Speaker 0 | 00:09.282
Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Rick Nolan, Director of IT at United Structural Systems. Rick, how’s it going today?
Speaker 1 | 00:20.270
I’m good, Michael. How are you doing?
Speaker 0 | 00:21.791
Very good. Thanks for hopping on the podcast today. We’re going to be starting off like we always do, which is a… our icebreaker segment called Random Access Memories. I’m going to ask you a question, and there’s three of them, and I’m going to have you just kind of respond with, you know, the answer that pops in your head first, right? So your first question is, if your computer had a personality, what would it be like?
Speaker 1 | 00:49.315
Depends on the day. I think it would be Skynet on some days, and maybe we’re headed there anyways. Um, and most of the time, I think it’s like my wife, it just keeps telling me what I’m doing wrong. And I do the best that I possibly can. I love you, honey.
Speaker 0 | 01:07.544
That was a good one there. This is recorded. So now the your next great answer, by the way, your next one is, what’s the most unusual IT related hobby that you have?
Speaker 1 | 01:26.096
Most unusual IT-related hobby,
Speaker 0 | 01:29.117
I know. Yeah. Ooh. I know. I don’t, you know, listen, whatever pops in your head, you know, when you’re working with something IT-related or something you could have done in the past, if you want to, that was unusual or not out of the ordinary.
Speaker 1 | 01:49.005
That’s a really great question. I’m going to steal that one for later, maybe. I think. Probably for me, I would say, I don’t know if it’s necessarily related, but I’ll give it my best shot. I had some time between jobs in the last this past year. And so I took the time to actually do something I want to do a long time ago, which was take all of my movies off DVD, et cetera, et cetera, and put towards a digital collection. So I don’t know if it’s unusual, but I also know a lot of people go like, I really wish I could have done that or did that or worked on it. So I did it. It was painful. God help me.
Speaker 0 | 02:26.677
It was unconsuming. Yes, that is totally work.
Speaker 1 | 02:31.480
I enjoyed the benefits of it afterwards. But of course, now I haven’t actually watched a single thing. Of course,
Speaker 0 | 02:36.784
you do all the work and then you’re like, I’ve done all the setup, but I haven’t done most of it. All right. What’s the most unusual place you’ve ever solved an IT problem?
Speaker 1 | 02:51.053
Unusual place. I can tell you this. scariest, creepiest one for sure.
Speaker 0 | 02:57.197
Yeah, I’ll take that one. I’ll take that one.
Speaker 1 | 02:58.858
See, that one’s good, right? I’m leading in. I was doing some work on behalf of State Farm. This was early in my IT career. We were replacing like token ring networks to Ethernet networks, which is hilarious to think about now. And they sent me to one location and the guy was in Mobile, Alabama. And it was, the guy had never cleaned this office like ever. Like I got done. I never moved as fast on an install in my entire life as I did with that one because I literally could feel things crawling on me.
Speaker 0 | 03:39.824
Ooh.
Speaker 1 | 03:42.585
That shower literally.
Speaker 0 | 03:43.505
The collective shudder of the audience.
Speaker 1 | 03:47.426
It was horrifying and horrible. I still probably sweat a little bit at night when it comes to those sometimes. It was definitely the creepiest situation in that regard. I would say it’s probably that one out of all of them. We’ve all had weird stories, but that one’s, yeah. Especially time, it’s almost October, right? So it’s a great time for the skin. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 04:07.567
that was disturbing, and I appreciate it in every single way. Thanks, I hate it. Yeah, well, no, it’s great to have you on the show. program. You know, looking at a lot of what you have done over your career, there has been a lot of work in infrastructure. And as we all know, infrastructure has overgone a massive transformation over the past five, less than five years, right? You know, and we all saw it coming. But it really started moving. And we have seen infrastructure move from, I have to patch this physical thing sitting here. to now I’m virtually configuring something in the cloud and making sure it connects to another virtual thing. It’s really turned from, I guess, physical to conceptual. It’s a lot of thinking inside your head now rather than grabbing something physical and updating it. And I’m interested, before we really get started and dive into details and stuff like that, I’m interested in your thoughts on… what that means, you know, and how you’ve dealt with that. Because, I mean, most of your work is in infrastructure. And that means you have seen this happen over a long period of time and seen this change and morph. So what’s your thoughts?
Speaker 1 | 05:50.733
I remember starting kind of my career in that vein of, you know, to really either date myself or it doesn’t date myself nearly as much as I like to think it does. Kind of the birth of Active Directory really around 2000 was when I got my career started in IT. And everything changes right in IT all the time. It’s consistent, it’s going fast, everything else. 20 years is a long time and it amazes me to think back to what I did do, right? I think we were having a discussion the other day with a couple of other IT folks, and the conversation was, you know, what, you know, cloud, and we kind of moved past the cloud as being a novelty, so to speak. Right now it’s a part of the business process, and now we’re seeing the natural ebb and flow in IT, where now some things are coming out of the cloud, right, or things that I didn’t show. It’s always the ebb and flow of these things, and I thought to myself the other day, I said, it’s weird for me. growing up where it’s like you did exchange you know now you couldn’t pay me to go back away from like the 365 route so to speak of of that simplification of of that build if that means you don’t want to run commands to restore an exchange uh database that’s gone corrupt no design no design let’s see all your athletic bullets going i hope the email’s there i hope I think it’s I mean, that to me right there is probably one of the great examples of a situation. I mean, if you look at that and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, right. We’re just talking off the cuff. But since the birth of 365 or whatever, we draw a blank on the name, we call it beforehand. But but in that grand scheme of the piece of that puzzle, that significantly changed a lot of our careers, especially the infrastructure side tremendously, because you did have that. the exchange team and to a degree you still do for some enterprise companies to when they separate it out but there was a lot of stuff there where you’re like what did you build your career on i built my career on active directory and exchange now azure ad simplifies things not exactly like for like but you know close enough um exchange and 365 is is you know really nice from that perspective of not having to do that so it’s changed our career trajectory not just in terms of what we did and what we do now but also i think as we go forward right um what what is that next thing we talk about ai to death in that sense but the point being is that’s the evolution of what we do in it right what is the next thing that happens along and so it’s interesting in my day there was the great separation i say my day right i’m still not that old but it’s still one of those situations where it’s like there’s a separation between what we did in terms like you didn’t script scripting for us was you know Net use, right? It was a specific thing we did to map a drive, a printer, or whatever else, right? That was as much as we did programming, air quotes, as infrastructure folks. Nowadays, DevOps is like all of it, right? Infrastructure’s code and things like that. So it is interesting. I often wondered, could I be now what I was then, right? I felt like I was a decent engineer in those days. but i’d be a decent engineer nowadays or would be the programming side which destroyed me that’s actually why it pushed me to infrastructure i wonder now if i could still be that same guy that same time frame which is is interesting to think about from from that’s such such a great thought experiment so by the way um
Speaker 0 | 09:29.433
you know i started my career in 2003 uh so i’m not that far behind right and i and i will go uh you know i’ll catch myself going back in my days and you know oh yes uh i i know the feeling well but what what a um interesting thought experiment there which is uh you know could i take the me that’s me right now and place it back you know in back in time and and go do i really have to do this right you didn’t know it at the time but but that’s i mean life itself does that as well i mean there’s stuff that like you know how did you know how did we deal without having a smartphone how did we deal without having uh you know all this technology i have today well it’s because it’s because you know prior to having it right everybody was doing it that way and that’s the only way you could do it right so you know i when the phone rang right and you didn’t have a smartphone uh then someone just left a message and you got back to one whatever you wanted right you didn’t have to like oh i have a text message that i have to uh respond to immediately otherwise the world will blow up right so you’re right there’s a culture change that happens when the um uh when the new technology appears right and and
Speaker 1 | 10:57.812
new a new set of standards and how things uh um you know how you react to them happens right so so let me give you one that that plays into that too because this is interesting too you take the technology side of that out of the equation for this next piece really when we started out like you mentioned with the with the phone situation who who hasn’t in it right fixed something from the airport the beach the cabin whatever else right that’s that’s something we’ve done well you It’s interesting if you take a look at the whole dynamic, to me anyways, of saying, okay, in those days, wow, you’re a miracle worker because you fixed it from wherever you were in that situation. Now it’s expected. Same thing when we went through not just COVID, but we had that, like, you have to be in the office. I have to be able to see you’re doing your job. Well, now you’re in a situation where you don’t have to be in the office to do that. Then we all got comfortable enough in that vein that we started to move back the other way, which is we need to be back in the office. So it is. To me, I see a lot of ebbs and flows in just society that way, right? You have these interesting things. People always argue cloud isn’t like a new technology, really, at the end of the day. Mainframes existed. There’s similar types of things that we’ve done in the past. So it’s just weird. We call it something different. We put a nice little marketing spin on it, if you will. But all of these things all have interesting loops as you go through in time.
Speaker 0 | 12:20.308
It’s very true. I mean, you could make the argument. and I think you were, that cloud is just a very large mainframe, like you said. Right. I mean, that’s essentially we’ve gone back to that model of work off a massive computer. Right. And have everyone connect to it because it works very well. You know, and always kind of with if we go back to talking about mainframes. Right. The thing that worked really well with mainframes is that you updated it once and everybody was up to date. You didn’t have to go individually like you did with client server type models where you have to update the server and then update all the clients. And then it’s very time consuming. Right. And it’s it’s it’s a scalable model, but it’s very time consuming. Right. So, yeah, there’s a good point to be made there about.
Speaker 1 | 13:22.340
um about you know it’s essentially uh you know cyclical and it just reinvents itself with new names and in different ways i think the you know you when we talk about like the old days was cole gates and steve jobs the revolution of the the desktop computers we know it in that sense and that’s one of the reasons why i think ai gets a lot of the thing that it gets nowadays is it’s probably the biggest invention for lack of better wording and again i my my oldest would kill me in the sense he does not see our version of AI being actual AI, right? And so to our kids, which is also interesting to think about how they view it differently in that vein as well. So I have Skynet as a reference, right, from a pop culture perspective. But it’s funny to me because my kid looks at it and goes like, no, dad, that’s not how AI is. That’s not how it would work and everything else. It’s funny to me.
Speaker 0 | 14:18.832
um just the differences in the generations that we have that way you know it’s good good point they don’t uh they look at it a different way and you’re absolutely right um uh they don’t have the same same thought uh that we do and it’s just because of an experience and the pop culture references that we see in all that right but and you know the ai that we are dealing with right now and he has a good point right this generalized ai is essentially a very good pattern recognition and repetition. I can recognize a pattern and repeat it back to you. And I catch mistakes from the thing all the time. you know and i correct it and i love when i correct it because i correct it and then it responds back to me it’s like yeah you’re right i’m sorry i’m still learning i like i know you’re programmed to say that but i appreciate the apology right exactly the um it’s an interesting thought and i think you’re right that ai has taken a um uh he’s gotten a lot of attention Because it is the newest new, so to speak, right? You know, we had, you know, everyone looks back and said, well, we’re not talking about blockchain right now. Now we’re talking about, you know, AI. It’s the newest type word. It’s the newest thing. It’s a new thing that people can attach to things and sell things with. But it also is a culture change, right? Because it does. And I know this because every time I get an email that says, I hope this email finds you well, I’m like, I know you type that in artificial intelligence. Just remove that first line. So, no, I know you don’t think that the email find me well. But but yeah, you can tell that everybody’s feeding their emails through, you know, AI double checking them. You can tell that, you know, everyone didn’t just automatically get very good writing formal emails overnight.
Speaker 1 | 16:36.540
No, not at all. I mean, I think that’s one of the bigger benefits of the situation in a general sense. And where I go with that is when I was teaching help desk folks, right, the typically younger side of the career, the inexperienced side of that piece, they’re growing in their career. one of the tough challenges that you have in that spot, right, is communication. And being able to give them a leg up in those regards, I think, is huge. I mean, obviously, it can’t do like what we’re doing right now, right? Having a conversation, that’s a struggle with this generation coming up who are used to talking by thumbs only situation. And, you know, not to get too esoteric, I guess, but it is. concerning, right, in terms of that. I have two kids. My youngest is Chatterbox, Mr. Sales Guy, so to speak, right? At 12, I can already kind of tell where his career can go. My 15-year-old is the tech guy, so to speak, in that sense. You know, wants to be an astronaut. I’m hopeful in more ways than one because I think you win at parenting. You can say you’re an astronaut, right, at that point. But I think it’s just… Just… Two entirely different people that I see from our standpoint for the kids. But I see that in a lot of cases and generations. And I think there’s a lot to unpack, way more than one podcast could do. There’s a lot. I just personally see a lot of changes that are coming in terms of personnel and what we do as IT people in general going towards the future. And I think that’s one of those areas where it’s interesting in terms of communication style. Person to person is really, really going to struggle, I think. um as we go forward we’re in communications easy right and now it’s even easier because you got somebody to kind of do it for you if you will right um so it’s it’s interesting to me just that how that’s going to change as we get we evolve um and i think we’ll have to change as leaders as well uh
Speaker 0 | 18:33.309
to get around that it’s really interesting and it’s such a great thought because communication is so overlooked uh in uh in business um and it’s And it’s such a great way to, if you can master that skill and you can really be, you know, tweak your communications skills to come out the right way, especially to deal with leadership and executives, which is a whole other skill set. You know, right. Right. These these are. Probably the hardest, and I completely agree with what you’re saying, they’re the hardest soft skills to learn when you are new and trying to make it out in the IT field. It is so easy for the newer generations to pick up the tech now. So easy. You know, it is, they grew up with it. They already understand it natively, right? Most of them. And they use it in ways that you and I couldn’t even possibly think, right? I mean, it’s amazing to me when I go and look at somebody that is 20 years younger than I am. working on a working on a computer and watching them do things that I have never seen before. And I’ve worked in IT for 20 years, like you said. And I’m like, how, you know, but it’s and it’s and what we need to do. And I think what you’re talking about is, you know, as leaders, we need to we need to step back and we need to go. We need to embrace what they’re bringing to the table at the same time. we need to turn around and coach them on the soft skills that we learned and bring them up to speed. The more we do this, the better off they’re going to be. Go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 20:41.049
Oh, no, I 100% agree with you. One anecdote I can tell, a job a few years back, I guess it’s been about seven years ago, six or seven years ago, there was a lady on my team, and I love her to death. She was one of those that you just saw right away. She has that potential, right? And she’s a great person. And I’m so proud of what she’s done with her career. She’s gone on as time has gone by too. And the story for me with her was we were all in a group meeting together and discussing what we could do with this particular strategy we were on. And she pulls out her phone. Now, in my day, got my walking cane again here. And by day, that’s a no-no, right? You can’t bring the phone out. You’re not paying attention to the meeting. We’re having a conversation, whatever. She literally looks at me when she could tell what was in my eye for a second. And she goes, I’m sorry. She said, I was looking up on the internet what we could do about whatever else. The point that we talked about later, she felt more comfortable typing with her thumbs, right, talking back to that conversation again, and searching on her phone than she does on the desktop computer with the keyboard and everything else. And it was a light bulb moment. I’ve had several, right? We all have as we go through his leadership, but it was a libel moment where I’m like, I can’t view this the same way that everyone else will. Again, I’ve managed through that section where how do you manage millennials, right? You’ve had to read the, well, now what do we call this next generation that we’re trying to lead right in that same vein? And so I’ve always encouraged other leaders as well. You’ve got to learn your people. You’ve got to learn those groups. And then you’ve got to learn that generational gap. You don’t have to agree, right? I mean, my kids do things I don’t agree with, but you got to understand where they’re coming from. And I always remember that story from a few years ago, when I was like, man, I got to really adjust my thought process. She’s not checking out of the conversation. She’s checking into the conversation in her own way. And it was definitely an important moment for me to realize as well.
Speaker 0 | 22:50.592
You know, and it’s so true. And, you know, the… When you talk about that light bulb moment, I had that light bulb moment when a long time ago, my kids are roughly the same age as yours. But a long time ago, when my youngest was like two, right, she had, you know, she had seen us, you know, work, you know, on our phones and stuff like that during the time. So the TV was on. And so she walks over to the TV. And she starts touching the TV to try and interact with it. And I sat there for a minute and I just let her. And I just like thought like, wow, this is really this is what’s going to happen here. I mean, this is a child that has seen us interact with phones. They they know that they can hit buttons on a phone and make it do things. And so they’re like, this is another screen. Why can’t I do it with that? And it’s just I mean, the thought process that. that that took me down right that that was just like wow this is where we’re heading uh a a um a generation of folks that that understand like from birth that you can interact with technology and make it do things and um and that’s not what we were done that was it’s not what we what we were raised right so that’s it’s huge it’s a big difference they almost
Speaker 1 | 24:22.738
And I’ve noticed this, right? I mean, we’ve all seen different videos or things like that. People look at a Walkman now, right? And like, what is this? And trying to like conceptually get around these things. And it’s interesting too, because I do like it from my kids’perspective because they see me interface with some older technology of some kind. And they’re like, wow, that’s amazing that you can do that without having the ability to touch the screen. And so I’m like, I like being a miracle worker to my kids for that exact reason. But it’s also kind of sad, right, when you kind of get the rocking chair on the back porch immediately moment. So it’s. I think it’s critical to understand for all of us as leaders that the times are changing as they always do. And I think we’re going to see even more of that. Again, I could go on and on. I have a big soft spot in my heart, so to speak, for where these things go and how to move between, again, I mentioned managing millennials to this generation. groups of people that are going into security fields that are different than things like that. I mean, security is a great idea in that sense, too, where now you can get the degree directly in security. And now you get to bypass the help desk and learn the troubleshooting skills that are paramount at that first part of that stage or the programming skills that you learn at the very first. You’re able to go special. It’s different now for those folks coming into the workspace than what we did growing up. And it’s it’s great, but it’s also. Not as great, in my opinion, too, because you do get to miss some of the foundational stuff that makes you a well-rounded IT individual as well.
Speaker 0 | 26:02.286
And that’s a great point. The amount of experience, I think we’ve touched on this in previous podcasts, but the amount of experience you get from just working at help desk. Like I said, in my career, probably the most influential several years of my life was working help desk. And. That’s why I learned communication. That’s why I learned how to deal with many different problems and get exposures to many different things. It was a very, very great experience for me. Grueling, but great. You know, you look back on it and go, you know, I put in the time and it did help me going forward. So that makes complete sense. When you do get a security degree, bypass that technology. And and now you’re you’re trying to do IT security for things that you have not been exposed to. There’s a steep learning curve. And that’s a good question. Where does that you know, what’s the impact of that? What do you think the impact is going to be of that?
Speaker 1 | 27:18.496
I think we’re seeing the impact now throughout the industry. I I quote this, I can’t tell you that the number is exactly right, and I can’t tell you where I got it from. Years back, less than 10 though, there was a survey I read that surveyed IT folks like us and said, hey, if you could direct your kids into IT, would you want your kids to do IT work as you go through that? 92% great number, because it stuck with me. 92% said no, I would not want my kids to be in IT at all. Now that’s our generation. That’s our, that’s our group, right? Those folks are starting to get towards that field. So you have this interesting, I hate using giant words, nexus that’s all kind of coalescing into one. It’s easy.
Speaker 0 | 28:11.902
There’s two giant words right there. Nexus and coalescing.
Speaker 1 | 28:16.425
Nice word. I get paid by the word, I think.
Speaker 0 | 28:22.876
He ran this through chat GPT before.
Speaker 1 | 28:25.218
I’m actually a PI program. I’m actually talking to you right now. I’m conceptualizing. So I think you have this space where you’re able to bypass the early parts, right? You can go straight into an advanced position. And I’m not kidding when I say this, walking through somebody in a management role who did not understand the difference between the monitor and the computer and turning it on and off like the old story we all had. But that was a recent story. You have that level. You have this other group that says, hey, I’m not even going to get an IT, right? Because they saw the 2 a.m. phone call, the 40 hours of on-call on top of the 40 hours that you did during that week situation. And businesses being unflexing on, you got to be in the office. You have all of that that’s happened. You’ve had the skips, as I mentioned. You have a general. What I’ve seen and I’ve talked to other leaders who’ve seen the same thing, a lack of troubleshooting steps being taught. Right. Nobody’s asking the who, what, when, where, why, how questions as well. They’re not being taught that. So we have helped those people. You’re like, well, just just take that example that you did before and apply it here. Can’t do that. Right. I’m not bashing everybody. When I say I’m saying just in general, we’re seeing more and more of this. So. What you have is improper coaching. You have companies not willing to invest in their people by keeping training on the books, right? What’s the one budget item that always comes out right out of the gate? Even more than security is training, right?
Speaker 0 | 30:01.949
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 30:03.218
And so you have this complete thing that’s going throughout the industry. And then the force back into the office for some groups, right? As a parent of an ADHD kid, I take this seriously. Where do they mostly go? They tend to kind of line towards programming and security pieces. They’re not comfortable sitting in an office talking like you and I would, right? Yep. some time and efforts and buddy having coffee and stopping by and say how did you see the game yesterday they’re not comfortable with that you gave them an assignment to do i got to do the assignment and i move on but we’re forcing them back into the workforce right and so you have this interesting like all this stuff’s kind of going in kind of a witch’s brew if you will and i think we’re starting to pay the dividend the the the pieces of that going forward and where i go to that too is if you look at that in in where we’re headed you Less talent on the board. So now you have a talent war that’s going on more so than anything else. It’s not just the money and everything else. I know there’s some about jobs in different parts of the country, but by and large, right? I live in Nashville, so we see this a lot here. There is a talent war that goes on. It’s just less than what it was televised, if you will, in the last couple of years. It’s still there. Yes. Nobody’s wanting to move now. So we have these great names lately, the great, you know, all these wonderful terms that we’ve come back with lately in terms of that. Now we’ve got the great staying put or whatever we’re calling it, right? And they’re staying put, but that’s the talent.
Speaker 0 | 31:43.358
The great superglue.
Speaker 1 | 31:44.979
Yeah. They’re not moving.
Speaker 0 | 31:47.039
They’re not moving.
Speaker 1 | 31:47.879
And if they don’t move, then the talent stays, which is good in the sense for those businesses. But we’re all trying to find. That talent and that talent shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Well, it’s been happening over the last 10, 15 years, in my opinion. I’m glad a lot of us got paid during that stretch, right? When the salaries kind of started spiking and things like that, because honestly, they had been stagnant for a while. I’m happy for anybody who betters themselves at the end of the day. Right. But I just think it’s this this this complete, again, which is brew, for lack of a better word. It’s all this stuff going together and you’re seeing it. And now, again, we’re doing the old things, too. Right. You’re really good at doing technology. You’re fantastic at fixing computers. Go manage people. No training, no elements to that, everything else. And then we go, well, I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s all of that. It’s all happening at once.
Speaker 0 | 32:43.102
That’s such a great perspective on what’s happening. And it’s a lot of food for thought. for a lot of business leaders out there. You know, if you give up on training, especially when you have, you can’t just take people that are really good at doing their job and expect that they’re going to be good at managing. I mean, that’s a misnomer. I’ve had really, really, really stellar employees that were really not good at managing, but they were really good at doing their jobs. Right. And that’s OK. Not everybody has that soft skill, right, to be able to manage.
Speaker 1 | 33:29.117
I’ll pass along one thing. I promise I’ll leave it alone after that. But one of the things that I’ve always told everybody is even if you have a bad boss, you have an opportunity to learn. So don’t just take the mentorship from those. And again, for all of us who have an opportunity to mentor, please do so. Right. I mean, I think it’s we all have great lessons to learn. And keep in mind. you know, managing and parenting are the same thing in a lot of ways. It’s just different things, different age groups, if you will. But so mentor when you can’t, but even if, and I, cause I had to learn this lesson where we do, if you have a bad boss, you can still learn what not to do, which is just as valuable as learning what to do. And, and so don’t, don’t just fall asleep at the wheel. When you have that opportunity, you want to move into management for those who want to move into management. You’re hearing this. That’s my, my, my piece that I’ve shared with everybody. find the times when it’s it’s not a good boss a good leadership experience a good situation what can you take out of that and sometimes the best answer is i would not do that when blank happens and that’s yeah that’s a great that’s a great um observation as well i mean in my career i’ve been lucky to have really really good mentors um uh
Speaker 0 | 34:42.704
but you know that being said you know um everybody has worked with people right that and seen things that they said, well, I’m not going to do that. And it’s important that you bring that up because having that observation about the way that other people do things. and the way that other things are run and being open and thinking, well, let me let me take a look at what they’re doing and see if it’s working and whether or not that may be something I want to incorporate into the way I’m doing things or or vice versa, as you just pointed out. You know, that’s definitely not what I want to incorporate into the way that I’m doing things. No, it’s a it’s a good it’s a good good motive. I mean, I have seen folks that. from a management standpoint that use, uh, um, fear as their motivator. And I think, I always think that that is, uh, the wrong way, uh, to do it. Stifles innovation, stifles, uh, um, uh, you know, people will just work to work then they won’t, uh, work to, uh, uh, you know, create any real, uh, um, change and stuff within an organization. Um, so that that’s definitely not a path you’d want to go for sure.
Speaker 1 | 35:59.009
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 36:00.769
Um, we’ve covered a lot so far. Let’s turn to tech, though, for a little bit. And let’s talk about, you know, you have been, you’ve worked in a lot of different places. You started off with Dell. Yeah. Dell Tech Support, right?
Speaker 1 | 36:22.328
Yep. That was my first job, and I… I wound up surviving the average at the time was about six months in that almost to the day in that sense. Think that good or bad if you want to. And I say this with all due respect to all my friends at Dell in that sense. The things that upset me maybe in the time, they changed after time as well. But I learned a lot from Dell. that was a great experience at the start because they had an amazing troubleshooting class that they taught you were you were not on the phones at that time for six weeks when you first got hired on that they took what a great smart move right and so it was um they went through everything they gave me the thing right the the the piece where they taught you know the i call it the pregnant pause right the that i’ll be back in just a minute and then that silence right for a minute right and You sit there and listen to it. And like, what does that sound like? What does it feel like? Right. So they went to that level, not just here’s how you replace the modem and a computer. Here’s how you replace the CPU, all that stuff. It was all through that sequence. And so I had a lot of great foundational pieces. I learned a lot about business stuff, both good and bad through that sequence at Dell. But yeah, Dell was a good experience at the start. And it kind of propelled me into some of the other positions that I had as well.
Speaker 0 | 37:50.210
It’s amazing the silence aspect of it that you bring up because it’s something that makes people, not everyone, but it makes people so uncomfortable to hear. So much so that when I do this podcast, I try to make it so that there’s never any silence. Even when somebody’s thinking of a question, I’m still talking while you think of that question. It’s an interesting… You know, I’d love to see, you know, the psychology behind what makes silence such a such a formidable, formidable thing there. You know, when we talk about some of the things you’ve done from an infrastructure standpoint, what I want to get into, because we talked about kind of the prior pieces and stuff like that. And for fun, you even brought up Token Ring, which is hilarious. Um. So what I want to talk about now is, you know, what have been your recent experiences past several years dealing with infrastructure in its new form, right? Which is this reboot, because it didn’t go away. It just morphed. It’s a shapeshifter now, right? What’s been your experiences in that?
Speaker 1 | 39:12.814
Well, we talked about 365 a lot, right? So I don’t have to spend a lot of time there. Everybody knows the story there through that process. I think that’s been a foundationally good change overall. Again, good job of Microsoft finding a way to monetize the subscription model that everybody else used after that, I think. But I think that was a foundational change. I think SD-WAN. has been obviously a major change in terms of being able to get rid of MPLS circuits as well. That was one of my favorite parts of cutting MPLS circuits back in the day, was being able to cut those off for cheaper broadband internet lines. So it has to weigh on, I think, is a big one. But again, it doesn’t get the press anymore, right, in terms of that because of the way the cloud structure has been. Cloud in general, I think, obviously plays into it, the separation tiers of that, right? You know, your cold storage, your warm storage, things like that, things that have moved on. I think through all of those iterations, even the simplest things that we knew and used, Citrix, great example of another situation that is. changed with the times as well. You know, you had a large enterprise that would have that large, gigantic Citrix fleet, right? And then suddenly that was able to be in the cloud in its way. Good or bad, I’ll leave that up to people’s judgment in that regard. But some pieces of the puzzle there. I think the ability to support these systems truly, natively inside a browser is In my opinion, one of the more fundamental changes that has occurred in IT in the last 15 years or so, you had the client software before, but being able to kind of do some stuff through a browser piece or even an app on your phone is foundationally improved. They’re designed for that as well. But I think from a true infrastructure perspective, it’s been the giant change from the fat application on the desktop to the browser. window for everything to the point that i remember having conversations 10 years ago with the company going like wait why do you not have an html5 application don’t timeline it it it’s to me it’s foundationally different in terms of that i had a current company i’m at now we were we that are mostly in the cloud um that i inherited when i got on board with the company and we had a recent person come in they asked that deal about you know how do you feel and trust me i can get into cloud versus not cloud any day of the week but i’ll leave it alone for now but the conversation was what if we move some of this stuff back on site and i’m like do you want to move it all back on site so to speak or do you want to move just this one piece and if you just want the one piece is that really the right way to go when the company’s already moved to the cloud for everything else you know for the giant application so um to me i i I think you still have those conversations going on. I talked with a company a few months back, and they had started what has become a thriving business in pulling people back from the cloud. So they have, it’s an interesting thing for their company. They built their model on going, how people get to the cloud. Well, in the process, they built another part of the business on the offshoot that basically says, hey, here’s how we help you get out of the cloud for those clients that want to do that.
Speaker 0 | 42:39.326
It’s like a revolving door.
Speaker 1 | 42:42.528
Which is brilliant, right? From a business perspective, right? I catch it going in and I catch it coming back out. Either way, I’m golden, right? But it’s kind of funny to me that way. But to me, those are the pieces I think that stand out to me right away. VMware, the change of having everything. I mean, again, I know you can use VMware in the cloud, but in a general sense, the typical server storage, compute, things like that. It’s interesting to me where you… you don’t have to do that now you’ve got the azure layer the aws layer you can do the vmware side not arguing about it’s not benefits or not it’s just it’s interesting that you don’t have to do that per se um for some some customers and so server server and storage virtualization was a major game changer uh
Speaker 0 | 43:32.904
um in the ways that you know you could you know get store data and then move it around uh, uh, Breckley. It was a, it was a major, uh, major change. Uh,
Speaker 1 | 43:45.874
yeah, and it wasn’t, but a few years ago we were all talking hyperconverged.
Speaker 0 | 43:49.796
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 43:51.217
it’s not been that long ago. Uh, Nutanix being obviously one of the big ones in that realm, but it’s interesting to me in the sense that, and again, they still have their clientele and everything else. I don’t think there’s anything wrong from that perspective. It’s just, we were talking hardcore about hyperconverged and then we just, we don’t really talk about hyperconversion more because it’s just part of what we do. from an infrastructure side is we find the solution and we try to find the best price tag and solution the one thing that has not changed right in our entire infrastructure careers has been one thing we got to find a way to do it with duct tape and bailing wire it’s right what
Speaker 0 | 44:25.941
is the not even necessarily what is the cheapest solution but what is the solution that gets us the most bang for our but that’s really you said it right there that’s it what is the solution you know and i think you know people use terms like this before, which I always think is interesting. Listen, you know, what is the model that is the economy model? What is the model that is the sports car model, right? Give me the one in the middle, right? The one where I’m going to, it’s going to be reliable. It’s going to get me what I need to do, but it’s also not going to break the bank account. And that works for a good portion of individuals. Some people, they need the forerunner because it runs critical business operations and it’s also a strategic advantage to them to have it. Right. And some people, they can just get away with an economy model because it’s just is what it is. Right. It really depends on the use case. And and I think that’s infrastructure. folks have learned that several ways because we have to understand the underlying thought process of what’s happening with this thing. What is it going to support? What are you going to layer on top of this? And if we go back far enough, we never knew. Because they were it was buying a server and I’m just going to put a bunch of stuff on it. And it could be running the most mundane program, but also the most business critical. And so you had to map out where all the critical servers were in your environment, not based on the name, but based on, OK, well, this computer, this server, which is named who knows what, has three. critical business applications on it and it ties to a database over on this other server and you know and that was the hard part now you’re just like well i’m just going to name it the thing so i know you know know what it is yes and i and i and i’ll put it and i’ll segment it into a special environment that i can set up for most most critical things so you know we take advantage of some of the amazing technologies and things that they’ve given us to make the job easier and um help the infrastructure team maintain a critical infrastructure segmented from other infrastructure that’s not as critical. So it’s a good point on that, kind of bringing that up.
Speaker 1 | 47:08.938
I think, I mean, you know, technology changes, right? That’s the one given in any line of our side of the technology curve. I think it’s just fun to kind of go back and look at times where we were and where you’re at. You know, again, I remember the first time you saw an all-flash array. uh from a storage perspective and going holy cow i can’t believe the performance that it’s it’s doing whiptail in the back in the day but it it was it’s funny to me just now you know like that’s the expectation right and and we don’t even think about anything else um and and again you can still tear your storage and everything else but it’s just nowadays you’re almost kind of like should i i mean really like it you know because and then the argument the hard part with the argument to me of the business is because i’ve been having this conversation the last couple weeks has been storage is cheap well, storage isn’t really cheap. It’s cheaper, but it’s not cheap. And depending on what you do, especially in the cloud, it’s a completely different ballgame. But it’s just, to me, it’s interesting just in terms of some of the things that we’ve kind of taken for granted now in the last five to seven years, really, if you think about it, versus where we were, like, say, 10 years ago where you were trying to figure out, okay, can we afford to do that? Now it’s more like, why would you not do that? Is the question you ask.
Speaker 0 | 48:22.520
uh on some of those infrastructure pieces yeah i would uh i would say uh some storage is cheap but uh it depends on where you store it and uh what you’re storing right so absolutely for sure um uh i also want to kind of uh you had mentioned change so i actually want to use this as a um It’s kind of a transition into the IT crystal ball, which is the future of IT. I kind of put this segment out here so that we can get insights from IT professionals like yourself into where we’re going. Right. And we talked a little bit while we talked a lot at length about where we were and where we are, you know, and how we got there. And that would just make sense that we talk about where we’re headed. Right. And I think that for this discussion, it’d be great to get an infrastructure viewpoint on where we’re headed down the future of infrastructure. Like where what can we expect? You know, what are some of the things they’re cooking up in your head where you’re like, I need to get ahead of it?
Speaker 1 | 49:43.647
I think. As much as I hate this, because again, it’s the most popular thing you can say. You say it as an IT guy, oh, he knows AI. We got to find a way to weaponize AI. I mean, appropriately from an infrastructure perspective. I do not give it weapons. I think that’s a bad idea. But I think we’ve got to find a way to utilize that in ways. And again, I understand the automation pieces and puzzle of that. I just, in general, I think there’s other ways we can get to utilize that as we move forward that we probably haven’t really thought through yet, right? I mean, the automation piece is the easy part of that. We were automating before AI, though. So it always… drives me nuts when I see the sales spam call type stuff when it comes to that. I was like, well, you use AI for automation. We were automating before AI. It’s okay. I think AI is the easy one in that section. I honestly think if I’m really pulling back that crystal ball, I think really it’s going to be on the who of a lot of us on the infrastructure side understand where the businesses are going over the next little bit. I anticipate that some struggle points over the next couple of years in a general sense. So getting invested with the business is big from a personnel perspective. From an infrastructure perspective, we may have to kind of figure out exactly what we want to utilize and help those businesses grow as we go along. I think the technology side of it is really the interesting part. Are we really seeing a pullback from the cloud, right, is an interesting part. My own opinion on that situation, just to real quickly go through that is, I think the cloud is expensive. And anybody who says that it’s not as a salesperson you’re talking to, you’re leasing servers, and it has always been more expensive to lease servers than it has been to buy the server. And so I think the struggle there is to see, is that actually something that’s going to take place? If so, then that… It’s going to be interesting for a lot of us because I think going to the cloud for what goes to the cloud makes sense. If you’re starting a business from scratch, go to the cloud. There’s no reason to buy the structure on site. If you’re a enterprise or you’re in a situation, I know several enterprise companies are looking like, what if we pulled this part back from the cloud? Because that’s too expensive. This hybrid model, which is what I always thought it was going to end up being anyways, the struggle with that, I think, is. it puts way more pressure on the IT leadership in those sequences, right? This was there. It’s not there now. What did we give up because of that? Or what did we gain because we did that? I think the cloud piece is going to be an interesting one to see as we kind of play through it. I never saw us going full-fledged. Everything’s there no matter what. But stuff there that makes sense and stay away. DevOps has been talked about ad nauseum in that sense. We’re living in that time. But I do think the element of infrastructure as code, I think that’s great from an enterprise. I’m curious how that plays out in the SMB space because you’re not going to be able to, quite frankly, we’re just not going to be able to afford those DevOps guys in the SMB space. I know a couple of those guys in that deal in my hats. I mean, I bow down to them. To be able to do code and server structure at the same time. like that’s a person. If you have that person pay them, they’re going to leave. I don’t care what you’re paying. It’s, it’s, I think that piece of the puzzle is going to be interesting and if we can find a way to do that at the SMB space, I think it’s going to be very cool at that point. But I really think in a lot of ways it’s, it’s from an infrastructure side, I think it’s business as usual in the sense that what we have now is what we’re going to have in the very near future. I don’t see a gigantic change on the infrastructure side, like you can say like in the application stack world or in other areas. The security world, I think it’s going to play into that a lot as we go forward too. So I’m excited about that as well. But it is interesting from my perspective. I see a lot of business as usual from the infrastructure side. And then again, take that good or bad. I just think it just may, we go back to our previous topic, it just may change the name. of what we were doing before. It’s not new. It’s the same thing, just called something different.
Speaker 0 | 54:27.242
Well, you know, and that’s, there’s so many good points in there that I’m going to let the audience digest and think about.
Speaker 1 | 54:36.566
But,
Speaker 0 | 54:37.706
you know, to end and recap here, what it sounds like to me is infrastructure, folks that have worked in infrastructure for quite a while are used to change. They’re used to adapting and they’re used to you know, the new names, so to speak, for the same concepts, right? And even though the job may change a little bit, the concepts are still there. And the folks that have been working this are used to adapting and moving with that technology. So we may see change, but it’s not going to be disruptive change is what you’re getting at the ground.
Speaker 1 | 55:20.050
Yeah, I again, I could be wrong. Right. It’s a crystal ball. Right.
Speaker 0 | 55:24.114
Hey, that’s why we talk about it.
Speaker 1 | 55:29.002
It’ll be interesting to see. But yeah, I like where we are. But I also I’m interested to see what out of the blue happens for all of us as we go forward.
Speaker 0 | 55:38.967
Well, nerds, this has been Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’ve been here with Rick Nolan, director of IT at United Structural Systems. Rick, thank you so much for coming on. Please come on again. I’d love to have some more discussions and chats with you.
Speaker 1 | 55:56.436
Sounds great, Michael. Thank you so much.
