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129. Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica

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Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
129. Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica
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George Bica

George is the Director of information technology at HZO, a global company that delivers world-class water-proof nanocoating solutions that safeguard electronics, electrical products & critical applications in an ever-changing market. His position in IT is the highest leadership position within the organization in charge of information technology operations and vision for the future direction. George leads multiple teams across the globe tasked with supporting business operations.

Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica

Here at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds Podcast, our host, Phil Howard, is up and ready to roll–despite having caught the COVID-19 variant. Join him and guest George Bica, director of information technology, to identify common pitfalls and practices that George has noticed from managing over six people personally in a 500-employee tech business. Find out why you should better balance your home life as priority over work life, the best practices George has ever used as a director, and even how he managed to overcome the Great Firewall of China.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica

3 Key Takeaways

  • Questions to ask to determine vendor flags
  • What the endgame is for IT leaders
  • How George manages a work/life balance

Episode Show Notes

[1:00] Phil has COVID!
[1:40] What George does on a daily basis
  • Dealing with vendors and large scale projects
  • Having a large IT staff outside of the US
[2:38] Is there a language gap working with staff outside of his country
  • Keeping communication simple
  • Headquarters in NC while manufacturing is conducted abroad
[3:40] Dealing with the Great Firewall of China
  • Overcoming it with a variety of methods
    • Telecom China providers allow internet lines
  • Going through less checks and filtering than normal internet
    • Using site-to-site VPNs and public clouds hosting
    • “By using two layers, we can bypass most of the restrictions of the great Chinese firewall.” -George Bica
[6:20] How big is George’s team?
  • Six people report to George with 500 employees in the business
[7:15] From dentist to tech expert: How George got into the IT industry
  • It started in high school with his first computer experience
  • Living in Albania under the Iron Curtain in the early ’90s
  • The language variety in his home country
[9:20] Getting his first computer after the regime collapses in ’91
  • Playing chess on a black and white, 286 computer and falling in love
  • His parents visit family in the US and bringing back a Compac 486 for George
  • Less than 10 computers in a city of roughly 60,000 people
  • Comparing computers to punch cards
[12:31] What it was like being one of the first people with a computer
  • Mostly everyone was ambivalent to them
  • Playing Gorilla, Lemmings, and other basic built-in computer games
[13:45] His first gig: A famous Jeweler is looking for 3D engraving help
  • Creating wax molds out of a 3D engraver
    • Pirro Jewelry
[16:00] George decided to drop dentistry as soon as he touched a computer
  • How George ends up an IT team leader in America
    • He came to the US as an F1 student, funded by his father in 1996
[17:00] How he met his wife
  • Going to the college library to sign up for a Hotmail account
  • Getting an email from a friend in Philly
  • Speaking with them on the phone and visiting for Christmas
  • Marrying his wife!
  • Keeping his old email
[20:00] Are they on Microsoft Teams?
  • Yes – “Microsoft 365 is a big collaboration platform for us.” -George Bica
  • The utilization of the Cloud
  • Best practices George uses as IT director
[21:30] Questions you can ask to determine vendor flags
  • Compliance certifications
  • The biggest vendor cover-up George has experienced
  • HIPPA and PCI compliancy
  • If they follow any government compliance audit, what are their security practices, what is their disaster recovery, and how frequent do they do it?
  • “If you claim something to the customer, you better make sure you can back that up.” -George Bica
[25:10] How George manages a work/life balance
  • “It’s a personal choice. You as a person have responsibility to live first and then provide a living.” -George Bica
    • His base line is 35 hours
    • He uses one-on-one meetings with his team, 20 minutes each
    • His Thursday group scrum
    • He leaves a little early on Monday and Thursday to make up for the at-home meetings
    • “If you are working consistently, 60 hours or more, that means you need to hire someone else. It’s a disservice to yourself to burn out.” -George Bica
      • This includes calls!
[29:00] Phil explains how IT work has only been around for 20 years
  • What’s the endgame for IT leaders according to George?
  • There are a lot of nuances to it
  • People are compartmentalizing departments that it becomes a turf
  • “I think the outlook in life should be such that you really think about your skillset around the line. How expendable are you compared to a hungry young man who’s willing to do it for less than you? You’re only option is to grow your skillset.” -George Bica
  • “Develop skillsets while you’re young. Make yourself learn the back end. And figure out your end goal based on that.” -George Bica
  • Nothing is static in this world; keep learning!
[34:20] How is the supply chain affecting George?
  • They don’t produce anything but are part of a larger manufacturing flow
  • Chip shortages and similar situations affect their lines
  • COVID’s affect on their bottom line
    • Letting go of some team members because they shrunk as a business
    • The hope for 2022
      • News of the $500 billion profit
[36:00] Is that profit just due to supply and demand?
  • Using the car industry as an example
    • The price of a car between 2019 to 2022 has jumped up $35,000 on average
    • George anticipates a flood of new cars in the near future
[38:45] One major piece of advice from George
  • For IT managers looking to get budgets filled: “If you want the bunny, ask for the donkey.” -George Bica
    • Ask for a little more than you need
  • For the rest of the force: keep your work/life balance in mind
  • Pulling advice from The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
  • George and Philip talk about TikTok
    • Taking on the role of benevolent dictator in his children’s lives

Transcript

Speaker 0 | 00:00.140

So in 91, the regime collapsed, and I got a chance to look at the first computers back then. Probably a 286 is my guess. It was black and white. I played chess on it, and then I fell in love. So that was it.

Speaker 1 | 00:16.353

Was it good enough? Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it hard enough that you couldn’t beat the computer? All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, talking with George Bica. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Speaker 0 | 00:41.716

Close it up.

Speaker 1 | 00:42.977

All right, well, you pronounce it so we get it right, because I can’t do it, you know.

Speaker 0 | 00:47.881

Bica. It sounds like pizza, but with a B.

Speaker 1 | 00:50.964

Bica. George Bica. Yeah. Director of Information Technology, and you are currently, are you in Raleigh? It’s nice down there. I’ve got snow up here.

Speaker 0 | 01:01.949

I ended up.

Speaker 1 | 01:02.990

Yeah. Yeah. So the, why don’t you just give me, and just for everyone knowing if I sound a little bit, I don’t know, hoarse or weird, this is officially Phil Howard’s first podcast under the influence of COVID-19. I tested, I tested positive two days ago and all of my kids, every single person in my family tested positive except for my. one uh 11 year old who had recently just gotten her tonsils out so i don’t know if that affects covid maybe getting your tonsils out helps you not get covid but i’m about two days into this thing and uh it’s going on some ups and downs i’m not you know i’m not too out of it i think i sound all right we can still do this podcast right it makes it more uh yeah

Speaker 0 | 01:52.083

so i hope everybody is gonna be okay and and uh you know you get all the mild symptoms and nothing else you

Speaker 1 | 01:58.772

Yes, yes, God willing. They’re almost all cured already. I’m the last one that’s following through on this. So give me, let’s start off with your day job and what you’re doing right now. You’re in, you know, some sort of electrical manufacturing, which is pretty simple, you know. What are we doing on a daily basis? That was me being sarcastic, by the way. Electrical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In case anyone didn’t catch that.

Speaker 0 | 02:27.188

This is very different. I deal with vendors, I deal with large-scale projects and day-to-day problems that users have. I have a large staff of ITs, but most of them are actually outside the United States, mostly in China, but I also have staff in Vietnam and as well as the US. So I make sure that they work. Right now, for example, it’s performance review time. I got to prep and get ready for 2022 performance reviews and how much money we’re all going to get out of this. If any, if any.

Speaker 1 | 03:07.616

Is there a, what’s the language gap? Is there any language gap working with the staff? And I mean, obviously we know there’s a time difference, but is there a language gap with China and Vietnam? And how does that work?

Speaker 0 | 03:20.119

It is somewhat of a language gap. But it’s definitely overcome. They speak English. Most staff are pretty decent at speaking English. I try to be very simple when I communicate with them. So that’s very important. Keep it simple. Use simple words. Even though we’re talking technical, they are brilliant guys. But I don’t think the English language barrier is not a big deal.

Speaker 1 | 03:49.620

And I’m assuming obviously China and Vietnam because of manufacturing, and I’m assuming there’s a lot of manufacturing going on over there.

Speaker 0 | 03:57.122

Yeah, most of the manufacturing is happening there, and the headquarters is actually located here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Speaker 1 | 04:05.604

And how about the Great Wall of China? Is there a firewall? Any firewall issues? How do you get around that?

Speaker 0 | 04:12.126

Yes, the Great Wall of China.

Speaker 1 | 04:15.226

That’s the first thing that we think about when we talk about it.

Speaker 0 | 04:19.372

We have been dealing with that on and off ever since the company started and started manufacturing in China. We have somewhat overcome it by a variety of methods. The primary one is that now China Telecom providers, China Telecom and China Unicom are the two bigger providers of China internet services. They allow what they are called internet fast lane internet lines. So what they do is they have less checks and they go through less filtering than normal internet. It’s a little slower. uh speeds than what you would get if you got like a vanilla internet access for a business yeah but it actually has better performance for international interesting and then the the second layer that we use is we use vpn site-to-site vpns to connect to our cloud hosting public cloud hosting in japan and anywhere outside china So that helps. By using those two layers, we cannot bypass most of the restrictions of the grades firewall.

Speaker 1 | 05:38.422

I have a few customers with manufacturing in China that have helped in the past get around the Chinese firewall. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Cato Networks. It’s a kind of like a global SD-WAN provider on their own network. So we’ve got basically, you know, co-location in mainland China. And then we basically go from there to Hong Kong. And then we actually used the Cato network, which is like a multi-gig global network, kind of like a private MPLS backbone. So we use that as the kind of SD-WAN option for traversing back to United States, India, UK, you know, all over the place. I mean, that was one thing because, yeah, that was, that was one thing because what was happening was a lot of these manufacturers, you know, China would, Congress or whatever it was, would go into like, you know, do something and they would shut down like the international, like. you know, VPNs or firewalls or something, and they would lose all their connection to, to the warehouse, you know, to the manufacturing warehouses, whatever we call it over there. So we had to find a way around it, um, that way, but yeah, China telecom helpful, 49% ownership, whatever, however you have ownership in China, you can only have 49%. Um, so, um, cool. Um, how many employees, I guess employees, not the We don’t want to say headcount. We don’t want to say employees. How big is your team?

Speaker 0 | 07:00.715

I’ve got six people reporting to me. And then we are about 500 employees total as a company.

Speaker 1 | 07:09.101

So that’s good. You’re a little bit over the ratio. Whenever I’ve talked with, looked at mid-market. I’d call it mid-market manufacturing. That would be anywhere from 200 employees maybe to 10,000. The ratio of IT leadership to end users is usually like 1 to 100. So you’re a little bit over that ratio. If you’ve got seven people, it’s in about 500. So that’s doing well. You must be doing something well with the budget there. You must be good at asking for money. I had an interesting note from you when you took my quiz. on the website that you kind of got into this industry by fault. Like you were going to become a dentist. That’s like me. I was going to become, I was going to become a doctor, but that just never happened. I think I realized how hard it was and that my, my passion for being a doctor, you really have to be passionate for that. And that just wasn’t there. So, so what happened there? You were going to become a dentist and then now you’re, now you’re in it manufacturing.

Speaker 0 | 08:19.135

Yeah. So, this goes back to my early high school days. I’m a Gen X and born, you know, like late 70s. And when I went to high school, I came across my first computer. And I was born outside of the United States, as you probably would have guessed. I have an accent. So I was born in Albania, which is in southern, southeast Europe. We were under the Iron Curtain, similar to North Korea.

Speaker 1 | 08:58.511

Do you speak Russian there? Is that what we speak? Is that we speak Russian there?

Speaker 0 | 09:04.095

No, Albania is a distinct, unique Indo-European language. We have our own very unique to Indo-European languages. Actually, it’s one of the four unique languages. that are spoken in Europe. One other one is being Greek. I think Armenian is another one. I forget which one is spoken. That’s unique to the region. But so yes, my father spoke Greek and he also spoke Russian. He had to learn Russian in school because we had a lot of dealings with Russians. But Albania speaks pure Albanian. It’s a very unique language. But back to my computer, so in 91 the regime collapsed and I got a chance to look at my at the first computers back then Probably at 286 is my guess. It was black and white I played chess on it, and then I fell in love. So that was it.

Speaker 1 | 10:04.687

Was it good enough? Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it hard enough that you couldn’t beat the computer?

Speaker 0 | 10:11.173

I was never a good chess player, but I enjoyed the game. I think I lost, but I don’t remember.

Speaker 1 | 10:17.978

If you put the computer on the hardest level, it’s almost impossible to win. It’s just ridiculous, even on medium level. Wait, so you got a 286.

Speaker 0 | 10:29.808

No, I just… It was somebody else that had that computer. And then two years later, my parents were lucky to come to the United States as visitors to visit some family. And from there, they brought a Compaq 486 back at my request. And I was the lucky owner of a Compaq 486 for a couple of years. And that furthered my interest in computers.

Speaker 1 | 10:57.840

How many people… Like, did you live in the country? Did you live in the city? Was it like, what was it like where you lived? Was it like crowded?

Speaker 0 | 11:10.917

I lived in the city, yeah. Okay. I lived in the city.

Speaker 1 | 11:14.180

Population. I’m just, I’m going somewhere there. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. So back then, your parents bring back a compact 46. Yeah, yeah. How many people lived in your, was it like thousands? Like, what was the population where you lived?

Speaker 0 | 11:30.533

No, I mean, it was 60,000 at the time. Oh,

Speaker 1 | 11:33.334

that’s big. Okay, so 60,000.

Speaker 0 | 11:35.155

Yeah, it’s a decent size.

Speaker 1 | 11:36.375

Of the 60,000, how many people had a computer?

Speaker 0 | 11:42.198

Oh, I’d probably say in the whole country, there were probably less than 10 computers.

Speaker 1 | 11:48.600

That’s wild.

Speaker 0 | 11:49.241

At the time.

Speaker 1 | 11:49.921

That’s absolutely amazing. And how old were you when you got this computer?

Speaker 0 | 11:56.564

I was, I’m going to say…

Speaker 1 | 12:01.766

14, maybe 15 at the time. So you’re a 15-year-old with one of the 10 computers out of maybe 60,000 people.

Speaker 0 | 12:08.648

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 12:10.689

That must have made you pretty popular.

Speaker 0 | 12:13.831

Well, not really. See,

Speaker 1 | 12:17.052

why was it not cool?

Speaker 0 | 12:18.172

I never let anybody else touch my computer.

Speaker 1 | 12:20.293

It was still not cool? Are you telling me it was still not cool to be a nerd back then? It was still not cool, see? That’s the thing. No one cared. I was talking with my sister yesterday. She said, remember punch cards? She was like, ugh. I was like, why do I have to do this stupid punch card program? They made my sister, who is older than us, she was born in like the 60s, right? They used to make her do punch cards in high school. And she’s like, this is the dumbest thing ever. Why are they making us do that? And then, you know, now we have computers. And so there was a big difference back then. It just wasn’t, it was kind of like one of those things. But here you are. One of the very few people with a computer, what was that like? Was it powerful for you back then? Did you show it to people like, hey, check this out? I just want to go back in time and know what that was like.

Speaker 0 | 13:11.636

It was exciting. There was a small group of people that did have interactions with the computers, but everybody else was ambivalent to them. They didn’t really care. They didn’t understand the power of the computers. Uh-huh. When I got it, it was running like DOS 6, I think, maybe 6.2.2, if I recall correctly. And then I upgraded it to Windows 95. And I was playing like the basic games that were built in there, you know, Guerrilla, Lemmings, if I recall correctly, and a bunch of other games.

Speaker 1 | 13:48.540

Lemmings was awesome. People don’t know, but Lemmings was like, that was like high-end graphics back then if you had Lemmings.

Speaker 0 | 13:55.364

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 13:56.705

It was cool. And you had to upgrade to Windows 95, meaning, I don’t know, most people don’t understand, like, it was, like, not a command prompt. Like, it was Windows. Yes,

Speaker 0 | 14:08.873

well, I was lucky to actually interact with another computer. I worked as an IT consultant. This is my first gig. I worked as an IT consultant for a jeweler. He’s a very famous jeweler right now. He’s one of the best custom jewelers, I think, in… Europe, but at the time he just started out and he was all into tech and he still is. And he actually had a computer and needed help with running his, I believe it was some kind of 3D engraving capability that drove the computer.

Speaker 1 | 14:41.541

See, this is a beautiful example. This is a beautiful example of how technology is a business force multiplier. He was one of the very, very few jewelers. Well, one of the very few. business owners forget the fact that he was a jeweler that had a computer and used it and now he’s like one of the best jewelers in in the world you’re saying that’s right

Speaker 0 | 15:03.382

That’s right. I mean, he designed beautiful custom jewelry even to this day. And but I remember back then he needed help with running the computer because he still didn’t understand this. Like he understood that the technology was the future, but he didn’t have the expertise. So he brought me in. He was a friend of my dad and I helped him out with setting up the computer, running the tool. And he was creating wax mold out of this 3D engraver. All custom made and handmade by him.

Speaker 1 | 15:35.355

So you’re consulting back in computers before it even happened. So at what point were you like, you know, forget dentistry? At this point, were you like, forget dentistry?

Speaker 0 | 15:46.923

Oh, yeah. I already gave up on that point. I was thinking I was going to go into dentistry before I even touched the computer. The moment I touched it, I completely forgot about dentistry. It was not my thing to do. Although, I would have been a good dentist.

Speaker 1 | 16:04.916

What, so what happened? So how’d you end up over? So how’d you end up over here? How’d you end up over as IT leader in America? Maybe, maybe the short story. Just give me the exciting parts.

Speaker 0 | 16:18.709

I came into the United States as an F1 student. My father was kind enough to sponsor me for the first year. off my college. And then I had to kind of piece together the rest of the year. But that’s a long story. And so in 1996, I came to the United States. I landed in Michigan to a small college there. And then I know you’re going to ask me about my wife and how I met her and what hotmail.

Speaker 1 | 16:51.491

Okay. Yeah. Let’s get to the important stuff. So yeah. So anyways, yeah. How did you meet your wife?

Speaker 0 | 16:57.970

So, yeah, so I came to the United States in 1996, and I needed an email address at that time, and I went to the college library, and I signed up for Hotmail. Hotmail at the time had just launched, so it was very fresh, and you could look up anybody in the directory because there was no spam.

Speaker 1 | 17:16.545

That’s crazy.

Speaker 0 | 17:18.187

Yeah. And then I believe a couple months later, I checked my inbox, and sure enough, I get an email from… a friend of mine from Albania that said hey I don’t know if this is George but if you are um you know I’m so-and-so and we are here in Philly um and if you are really George you know get in touch with us this is our phone number you know and call us so sure enough I’m like yeah that’s her so I call them and sure enough those two friends were in Philly I got in touch with them I spoke for a long time back and forth and then i went to visit them for christmas um and one thing led to another and i married one of the girls i’m gonna bring back the directory for hotmail imagine

Speaker 1 | 18:10.382

that’s right people ruined it everyone ruined it we used to just be able to use it like it was like a phone book it was like a phone book you know you could just look anyone up that’s wild i do not remember that at all but that’s crazy that that that that used to be a feature. I really don’t remember that, which is…

Speaker 0 | 18:30.509

I still have my old email address from Hotmail as an alias now because it’s no longer available. But it’s an alias to my Outlook.com email address still. So if you do still know my old email address, you can reach out to me still, which happened. My old college buddy from that college actually reached out to me after like… 20 years, really. And he said, I don’t know, George, if this email is still good. And sure enough, he lives in Ohio. He’s a policeman right now. And we got in touch. And I was like, wow, blast from the past. I can’t believe it. You kept my email address. So hotmail twice for keeping in touch. Forget Facebook.

Speaker 1 | 19:16.884

So, yeah. Good. We’re on a heavily weighted Microsoft platform anyways, considering that this is going to be released on LinkedIn. So, yes. So, everything Microsoft. Microsoft for the win everywhere. Well, which begs the question, I’m assuming, are you guys on Microsoft? Are you on Teams?

Speaker 0 | 19:42.934

We are on Microsoft. We are on Teams, yes. Office 365, or I should say Microsoft 365 now is a big… platform, a big collaboration tool for us. We are all cloud-based. Most of our services are all cloud. I think the only thing that we run are some in-house tools for engineering and ERP. Everything else is cloud.

Speaker 1 | 20:05.347

Remember when cloud was the enemy? Like, it wasn’t too long ago, like two years ago. Like, the cloud? Like, no. Remember that?

Speaker 0 | 20:11.631

I think people abused the cloud. I mean, they saw the potential, but they didn’t realize the cost.

Speaker 1 | 20:17.175

It was, like, insecure. People were worried, we’re going to lose everything.

Speaker 0 | 20:21.338

Yeah. It does take a little bit of a faith to give everything you have. to somebody else and hope that they’re doing backup following the right process.

Speaker 1 | 20:33.067

Well, I don’t think hope shouldn’t be a, I don’t think hope should ever be a strategy. What do you think?

Speaker 0 | 20:40.433

No, definitely not. This is why there’s audits.

Speaker 1 | 20:45.958

I mean, let’s, I’m just, you know, I’m going to hope my way that this doesn’t happen. So what do you do in that situation? What kind of? I’m just out of curiosity, any best practices that you have as IT director, IT manager, leader, IT? I always say IT director because it’s just a common thing that I think of.

Speaker 0 | 21:04.713

I’ve been in this business for now for a long time, and there is certainly some flags and some questions that you can ask a vendor regarding their security and operational best practices.

Speaker 1 | 21:23.050

Vendor flags.

Speaker 0 | 21:25.131

The biggest indicator is certifications when it comes to compliance, whether it’s some kind of SOC or some other compliance that they can provide to you. That means that somebody has audited them, make sure that they’re doing their correct disaster recovery, they’re following procedures for backups and all that. You know, they’re taking care of security. They’re using encryption.

Speaker 1 | 21:54.408

What’s the biggest red flag? What’s the biggest red flag you ever ran into on a vendor? What was the biggest, like, cover-up? What was the biggest cover-up?

Speaker 0 | 22:04.834

The biggest cover-up? Oh, I’ll have to look into this. Usually,

Speaker 1 | 22:09.297

here’s what I find. Usually the red flag is covered up with a strength. This is our strength. That’s what I’ve found. And really that’s just them like selling around like a hole in their system. Like, like I remember, I remember some guys saying we’re not voiceover. We’re not voiceover internet protocol. No, it’s not us. We’re voiceover PI. We’re voiceover private internet. We’re like, what? Like, what are you talking about? And really what they meant was, is you have to buy an MPLS circuit and have a point to point back to our data center in order for this stuff to work. If that makes sense. They turned it into a strength. No, no, no. We’re not voice over internet protocol. We’re voice over private internet and much more expensive. That’s why. So questions to ask red flags. So yeah, SOC, SOC one, two, HIPAA compliancy, some sort of essay, some sort of government. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 23:02.430

things like this.

Speaker 1 | 23:03.791

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 23:05.572

They follow any, any, any, you know, like government compliance audit. What are their. security best practices, disaster recovery, how frequently they do it. If they don’t follow, if they don’t have any certification, it doesn’t mean that they are actually bad, but you could ask them a questionnaire. We fairly often used to get questionnaires when I used to work in as a company that did provide internet services and we didn’t really have compliance per se in a lot of the services, but we had that covered with Robust backup and disaster recovery testing and all that stuff. Gotcha. I think it’s a degree of, you know, if a customer wants to test, you make sure that if you claim something you better be able to back that up. If you say that you’ve got disaster recovery and the customer says, well, show me your disaster recovery that you did from six months ago or the last one you did, you better have some documentation that you did that.

Speaker 1 | 24:10.198

Work-life balance as an IT director. We have people that work like crazy and work all hours of the night. How do you manage that considering there’s really no end in mind when it comes to technology? Or have you gotten to the point where it is automated and you feel like you’re just steering the ship, so to speak?

Speaker 0 | 24:32.927

That’s a tough one. It’s a personal choice. You as a person have a responsibility to live first and then work to be able to provide for that living. This is my philosophy in life. So my thinking is, my baseline is 40 hours. If I can do 35 hours for the week, that’s great, but… baseline is 40 hours. I’ll do extra hours on a one-off, but I won’t commit to 60 or 80 hours every single week. So for example, you mentioned that there’s a time gap between me and my team in Asia. So how do I communicate with them? Well, I have one-on-one meetings with them every week. I dedicate about 20 minutes for each person and we speak. Every Monday night for me, which is Tuesday morning for them. And then I have on Thursday, I have a group scrum that’s about, I’ll say, 40 minutes long that we talk about all our projects and all that. Again,

Speaker 1 | 25:40.828

that’s on Thursday. That’s on Thursday.

Speaker 0 | 25:44.651

Yeah, Thursday night for myself. It’s Friday morning for them. So how does that those hours that I have to spend? It’s about an hour and a half that I spend. spend on Monday and about an hour that I spent on Thursday. How does that get in on my work schedule? Well, I leave a little early on Monday and I leave a little early on Thursday. That’s the end of it. I mean, I don’t have to commit eight hours in the office and then do an extra hour and a half on top of that on Monday. So I have to find that balance. And this is my philosophy. If you are working consistently… 60 hours or more that means you are you need somebody else you need to hire somebody else because you’re not really um it’s a disservice to yourself and really you’re gonna end up burning out unfortunately in i.t burnouts are fairly common if you don’t really follow that good life work balance i’ve never been able to to say that you know i’ve been burned out by a job i’ve been to jobs that are fairly intensive um and and i’ve worked but uh the most part you need to find a job you need to speak to your supervisor your manager or somebody else and explain the situation that this is not sustainable 40 hours i think is very reasonable to work and no more unless absolutely necessary and this includes on call by the way if you are working on call um there should be some kind of compensation either monetary or some other compensation time wise if you’re doing on-call service nothing is free what no but i never turned down a free lunch yeah from from a vendor yeah you don’t have to let it it’s a violation of some kind of

Speaker 1 | 27:49.072

I never turn down burritos for anyone out there listening. What is it? There’s a difficult kind of weird conundrum for IT leadership, meaning only in the last two decades has it become a real job. Two decades, maybe more than that. Maybe three decades. We’ll give it 30 years. But really 20 years in the last 10 years. It’s really gotten crazy amazon blows me away I’m, just shocked When I look at it’s a it’s a gui, right? It’s an interface. It’s It’s just amazing to me How people and things have grown with technology it’s a it’s um, it’s quite amazing to me. So with that It’s like a whole new frontier of, you know, I don’t know what, you know, what to do or like, what’s, what’s the end game? You know, I think doctors had an end game retirement of some sort. Lawyers had an end game, right? What’s the IT leaders end game? Is it the same now? Is it just like, I don’t think it’s going to be that. I don’t, I think 10 years from now when people can’t work anymore.

Speaker 0 | 29:11.024

don’t want to work or whatever what’s the do are do it leaders and people have an end game in mind do they have a clear route to the future or is it i’m just showing up to work every day yeah that’s a loaded question because it has a lot of nuances to it so first of all you’re absolutely right uh 10 or 20 years ago the it landscape was much more simple uh you could have people that knew you a bunch of technologies and they were comfortable with running a whole IT department. Nowadays, you are more likely to be siloed into a specific role, especially if you are in a larger organization. You know, you’re going to be only dealing with storage, or you’re only going to do security, you’re only going to do virtualization for desktops. You know, you can narrow that down. And then… you compartmentalize these departments so much that it becomes like a turf where where is my job that ends and who else is going to do the rest of the job so if you want a project done in IT then you are going to have to involve and direct all these people from different IT departments to kind of work together and complete projects that’s the complexity of of an IT manager when it comes to IT staff themselves and what’s their end goal. I think the outlook in life should be such that you really need to think about your skill set down the line. If you are a young person now and you’re doing help tests for some basic level, is that what you really want to do when you are about to retire? How expendable are you compared to a hungry young man that is willing to do your job for like lot less than you so your only option is to grow your skill set become better and become somebody with with better skill set than just doing help desk you know later in your life before retirement first is not going to provide you that retirement goal that you want and second you’re gonna find yourself out of a job very quickly and it’s going to be tough to find that job if you if you don’t have the skill set at that age. So my advice is develop those skill sets while you’re young. Make yourself learn the back end, whether it’s servers and networking, security, and then figure out what’s your end goal based on that.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.316

Your only option is to relentlessly grow. Yeah. I like it.

Speaker 0 | 32:00.876

As somebody has said, technology changes every couple of years, which is still true, although I would say less so now, maybe every three years technology changes, but it still changes radically. So you still have to keep up with endless changes, constant changes all the time. Nothing is static in this world. I look back at technology, even three years ago it was so different than today. You got to keep up with everything. Always learn. Otherwise, you’re going to fall behind and you’re going to be discarded. Employees or employers are ruthless in that regard.

Speaker 1 | 32:40.494

Nothing is static.

Speaker 0 | 32:41.254

If you’re overpaid and underqualified.

Speaker 1 | 32:45.837

Nothing is static, even your IP addresses.

Speaker 0 | 32:48.518

They’re not. That’s right.

Speaker 1 | 32:50.319

There should be some, we coined that quote or something. There’s got to be some quote there. It’s not, right? Because we’re going like, they’re just not. They’re going to disappear. There’s going to be no more static IP addresses.

Speaker 0 | 32:58.892

ipv4 and ipv6 people not learning ipv6 now they are going to be up to leap at some point nothing is static even your slash 29.

Speaker 1 | 33:11.562

um i like that i feel like we should coin that i wonder if that’s ever been done i wonder if that’s ever even been said before i like that a lot the uh manufacturing i never even thought about this but i would think uh how’s the supply chain and how’s the supply chain affecting you

Speaker 0 | 33:30.316

We’re in…

Speaker 1 | 33:31.776

Didn’t sound too excited.

Speaker 0 | 33:33.357

We’re suffering, I could say. I mean, we are embedded in the manufacturing supply chain. We don’t actually produce anything per se, but we are part of a larger electronic manufacturing flow. So any chip shortage, any COVID situation impacts our production lines and our bottom lines directly. It has been difficult a couple of years. Most of the time, the factories tend to close down for a week or two if there is a COVID infection. Plus, the chip shortage has slowed down the manufacturing of the products for our vendors. I’m sorry, for our clients. So it has impacted our bottom line for sure. I used to have a larger team, actually, and I’ve had to… let go of some of my team members, even though it was tough. But unfortunately, it was required because we shrank down as a business. And I’m hoping that 2022 is going to change things around. The semiconductor industry just announced like a crazy, I think it was $500 billion profit this year, even though there’s a chip shortage. So I’m assuming 2022 is going to turn this around. And it’s just going to be out from here.

Speaker 1 | 34:58.352

Do you think that profit was because, is that profit just due to supply and demand? Like just people could charge more money? Like I want to go buy a float. kids you know you look at the car industry for example i was you just you read my mind because i’m going to i was like i’m gonna buy uh you know i just want a new i don’t know diesel chevy heck no it’s 120

Speaker 0 | 35:22.644

000 for a car to buy yeah exactly so right now the price of a car from 2019 to 2022 it has jumped up by ten thousand dollars this is the average car price it’s crazy $35,000 or $30-some thousand dollars in 2019. It is now $43,000 in 2022. And this is a new car average. Yeah. And if you go anywhere, if you go to any dealer, you’re lucky to find five cars in the whole lot. When I was there, I was shocked. I thought they were remodeling and they had moved the car somewhere. And they said, no, no, no, this is all we got. And if you don’t buy this right now. in two hours i’m going to sell this to somebody else the sales guy’s the easiest job ever yeah right now right now but i don’t know in next year i think you look at the parking lot fields and somewhere in texas or michigan where all these cars are parked they’re waiting for chips to be put in and they’re going to be sitting there for a couple years with no chips and once they put the chips in they’re going to flood the market so we’re going to have, in my opinion, a flood of new cars and the prices of new cars are going to come down significantly, hopefully, from this competition. But it’s going to look bad for the salespeople at that time. I don’t know. I mean, it’s going to happen.

Speaker 1 | 36:47.162

The salespeople never have it bad. They do well in a down market. They do well in an up market. So they’ll just sell more. They’ll just go for quantity at that point.

Speaker 0 | 36:56.558

Who is going to buy these cars that have been sitting in the parking lot for two, three years, though? I know,

Speaker 1 | 37:02.060

but if I get a good deal, you better give me a good deal. What we need to do is pull the chips out of the car. Can’t we just go back to making cars simple? You know, I’ve never been more disappointed by the…

Speaker 0 | 37:14.985

Like these cars that are backed with a carburetor and no, you know, electronic…

Speaker 1 | 37:21.908

Yeah, let’s do it. Well,

Speaker 0 | 37:24.289

is it cold? The car won’t start. we’re not driving anywhere anyways sorry the carburetor has all kinds of other problems you know computers are really good at making cars fuel efficient and keeping up with the standards well

Speaker 1 | 37:43.119

it has been a pleasure having you on the show if you had any one piece of advice major piece of advice to people out there listening Uh, as a person who somehow convinced his parents to bring a 46 back on the plane, I’m assuming it was on the plane back on the plane to Albania all the way back. And then to come all the way to, uh, to America, find your wife via hotmail, which is really cool. Um, and been through quite a bit of growth and I would say minor tribulations. What is your piece of advice to people out there listening?

Speaker 0 | 38:25.206

For the IT managers that are looking to get their budgets filled, I say, and I don’t know exactly what the exact U.S. expression is, but my expression is, if you want a bunny, ask for the donkey.

Speaker 1 | 38:46.323

I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it’s funny. Okay. So you’re saying?

Speaker 0 | 38:51.147

Just ask for more than what you really need. So you can. fill in your budget um for the for the regular hands-on folks you know keep your work-life balance with your family in mind that’s the most important thing in life and it’s not the job job should only be there to support you for your life events but be there for the family time flies by really fast it’s easy to stress yeah man yeah it’s easy to let stress in the a sense of

Speaker 1 | 39:23.890

And when I say sense, it’s merely a sense of urgency and impending events and all kinds of crap going on in your life. It’s easy to get wrapped up in a sense of, oh, I’m just so overwhelmed. Right. But I think what, and I’ve just found this from my own, uh, periods in life where I just said, I don’t give a crap and I’m just going to ignore everything. What I found is that when I did that, not much changed. I still did okay. In fact, I did better. In fact, I did better.

Speaker 0 | 40:00.075

Yeah. Come back from vacation and you’ve got an inbox full of emails. You can just select all and delete. The people that care to follow up with you, they’re going to email you back.

Speaker 1 | 40:11.854

It’s true. Ignore,

Speaker 0 | 40:13.634

ignore,

Speaker 1 | 40:14.395

ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore. Don’t watch the news. Don’t listen to the news. I threw the TV away years ago. I think it was part, I think it was in like a, the four hour work week or something. One of those Tim Ferriss books I read, he’s like, don’t worry. He’s like, just, he’s like one of the, he has like all these different, like step out of your comfort zone, little exercises when you read the book. Like one is like, I think he said, just lay down in the street and play dead in like the middle of New York and just you know, you just have to sit there for like a minute and play dead and like to get out of your comfort zone, you know, just like the feeling of people staring at you and like, what the heck is this guy doing? You know? And another one was, uh, you know, news like for a week, don’t worry. And basically he said, basically he said like, don’t worry. Like if something important happens, like you’ll hear about it. Did you hear about that? And, uh, anyways, it’s true.

Speaker 0 | 41:05.664

So my, my philosophy is the less social media the better the only thing i have in terms of social media is linkedin and reddit um that’s it i have no twitter i have no facebook i have no whatsapp um i have no tick tock or or anything else that’s it linkedin

Speaker 1 | 41:25.396

and and and reddit these are the only two tick tock i wouldn’t even know what to do with tick tock that just it’s just weird to me i wouldn’t even want do you believe that that is the number one

Speaker 0 | 41:35.982

most heavily used website in the world it surpassed google for a while it is ridiculous help us i don’t even know it’s so bad i

Speaker 1 | 41:53.754

block it for all my kids and this is why and people are gonna people are gonna bash me for this but this is why democracy is doomed to fail because it is a rep It is a government by the people, for the people, of the people. And if the majority of the people are on TikTok, we’re screwed.

Speaker 0 | 42:13.524

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was lucky to be born in a country that was completely totalitarian and I’ve lived in the greatest democracy of them all. And I can say there’s pros and cons to both. Something in the middle is the good part. I just don’t know where that is.

Speaker 1 | 42:32.590

Somewhere between totalitarian control and complete and utter representative freedom of humans’desires, of human desires. Somewhere in between there is a happy medium. So it’s like, yes, if we just let our kids do anything and everything all the time and vote. If the kids voted on what they would have for dinner, then it’d be ice cream every night. Let’s be honest. If the kids voted, if I let the kids vote. We’d all be, they’d all be like done. They’d be stupid, unhealthy, and who knows? Numerous other things. Maybe we should, we should do a test on that, you know, control groups and everything.

Speaker 0 | 43:14.261

In my family, Bill, in my family, I call this a benevolent dictatorship.

Speaker 1 | 43:24.544

Love it. Writing this one down. Benevolent dictatorship. I am running that. Go ahead. I’m going to, I think I’m going to upgrade from meritocracy because I run a meritocracy to benevolent dictatorship. I like this better.

Speaker 0 | 43:37.156

Yeah. You, you basically are a dictator, but you do all the good things, you know, for your constituents, but they need to listen to you because you are, you are the dictator. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 43:51.109

Yes. Trust me. Um, trust me.

Speaker 0 | 43:53.811

It’s good for you.

Speaker 1 | 43:54.952

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 0 | 43:55.573

No better.

Speaker 1 | 43:56.173

Yes. hate me now, love me later, something like that. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Hate me now, love me now.

Speaker 0 | 44:02.576

If you follow that, your kids will appreciate it when they’re grown up and understand. Because right now they think that, you know, they are right, especially if they’re teenagers. They are right and we’re wrong. And when they become dads and mothers, then they’ll say, you know what, my parents were right.

Speaker 1 | 44:22.426

No, I’m one of those homeschooler people that’s completely sheltered as child from all of the world and taking all their devices away and keep them held up inside a house. Not really, not entirely, but it is amazing how adults tell me my kids are mature, can hold a normal conversation, which is cool. Thank you very much. These shows always get so great at the end. I wish we could start there. I wish we could do like the show in reverbs. You know, I wish we could start with benevolent dictatorship. That would just be great. They just. The shows just seem to get so good towards the end. Well, sir.

Speaker 0 | 44:54.489

Hopefully all the listeners have not got bored and missed the good part.

Speaker 1 | 44:58.854

Yeah, if they’ve made it this far, they know that dictatorship is the way to go.

Speaker 0 | 45:02.617

That’s right.

Speaker 1 | 45:05.360

Have an absolute, well, I hope this year turns out better for the microchip shortage, and I hope that we do get a flood of cheap cars, at least for my sake.

Speaker 0 | 45:16.194

Yeah, and for my sake. And thank you, Phil, for hosting me at your podcast. It has been a pleasure. Hey,

Speaker 1 | 45:22.416

thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.

129. Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica

Speaker 0 | 00:00.140

So in 91, the regime collapsed, and I got a chance to look at the first computers back then. Probably a 286 is my guess. It was black and white. I played chess on it, and then I fell in love. So that was it.

Speaker 1 | 00:16.353

Was it good enough? Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it hard enough that you couldn’t beat the computer? All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, talking with George Bica. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Speaker 0 | 00:41.716

Close it up.

Speaker 1 | 00:42.977

All right, well, you pronounce it so we get it right, because I can’t do it, you know.

Speaker 0 | 00:47.881

Bica. It sounds like pizza, but with a B.

Speaker 1 | 00:50.964

Bica. George Bica. Yeah. Director of Information Technology, and you are currently, are you in Raleigh? It’s nice down there. I’ve got snow up here.

Speaker 0 | 01:01.949

I ended up.

Speaker 1 | 01:02.990

Yeah. Yeah. So the, why don’t you just give me, and just for everyone knowing if I sound a little bit, I don’t know, hoarse or weird, this is officially Phil Howard’s first podcast under the influence of COVID-19. I tested, I tested positive two days ago and all of my kids, every single person in my family tested positive except for my. one uh 11 year old who had recently just gotten her tonsils out so i don’t know if that affects covid maybe getting your tonsils out helps you not get covid but i’m about two days into this thing and uh it’s going on some ups and downs i’m not you know i’m not too out of it i think i sound all right we can still do this podcast right it makes it more uh yeah

Speaker 0 | 01:52.083

so i hope everybody is gonna be okay and and uh you know you get all the mild symptoms and nothing else you

Speaker 1 | 01:58.772

Yes, yes, God willing. They’re almost all cured already. I’m the last one that’s following through on this. So give me, let’s start off with your day job and what you’re doing right now. You’re in, you know, some sort of electrical manufacturing, which is pretty simple, you know. What are we doing on a daily basis? That was me being sarcastic, by the way. Electrical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In case anyone didn’t catch that.

Speaker 0 | 02:27.188

This is very different. I deal with vendors, I deal with large-scale projects and day-to-day problems that users have. I have a large staff of ITs, but most of them are actually outside the United States, mostly in China, but I also have staff in Vietnam and as well as the US. So I make sure that they work. Right now, for example, it’s performance review time. I got to prep and get ready for 2022 performance reviews and how much money we’re all going to get out of this. If any, if any.

Speaker 1 | 03:07.616

Is there a, what’s the language gap? Is there any language gap working with the staff? And I mean, obviously we know there’s a time difference, but is there a language gap with China and Vietnam? And how does that work?

Speaker 0 | 03:20.119

It is somewhat of a language gap. But it’s definitely overcome. They speak English. Most staff are pretty decent at speaking English. I try to be very simple when I communicate with them. So that’s very important. Keep it simple. Use simple words. Even though we’re talking technical, they are brilliant guys. But I don’t think the English language barrier is not a big deal.

Speaker 1 | 03:49.620

And I’m assuming obviously China and Vietnam because of manufacturing, and I’m assuming there’s a lot of manufacturing going on over there.

Speaker 0 | 03:57.122

Yeah, most of the manufacturing is happening there, and the headquarters is actually located here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Speaker 1 | 04:05.604

And how about the Great Wall of China? Is there a firewall? Any firewall issues? How do you get around that?

Speaker 0 | 04:12.126

Yes, the Great Wall of China.

Speaker 1 | 04:15.226

That’s the first thing that we think about when we talk about it.

Speaker 0 | 04:19.372

We have been dealing with that on and off ever since the company started and started manufacturing in China. We have somewhat overcome it by a variety of methods. The primary one is that now China Telecom providers, China Telecom and China Unicom are the two bigger providers of China internet services. They allow what they are called internet fast lane internet lines. So what they do is they have less checks and they go through less filtering than normal internet. It’s a little slower. uh speeds than what you would get if you got like a vanilla internet access for a business yeah but it actually has better performance for international interesting and then the the second layer that we use is we use vpn site-to-site vpns to connect to our cloud hosting public cloud hosting in japan and anywhere outside china So that helps. By using those two layers, we cannot bypass most of the restrictions of the grades firewall.

Speaker 1 | 05:38.422

I have a few customers with manufacturing in China that have helped in the past get around the Chinese firewall. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Cato Networks. It’s a kind of like a global SD-WAN provider on their own network. So we’ve got basically, you know, co-location in mainland China. And then we basically go from there to Hong Kong. And then we actually used the Cato network, which is like a multi-gig global network, kind of like a private MPLS backbone. So we use that as the kind of SD-WAN option for traversing back to United States, India, UK, you know, all over the place. I mean, that was one thing because, yeah, that was, that was one thing because what was happening was a lot of these manufacturers, you know, China would, Congress or whatever it was, would go into like, you know, do something and they would shut down like the international, like. you know, VPNs or firewalls or something, and they would lose all their connection to, to the warehouse, you know, to the manufacturing warehouses, whatever we call it over there. So we had to find a way around it, um, that way, but yeah, China telecom helpful, 49% ownership, whatever, however you have ownership in China, you can only have 49%. Um, so, um, cool. Um, how many employees, I guess employees, not the We don’t want to say headcount. We don’t want to say employees. How big is your team?

Speaker 0 | 07:00.715

I’ve got six people reporting to me. And then we are about 500 employees total as a company.

Speaker 1 | 07:09.101

So that’s good. You’re a little bit over the ratio. Whenever I’ve talked with, looked at mid-market. I’d call it mid-market manufacturing. That would be anywhere from 200 employees maybe to 10,000. The ratio of IT leadership to end users is usually like 1 to 100. So you’re a little bit over that ratio. If you’ve got seven people, it’s in about 500. So that’s doing well. You must be doing something well with the budget there. You must be good at asking for money. I had an interesting note from you when you took my quiz. on the website that you kind of got into this industry by fault. Like you were going to become a dentist. That’s like me. I was going to become, I was going to become a doctor, but that just never happened. I think I realized how hard it was and that my, my passion for being a doctor, you really have to be passionate for that. And that just wasn’t there. So, so what happened there? You were going to become a dentist and then now you’re, now you’re in it manufacturing.

Speaker 0 | 08:19.135

Yeah. So, this goes back to my early high school days. I’m a Gen X and born, you know, like late 70s. And when I went to high school, I came across my first computer. And I was born outside of the United States, as you probably would have guessed. I have an accent. So I was born in Albania, which is in southern, southeast Europe. We were under the Iron Curtain, similar to North Korea.

Speaker 1 | 08:58.511

Do you speak Russian there? Is that what we speak? Is that we speak Russian there?

Speaker 0 | 09:04.095

No, Albania is a distinct, unique Indo-European language. We have our own very unique to Indo-European languages. Actually, it’s one of the four unique languages. that are spoken in Europe. One other one is being Greek. I think Armenian is another one. I forget which one is spoken. That’s unique to the region. But so yes, my father spoke Greek and he also spoke Russian. He had to learn Russian in school because we had a lot of dealings with Russians. But Albania speaks pure Albanian. It’s a very unique language. But back to my computer, so in 91 the regime collapsed and I got a chance to look at my at the first computers back then Probably at 286 is my guess. It was black and white I played chess on it, and then I fell in love. So that was it.

Speaker 1 | 10:04.687

Was it good enough? Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it hard enough that you couldn’t beat the computer?

Speaker 0 | 10:11.173

I was never a good chess player, but I enjoyed the game. I think I lost, but I don’t remember.

Speaker 1 | 10:17.978

If you put the computer on the hardest level, it’s almost impossible to win. It’s just ridiculous, even on medium level. Wait, so you got a 286.

Speaker 0 | 10:29.808

No, I just… It was somebody else that had that computer. And then two years later, my parents were lucky to come to the United States as visitors to visit some family. And from there, they brought a Compaq 486 back at my request. And I was the lucky owner of a Compaq 486 for a couple of years. And that furthered my interest in computers.

Speaker 1 | 10:57.840

How many people… Like, did you live in the country? Did you live in the city? Was it like, what was it like where you lived? Was it like crowded?

Speaker 0 | 11:10.917

I lived in the city, yeah. Okay. I lived in the city.

Speaker 1 | 11:14.180

Population. I’m just, I’m going somewhere there. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. So back then, your parents bring back a compact 46. Yeah, yeah. How many people lived in your, was it like thousands? Like, what was the population where you lived?

Speaker 0 | 11:30.533

No, I mean, it was 60,000 at the time. Oh,

Speaker 1 | 11:33.334

that’s big. Okay, so 60,000.

Speaker 0 | 11:35.155

Yeah, it’s a decent size.

Speaker 1 | 11:36.375

Of the 60,000, how many people had a computer?

Speaker 0 | 11:42.198

Oh, I’d probably say in the whole country, there were probably less than 10 computers.

Speaker 1 | 11:48.600

That’s wild.

Speaker 0 | 11:49.241

At the time.

Speaker 1 | 11:49.921

That’s absolutely amazing. And how old were you when you got this computer?

Speaker 0 | 11:56.564

I was, I’m going to say…

Speaker 1 | 12:01.766

14, maybe 15 at the time. So you’re a 15-year-old with one of the 10 computers out of maybe 60,000 people.

Speaker 0 | 12:08.648

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 12:10.689

That must have made you pretty popular.

Speaker 0 | 12:13.831

Well, not really. See,

Speaker 1 | 12:17.052

why was it not cool?

Speaker 0 | 12:18.172

I never let anybody else touch my computer.

Speaker 1 | 12:20.293

It was still not cool? Are you telling me it was still not cool to be a nerd back then? It was still not cool, see? That’s the thing. No one cared. I was talking with my sister yesterday. She said, remember punch cards? She was like, ugh. I was like, why do I have to do this stupid punch card program? They made my sister, who is older than us, she was born in like the 60s, right? They used to make her do punch cards in high school. And she’s like, this is the dumbest thing ever. Why are they making us do that? And then, you know, now we have computers. And so there was a big difference back then. It just wasn’t, it was kind of like one of those things. But here you are. One of the very few people with a computer, what was that like? Was it powerful for you back then? Did you show it to people like, hey, check this out? I just want to go back in time and know what that was like.

Speaker 0 | 13:11.636

It was exciting. There was a small group of people that did have interactions with the computers, but everybody else was ambivalent to them. They didn’t really care. They didn’t understand the power of the computers. Uh-huh. When I got it, it was running like DOS 6, I think, maybe 6.2.2, if I recall correctly. And then I upgraded it to Windows 95. And I was playing like the basic games that were built in there, you know, Guerrilla, Lemmings, if I recall correctly, and a bunch of other games.

Speaker 1 | 13:48.540

Lemmings was awesome. People don’t know, but Lemmings was like, that was like high-end graphics back then if you had Lemmings.

Speaker 0 | 13:55.364

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 13:56.705

It was cool. And you had to upgrade to Windows 95, meaning, I don’t know, most people don’t understand, like, it was, like, not a command prompt. Like, it was Windows. Yes,

Speaker 0 | 14:08.873

well, I was lucky to actually interact with another computer. I worked as an IT consultant. This is my first gig. I worked as an IT consultant for a jeweler. He’s a very famous jeweler right now. He’s one of the best custom jewelers, I think, in… Europe, but at the time he just started out and he was all into tech and he still is. And he actually had a computer and needed help with running his, I believe it was some kind of 3D engraving capability that drove the computer.

Speaker 1 | 14:41.541

See, this is a beautiful example. This is a beautiful example of how technology is a business force multiplier. He was one of the very, very few jewelers. Well, one of the very few. business owners forget the fact that he was a jeweler that had a computer and used it and now he’s like one of the best jewelers in in the world you’re saying that’s right

Speaker 0 | 15:03.382

That’s right. I mean, he designed beautiful custom jewelry even to this day. And but I remember back then he needed help with running the computer because he still didn’t understand this. Like he understood that the technology was the future, but he didn’t have the expertise. So he brought me in. He was a friend of my dad and I helped him out with setting up the computer, running the tool. And he was creating wax mold out of this 3D engraver. All custom made and handmade by him.

Speaker 1 | 15:35.355

So you’re consulting back in computers before it even happened. So at what point were you like, you know, forget dentistry? At this point, were you like, forget dentistry?

Speaker 0 | 15:46.923

Oh, yeah. I already gave up on that point. I was thinking I was going to go into dentistry before I even touched the computer. The moment I touched it, I completely forgot about dentistry. It was not my thing to do. Although, I would have been a good dentist.

Speaker 1 | 16:04.916

What, so what happened? So how’d you end up over? So how’d you end up over here? How’d you end up over as IT leader in America? Maybe, maybe the short story. Just give me the exciting parts.

Speaker 0 | 16:18.709

I came into the United States as an F1 student. My father was kind enough to sponsor me for the first year. off my college. And then I had to kind of piece together the rest of the year. But that’s a long story. And so in 1996, I came to the United States. I landed in Michigan to a small college there. And then I know you’re going to ask me about my wife and how I met her and what hotmail.

Speaker 1 | 16:51.491

Okay. Yeah. Let’s get to the important stuff. So yeah. So anyways, yeah. How did you meet your wife?

Speaker 0 | 16:57.970

So, yeah, so I came to the United States in 1996, and I needed an email address at that time, and I went to the college library, and I signed up for Hotmail. Hotmail at the time had just launched, so it was very fresh, and you could look up anybody in the directory because there was no spam.

Speaker 1 | 17:16.545

That’s crazy.

Speaker 0 | 17:18.187

Yeah. And then I believe a couple months later, I checked my inbox, and sure enough, I get an email from… a friend of mine from Albania that said hey I don’t know if this is George but if you are um you know I’m so-and-so and we are here in Philly um and if you are really George you know get in touch with us this is our phone number you know and call us so sure enough I’m like yeah that’s her so I call them and sure enough those two friends were in Philly I got in touch with them I spoke for a long time back and forth and then i went to visit them for christmas um and one thing led to another and i married one of the girls i’m gonna bring back the directory for hotmail imagine

Speaker 1 | 18:10.382

that’s right people ruined it everyone ruined it we used to just be able to use it like it was like a phone book it was like a phone book you know you could just look anyone up that’s wild i do not remember that at all but that’s crazy that that that that used to be a feature. I really don’t remember that, which is…

Speaker 0 | 18:30.509

I still have my old email address from Hotmail as an alias now because it’s no longer available. But it’s an alias to my Outlook.com email address still. So if you do still know my old email address, you can reach out to me still, which happened. My old college buddy from that college actually reached out to me after like… 20 years, really. And he said, I don’t know, George, if this email is still good. And sure enough, he lives in Ohio. He’s a policeman right now. And we got in touch. And I was like, wow, blast from the past. I can’t believe it. You kept my email address. So hotmail twice for keeping in touch. Forget Facebook.

Speaker 1 | 19:16.884

So, yeah. Good. We’re on a heavily weighted Microsoft platform anyways, considering that this is going to be released on LinkedIn. So, yes. So, everything Microsoft. Microsoft for the win everywhere. Well, which begs the question, I’m assuming, are you guys on Microsoft? Are you on Teams?

Speaker 0 | 19:42.934

We are on Microsoft. We are on Teams, yes. Office 365, or I should say Microsoft 365 now is a big… platform, a big collaboration tool for us. We are all cloud-based. Most of our services are all cloud. I think the only thing that we run are some in-house tools for engineering and ERP. Everything else is cloud.

Speaker 1 | 20:05.347

Remember when cloud was the enemy? Like, it wasn’t too long ago, like two years ago. Like, the cloud? Like, no. Remember that?

Speaker 0 | 20:11.631

I think people abused the cloud. I mean, they saw the potential, but they didn’t realize the cost.

Speaker 1 | 20:17.175

It was, like, insecure. People were worried, we’re going to lose everything.

Speaker 0 | 20:21.338

Yeah. It does take a little bit of a faith to give everything you have. to somebody else and hope that they’re doing backup following the right process.

Speaker 1 | 20:33.067

Well, I don’t think hope shouldn’t be a, I don’t think hope should ever be a strategy. What do you think?

Speaker 0 | 20:40.433

No, definitely not. This is why there’s audits.

Speaker 1 | 20:45.958

I mean, let’s, I’m just, you know, I’m going to hope my way that this doesn’t happen. So what do you do in that situation? What kind of? I’m just out of curiosity, any best practices that you have as IT director, IT manager, leader, IT? I always say IT director because it’s just a common thing that I think of.

Speaker 0 | 21:04.713

I’ve been in this business for now for a long time, and there is certainly some flags and some questions that you can ask a vendor regarding their security and operational best practices.

Speaker 1 | 21:23.050

Vendor flags.

Speaker 0 | 21:25.131

The biggest indicator is certifications when it comes to compliance, whether it’s some kind of SOC or some other compliance that they can provide to you. That means that somebody has audited them, make sure that they’re doing their correct disaster recovery, they’re following procedures for backups and all that. You know, they’re taking care of security. They’re using encryption.

Speaker 1 | 21:54.408

What’s the biggest red flag? What’s the biggest red flag you ever ran into on a vendor? What was the biggest, like, cover-up? What was the biggest cover-up?

Speaker 0 | 22:04.834

The biggest cover-up? Oh, I’ll have to look into this. Usually,

Speaker 1 | 22:09.297

here’s what I find. Usually the red flag is covered up with a strength. This is our strength. That’s what I’ve found. And really that’s just them like selling around like a hole in their system. Like, like I remember, I remember some guys saying we’re not voiceover. We’re not voiceover internet protocol. No, it’s not us. We’re voiceover PI. We’re voiceover private internet. We’re like, what? Like, what are you talking about? And really what they meant was, is you have to buy an MPLS circuit and have a point to point back to our data center in order for this stuff to work. If that makes sense. They turned it into a strength. No, no, no. We’re not voice over internet protocol. We’re voice over private internet and much more expensive. That’s why. So questions to ask red flags. So yeah, SOC, SOC one, two, HIPAA compliancy, some sort of essay, some sort of government. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 23:02.430

things like this.

Speaker 1 | 23:03.791

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 23:05.572

They follow any, any, any, you know, like government compliance audit. What are their. security best practices, disaster recovery, how frequently they do it. If they don’t follow, if they don’t have any certification, it doesn’t mean that they are actually bad, but you could ask them a questionnaire. We fairly often used to get questionnaires when I used to work in as a company that did provide internet services and we didn’t really have compliance per se in a lot of the services, but we had that covered with Robust backup and disaster recovery testing and all that stuff. Gotcha. I think it’s a degree of, you know, if a customer wants to test, you make sure that if you claim something you better be able to back that up. If you say that you’ve got disaster recovery and the customer says, well, show me your disaster recovery that you did from six months ago or the last one you did, you better have some documentation that you did that.

Speaker 1 | 24:10.198

Work-life balance as an IT director. We have people that work like crazy and work all hours of the night. How do you manage that considering there’s really no end in mind when it comes to technology? Or have you gotten to the point where it is automated and you feel like you’re just steering the ship, so to speak?

Speaker 0 | 24:32.927

That’s a tough one. It’s a personal choice. You as a person have a responsibility to live first and then work to be able to provide for that living. This is my philosophy in life. So my thinking is, my baseline is 40 hours. If I can do 35 hours for the week, that’s great, but… baseline is 40 hours. I’ll do extra hours on a one-off, but I won’t commit to 60 or 80 hours every single week. So for example, you mentioned that there’s a time gap between me and my team in Asia. So how do I communicate with them? Well, I have one-on-one meetings with them every week. I dedicate about 20 minutes for each person and we speak. Every Monday night for me, which is Tuesday morning for them. And then I have on Thursday, I have a group scrum that’s about, I’ll say, 40 minutes long that we talk about all our projects and all that. Again,

Speaker 1 | 25:40.828

that’s on Thursday. That’s on Thursday.

Speaker 0 | 25:44.651

Yeah, Thursday night for myself. It’s Friday morning for them. So how does that those hours that I have to spend? It’s about an hour and a half that I spend. spend on Monday and about an hour that I spent on Thursday. How does that get in on my work schedule? Well, I leave a little early on Monday and I leave a little early on Thursday. That’s the end of it. I mean, I don’t have to commit eight hours in the office and then do an extra hour and a half on top of that on Monday. So I have to find that balance. And this is my philosophy. If you are working consistently… 60 hours or more that means you are you need somebody else you need to hire somebody else because you’re not really um it’s a disservice to yourself and really you’re gonna end up burning out unfortunately in i.t burnouts are fairly common if you don’t really follow that good life work balance i’ve never been able to to say that you know i’ve been burned out by a job i’ve been to jobs that are fairly intensive um and and i’ve worked but uh the most part you need to find a job you need to speak to your supervisor your manager or somebody else and explain the situation that this is not sustainable 40 hours i think is very reasonable to work and no more unless absolutely necessary and this includes on call by the way if you are working on call um there should be some kind of compensation either monetary or some other compensation time wise if you’re doing on-call service nothing is free what no but i never turned down a free lunch yeah from from a vendor yeah you don’t have to let it it’s a violation of some kind of

Speaker 1 | 27:49.072

I never turn down burritos for anyone out there listening. What is it? There’s a difficult kind of weird conundrum for IT leadership, meaning only in the last two decades has it become a real job. Two decades, maybe more than that. Maybe three decades. We’ll give it 30 years. But really 20 years in the last 10 years. It’s really gotten crazy amazon blows me away I’m, just shocked When I look at it’s a it’s a gui, right? It’s an interface. It’s It’s just amazing to me How people and things have grown with technology it’s a it’s um, it’s quite amazing to me. So with that It’s like a whole new frontier of, you know, I don’t know what, you know, what to do or like, what’s, what’s the end game? You know, I think doctors had an end game retirement of some sort. Lawyers had an end game, right? What’s the IT leaders end game? Is it the same now? Is it just like, I don’t think it’s going to be that. I don’t, I think 10 years from now when people can’t work anymore.

Speaker 0 | 29:11.024

don’t want to work or whatever what’s the do are do it leaders and people have an end game in mind do they have a clear route to the future or is it i’m just showing up to work every day yeah that’s a loaded question because it has a lot of nuances to it so first of all you’re absolutely right uh 10 or 20 years ago the it landscape was much more simple uh you could have people that knew you a bunch of technologies and they were comfortable with running a whole IT department. Nowadays, you are more likely to be siloed into a specific role, especially if you are in a larger organization. You know, you’re going to be only dealing with storage, or you’re only going to do security, you’re only going to do virtualization for desktops. You know, you can narrow that down. And then… you compartmentalize these departments so much that it becomes like a turf where where is my job that ends and who else is going to do the rest of the job so if you want a project done in IT then you are going to have to involve and direct all these people from different IT departments to kind of work together and complete projects that’s the complexity of of an IT manager when it comes to IT staff themselves and what’s their end goal. I think the outlook in life should be such that you really need to think about your skill set down the line. If you are a young person now and you’re doing help tests for some basic level, is that what you really want to do when you are about to retire? How expendable are you compared to a hungry young man that is willing to do your job for like lot less than you so your only option is to grow your skill set become better and become somebody with with better skill set than just doing help desk you know later in your life before retirement first is not going to provide you that retirement goal that you want and second you’re gonna find yourself out of a job very quickly and it’s going to be tough to find that job if you if you don’t have the skill set at that age. So my advice is develop those skill sets while you’re young. Make yourself learn the back end, whether it’s servers and networking, security, and then figure out what’s your end goal based on that.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.316

Your only option is to relentlessly grow. Yeah. I like it.

Speaker 0 | 32:00.876

As somebody has said, technology changes every couple of years, which is still true, although I would say less so now, maybe every three years technology changes, but it still changes radically. So you still have to keep up with endless changes, constant changes all the time. Nothing is static in this world. I look back at technology, even three years ago it was so different than today. You got to keep up with everything. Always learn. Otherwise, you’re going to fall behind and you’re going to be discarded. Employees or employers are ruthless in that regard.

Speaker 1 | 32:40.494

Nothing is static.

Speaker 0 | 32:41.254

If you’re overpaid and underqualified.

Speaker 1 | 32:45.837

Nothing is static, even your IP addresses.

Speaker 0 | 32:48.518

They’re not. That’s right.

Speaker 1 | 32:50.319

There should be some, we coined that quote or something. There’s got to be some quote there. It’s not, right? Because we’re going like, they’re just not. They’re going to disappear. There’s going to be no more static IP addresses.

Speaker 0 | 32:58.892

ipv4 and ipv6 people not learning ipv6 now they are going to be up to leap at some point nothing is static even your slash 29.

Speaker 1 | 33:11.562

um i like that i feel like we should coin that i wonder if that’s ever been done i wonder if that’s ever even been said before i like that a lot the uh manufacturing i never even thought about this but i would think uh how’s the supply chain and how’s the supply chain affecting you

Speaker 0 | 33:30.316

We’re in…

Speaker 1 | 33:31.776

Didn’t sound too excited.

Speaker 0 | 33:33.357

We’re suffering, I could say. I mean, we are embedded in the manufacturing supply chain. We don’t actually produce anything per se, but we are part of a larger electronic manufacturing flow. So any chip shortage, any COVID situation impacts our production lines and our bottom lines directly. It has been difficult a couple of years. Most of the time, the factories tend to close down for a week or two if there is a COVID infection. Plus, the chip shortage has slowed down the manufacturing of the products for our vendors. I’m sorry, for our clients. So it has impacted our bottom line for sure. I used to have a larger team, actually, and I’ve had to… let go of some of my team members, even though it was tough. But unfortunately, it was required because we shrank down as a business. And I’m hoping that 2022 is going to change things around. The semiconductor industry just announced like a crazy, I think it was $500 billion profit this year, even though there’s a chip shortage. So I’m assuming 2022 is going to turn this around. And it’s just going to be out from here.

Speaker 1 | 34:58.352

Do you think that profit was because, is that profit just due to supply and demand? Like just people could charge more money? Like I want to go buy a float. kids you know you look at the car industry for example i was you just you read my mind because i’m going to i was like i’m gonna buy uh you know i just want a new i don’t know diesel chevy heck no it’s 120

Speaker 0 | 35:22.644

000 for a car to buy yeah exactly so right now the price of a car from 2019 to 2022 it has jumped up by ten thousand dollars this is the average car price it’s crazy $35,000 or $30-some thousand dollars in 2019. It is now $43,000 in 2022. And this is a new car average. Yeah. And if you go anywhere, if you go to any dealer, you’re lucky to find five cars in the whole lot. When I was there, I was shocked. I thought they were remodeling and they had moved the car somewhere. And they said, no, no, no, this is all we got. And if you don’t buy this right now. in two hours i’m going to sell this to somebody else the sales guy’s the easiest job ever yeah right now right now but i don’t know in next year i think you look at the parking lot fields and somewhere in texas or michigan where all these cars are parked they’re waiting for chips to be put in and they’re going to be sitting there for a couple years with no chips and once they put the chips in they’re going to flood the market so we’re going to have, in my opinion, a flood of new cars and the prices of new cars are going to come down significantly, hopefully, from this competition. But it’s going to look bad for the salespeople at that time. I don’t know. I mean, it’s going to happen.

Speaker 1 | 36:47.162

The salespeople never have it bad. They do well in a down market. They do well in an up market. So they’ll just sell more. They’ll just go for quantity at that point.

Speaker 0 | 36:56.558

Who is going to buy these cars that have been sitting in the parking lot for two, three years, though? I know,

Speaker 1 | 37:02.060

but if I get a good deal, you better give me a good deal. What we need to do is pull the chips out of the car. Can’t we just go back to making cars simple? You know, I’ve never been more disappointed by the…

Speaker 0 | 37:14.985

Like these cars that are backed with a carburetor and no, you know, electronic…

Speaker 1 | 37:21.908

Yeah, let’s do it. Well,

Speaker 0 | 37:24.289

is it cold? The car won’t start. we’re not driving anywhere anyways sorry the carburetor has all kinds of other problems you know computers are really good at making cars fuel efficient and keeping up with the standards well

Speaker 1 | 37:43.119

it has been a pleasure having you on the show if you had any one piece of advice major piece of advice to people out there listening Uh, as a person who somehow convinced his parents to bring a 46 back on the plane, I’m assuming it was on the plane back on the plane to Albania all the way back. And then to come all the way to, uh, to America, find your wife via hotmail, which is really cool. Um, and been through quite a bit of growth and I would say minor tribulations. What is your piece of advice to people out there listening?

Speaker 0 | 38:25.206

For the IT managers that are looking to get their budgets filled, I say, and I don’t know exactly what the exact U.S. expression is, but my expression is, if you want a bunny, ask for the donkey.

Speaker 1 | 38:46.323

I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it’s funny. Okay. So you’re saying?

Speaker 0 | 38:51.147

Just ask for more than what you really need. So you can. fill in your budget um for the for the regular hands-on folks you know keep your work-life balance with your family in mind that’s the most important thing in life and it’s not the job job should only be there to support you for your life events but be there for the family time flies by really fast it’s easy to stress yeah man yeah it’s easy to let stress in the a sense of

Speaker 1 | 39:23.890

And when I say sense, it’s merely a sense of urgency and impending events and all kinds of crap going on in your life. It’s easy to get wrapped up in a sense of, oh, I’m just so overwhelmed. Right. But I think what, and I’ve just found this from my own, uh, periods in life where I just said, I don’t give a crap and I’m just going to ignore everything. What I found is that when I did that, not much changed. I still did okay. In fact, I did better. In fact, I did better.

Speaker 0 | 40:00.075

Yeah. Come back from vacation and you’ve got an inbox full of emails. You can just select all and delete. The people that care to follow up with you, they’re going to email you back.

Speaker 1 | 40:11.854

It’s true. Ignore,

Speaker 0 | 40:13.634

ignore,

Speaker 1 | 40:14.395

ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore. Don’t watch the news. Don’t listen to the news. I threw the TV away years ago. I think it was part, I think it was in like a, the four hour work week or something. One of those Tim Ferriss books I read, he’s like, don’t worry. He’s like, just, he’s like one of the, he has like all these different, like step out of your comfort zone, little exercises when you read the book. Like one is like, I think he said, just lay down in the street and play dead in like the middle of New York and just you know, you just have to sit there for like a minute and play dead and like to get out of your comfort zone, you know, just like the feeling of people staring at you and like, what the heck is this guy doing? You know? And another one was, uh, you know, news like for a week, don’t worry. And basically he said, basically he said like, don’t worry. Like if something important happens, like you’ll hear about it. Did you hear about that? And, uh, anyways, it’s true.

Speaker 0 | 41:05.664

So my, my philosophy is the less social media the better the only thing i have in terms of social media is linkedin and reddit um that’s it i have no twitter i have no facebook i have no whatsapp um i have no tick tock or or anything else that’s it linkedin

Speaker 1 | 41:25.396

and and and reddit these are the only two tick tock i wouldn’t even know what to do with tick tock that just it’s just weird to me i wouldn’t even want do you believe that that is the number one

Speaker 0 | 41:35.982

most heavily used website in the world it surpassed google for a while it is ridiculous help us i don’t even know it’s so bad i

Speaker 1 | 41:53.754

block it for all my kids and this is why and people are gonna people are gonna bash me for this but this is why democracy is doomed to fail because it is a rep It is a government by the people, for the people, of the people. And if the majority of the people are on TikTok, we’re screwed.

Speaker 0 | 42:13.524

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was lucky to be born in a country that was completely totalitarian and I’ve lived in the greatest democracy of them all. And I can say there’s pros and cons to both. Something in the middle is the good part. I just don’t know where that is.

Speaker 1 | 42:32.590

Somewhere between totalitarian control and complete and utter representative freedom of humans’desires, of human desires. Somewhere in between there is a happy medium. So it’s like, yes, if we just let our kids do anything and everything all the time and vote. If the kids voted on what they would have for dinner, then it’d be ice cream every night. Let’s be honest. If the kids voted, if I let the kids vote. We’d all be, they’d all be like done. They’d be stupid, unhealthy, and who knows? Numerous other things. Maybe we should, we should do a test on that, you know, control groups and everything.

Speaker 0 | 43:14.261

In my family, Bill, in my family, I call this a benevolent dictatorship.

Speaker 1 | 43:24.544

Love it. Writing this one down. Benevolent dictatorship. I am running that. Go ahead. I’m going to, I think I’m going to upgrade from meritocracy because I run a meritocracy to benevolent dictatorship. I like this better.

Speaker 0 | 43:37.156

Yeah. You, you basically are a dictator, but you do all the good things, you know, for your constituents, but they need to listen to you because you are, you are the dictator. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 43:51.109

Yes. Trust me. Um, trust me.

Speaker 0 | 43:53.811

It’s good for you.

Speaker 1 | 43:54.952

Yes. Yes.

Speaker 0 | 43:55.573

No better.

Speaker 1 | 43:56.173

Yes. hate me now, love me later, something like that. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Hate me now, love me now.

Speaker 0 | 44:02.576

If you follow that, your kids will appreciate it when they’re grown up and understand. Because right now they think that, you know, they are right, especially if they’re teenagers. They are right and we’re wrong. And when they become dads and mothers, then they’ll say, you know what, my parents were right.

Speaker 1 | 44:22.426

No, I’m one of those homeschooler people that’s completely sheltered as child from all of the world and taking all their devices away and keep them held up inside a house. Not really, not entirely, but it is amazing how adults tell me my kids are mature, can hold a normal conversation, which is cool. Thank you very much. These shows always get so great at the end. I wish we could start there. I wish we could do like the show in reverbs. You know, I wish we could start with benevolent dictatorship. That would just be great. They just. The shows just seem to get so good towards the end. Well, sir.

Speaker 0 | 44:54.489

Hopefully all the listeners have not got bored and missed the good part.

Speaker 1 | 44:58.854

Yeah, if they’ve made it this far, they know that dictatorship is the way to go.

Speaker 0 | 45:02.617

That’s right.

Speaker 1 | 45:05.360

Have an absolute, well, I hope this year turns out better for the microchip shortage, and I hope that we do get a flood of cheap cars, at least for my sake.

Speaker 0 | 45:16.194

Yeah, and for my sake. And thank you, Phil, for hosting me at your podcast. It has been a pleasure. Hey,

Speaker 1 | 45:22.416

thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.

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