attacks and everything. I’m like, how do you know about that? Like, what are you doing? He’s like, because we’ll be playing on Xbox. And like my team’s like… We’re really good. And then another team will get mad that we’re winning in some game room or something. So they’ll start sending DDoS attacks on our home IP addresses to shut us down.

Speaker 1 | 06:11.789

Awesome.

Speaker 0 | 06:13.809

Isn’t that crazy? It is. I don’t know if people were doing that back then.

Speaker 1 | 06:17.550

No, not then. It was just a dial-up. You were lucky if you were able to get online. The only person that really got you was mom and dad when they wanted to use the phone. Who’s on the line? Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 06:29.534

What was it? Yeah, that’s… That’s… What was your first computer?

Speaker 1 | 06:36.073

I will never forget it. I had a Cyrix PR-166. And at that time, Cyrix chips were at the top of the line, and they were safe all summer for it. And also at that time, the way to get computers was you go to the computer shows. And we’d go there, and we’d pick carts and build it up and break things. Because all I wanted was to be able to run Tomb Raider 2. So, uh, we, I got that Cyrix chip and, uh, that was a kind of a custom built, uh, built chip.

Speaker 0 | 07:10.640

That, you know, that was just fun. That was that kind of like the exciting time, you know, now you can kind of just, you can kind of just buy your, your, your gaming. I mean, you can still build a computer, but you don’t have like the same problems that we used to have, like memory.

Speaker 1 | 07:24.250

Right.

Speaker 0 | 07:25.390

Like moving, moving memory around to make a game load, you know, something like that. Um. So I see on your profile you’ve got engineer, United States Marine Corps. What’s that all about? So, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 07:40.466

in between college, I decided it was a good idea to join the Marines. I was a little bit unsure of what I wanted to do in college, and I signed up. And I was an engineer in the Marines for four or five years there.

Speaker 0 | 07:57.813

Now, when you say engineer, it’s such a broad term. What were you engineering?

Speaker 1 | 08:02.419

So it’s mostly common in your basically what we do in short time we blow up stuff. Work with C4, buy-ins, things like that.

Speaker 0 | 08:10.746

That actually sounds like fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 08:13.828

It is fun to a certain extent, but it does take a toll on the old body. After a while, your ears can only take so much.

Speaker 0 | 08:25.478

I mean, unless of course there’s like a lot of, you know, I guess it depends on what we’re blowing up. But, okay. So what was kind of like the turning point? At what point were you, at what point did you say, you know, I’m making a career out of this? Was it, did you kind of just?

Speaker 1 | 08:42.836

It was in the Marines because I ended up fixing systems when we were out in the field and we were deployed. I ended up fixing computers while we were out there. I was like, I kind of like this. And that was kind of the thing. Okay, wait a minute. Well, maybe why not do something that I like? So after that, I, you know. decided to when I got out of the site to pursue that as my career.

Speaker 0 | 09:06.066

Okay, gotcha. And so you’re IT manager now. What’s, what’s your team look like?

Speaker 1 | 09:12.210

So I’ve got about three developers, about four AWS engineers, and a couple compliance guys. And, you know, that’s, that’s about it. We’re not not a huge shop, but we have enough.

Speaker 0 | 09:31.363

And so you got about, you know, nine guys. We include software. They’re humans too. What do we, how many end users?

Speaker 1 | 09:42.429

So we’ve got about 300 or so in our company here. But we also support a lot of clients in their infrastructure. That’s mostly what our AWS team does. Got it.

Speaker 0 | 09:59.078

And as… I, you know, of all the IT directors, IT managers, kind of IT leadership in general, that I… talk with on a daily basis. The average ratio of technology personnel to end users is, from what I have yet to see, it be less than one to a hundred. Let’s just put it that way. So there’s about one IT person to a hundred end users. And with technology in general growing at the pace that it is, you’re responsible for… so many things. I mean, so many devices are connected to the internet, just technology in general, even if you bring in manufacturing, now you’ve got all kinds of other things that are involved. And you guys are, I mean, you guys are in, you know, consulting where you’re at right now. Is that, what would you say as a, as an IT leader growing up right now in the space, what’s your single biggest challenge? And I guess, how do you combat that? What do you think? Across the board, what is every IT director’s single biggest challenge and or frustration? I would say there’s four or five.

Speaker 1 | 11:10.250

Yeah, well, I would say the number one is, well, specific technology concerns. And specifically, I mean, security. That’s number one. How do you secure your environment? That’s what keeps us up at night. And then number two would be is, you know, how do you… best make use of your time because by then you have huge dinos, you’re wearing many hats and you’re doing more than just what your role is defined. So those are my two, at least for me and my environment, my two biggest things. As well as all that bottles up into staying within a budget that’s appropriate to the powers that be.

Speaker 0 | 12:02.997

and let’s just talk about the time piece, for example. What do you delegate? I’m kind of like on this. I recently hired an IT manager. I recently hired a producer for the show. I hired a web developer, and now I hired, I’ve got kind of like another person that’s just like, I don’t know if I’d call him like a sub-producer, someone that just scrubs the shows and does stuff. And I’m on this. kind of like hyper focused right now of how many things can I delegate and what kind of stuff can I get off my plate? Even, you know, even now that I was driving back from jujitsu earlier this morning, I was like, I don’t need to drive anymore. My daughter’s going to have a, you know, I’m going to make sure that she’s driving and I’m working well. And I’m gonna try to like, really maximize my time as much as possible. Is there, do you think there’s a lot of things that IT directors hold close to their vest, so to speak, and do not let go of, but they should?

Speaker 1 | 12:58.656

Yeah, I think there’s too much. I think that’s a challenge, a real challenge for anybody that’s in a management position, being able to delegate trust. I mean, that is trusting that somebody will do it. And this may sound a little bit arrogant, but I think people have lost trust in other people to do their jobs. I mean, I need you to do this task, and it needs to be done as well as I’m going. You’re thinking it needs to be done as well as I would do it, if not better. And when you… pass that on to somebody you’ve now extended yourself to that person because now upper management everybody else looks at if it doesn’t get done and looks it reflects on you yeah so i think so i think trusting people with the ability to do their jobs and that’s one of the things that i found the most challenging but also the most rewarding because when you find that person that you can hand off the trust to delegate tasks to and we’ll get things done and is not afraid to try new things Especially when you get a lot of junior people, they’re really afraid to take a leap forward into a space, a technology space, or a technical problem. Something that they’ve never seen before. They fear a breaking thing. But when you find that person that’s willing to do that and actually takes risks and calculated risks and things, it’s very rewarding. Because then you realize, okay, I have the trust of that person. I can ask them to hand off some things to them. And. you can bring a sigh of relief and move on to other things.

Speaker 0 | 14:33.891

Sometimes it’s like the step back to take a step forward.

Speaker 1 | 14:37.172

Right.

Speaker 0 | 14:37.792

And so let’s just talk about that real quick. So you’re handing off a new task to someone. What do you think is the biggest, the most important thing first? A, they’ve got to be knowledgeable and be able to do it. The second thing, is there some kind of… You know, do you do anything like setting expectations or should we go through some kind of training protocol? And I’m selfishly asking you this because I’ve delegated some tasks and then I realized halfway through the task, I’ve got someone asking me questions like, hey, what about this? And I’m like, wow, that’s like a real basic. knowledge gap that I should have seen or I should have, you know, I should have like maybe like put them through some kind of like basic training first, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 | 15:21.924

Yeah. And that is a challenge. One of the things that we do here that I do here is I take a lot of time to document how processes and procedures guidelines should be. So most everything’s on paper. And if it’s not, it should encourage the person that has the instruction. in front of them to think logically about what the next step should be. And of course, making yourself available to questions and being approachable and not being the guy that’s standing up and has to be the smartest. So that people are willing to ask questions. But I find that documenting things, and what I kind of draw the line to say is that I spend a lot of time documenting. a lot of times, put things on paper so you can understand. And you don’t read them, but you skip over things that’s there. And that’s when it becomes more of an issue because then you kind of feel like, oh, this person hadn’t spent the time to read the documentation. So it may not work out. Because those things are important because you’ve invested a lot of time to set up people for success and you’re not using those tools. then, you know, we’re now taking steps backwards.

Speaker 0 | 16:44.669

And when you go to document something, how do you think? Are you thinking, we’re going to break it down into these top three things. And step one is this, and step two is this, and step three is this. And I’m thinking of that because, I don’t know, we might need to put together some kind of training program for X, Y, Z, any number of things. And do we start with an outline just like in college and then we’re writing a paper and then we’re you know what I mean? Is there is there any kind of do you have any systematic way of doing this?

Speaker 1 | 17:19.561

I do. I first number one, I look at my audience. Who am I talking to? Am I talking to a technical person? Am I talking to an end user? Am I talking to an executive? And then I then I then I build my framework around that. I’m talking to a technical person or making guideline procedures for a technical person that I’m going to get really technical in the lead. and assume they know certain things. Whether that be networking, whether that be particular to my environment, such procedures.

Speaker 0 | 17:47.059

Like you say, IPv4. Right. Like someone might not know what the heck that is, but hopefully the guys on your team know what that is.

Speaker 1 | 17:54.406

Right. If it’s a technical person, I would expect them to know what that means. Sure.

Speaker 0 | 17:59.030

Yeah. All right. So who are you talking to first? You build the framework and then… When you say that, let’s just use an example. You got an example of something that we could think of? It might be something that you would delegate off, that you documented and provided a framework for?

Speaker 1 | 18:17.052

Yeah, so a good example would be help desk procedures. So when there are certain things in our environment, at least, where they need to be done in a certain way, and it might be user onboarded, so the help desk knows, hey, Johnny’s coming on board. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s the checklist from start to finish, setting up the computer, adding them to the identity management system, and you’re off to the races. You check this box, you check this box, you check this box, you go through it, and you print out the paperwork so you have it. And it’s really important because when you have checkboxes, I mean, you have those little things you think, you know, we go back to, you know, the ABC basics of checking out the box and doing it, but it really does matter, at least in my eye fall. that to have that so that people are going over and we don’t miss steps and miss those important steps so for help us we have a lot of those types of documentations where we do that where it’s just basic checklists and printing out documentation and that’s that’s well this is the way it goes we don’t waver to the left or right we just go straight down the middle with those procedures so that way there’s no there’s no question of what needs to be done gotcha and

Speaker 0 | 19:36.052

Okay. How about building a framework for executive management budget meeting? I would hope that your budget grows on a yearly basis, but I have a feeling that a lot of executive management, possibly maybe finance team, might underestimate the amount of money that technology needs and is growing with on a yearly basis. And how do you make that argument?

Speaker 1 | 20:04.588

Well, my argument is really simple. I don’t have any problems in that area because I’m in an environment where security is a bad thing. and compliance is a driving factor. I mean, the DOD scopes. So, you know, I may end up missing 100-171, ICAR, CTMC, all these things, these pre-compliance, they drive my budget. So if I don’t have it, if I don’t need it, if I don’t leave it there, if it’s not there, then it has to be there. And here’s the reason why. We have to make compliance. So in that case, in that regard, it’s easy. It’s an easy sell. And my management, I’m really, my executive team is really on board with IT. We don’t find that a lot in a lot of organizations, but they really understand IT because we have an open dialogue and we talk about finance and we talk about those things regularly so that everybody’s on the same page and this is why we’re doing this. um so but in our in our in our company compliance is the driving factor security because our business depends if we are not compliance we don’t have this so that’s that’s you know kind of the at a high level what drives those kind of conversations the

Speaker 0 | 21:28.157

you mentioned earlier that security keeps you up at night what area What area of security is most, what is, what’s the, what’s the most scary? Or maybe we shouldn’t even talk about this, but I’m just curious, like, is it, is it end users doing stupid things that that’s been trying to prevent them from doing stupid things or what is it?

Speaker 1 | 21:46.169

It’s the outside threat. Um, we’re a DOD contractor, so we have a target on our back of state sponsored actors. We’re not talking about little Johnny script kitty. We’re talking about state sponsored, you know, threats where they have full financial, you know, support. from those types of things so those types of things keep people in the defense sector really up at night because you’re dealing with sophisticated threats advanced you know threats type you know stuff like that so it’s those are the type of things you know are we doing enough and you never i think the moment you get complain complacent with security is the the moment that you have to really start worrying so We try to be vigilant in that area, and we keep securing at the forefront of every kind of conversation. If we do this, how does it affect security? If we don’t do that, how does it affect security? So every decision is based upon security, whether that be financial, whether it be technological. Everything is based on security. How does it affect an organization from a security standpoint? How does it affect our security posture?

Speaker 0 | 23:00.421

And Is there any single thing, any single one thing that’s been the most helpful to you when it comes to security?

Speaker 1 | 23:10.432

Believe it or not, there’s been a lot of resources online provided from the DOD on where to get resources. We have a defense industrial base. We have a lot of stuff in there for small businesses. There’s a lot of stuff in the NIST. of course, there’s a lot of stuff, Sands Institute, those places. So there’s a lot of, those are kind of my primary reading rooms, if you will, for information. And it’s just a goldmine for things. And it can be overwhelming at times, of course, because there’s so much stuff, but you have to have a trusted resource to go to to get some information on some of this stuff.

Speaker 0 | 23:58.394

Yeah, because it really is fairly overwhelming, the amount of information that’s out there in security. And to me, the trust factor has to be so high. It’s how could you, I’m just, I guess my question would be is how do you sift through vendors? How do you sift through security vendors?

Speaker 1 | 24:14.200

You know,

Speaker 0 | 24:14.800

I have a conversation.

Speaker 1 | 24:16.541

I have a conversation. That’s a very big part of it. I have a conversation and try to see where they’ll lead me. And if I feel like they’re leading me down the path, that’s uncertain. Because I have a lot of times. people come in and they’ll say, we can do this, this, and this. And then when I get down to the weeds in it, come to find out you really can’t do this. You really don’t understand. So the number one thing for me when talking to vendors is, do you understand my industry? Number two, do you understand my needs? And number three, do you understand my budget and my costs? So those are my priorities because I can’t even get into a conversation with a vendor if they don’t understand my industry. And then if they don’t understand the combination, I’m not even as top possible if we don’t get past those two first two points. So, and I can usually tell within, you know, a couple of phone calls. So whether or not somebody understands. my industry when i see my industry i’m talking about the contact and things like that stuff like that it’s a whole different world and um so i so when we talk about that it usually the defining factor which the yay or nay or fight or flight which i say instead um we we that c where again compliance that’s usually what’s that’s usually what the uh the break and remain goes so that’s how i usually step out

Speaker 0 | 25:39.858

vendors and then I keep them on my trust I think that’s just key in general so many people try to be everything to everyone and if they aren’t niching down and understanding each individual industry or they aren’t picking you know like healthcare for example like people focus on healthcare I don’t think there’s just certain people that just couldn’t ever bring a product to healthcare because there’s I don’t know too many people that specialize in healthcare all by themselves. And there’s so many different, I mean, I don’t even know if it’s compliance in healthcare as much as it is, just a very, very niche industry that serves patients, that has all kinds of various different electronic medical records and different software pieces and all kinds of things that plug into numerous different things, a thousand different APIs. So, I mean… And in your industry, you know, like you said, you’re in the DOD. So I’m assuming there’s a lot of, I mean, do you have a very complicated, I mean, I’m assuming you work with a lot of people that have a very complicated bid process and kind of 8A stuff and all that type of thing.

Speaker 1 | 26:54.775

Yeah, we do. It’s very complicated. It’s very, you know, frustrating at times because, you know, our customers are, you know, Navy, Coast Guard, things like those types of people. And dealing with those, everybody knows it’s not exactly the smoothest operation. So from contracts all the way down to projects. So it’s very challenging.

Speaker 0 | 27:29.358

Yeah, and time being a factor there. Sometimes I feel like it’s very hard to get something done that you really need to get done in the right amount of time. For sure. It could be delayed by eight months because of red tape and paperwork, which is not good from a compliance and securities standpoint. So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with red tape and paperwork and the bureaucracy slowing things down and security’s got this gaping hole in it? Well, you know, for me,

Speaker 1 | 27:54.542

it’s nice because I don’t have to deal too much along with the… with the contracting point of view but i do uh i do you know make sure that our organization is well-oiled so you know and in one sense i can pass the pawn off but then it always comes off with okay well are we meeting this part of the contract and it’s always some security okay well you know okay we need to pass that off to somebody else so it’s only this revolving door but the way you deal with it usually is i try to prioritize what’s going to be the most complex to implement based on what we’re basically the most of the urgency really and and deal with dashboards um and not you know kind of give in to the fact of how powers that be that say it must be done but rather do it right the first time than have to to rework and do all the paperwork over again and this again yeah yeah very important okay

Speaker 0 | 29:04.142

So let’s take it back to, um, let’s take it back to the nineties and you deal in security. What year did paranoia set in?

Speaker 1 | 29:17.072

Well, for me, it would be Y2K. That is man.

Speaker 0 | 29:18.013

It’s like the cutoff. Yeah. That’s, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 29:22.016

that’s, that’s the most thing because, you know, again, security wasn’t really the buzzword back in the nineties for me, at least in my, my.

Speaker 0 | 29:33.682

my world it was like a make-believe thing they made movies out of it yeah it was make-believe it really was it was make-believe it was like weird science it was my you know like you know stuff like that where it was just you know it was like another world yeah the wizard i think was one that came out then i think it was gone with that yeah yeah it was uh yeah it was just you know it was like it was kind of like make-believe back then which to me uh being that it’s 2020 and none of my kids lived through that era. You know, my oldest kid is 16. They’ll just never know. Yeah. And that’s mind-blowing to me. I don’t think that’ll ever get old. I don’t think that’ll ever get old.

Speaker 1 | 30:16.468

Yeah, I really think the Y2K thing was the only thing that first started talking about computer security. I just will never forget that. Just everything was going to me. That was a total hit. And then, you know, everywhere.

Speaker 0 | 30:33.714

Yeah. And I’ll never remember my friend shutting the power off in the house, like, you know, down hitting the moon breaker at like, you know, 12 o’clock. Yeah. Hey, so what’s the point? Honestly, for IT director, come history major, gamer, building computers, what’s the, I’m a full proponent that life is a journey, not a destination, but what’s the end game? Like, what’s the end game? Is it, you know, for ITU eaters nowadays? Not that I think we’ll even be able to know or contemplate what might happen over the next 20 years. And, you know, and let’s say you, let’s say you live to 90 and I hope you do or a hundred or more, you know, maybe by then we’ve got some other kinds of crazy technology and we’re living to be 150 or something, but what’s the, you know, is there an end game or, you know, what do you do for fun? I mean, you’ve been blowing up stuff with C4, so I don’t know how much more fun it could get.

Speaker 1 | 31:31.572

So I still game. Gaming helps me relax. It’s one of the things that I like to do with my friends, the same friends that play all the online games today. We still play games today. And that’s the way that, you know, I think we do. So old and feeble. But it’s something that I enjoy doing. Just relaxing. Some people watch TV.

Speaker 0 | 31:57.858

yeah hey man look my grandmother was playing she had a bridge club okay she had a bridge club and uh that’s actually kind of fun i’m definitely getting older now that like i like you know that i want to have a club and play cards and stuff and like i can see myself going down to florida and playing shuffleboard and cards like i really could you know that sounds okay to me at this moment being that i live in new england it’s still freezing cold outside um well yeah that’s a So we’re in a game into our old age. Again, I’ve got guys in jujitsu class that are like Fortnite dudes, and you see them on Facebook, and they’re like, we just met up with our team. We all traveled from different parts of the world, and this is the first time we’re meeting each other in person. Yeah. And they’ve known each other for years. That’s pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 | 32:50.577

Yeah, it is.

Speaker 0 | 32:53.314

Well, man, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. If you had any one piece of advice or anything like that out there to your fellow colleagues and other IT directors, is there anything that’s just been, you know, made your life so much easier or was like that aha moment that you just, you know, any piece of advice?

Speaker 1 | 33:13.948

Yeah, be humble and don’t be, you know, always be willing to learn. I’ve seen so many people that wanted to be the smartest guy in the world. Some people with the IQ, you’ll see that a lot. But the ones I’ve seen that have the most success, people that I’m willing to learn and educate themselves in this ever-changing world that we live in about technology. So that would be my one piece of advice. All righty,

Speaker 0 | 33:47.733

sir. Uh, that’s a good point, man. Cause there is, there’s a lot of times that, uh, the it guys, the smartest guy in the room and in reality it’s probably because, um, maybe he’s scared to admit that. Um, I don’t know. He uses, he, he hides behind it. Yeah. I mean, to mask some other thing, but, uh, man, I really appreciate you being on the show. Thank you so much. And I hope you have a great day.

Speaker 1 | 34:10.616

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks for