Speaker 0 | 00:09.585
All right. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Mark Kaplan on the show. And I’d just like to start off by saying, you know, seeing is honestly not always believing. I don’t think you agree with that. But I’m just going to, I’ll let you introduce yourself, you know, senior IT director at Barbary Group. You know, why do you say seeing is honestly believing?
Speaker 1 | 00:37.919
So in my business, you really don’t always see with your eyes. You have to see with your mind. And what I mean by that is when you experience something. that’s when you can really believe in it. I’ll even take it to a higher level. Why do people believe in God? Because it’s a belief that you have, a strong belief in the entity. So when we’re working in IT, a lot of times you cannot see with your eyes what you need to know to believe in something.
Speaker 0 | 01:22.904
but you can experience something to know that it was successful and believe in it and you can also honestly believe that it was not successful as well and know not to go that direction um you uh last time we spoke you you prided yourself in in living on the edge the bleeding edge the bleeding edge of technology and a lot of people don’t aren’t willing to jump into uh the bleeding edge of technology or jump right in right away why are you why are you such a like this misfit that’s uh you know willing to like jump in right away i have been called that many times definitely by my mother i think a long time ago um i
Speaker 1 | 02:07.892
i have i’ve always had a very keen interest in technology since i was a kid and i like seeing the new things that are out there. There is constant innovation going around. And you can either be the one who waits for everybody else to try it, and then safely go into the water, or you can be the one that rides the rapids. And I like to be the one that rides the rapids. I do it carefully, though. I make sure I have the right boat. I make sure I have the right equipment and the right people with me in that boat to do this type of work. And We take things that are in early preview or public preview, and we test them out in our dev environments. And I have complete replicated environments for us to be able to do these things safely. And once we find something that we like and that works well, I’ll deploy it to production, even if it’s still in preview.
Speaker 0 | 03:07.655
So essentially a lab type of environment where you can do POCs and testing. and approve at least through 90% of the use cases, I’m assuming, that were good for us.
Speaker 1 | 03:23.025
And people will say, well, I don’t have resources to do that. Well, I didn’t have them either, but that’s why we’re in the cloud, right? You spin up some dev environments at a much lower cost than production environments, and you have the ability to do all these tests.
Speaker 0 | 03:40.040
Yes. And you’re an interesting, I mean, you’re in education. Why don’t you just give us a brief rundown of what you guys do? Because I think it is important. Because obviously some people are into, you know, making brake parts.
Speaker 1 | 03:50.805
Right. And to me, it really doesn’t matter what business you’re in when it comes to the technology side, as far as what you can accomplish. But we are a 53-year-old company. We take law school students and prepare them for the bar exam. Our entire course is online. And our LMS, which is a learning management system for those not in the business, is custom made with our own development team. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 04:18.458
So that’s changed over 52 years.
Speaker 1 | 04:21.220
Yeah. We’ve been online for 20 of those 50.
Speaker 0 | 04:24.701
Oh, wow. That’s pretty. And you’ve been there for almost 10 years.
Speaker 1 | 04:30.044
So,
Speaker 0 | 04:30.685
I mean, let’s go back 10 years just for fun because that’s just a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 | 04:38.009
That’s an interesting story for my company because 10 years ago, we were owned by a company called Thomson Reuters. And Barbary had no IT of its own other than some developers. They had no managed infrastructure of their own because they used Thomson Reuters. So I was hired to deintegrate them from Thomson Reuters and build out. a whole infrastructure. So I built two data centers, one on each coast. They were colos. And we operated six months out of each. It wasn’t that one was a disaster recovery that you sat there and hoped it worked. That’s not how I operated it. I operated six months in each one. So I know they’re fully up and capable. And if one goes down, I can fail over to the other in five minutes.
Speaker 0 | 05:33.889
Then we just had to have changed a little bit. How did you guys, how’d you link the two back then? What kind of,
Speaker 1 | 05:39.031
then we were EMC on a,
Speaker 0 | 05:42.532
it’s hard to think of 2011 as being back in time. It’s really hard to think of 2011 is back in time, but I mean, it’s, it’s weird that that was 10 years ago. I mean, were you using MPLS or what were we doing back then? Yes.
Speaker 1 | 05:59.620
Yes. i was using it and thank you mpls is what i was struggling with afterthought you know we don’t even have a core network anymore it’s the game has all changed um yes we used mpls between the two i had a dedicated circuit that ran between the two it was fiber and um we had some back-end connections as well in case of one went down but it was an active active configuration so Both SQL databases were always, actually, back then it was Oracle, and then we ended up moving to SQL. And we used Oracle, I forget what they call it, DataSync, I believe, to keep the two in constant sync so that in any moment I can flip from one to the other.
Speaker 0 | 06:50.703
Keep going. Go.
Speaker 1 | 06:53.384
No, go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 06:54.464
Well, I’m just thinking, I was just, you know. I’ve got to go get my COVID-19 test today because I’m traveling and now I’ve got to get a test and it’s got to, I’ve got to, you know, make sure everything works out 72 hours before I travel. And I haven’t really left the cave for, um, you know, I just, I don’t usually see the light of day unless I’m out on the ocean, you know, surfing and picking seaweed out of my beard. But, um, you know, I’ve got to leave. And just the thought of your business and COVID probably was, I would assume little affected at all, if not benefited.
Speaker 1 | 07:28.365
COVID really didn’t have a huge effect on us because we were already all online. The only impact it had to me was to move my office people to home office. Okay. Convert a few desktops to laptops. But from a student perspective, we were already all virtual.
Speaker 0 | 07:49.034
Do you see any reason now that you’ve moved home? Is there any reason why you would move back?
Speaker 1 | 07:54.856
Yeah. No, none of my people want to. I’m still in the office. I’m the type of guy that I hate working from home. I wouldn’t mind it if I lived alone.
Speaker 0 | 08:05.894
You’re like the thank God it’s Monday guy.
Speaker 1 | 08:08.295
Yeah, I really look forward to my private office. And I came in when no one was here. The whole 28-story building, it was empty, but I still came in because I have my monitors on the wall. I have my…
Speaker 0 | 08:25.001
privacy and i have this is where i can think i can’t think at home yeah no i got you right right now i’ve got i already had to text my wife and mute you while we were doing this to tell the kids to stop jumping on the field dogs barking or it’s
Speaker 1 | 08:41.035
uh but my people like it and i’ve always been the type that uh has been very uh bending to people especially my own resources As long as they deliver, I really could care less where they are. Do it from a beach.
Speaker 0 | 08:57.767
What’s your team look like? What’s work to you?
Speaker 1 | 09:01.768
It’s small. I have five infrastructure, which covers system and network. I have three people on the help desk, one of which does the hardware. And then I have a team of three on-site and 15 offshore developers.
Speaker 0 | 09:23.874
How do you control those offshore developer guys? How do you like, is there goals and implementation? I mean, is there some kind of like bonus structure?
Speaker 1 | 09:32.862
If you’re going to use offshore, which we did for financial reasons, you have to be able to include them in the team and manage them as you would an on-site person. Since everybody’s remote, It really doesn’t matter if it’s onshore or offshore, as long as you can communicate and relate to the people you’re working with. So we’re very particular with who we bring on. I don’t just call up a company and say, I need four developers. We actually interview. And we decide who we’re going to bring onto the team and we include them as the member of the team,
Speaker 0 | 10:09.450
even though they’re contracted. Just for anyone that’s never done this, that’s never outsourced something overseas or hasn’t done that or is new to doing that or maybe thinking about it, how do you build? What are the differences? Are there any key things that people need to know as far as? be very specific when you request something or understand that. How do we, you know, include various different cultural differences or anything like that? I’m just thinking off the top of my head here.
Speaker 1 | 10:45.050
You have to, first of all, once you get into offshore, you will get inundated with people that want to help you and want you to use their services. There is a lot of competition out there. So First of all, I want a company who’s going to give me a dedicated person. First, I check the rates. That’s the very first thing I check, because if they’re not in line with what I think I should be paying for this particular developer, then we move on. Once I have a company that has the rates I’m looking for, and we interview the people, we make sure, and I include my lead developers in those interviews. Because they’re the ones that are going to have to work with them. And I want them to tell me, hey, I like this guy. Or, hey, this guy can’t even talk English. I’m not going to speak with him. There’s two types of offshore, to me, offshore development. You have the type where you’re just going to give a project to a company and say, build this. And you don’t have to interact with anybody but me. And then there’s staff augmentation. That’s how I look at my offshore developers. They’re staff augmentation. I could hire one developer here for, I don’t know, $125,000 a year. That’s what they pay. Or I can go offshore and pay $50 an hour for a developer who is skilled in the one area that I need. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 12:20.032
like my web development, I use a lot of… It’s hard for me to sift and sort and find the right personality and find the right talent. They can get something done and get it done in a timely fashion and have it be really crisp.
Speaker 1 | 12:33.662
That’s why you got to talk to me. You can’t tell from a resume. I would never hire somebody just from a resume. It’s just it’s so easy to bullshit. I know.
Speaker 0 | 12:45.329
Well, I kind of like I saw this post the other day about someone saying I was talking with a guy. I often am surveying. I’m always surveying IT directors. I’ll ask you right now, what is your single biggest frustration, problem, or concern when it comes to IT management? What’s the biggest thing that you just bang your head against?
Speaker 1 | 13:16.715
The thing that keeps me up at night?
Speaker 0 | 13:18.456
Yeah, yeah. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 13:20.757
Retention. Honestly, retention, because I have such a small team that I have built over the years. If one of them leaves, it hurts.
Speaker 0 | 13:33.327
So is it retention or is it ability to pay my guys what they’re worth?
Speaker 1 | 13:38.689
Well, it’s both, but it’s not always just money.
Speaker 0 | 13:41.950
I’m just saying I had that question because I was speaking with another person. It’s a very secret interview that can’t be released yet. But he basically got to the point where he said, I’m, you know, it’s kind of like the golden handcuffs is what we call them in the industry, right? You know, the golden handcuffs. I’m at the point now where I’m like, I’m making enough money to keep the lights on, but I know I’m worth twice as much if I go here. Or if I do this, or I go on my own, but I just don’t have the guts to do it, or I don’t know how to do it, or, you know, whatever it is. And I’m just asking the tough question because I think it’s a legitimate question.
Speaker 1 | 14:17.182
It is a legitimate question. It’s a very legitimate question. But it depends on what stage you are in your life, too. I could make twice what I make, but I’d never be home. I would have to travel all over the globe.
Speaker 0 | 14:30.517
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 14:32.058
I don’t want that at this stage in my life.
Speaker 0 | 14:34.199
I’d help people see where I am.
Speaker 1 | 14:36.741
And yeah, I could make more, but I’m happy. I’m comfortable.
Speaker 0 | 14:40.775
I work four hours a day right now.
Speaker 1 | 14:44.980
I’m a workaholic. So this is the actual perfect job for me.
Speaker 0 | 14:49.464
You have flexibility. You like where you are. Yeah, yeah, I got you.
Speaker 1 | 14:53.048
Yeah. Now I take my team.
Speaker 0 | 14:56.491
I don’t work four hours a day, by the way. I work, it’s like I’m either always working or always not working.
Speaker 1 | 15:01.156
So you never sleep.
Speaker 0 | 15:06.448
you know just so you know i have the data on that i can share my sleep data for like every day i’m not i’m telling you i can tell you when i wake up at night i have i wear this order ring i’ve literally tracked my sleep data like that i feel sleep with a sleep pap so it’s you know i tell you like this is the night i took two benadryl four melatonin and two uh some other root i don’t know anyways go ahead
Speaker 1 | 15:32.343
No, what I wanted to say was that there are more than money that you can use to help retain your staff. And to me, it’s more a quality of life. Yeah, they can go down the street and make probably, I don’t know, 30, 40 percent more. But they’re not going to have the flexibility that I give them. They’re not going to be able to come and go as they want. Work from home, work from the office, work from a beach. I care less. Just get your work done. Work in the middle of the night. I don’t care.
Speaker 0 | 16:01.939
And the work from the beach is very, very important to me. It really is. I’m serious because there’s two things. You know,
Speaker 1 | 16:09.723
someday I will do that. I always say it and I’ve never done it.
Speaker 0 | 16:12.965
There’s two things that I like to do. And I don’t want to be on the beach when it’s hot out. I want to be on the beach when it’s snowing. There’s two things that I really like to do. I’m serious. There’s two things. I like to surf in the wintertime because that’s when the waves are the best. People think you’re crazy because I jump in the water when it’s 39 degrees out. When it’s 39 degrees in the water, when the water is 39 degrees,
Speaker 1 | 16:31.636
it’s 13 degrees outside.
Speaker 0 | 16:34.158
And I like jujitsu. Do those cost a lot of money? No. I can go buy a new surfboard. Even if you think a surfboard for $1,000 is a lot of money, fine. But it’s not a race car. It’s not, you know, I don’t have to live in a mansion. And I’ve realized that as you move on in your career and you start to make more money and you work harder and there’s a lot of people that are out there to just, you know, go. whatever but um you you get to a certain point where you realize you know you really don’t need that much money to be happy as long as you’ve got the flexibility in the culture now everyone’s going to say you know the people that say money isn’t everything but you know everyone
Speaker 1 | 17:13.464
wants to find out for themselves everyone wants to find out for themselves yeah yeah but there’s a question between comfortable and happy and
Speaker 0 | 17:25.223
uh whatever you call the pavlov’s dog or whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah there’s a balance so absolutely um so so retention is the biggest thing and oh and to transition into that so i i ask a lot of these i i’ve surveyed a lot of people and one um it’s an interesting this guy got back to me last night and he said i don’t know how to um you I don’t know which ITIL certification program to take because there’s so many of them out there and I can’t tell which one is the differentiations between the two. And I was like, I think you’re asking the wrong question. Why do you need an ITIL cert to begin with? He’s like, because the recruiters are all asking for it now. Why do you need a recruiter? And, you know, because… Maybe you should just go after the company that you actually want to work for and go straight to the top and sell yourself to the CEO over there because that’s where the break is happening in IT. There’s not enough conversation between high executive management and technology. I don’t know. I just found it interesting that he said, I need to go get this certification because if I don’t put it on my resume, which you just said is a bunch of garbage anyways. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1 | 18:43.660
No, I did not say it was the brain.
Speaker 0 | 18:46.562
Well, you said it could be lies. We need to test it. We need to verify.
Speaker 1 | 18:50.586
It could be embellished.
Speaker 0 | 18:53.348
I’ll put it that way. We need to check it. We need to verify. Checks and balances. Okay, I got you. You are a huge, and I have no affiliation with this whatsoever. We’re going to take a commercial break right now for anyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you actually like this show. Please go to iTunes because that’s what rates all the popularity of podcasts in the world and give us your honest review. I just want an honest review. You go to iTunes, you search in the little search bar, dissecting popular IT nerds, you scroll to the bottom where the stars are and give me a star and an actual legit review, please. That would be great. If you want to, if you’re, if you hate iPhones and everything to do with I anything, that’s fine. I guess go give me a review somewhere else. But what matters for whatever reason is, you know, iTunes. Okay. Um, And the reason why I’m saying there’s no commercial affiliate with this whatsoever. And if this company wants to come be a sponsor of mine, that’s great. But you happen to really love Dynatrace. And I just want to talk about it for a few minutes because you seem to be their like poster child. And I’m assuming you don’t get paid by them anyways. I’m sure they send you some great swag, but you know, let’s just talk about it.
Speaker 1 | 20:03.637
I have a couple of t-shirts. But yes, Dynatrace, I got involved with Dynatrace a long time ago, five years ago. They had this whole product that I never used. And I met this guy who talked to me about a product they had in development. And it was an APM that they were building from the ground up specifically for cloud. It worked on Prime 2, but they were building it from the ground up to be cloud native. And back then it was called Ruxit. And I worked with him through the development as a tester. And they used my environments as kind of a guinea pig until they perfected the product into what they call now Dynatrace One, which is their SaaS product. They retired all of their old products. One of the few companies I’ve ever known to throw away. all of their old code and start fresh from the ground up. That’s a big deal. They have developed over the years the most amazing product I’ve ever seen, only in the fact that its ability to analyze problems and point you to where you need to go to fix it is just phenomenal to me.
Speaker 0 | 21:29.171
Can you give me an example of how it has affected your life? Can you do that?
Speaker 1 | 21:34.534
Yeah, I can give you one, actually. I used to have a routine where I had to leave very early from my house because, like I said, I like to work in the office. So the first thing I would do when I got out of the office and come in early is go through all the reports, look for errors that happened during the night. What’s my aptX ratings on the locations that presented students? And what? ended up happening was I found out that this AI called Davis, you could interact with over Alexa. So I installed the skill on Alexa and I can now ask Davis for my morning report, which I do on my drive to work. So the whole drive to work, I get the aptX ratings on the applications. I get any open problems or any problems that were opened and closed during the night. And by the time I get to work, that part is done.
Speaker 0 | 22:40.240
And how do you remember this stuff on your drive? Texting?
Speaker 1 | 22:44.824
Well, I don’t have to remember anything if it’s all good, right? If I have open problems, I’m going to remember those. And the first thing I do when I come in is open the dashboard and see what the problems were. Or I could stop and look at my phone app and see what they were too. Davis is telling me the crux of the problem and the fact that it’s still open. So that means somebody’s working. Well, somebody on my team better be working.
Speaker 0 | 23:12.772
If I was to ask somebody what their single biggest struggle, frustration, problem, or concern is, and they say X, your answer would be Dynatrace, what would their problem be? I don’t know, what’s the biggest problem it’s going to solve? You know what I mean? What’s the biggest problem with this?
Speaker 1 | 23:33.424
What an APM is designed for, first off, is to tell you if you have any problems in your infrastructure. Right. What’s your load? What’s your CPU usage? What’s your memory utilization? What’s your database latency? Are you experiencing user latency? Those are all the types of things that a general APM will do. Now… Dynatrace is taking it a step further with, aside from standard APM, they’re getting into security. So they actually analyze the code and give you the vulnerabilities that normally I wouldn’t find until I ran a pen test. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 24:11.325
For example, give me some examples. There are some security issues.
Speaker 1 | 24:14.527
Well, let’s say I had a SQL injection vulnerability and I didn’t know it. Normally, and that’s not something that the average person would. expect to be hit with. But a SQL injection vulnerability for the right hacker could present a lot of problems if you’re the type of organization that gets hacked. We don’t like putting those things out there, but we don’t know about them until we run a tool that tells us we have them. And the tools that use databases like Snyk, which is the leader in this space, are out of reach for a company my size. It’s just financially not possible. So now I have a tool that integrates that into a tool that I already have and gives me access to data that… Again, I normally would not see until I ran a third party pen test.
Speaker 0 | 25:12.657
Super. And I don’t know how to, I don’t know how else to ask this question. Any weird, what’s the craziest maybe without, you know, giving up any. What are the things that end users do that have been kind of crazy? Or maybe shadow IT decisions? Or how do you manage that?
Speaker 1 | 25:46.834
It could be a different one, which I think is what you’re looking for. We had an issue with Microsoft. We use Azure SQL as our database backend. And we pay a lot of money for that. And I have Dynatrace hooked into it, so we get alerts when something goes wrong. And in the middle of the night, we had something go wrong. And we did.
Speaker 0 | 26:10.661
It doesn’t have to be in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 | 26:12.662
It was always in the middle of the night. You know, 2 a.m., get the call. So we initially thought we had a database problem. And we woke up the DBA and we started digging into it. And Dynatrace kept pointing to the database structure itself. Not the data. but the underlying infrastructure. But we don’t have full visibility into that, so we didn’t have any specifics. So of course we have to go through the rigmarole of opening up a support ticket. And we’re Premier Support, so they respond right away, but everybody knows what it’s like to deal with any support gathering logs and doing all this crap. Turns out in the end what happened was they were performing maintenance. And the database, which is supposed to, auto-failed over to another instance. Well, apparently that instance had underlying hardware problems that Microsoft wasn’t aware of, which caused huge latencies in our applications, and none of the users were able to log in. So it took them, I want to say, about four hours. to believe us and get the database itself moved to a different home.
Speaker 0 | 27:43.297
This was an Azure thing.
Speaker 1 | 27:44.838
This is Azure, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 27:46.739
It took them four hours after what? You guys providing them?
Speaker 1 | 27:49.940
Most of the time it took for us to prove it, right?
Speaker 0 | 27:52.641
Because they’re gathering logs. Opening a ticket, gathering logs, doing all this crap. And my biggest familiarity is gathering failed call routes and stuff like that and providing basically evidence.
Speaker 1 | 28:07.735
Right. So that sticks in my mind because it’s a rare case where they did admit fault.
Speaker 0 | 28:19.320
And they gave you a gift certificate to the Outback?
Speaker 1 | 28:28.225
Yeah, right. I got bupkis.
Speaker 0 | 28:29.446
That’s what I got. One time my intro to my leaving the years of retail and knowing that I needed to, I don’t know, find some other industry before this Cisco startup hired me was when I sold something like… $72,000 worth of coffee machines in three weeks because I, I don’t know, you know, listen to some like sales CD, like Zig Ziglar and like Tony Robbins and figured, oh, let’s just apply this to coffee machines and see if it works. Right. It works like crazy. And, uh, this little small coffee shop in Colorado was like 13th out of like 13,000 stores, you know, like there’s huge massive, like Starbucks stores, you know, and They’re like, congratulations, Phil Howard, your team is amazing. You guys killed the budget. It was so awesome. Like, you know, it’s like no one’s ever going to be able to do this again. And congratulations. Here’s your $50 gift certificate to the Outback.
Speaker 1 | 29:33.684
Oh, wow.
Speaker 0 | 29:39.348
No, it’s like, well, it just kind of gets back to you again. Sometimes we do things that are so valuable as an employee or a member of the team that is worth more than… our yearly salary, I guess. And, you know, how do we, it’s at that point that you’re like, you kind of looking, like you said, it gets back to the, the retention problem and the retention issue. And when you, when you’ve noticed something like that, how do you recognize an employee that has done something that’s been just so extra, you know, exponentially valuable? I think we, you know, it’s just like, Hey, thank you. Thanks Microsoft. Nothing against that. uh been outstanding if you had you know being uh uh well let me ask you this since i never got to ask you this to be in the story what was your first computer and um how do you get started in this whole this crazy that’s a great one um i i actually attended college
Speaker 1 | 30:42.115
for business administration i was a controller at the time i decided to quit and go into i.t fresh I had my first computer had no hard drive. It had dual five and a quarter flop floppy’s and a turbo button on the front. And what was that turbo? Forget it.
Speaker 0 | 31:04.366
What was that turbo button?
Speaker 1 | 31:06.167
It was an overclock. Supposedly it was an overclock button. Why anybody would ever not press the term?
Speaker 0 | 31:12.711
Exactly. It’s like, that’s like the Seinfeld standup where he’s like extra strength Tylenol. Like, is there just strength? And I would say,
Speaker 1 | 31:23.621
anybody attending this show who knows what a turbo button is, you’re all in the group. But I can still remember sitting at my desk and putting in a whole stack of floppy drives to get Windows 10 5 to work.
Speaker 0 | 31:44.937
Yes, yes, I definitely remember that. I remember when we could eventually put it on one CD-ROM. Oh, no,
Speaker 1 | 31:53.034
the big thing was when we went to three and a halves. Yeah. Five and a quarter floppies were big. Then you went to three and a halves. Then you got an actual hard drive.
Speaker 0 | 32:02.698
This is like the 89th or 90th episode, and I never get tired of talking about floppy disks. I never get tired of it. I could talk about it for hours.
Speaker 1 | 32:10.081
I’ve heard it embedded in Pyrex or whatever you call it, plastic stuff on my wall.
Speaker 0 | 32:16.083
If I hit, oh. Really?
Speaker 1 | 32:18.208
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:18.608
If I, you know, when I, we moved in, I’ve moved a bunch of times and we moved into this, this house in Princeton, Massachusetts, a small town and just moved out of there. But I remember going through every now and then there’s some remnant of somebody that lived in the house prior to you that they just weren’t able to clean out. And it was a shoe box of, of old, of old, like actually three and it wasn’t three and a half. Is that right? Three and a half, like the hard floppy disks. And it was like, you know, test drive and all these old little video games that I remember from like ninth grade. Anyways,
Speaker 1 | 32:53.946
flying toasters.
Speaker 0 | 32:55.507
No. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I do. Yes. Yes, of course I do. I just had to think for a second. Very nice. So the, would you say the business aspect is the business aspect of your education helped out a lot?
Speaker 1 | 33:14.324
The business aspect really helped my relationship with finance and allowed me to build my career because finance and IT never mixed well. So having somebody in IT who knew finance was a big help to my CIO at the time and really helped the advancement of my career.
Speaker 0 | 33:37.832
So what’s that language real quick for anyone out there that does not have a business education? And this is the main theme of this entire podcast is helping IT people speak the language of business and grow their career. What is that? Is there like if if if people are if there’s a clueless IT director out there that doesn’t know how to speak this language of business with finance, what are like the top three bullet points that he could collect that would be like an eye opener for him? I don’t even know if that person exists. I would hope most IT gurus have some inkling, but I don’t know if they’re constantly thinking. I know what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 34:11.882
So number one, I can get that done for less.
Speaker 0 | 34:18.107
It’s so simple. It’s like, what about Bob? It’s so simple.
Speaker 1 | 34:23.772
Number two, I know this is over budget, but don’t worry. I know exactly where I’m going to make it up. Even though I’m not going to do it. and number three i ask for forgiveness instead of permission and you have to reach a certain level before you can do that and
Speaker 0 | 34:47.887
be very confident all right so before they get to that level we got to give them a third one so i can get it done for less great And then do we rob Peter to pay Paul for the, where we’re going to make it up? Is that basically, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 35:01.482
Okay. But anybody who’s ever built a budget knows you got to put fat somewhere.
Speaker 0 | 35:07.366
Yes. It’s kind of like the roads. Like why are they repaving this road? It just got repaved. Like, why are we repaving that? Cause we don’t pay it. Like we’re not going to have that money next year.
Speaker 1 | 35:16.573
Right.
Speaker 0 | 35:19.815
Very good. Very good. If you had one piece of advice for anyone out there listening, what would it be?
Speaker 1 | 35:25.038
Do your diligence. Anything you want to do, do the diligence. Make sure that you know exactly what it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take.
Speaker 0 | 35:35.321
Any shortcuts?
Speaker 1 | 35:37.202
No shortcuts, man. There is no shortcuts to that. Because any shortcut you take is a shortcut to disaster.
Speaker 0 | 35:45.624
And I say from a perspective of partners, because… There’s certain experts. I mean, like, is there a shortcut from the perspective of using other people? In other words, is there a shortcut from, oh, you’re doing this, call this guy. He’s the expert that he’s done it 15 times. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 36:01.391
yeah. I mean, there’s always ways to get things done more efficiently and better. And by shortcut, I thought you meant business tells you get it out quicker than you’re able to. As long as you protect yourself. by knowing that whatever you deliver is going to be successful. If you deliver something that’s not successful, you’ve done damage not only to your career, but your reputation with everybody above you.
Speaker 0 | 36:32.948
In other words, test. Test and verify. POCs. Test, verify, test, verify.
Speaker 1 | 36:37.090
That is one thing you can’t cut corners on. You know, I always hear, well, we don’t need a full regression test. Let’s just get it out. No. I’m not going to do that because I don’t want the customer to be the one to find that page 15 failed.
Speaker 0 | 36:53.245
And they’re all lawyers and studying to be lawyers. So it’s possible, you know, we could get.
Speaker 1 | 36:58.167
If I ever suffer five minutes of outage, take a look at Twitter and see what they call me. It’s crazy, crazy business.
Speaker 0 | 37:07.971
That is kind of scary considering we’re in the business of legal, you know, educating, educating lawyers. And, yeah, so I really can’t screw up. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 | 37:21.679
I enjoyed this.
Speaker 0 | 37:22.740
Yeah, thank you very much.
