Speaker 0 | 00:08.580
All right, well, welcome to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, where we’re allowed to geek out with our fellow nerds. Today I’m proud to introduce Ted Assur, whose commitment to leadership, process improvement, and team building is the backbone of his career. Ted, welcome to the podcast, and please tell us a little about yourself and when and where you started on the path of being a tech leader.
Speaker 1 | 00:31.072
Hey Mike, thanks for having me. It’s really great to be here. I appreciate the invite and the opportunity to kind of talk about my background. So let’s see, right now I’m a director of IT at a small construction management firm in Burlington, Vermont. My IT background probably started when I was a kid. I’ll talk more about that and how that shaped my career and the successes within it. But I’ve worn a lot of hats. I was kind of reviewing before we had the chance to talk here. And I’ve done a lot of different things. So when people talk about being a generalist, I’ve kind of walked in a lot of different shoes or worn a lot of different hats or whatever you want to call it. So I was looking back in no particular order. These are the things that I’ve done in my IT roles over the last 25 years. A localization engineer. IT project manager, business analyst, SharePoint developer, software developer, because those aren’t the same thing, DBA, a bartender, network engineer, business owner, help desk manager, product evangelist, IT trainer, security analyst, team lead, IT manager, IT director. Now, those aren’t necessarily all things I would put on my resumes titles, but those are certainly the roles that I have been in.
Speaker 0 | 01:53.983
Let me jump in real quick and ask. because I too have some bartending experience. What did that bring to your, um, your career as far as, as it, cause I know it added to mine.
Speaker 1 | 02:07.413
For sure. Um, you know, so I took up bartending, uh, during the.com crash. So I was living in Boston at the time and I was working for a startup like a lot of folks were about that time. And this was, you know, right around 99, 2000. Um, When the economy and technology really tanked, all that investor capital kind of wasn’t producing what everybody thought. And a lot of folks just pulled out of the industry just financially. And there weren’t really tech jobs to be had because there was suddenly a glut of resources and not enough jobs for the people. And I ended up getting a nice little job at an upscale restaurant. And, you know, it’s being in the service industry. uh, was very educational. I recommend it for anybody, regardless of your kind of background or experiences, it helps shape an appreciation for the customer and their perspective. Um, and it certainly helps you appreciate people who are in that role. Um, so I’d say, you know, it, it, it certainly honed my people skills.
Speaker 0 | 03:14.177
Yeah. And that’s where I was going to go with it too, because I know that, that for me, it taught me one customer service, how to be empathetic, how to sell. And, um, I really realized at that point in my career, and I had yet to go into technology at all, but I recognized at that point that the primary differentiator is customer service because there’s plenty of developers out there. There’s plenty of people who know how to do DBA. There’s plenty of people who know how to manage a group of people. But it’s around that customer service that you get that loyalty that I helped build the team. You know, all of those kinds of things. It helped me in my career. And I’m assuming that it helped you as you went back into technology as things reemerged after the dot com.
Speaker 1 | 04:06.725
Yeah, for sure. The you know, and I’d like to talk about this more as we kind of get into kind of like my career track and what took me here, because that was certainly one aspect of it. But really identifying the user as the customer. um and who your customers are and really thinking of yourself as a customer service provider of technology right and um and why that was important as a differentiator uh for for me and something that i um you know when i train new folks that i hire i make sure they understand that that’s a key aspect of their professional success because when we get into um you know when when you’re a developer on a team you can easily be seen as a commodity, right? We can hire another developer. So how do you differentiate yourself to make sure that you’re ingratiated with the people who make that decision. And the way you do that is by providing excellent customer service and making them feel valued. Right.
Speaker 0 | 05:10.931
So, all right, let’s, let’s take a step back from this because this is hopefully we’ll, we’ll circle back to it and just, but, you know, and during the initial call, we were talking about some things and you talked about being one of those kids that had access to, well, not necessarily had access to. but enjoyed technology from the time that you were a teen and on. So tell us a little about that.
Speaker 1 | 05:35.876
Yeah. So, you know, as I thought about this and why it might be relevant, I really thought further back as far as just being a kid. And I’ll pause for a second and just say that my goal over the course of this hour that we have a chance to talk together for your listeners is to… share my experiences and how I got to where I am and why I feel that’s important. I’m going to make a lot of statements that some people might disagree with, and I’ll make generalities that I agree are generalities, but for the sake of kind of covering what I’d like to share with folks, it all comes back to experiences growing up and how I feel those shared experiences across a lot of people in technology shape where we’re at today and where we could be going. So that said, um, When I was a young kid, I grew up in rural Oregon, just south of Portland. My parents were entrepreneurs and cabinet makers. We were kind of lower middle class, poor enough to not have the things you really wanted, but not so poor that you’d ask for help. And so I grew up in a family of folks who were very self-sufficient and took care of themselves. They ran a cabinet shop of custom cabinets stocked with all kinds of machines and power tools, table saws. sanders and all kinds of stuff. And I was always fascinated by leveraging machinery or technology to accelerate work. I was excited about like, wow, we can cut things faster and make things faster with these things, with these devices. And so as a young kid during business hours, I would just run through that shop and turn on all the equipment and get all excited about all the different things. And that freaked a lot of people out. when you have a kid running through a shop, turning on big pieces of, they could easily take off limbs, you know? And so my parents were like, yeah, I don’t think this is for you. And so they kind of said, yeah, like, don’t even come up here. And so they discouraged me from participating in their business for the safety of everybody. Um, and so being a kid out there, you know, I hung out with other rural kids in the area and a horse farm nearby, our neighbors were the, they were the first folks to have a computer in the neighborhood. It was an Apple II. And when I discovered it and playing games on it, you know, when you’re a kid out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a computer with video games on it and no one has seen this before, that’s your new best friend. I was over there all the time. And I think ultimately they called it my parents and they’re like, you just got to get that kid a computer because he won’t stop coming over.
Speaker 0 | 08:15.241
We need him out of our,
Speaker 1 | 08:16.302
come on. Can you just do something about this? So, you know, my parents, you know, ultimately under the… guise of like well we’ll buy a computer for our business right got a computer um and so you know my first computer was a c64 living at home um eight or ten or so for those that recognize it yeah commodore 64 which is a great computer for its time it was pretty impressive for what it did 64k and an audio synthesizing chip in it which differentiated it from a lot of things made nice music yeah um for its time Yeah. So I was a computer nerd. I was a computer geek growing up. I was the kid who self-selected, would rather be in front of a computer than find friends. And I think that was really common in that time for folks who weren’t around then. If you are watching shows like Stranger Things, which is an excellent kind of snapshot of the setting of 80s culture and lifestyle before technology. Um, you can kind of see how, and there’s other shows like that. I’m just using that as an example to be like, Hey, when you’re thinking about this time period, it was kind of like that with all, without all the weird stuff. Um,
Speaker 0 | 09:34.670
unless you grew up in a place like I did, like Los Alamos, that show me my hometown. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 09:41.296
Um, so, you know, kids who glommed on to technology and that day and age did so at the expense of any sort of social capital. Let’s put that very nicely.
Speaker 0 | 09:57.010
Nick Huberman Yeah, that is a nice way of putting that.
Speaker 1 | 09:58.831
Preston Pyshko And so I was kind of a social liar, outsider. And I hung out with other geek friends, but definitely the fact that I was into technology and the fact that I was knowledgeable about computers certainly didn’t earn me any friends. And I think this is a really common and important thing that happened in that time for a lot of people is that if you were really into tech and you were a nerd or a geek, there was a price to pay for that socially. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 10:30.794
I mean, come on, Revenge of the Nerds. If you’ve never seen it or don’t know about it, I mean, we were not accepted like we are today. We were, back then, we were the ostracized group outside and the strange kids or, you know, the ones that ruined the curve inside of the class. But, yeah, we definitely didn’t have that social capital. But today, I mean, now we’re part of the mainstream. Now we’re like, it’s… The thing that freaks me out about this is that I see those guys out there that are the bodybuilders and they’re the nerds, just like we used to be. And it used to be that separation that you were either a nerd or you were a jock.
Speaker 1 | 11:13.725
Right. But I think it’s important. I think it’s important to recognize that there was a cultural norm that that’s just how things were. Right. And so, you know, I went on to high school. In high school, I took. advanced classes at the local community college and operating systems and data structures and programming languages. This was like, you know, late 80s, early 90s, pre-internet still. And, you know, went off to college ultimately and thought I’d be a computer science major. Went off to a local state school, U of O down in Eugene, that’s University of Oregon. Go Ducks. I thought, yeah, this was the track for me, computer science. And through a couple of events that happened, I realized that it really wasn’t. And with the guidance of a really good friend of mine and roommate at the time who was a computer science major, was redirected towards linguistics as a possible way for me to really get engaged academically and graduate successfully. I’m really grateful for that. It was a great thing to study. Not really practical in a lot of ways, but certainly very educational. First job out of college was in software localization, first in project management and then in engineering. Did that for several years. Then as the dot-com bubble began to expand, got into web development. And I really think of that time as when we were building the internet. And when I say building the internet, we’re talking like hand crafting HTML line by line to try to get, you know, some graphic graphic designers, you know, dream of what a web page should look like into reality.
Speaker 0 | 13:12.305
You think of that, those, those tags flash.
Speaker 1 | 13:16.648
That was the days. Right. And so kids these days, they don’t know how easy they got it. Um, so, uh. So I got in with some various startups that were really involved in the dot-com bubble at that time. And then, you know, crash happened and I went into bartending for a while and then ultimately ended up back on the West Coast in my mid-20s and worked for a very large health care system for about 12 years and had a lot of different experiences and roles there across.
Speaker 0 | 13:49.271
This is prior to HIPAA too, isn’t it? Or is it HIPAA? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 13:52.892
Okay. And a lot of the pivot in my sort of philosophy around IT happened during that 12 years in healthcare. I had a lot of great mentors and several negative experiences that sort of redefined how I approach things.
Speaker 0 | 14:12.318
You know, yeah, the web development, those kinds of things, you’re now moving into the healthcare and…
Speaker 1 | 14:21.641
Yeah, so healthcare IT is an animal in and of itself. It’s very complicated and there’s a lot of moving pieces, especially after the Affordable Care Act and after HIPAA. And it was around that time that I started to realize a couple of things. One was I was getting older compared to a lot of the young Turks coming into the industry. And you start to look at yourself and being like, is this really what I want to be doing? Am I going to be learning the latest and greatest thing and remembering all the things? Or is there something else I should be doing with my life? And at the same time, I was also taking a really close look at IT culture in that time and that space. And I started to notice a couple of patterns. What I started to see was like… you know these guys it was mostly guys at the time yeah um are the the same generation as me and these are the kids who grow up who grew up as social outcasts right these are the misanthropes and the people who really got into tech and this is one of my big if dice right and again i’m going to say this is one of my very broad generalizations it doesn’t apply to every single person but these are things that i experienced and noticed in the industry um And suddenly, as IT became prevalent across industries, especially after the dot-com spike, up and down and then back up again, and you start to see the importance of IT everywhere, across every industry, across every facet of every business, suddenly you got these guys who are the social outcasts, really important and in a place of a lot of power and a lot of control. And that doesn’t always work well. Culturally, when you have folks who are like, who have, you know, been on the outside for a long time and now we’re on top. Right. So I would say, like, if you if you were blessed enough to be a geek and then move into the 90s and early 2000s, the world is your oyster. Right. Probably it still is like like when you look at what you’re. professional mobility is across industries, you can work anywhere for anyone doing anything as an IT person. It’s that important. When you look at other industries that you might be in, you can’t say the same thing about any specialist that might be doing whatever that is. If you are focused on foreign aid implementation, your job options are limited. But if you’re working in IT in that space, you can go anywhere and do whatever. So let me get back to my thoughts on this. The So you have folks who might not be the most socially adept suddenly with really the keys to the kingdom of most industries. And that can be toxic in a lot of ways. You can run into situations where people who don’t necessarily have the social skills are now… running the show and making decisions and literally with the access to everything that runs a business and the business is hyper dependent on them creates this new sort of stereotypical IT guy that people, I think, really envision as kind of the norm for decades. And that is either the developer who’s sitting in a closet that you just put the pizza under the door and maybe a note. like, Hey, can you do this? And if you’re lucky, they do it. Um, or these other types of like, you know, folks who aren’t the friendliest, who aren’t necessarily focused around what people might need, but we’ll just do things that they think are the right thing to do.
Speaker 0 | 18:16.686
Yeah. Hold on. I want one second. Cause I, I worked with a lot of those kinds of guys and, um, and I always kind of, well, the majority of the ones that I ran into were like that lone cowboy. They would. They loved coming to the rescue. They love fixing things and they love making things, getting things back into motion and working. Although, you know, like 80% of the time it was due to them doing exactly what you’re talking about of, hey, I think I need to do this. And they go and start changing things and doing stuff and just instantiate a problem and cause the catastrophe that they become the hero of.
Speaker 1 | 18:58.261
Totally. Absolutely. And I’ve said, I’ve saw this across industries and across time is whether out of, um, hubris or, or malice or ignorance, it doesn’t really matter is a lot of the times the, the, the savior is the one who caused the problem in the first place. And they’re never going to admit that. Right. And so a lot of that sort of, I would call cultural pathology kind of get, got codified in a lot of organizations where. IT really sort of set the standard for what the business would and would not do. And so, you know, as I experienced that across a lot of different industries and organizations, I started really thinking about like, at the same time, as I was experiencing that the, you know, this, this idea of like the, the commoditized developer, the commoditized IT person, like if you’re a help desk person and you don’t like it here, we can just hire another. help desk person or if that software development isn’t happening fast enough we can just hire more developers um which is wrong by the way uh that’s not how it works here um But there was a mentality in the, you know, I would say in my career in the early to mid 2010s where that was just sort of the thing. And a lot of this sort of like toxicity around how we treat users was endemic in a lot of organizations. Well,
Speaker 0 | 20:29.824
and I think we faced a little of the reverse of it, too, because the business still looked at us and said they know tech. but they don’t know what we do and they don’t know how we make money and, and they, they keep the blinky lights blinking, but, but when it comes to this industry, so I, and I’m sure you were headed that way. Sorry.
Speaker 1 | 20:52.680
You know, a perfect example. And I think one of the turning points for me was a conversation that I was having with a developer on a healthcare system that patients would interact with. And we got into a, a heated debate let’s say as far as our role in the company and whether or not as software developers were we responsible for patient care delivery damn straight right and his argument was like hey i don’t deal with patients right and so so for me i was like okay so this is this is part of what has been to some degree like as a disconnect between what is the business about and what is the role of IT within it in service to the business versus IT as a monolithic organization that tells the business what IT is going to do. And so I came up with this self-philosophy and I started reading books around customer service delivery and started thinking about my bartending days. The way I looked at it was like every single person in a healthcare organization is responsible for patient care delivery. It doesn’t matter if you’re the janitor scrubbing the toilet or the electrical engineer making sure that the furnace is working or the software developer or the DBA. It doesn’t matter because between you and the patient is a series of people and events that affects their care, right? And it’s the same thing for every business, right? It doesn’t matter. You have customers along the way. that are important and who are relevant to your success, right? Customer service. And customer service. And so, you know, I shifted my mentality. And I’m really like, you know what, this industry that we’re on in is a service industry. We are experts in technology. Our job is to deliver service around IT to our customers. And, you know. Again, there’s some debate around, well, who’s my customer? Is it my business’s customer? No, it’s every single person that you interact with. Every employee that depends on your IT systems, those are your customers. And that sort of paradigm shift of thinking about things in that way really refactored my relationship with all of my end users. When you started thinking about things… Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 23:23.992
So I agree with you. And my philosophy has always been more of, do you want to be helpful or do you want to be right? But, you know, I’ve run into in the most recent years and probably the last, it’s taken, it’s been over the last decade, but it’s been, it took the first five years for me to start hearing it. And that sometimes is that, you know, there’s times where… that customer service or being helpful does need to take a backseat to what is right. Now, being right or what is right is a different thing because there were lots of experiences where the customer says, I need this, or I want it to do this, or make my life easier this way. And they’re propagating bad data going into the system. Or They want to make it easier for bad data to go into the system. So there’s times where IT needs to stand up and say, no, that’s not right. And what experiences do you have around that? And how do you suggest that we deal with that one? Because that was one of the ones that I was struggling with and learning how to provide customer service and customer care and not squish them and tell them you’re being stupid.
Speaker 1 | 24:54.385
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I was listening to one of the other guests in recent weeks and they kind of had some similar ideas around like, you know, they started there and I regret I forget who it was. I should have noted this down. But one of their comments was like, you know, I got into this industry and started thinking of the approach of like the customer is always right. And then I realized the customer isn’t always right. um especially in i.t our customers don’t know what they really want because they don’t understand the world the way we do when it comes to i.t and i.t solutions a lot of times what you what i’ve seen is that uh folks will come to me with solutions they’re like here’s here here’s what i want you to make this do yeah and And that’s the biggest red flag for me. And that really warrants and triggers a discussion. And a great analogy, and I use medical analogies because I lived in that industry for the longest time and so it’s easiest for me to draw from, is me going to a surgeon and saying, Doc, I need you to cut off my arm. Like, that’s how ridiculous. It can seem to IT people when your customer or your user comes to you and tells you the solution they want you to implement. Right.
Speaker 0 | 26:24.894
The doctor and us and we as IT, there’s one three-letter word that needs to be brought up.
Speaker 1 | 26:32.119
And that’s why. What do you want to get done? Why? What is the problem that you’re trying to solve? Right. And so this is all.
Speaker 0 | 26:38.223
Right. And or actually both of those questions really need to be asked. Because what’s the end result that you’re looking for? And why are you looking for it?
Speaker 1 | 26:47.065
Yeah. And so, you know, I, I, that’s a constant training issue for your users slash customers is position this back to them as far as a help me understand the problem, right? Help me, help me fall in love with the problem because I’m not going to fall in love with the solution. The solution doesn’t work for me, but the problem excites me and the problem challenges me. And this is the way my brain works. And you hired me to be the expert. Let me be the expert in my field and figure out the best solution for you. And there’s a way, there’s a tack to take with customers that isn’t, you’re an idiot. And this is how it’s going to be, right? So I think a partnership with the business is so critical where you establish a rapport where you need to educate them that… They hired you to be the expert in this field and to allow you to do that.
Speaker 0 | 27:44.579
Ironically, I hear you saying that, and I completely agree. But we as IT also need to respect the exact opposite of it, that that person who’s coming to us asking for a solution is to be an expert in what they’re doing also. So we need to respect part of that. And that’s, you know, as you said earlier, the user as the customer. So we need to have some respect for the fact that they need to be the expert in that thing also. And so we need to find a way to collaborate with them. Because if we can collaborate together, the solution that gets built is so much better and is so much more likely to be used than if we just run off and slice off their arm and come back. Here you go, beat somebody with it.
Speaker 1 | 28:35.494
Yeah. And so, you know. And of course, the end of that punchline is like, well, it’s because I got a sliver in my finger, right? That’s kind of how it hurts. Can you just take the whole thing off so this stops hurting? Yes. And so one of the other kind of big points that I say is successful in my career is really getting to know the business, really understanding it, really shadowing other people’s jobs. And not… sitting in an IT bubble where you’re just being fed information from a customer or an end user that thinks they know what they want or getting information secondhand is learning the business. One of the experiences that I had, again, I think this is common among IT folks is they sit within an IT bubble regardless of what their business’s business is. If you are in healthcare IT, then you should be learning about healthcare. If you’re in, and I’m reaching back in my own experiences, if you’re in foreign aid delivery in developing nations, you should learn about what that’s all about. If now I’m in construction and I had never been in construction before, I’m learning what construction is all about because how else am I going to understand the true nature of their problems that need help with? I can’t, right.
Speaker 0 | 30:06.904
To go back to one of the things that I was talking about a little bit earlier, we were both talking about it, you know, that lone wolf or that IT person that’s doing stuff because they think they know how things need to be done. I think of the different silos within work. So how does customer service relate to accounts payable? And how do they affect each other? Because we as IT, we can see across all of those, and we get to go interact with all of those groups. That customer service person just really gets stuck in their day-to-day doing just customer service, entering data or gathering data and gathering orders and working with… that, and I’m trying to think of a customer service as far as healthcare goes, and they’re the people that are, as the patient comes up to the window or any of those pieces, they’re critical in the information that goes into the system for accounts payable so that they can collect and that the business makes a profit. And in our bubble and say, I’m a web developer and I’m just, all I have to worry about is the HTML. or the CSS, then I’m isolated.
Speaker 1 | 31:26.050
One of the systems that I worked on back in healthcare was an internally facing credit card payment system. So exactly what you’re talking about, where patient comes up to what we call a registrar or whatever the person is that’s going to take their information and their payment. And they would enter that information into the system. and then do credit card transaction processing, all those things. And so I had the opportunity to, I deliberately put myself in situations in that industry where I could experience what does the end users, what do they see? What is their life like? How does this fit in what they’re doing? And one of the most interesting experiences I had was volunteering at the emergency department for six months. And I’d be working there one night a week after my day job. I’ll just go around to the other side of the hospital and just do whatever needed to be done. And it put me inside that group of people. And I had the opportunity to not only learn that side of the business, but watch how they interact with IT systems. And in this case, IT systems that my team was working on. It wasn’t my goal. It was just like, hey, I recognize that. And so I would watch. I would say, you know, if you don’t mind, can I watch as you’re using this? And I just saw them, like, struggle through various aspects of the user interface and, you know, do things that we would never expect the user to do. And it was really, I saw how clunky it was for them and how awkward the experience was for them. And what a waste of time this repetitive, poor design had on just… their day, right? It was a time suck. And what was fascinating for me was that I asked them, I said, you know, as you’re using this, do you have any feedback on how it could be improved? Because I work on the team that does this. And you think that’s like an exciting question for them. Like, yeah, let me tell you.
Speaker 0 | 33:36.752
That’s what I figured.
Speaker 1 | 33:37.993
Yeah. And what I realized was, and this is a common thing that happens, I think, with users and user experience. or yeah, it’s her experience is, um, she turned to me and she said, yeah, I can’t think of anything. And I’m like, I just watched you struggle with this thing. But what I realized had happened was, is that, uh, you know, it’s like an uncomfortable pair of shoes. After a time, they just stopped noticing what’s wrong. Um, and so it’s a long winded example, but, uh, you know, you can put yourself in situations where you can. really see what the user’s experience is. And you can take that back and really affect change by putting yourself out there with them and in the way of their experience.
Speaker 0 | 34:25.405
And this is a huge lesson to anybody that’s listening that hasn’t picked up on it, because by doing this, one of the things that we as IT can do when we start interacting with the people who are consuming what we’re… creating and watching how they’re interacting with it. And when we see potentials for added efficiencies and we can quantify those efficiencies, we start to become a value add to the organization. We quit being a cost center and we become a value add or, or as one of my favorite coworkers used to say, a force multiplier because yeah. I can’t tell you how many times a user would come in, tell us, hey, cut off my arm, and they would go away. And we’d figure out how to cut off their arm remotely. And then we’d come back to them, bring them, set the limb down on the desk. Man, this is not going the way I want it to. And give it to them. And they’ve already figured out how to work around the fact that they had that splinter in their finger. And so they’re just dealing with the loss of that one finger while they’re typing. And they’ve maybe regained their words per minute. But they just deal with the… that inefficiency. And when we can come in and give them that efficiency, we actually, we truly do give them double the time because not only are they no longer spending all that time doing it, but we free up that time and now they can do something else. So it’s double the time. It’s not just saving them that effort of the wasted time, whatever it is. Now it becomes productive in another way.
Speaker 1 | 36:17.311
Right. And this goes into systems design and user experience and things like that. But you remind me of a couple of things, going back to the user doesn’t really always know what they want. Same experience, I was working on the marketing team and we were building websites for clinics that were responsible for medical education. And so residents would have the opportunity to enroll in working at these specific clinics to be able to do their practice work before becoming a doctor. And there was competition for these students. And so the head of one of these clinics came into our marketing team and they’re like, so this button needs to be pink. Now pink is not anywhere in the color scheme of the website. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Well, it’s enrollment. okay, let’s talk about the user experience and enrollment and, you know, drop the pink button thing and get into the meat of the problem and what is a good way to solve it, right? So that was just sort of an anecdote I remembered.
Speaker 0 | 37:30.641
Well, let me throw us down a different path for a second because you bring up something and it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot, especially over the last couple of, well, actually the last decade, because things have changed. You and I grew up in a… time period where you use the term shared experiences. And so we had a lot of shared experiences. Come on. When you were talking about the Apple II, we had three, maybe four channels that we all watched. And so there was like a 30% chance that whatever show you liked, everybody else in the class knew about that show and watched the same show. Nowadays, the shared experience is so much more fragmented. Like my children get to watch so many different things, and the amount of shared experience amongst society in general has changed and deviated greatly. So you got any thoughts about that and what we’re talking about? Because it is. It’s so… different today compared to what it was when we were kids. The shared experience just happened. And now shared experiences, you almost have to search for somebody who has the shared experiences with you.
Speaker 1 | 38:55.209
Yeah. I was thinking about this this morning in the context of this whole kind of idea that I have that our experience in our generation in IT was one of kind of these social midfits rise to power uh some I would say pathology or toxicity that comes out of that in the cultural aspect and how you relate to your customer and you know I I was thinking to myself like is this going to be relatable is this going to be relevant to other Generations other folks who have come up and and come into IT in a different time in a different kind of space and what I’m guessing is they might be seeing that within their IT organization And not necessarily knowing where it came from, but again, not necessarily buying into it. And so my hope, as I was thinking about this, was that I really hope that what I’m telling people is not relevant. I’m hoping that the younger folks who are listening to this and thinking about their careers moving into the future are like, man, that must have sucked. Yeah. And that it’s different. So, my initial thought on the different experiences in today’s generation, maybe not the lack of shared experience, is one of… you know, thinking about it from user centric experience and thinking about it as a, uh, consultancy and a partnership with the business rather than being, um, almost antagonistic with the end user. Right. Um, but yeah, I’m not sure, like, you know, with, I don’t, I can’t begin to even guess how the.
Speaker 0 | 40:48.558
kind of fractured shared experiences and the lack of it um affect uh folks coming into the industry now well and and i there’s there’s a whole another aspect of all of this too is that that now with the plethora of information i mean right i was at one of the social media forums they were talking about well how did how do we how did our generation figure out who, oh, you remember that movie actor, that actor that was on in, uh, what was his name? What was his name? And, and how did we used to go figure that out?
Speaker 1 | 41:27.483
He was in that movie with so-and-so and so-and-so was in that other movie and his name is this. And then I’m like, uh, okay. And then you eventually figure it out. Right. Or,
Speaker 0 | 41:34.868
or what we had to do was we had to talk to each other until somebody could put, put together enough of the puzzle pieces to go, oh, Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 1 | 41:43.713
And about, and about. 30% of the time they were wrong and we were like, okay, yeah. And that must have been him.
Speaker 0 | 41:50.252
Yeah. Compared to now, I don’t want to say it because my phone will light up and it’ll start responding to me, but, you know, they just ask their device or the other device that’s sitting on the counter or, you know, any one of them, these new AI things and say, okay, who was, and it comes back with the answer. So, but where I’m headed with all of that is the plethora of information. the information overload and how i can find supporting information for any argument i want to make so i can pick a point of view that i believed in and now i’ve got i’ve got backup i’ve got my encyclopedias that prove that i’m right let’s
Speaker 1 | 42:32.905
talk about going back to the 80s encyclopedias oh my gosh yeah you know it’s it’s a it’s a strange days we live in for sure And I think every generational turn experiences the same thing. It’s like, wow, I’m glad I grew up when I did, because I can’t imagine what that must be like for you. But as you were saying that, I was thinking from an IT perspective, isn’t that all the more reason that if we have all of the resources at our fingertips, if we have AI that can write code for us now, which is miraculous, right? If you haven’t done this, you should try it out. you know, walk through creating a mobile app on your phone by telling chat GPT what you want it to do. And that happens, right? And like the things that are happening now are just mind-blowing as far as what people can do with technology these days. But what it cannot do is differentiate you as a valuable employee by providing that understanding and that customer service. It’s not going to do that, right? So, you know, folks are like, oh, well, AI is going to take my job. Well, if you’re not using AI five years from now, you might not be as valuable as a person who is using AI, maybe. But if you want to be valuable to the people who are responsible for giving you money for the service you provide, then you need to stand out. And the way you stand out is by ingratiating yourself. And the way you do that is by providing understanding and true customer service and really being invested in what it is they’re trying to achieve and do. So I think it’s all the more important now than it was previously.
Speaker 0 | 44:27.269
Yeah, for sure. It’s all of that understanding why and what’s the goal. We just have to have those pieces because otherwise… We can create all of these things. We can slice people’s arms off, but I’ve really got to drop that analogy. Oh, man.
Speaker 1 | 44:45.813
Now I’m regretting bringing it up. I should have come up with a better one.
Speaker 0 | 44:49.595
Yeah, my bad. But, you know, it’s, yeah, I hear you. And it’s one of the things that, you know, as we’ve been talking, I haven’t gone into a lot of the normal questions that I ask, but you bring up all of these good things, and this is what you. What got you out of that back room or got you away from being a web developer into a leadership role is this understanding, this empathy, this desire to know more and ask. You actually asked and found out why they’re trying to do these things and what was the goal.
Speaker 1 | 45:24.640
I’d say it’s two things. One is I was never satisfied in the role I was in. So I never became a specialist. I was happy to move on to a different role and learn a new thing. And so if your goal is to become a director, if your goal is to become a CTO, then your path should be one of a generalist because you need to at least have enough of an understanding of various aspects of IT. And as a generalist, if you’re able to move around and have these different experiences and have the opportunities to do these different things, because you’re of the mindset of like, I want to lead people, then that’s one part of it. And it’s going to be a little more challenging if you’ve been a DBA for 20 years, and now you want to get out of that and go into a leadership role. Okay, well, you might not have that shared experience with a lot of the people that you might be tasked with leading. And the second one is, Absolutely. Absolutely pivoting on empathy towards the user. And that doesn’t mean they’re always right. It means that you’re going to meet their needs because you understand what it is that they’re trying to do and you understand their goals and their business. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 46:43.709
So let’s, let’s go a little more lighthearted. So one of the co-hosts has this art that he likes to call random access memories. So I found one of the questions and I want to throw it towards you. So if you could use any IT-related superpower, what would it be and how would you use it?
Speaker 1 | 47:04.293
That’s great. Okay, here it is. I have it. I have it. I have it. I would want the power to remotely restart the user’s machine.
Speaker 0 | 47:22.176
Enough said.
Speaker 1 | 47:23.837
That would fix 90% of service desk problems, right? Yes. Not kidding. In a previous role, I had a team that reported to me about five folks. And one guy had been there like 20 years. And the software developer also did some customer service stuff. And I would complain to him about different systemic problems. I’m like, man, I don’t know why this is happening. It’s just like… uh you know whatever the problem was it always it keeps doing this thing and it breaks and several times over the course of my career with this person they’d be like have you just tried restarting have you turned it off and on again i’m like good on you yeah why am i yeah even me even me right but um man i wish it could just be something where i’m like yeah restart how amazing would you be like wow you’re a miracle worker
Speaker 0 | 48:18.964
Oh, and they’d never call back because everything was fixed. And so you wouldn’t have to. Oh, man, that’s awesome. I love that answer because, yeah. And I, too, I don’t want to restart.
Speaker 1 | 48:31.787
I’m in the middle of three things.
Speaker 0 | 48:34.828
But you know what? One of us thought about that problem. One of us figured out how to make it where the browsers are going to open up all my tabs again. Hang on. You know, now I can restart without as many problems. I just got to make sure that I’ve saved that Word document. Oh, wait, there’s an autosave feature. Oh. So here’s one for you. Why are trees bad at cybersecurity?
Speaker 1 | 49:01.857
Why are trees bad with cybersecurity?
Speaker 0 | 49:04.219
They always log in using their root password.
Speaker 1 | 49:07.541
Wah, wah. Yep.
Speaker 0 | 49:10.623
Oh, man. So tell me about some more of these fun IT tickets that you’ve had to deal with. Steven? Even if it was you that caused the ticket, have you restarted?
Speaker 1 | 49:22.433
Yeah. Gosh, what are those? Some of like crazy fun IT tickets. You know, there’s especially working service desk as a service text manager. Gosh, you just, you see some of the, you see patterns across your users. Right. And it’s great because you can identify systemic problems. Right. So when you see, you know. lateral issues you know that there’s something wrong not just one individual’s experience but multiple people so maybe that’s a system problem um and then you might see like really vertical ones where uh you know you’re getting a lot of interesting tickets from the same person and and we call those frequent flyers uh at least on the teams that I’ve been on um but man there are so many times where uh I will get a ticket and um it’s just something crazy like i’ve never like you’ve never even seen something like like in in your experience of 25 years you’re like yeah i don’t that’s new um and then you know you dig into it you’re like so what were you doing uh right before this happened
Speaker 0 | 50:30.456
nothing real quick and said with no no change in volume um you know and and so you run into situations where uh you have users who are over eager to
Speaker 1 | 50:46.084
to to do things and will just click things thinking that they’re being self-sufficient and then will walk themselves into a hole and then they’re embarrassed and then they don’t want to like you know tell you um and uh The funnest one I can think of in recent memory, let’s say, is, hey, my keyboard stopped working. Can you come over and check it out? Sure thing. So I come over there and I’m like, sure enough, wireless keyboard isn’t working. And I’m like, hey, so when did this problem start? Oh, yeah, just a couple of days ago when I got back from this trip. Okay. More troubleshooting, more troubleshooting. And I’m like, I’m looking at the keyboard and I’m looking at the dongle, you know, and I’m like, so you got a, I don’t know, you have an HP keyboard, but you have a Logitech dongle. That’s, that’s not going to work. So I’m like, so where’s the, where’s the dongle that goes with this keyboard? I threw it away. I was like, what? Why did you, why did you throw it away? oh, well, the mouse stopped working. And so I threw the mouse away and I just threw the dongle away with the mouse. Okay. When did that happen? Oh, while I was on my trip. So where did you get this? So where did you get, where’d you get this dongle? Oh, uh, out of your office, out of your desk. And I’m like, okay, for starters, this is never going to work with that. And second, like, why are you going into my desk getting the stuff? Well, I didn’t want to tell you. And so you run into, you know, there’s a class of users, a class of customers, especially in service desk where, you know, I say you really try to have grace with the users because a lot of times they are embarrassed. They aren’t going to be completely transparent for whatever reason in the root cause of what is happening. And through your forensic detective work as a diagnostic troubleshooter, you come to the fact that it was self-inflicted. And if you’re one of those classic less than great customer service people, you’re going to be like, dude, you’re an idiot. You did this thing. Don’t do that. You have to come back and try to have some sympathy for folks because they’re experts and they’re specialists in their business.
Speaker 0 | 53:19.935
That’s what we talked about.
Speaker 1 | 53:21.244
And you are the expert and specialist in yours. And a lot of times there’s an expectation today is that people should be tech savvy. And when they’re not, they don’t necessarily want to admit it. And so you do end up with fun tickets, quote unquote. But handling them with grace is important. It can be challenging.
Speaker 0 | 53:44.270
Yeah, with kindness.
Speaker 1 | 53:45.990
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 53:46.951
Well, you got any other last minute thoughts or you got… got anything you want to promote? Cause I noticed that you’re like in a sound studio. So you want to, you want to,
Speaker 1 | 53:57.756
that would be great. I’m sure my wife would love it. So my wife is a voiceover artist and I’m in her studio right now. And her website is, um, Carrieannassur.com. That’s K A R I A N N A S S U R.com. She’s been in this industry about eight years and just signed on with a huge agent in Los Angeles. excited about that. So I think her pipeline is going to get pretty full up. She’s the voice of a couple of different large commercials in the regional area, in the New England area. So it’s fun to be watching YouTube or listening to the radio and hear her voice come on. That’s always neat. Yeah. I wanted to leave folks with a couple of just suggestions. There’s a couple of books that are, I think, important reading. um or a sci-fi fan and have not read uh the wool series by Hugh Howey or watched silo on uh I guess on HBO right now um it’s really a great uh examination of I.T um believing itself to be good but not necessarily being good what was the series silo with the TV show it’s wool w-o-o-l like like what comes off a sheep Okay. It’s very compelling. It’s a great story. It moves really fast. It’s a page turner. And it really isn’t. I took it as a really interesting commentary on IT culture. in the context of business. And when we’re talking about differentiating yourself through customer service and how that fits in with an IT perspective, there’s a great book out there called The Fred Factor. And it’s about a guy’s experience with his postal carrier and how he differentiated himself as a postal carrier. Again, you think these are kind of mundane, run-of-the-mill jobs. but you can make them something special for the people who you work with. Other shout-outs that I would make that have been impactful in my career, I mentioned I started as a computer science undergrad and changed majors. The primary reason for that, it was really just too academic and theoretical. We were coding in Lisp and other old, arcane languages that you would never see used in any sort of… modern application today. And so I wanted to be relevant in the business that I was working in. And if you’re looking to differentiate software engineering from computer science, a guy by the name of Juval Lowy, that’s J-U-V-A-L-L-O-W-Y, is fantastic as a teacher on approaching… software development as an engineering with an engineering mindset. Yeah, those are my big ones. Like, you know, there’s resources out there to help you sharpen that saw, whether it’s how you approach software development or how you approach service delivery. So, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 57:18.892
Right on. Well, thank you very much, man.
Speaker 1 | 57:21.133
It’s been a thing.
Speaker 0 | 57:22.053
Could you cut? And as we come to a close on another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, I want to invite all of our listeners to comment and rate the podcast on the iTunes store or wherever you’re grabbing your copy of the podcast from. We really appreciate the support of the program and the time you invested in nerding out with us. So thank you very much.
Speaker 1 | 57:43.604
It’s been my pleasure. And I hope you folks have enjoyed the last hour of us talking IT geeky nerdy stuff.
Speaker 0 | 57:50.688
Yeah, me too. I really hope people are enjoying it. Thank you.
Speaker 1 | 57:54.498
Cheers.
