Speaker 0 | 00:09.646
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re doing this show today recorded completely off the hook. This is the first time I’ve spoke with Eduardo Simon, but I have to be honest with you, you said some really… pretty cool stuff and you know kind of with just our general messaging back and forth and how we got connected so that’s why we’re rolling with this completely off the cuff today so first of all welcome to the show and give me maybe just a little bit of a brief background on what you do on a day-to-day basis and then we can get into you know whatever the heck you want to talk about blockchain machine learning big data things blowing up weird I think it was some sort of Samsung weird Unix mix match thing or whatever it is. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, uh, so, so far away, man, what do you do on a day to day?
Speaker 1 | 01:04.530
Yeah. So like my day to day is divided into like my day job, which is, you know, from, you know, eight 30 to six 30, which is, you know, I run it, uh, for a large apparel company. Um, and, and I have a, I have a team in, uh, various teams in the U S and, and essential America. Um, so, um, uh, basically just being an IT nerd and the hard part about running a department of IT nerds when you’re an IT nerd yourself is you want to do everything yourself. Uh, but you end up having to just answer emails all day.
Speaker 0 | 01:36.503
Uh, yes, yes. The, the leadership piece versus, um, you know, I find that I’m not even like a, really a true IT nerd, maybe just remove, just remove the IT part. And I myself have a very hard time. I’m looking at, I mean, I’m I don’t know. I don’t know how many tabs you have open and how many screens you have up. I can’t really, you know, I would imagine it’s more than one. But I actually get really scared when I have to go somewhere with just my laptop and there’s only one screen. Anywho, I don’t know where I’m going. Long story short, how big is your team and how many end users do you manage?
Speaker 1 | 02:12.244
Yeah. So like our number of end users is around 2000. The team is around 50 people, which is divided pretty much roughly into. programmers and infrastructure slash security slash networking. And then I have my night slash weekend job, which is I’m an angel investor. And in general, just I love being part of the tech venture community. And I write about it. Sometimes I tweet about it. But most of the time, I’m just talking to entrepreneurs. learning about their businesses. Sometimes I invest in them, uh, rarely, but I always, always, uh, I mean, I’m very, I’m very,
Speaker 0 | 02:57.059
uh, dissecting popular it nerds is looking for angel investors right now.
Speaker 1 | 03:03.902
Uh, it’s pretty rare. Like I’m pretty obsessive and I, and I have what I look for usually doesn’t exist. It’s like, I’m looking for things that, that typically don’t go together, but every once in a while I do find it. Um, and, but for the most part, like, I just like talking to entrepreneurs. I love helping however I can. I like being a node, you know, a node in the network. And it’s, you know, it’s being someone who understands enterprise IT and who does enterprise IT on a daily basis. It really helps, right? Because entrepreneurs are looking into how do I sell, you know, how do I sell enterprise IT, right? So I’m like, well, I can tell you, like, because people sell to me all the time, basically all day, every day.
Speaker 0 | 03:45.544
Wait, who asked you how, oh, entrepreneurs ask you how to sell. Right. Gotcha. All right, so I’m going to ask you a question then since we, you know, we really have no direction for this whatsoever, but I already like what’s happening.
Speaker 1 | 03:59.553
Well, we can start with the crazy story of the Samsung device or whatever you want.
Speaker 0 | 04:04.696
Well, since you said you’re a node on the network and you sometimes do more work than you’re supposed to and you have a pretty good… um, sized team with ratio to end users, which is 40. And I would say that, I mean, when you call yourself mid market, are you enterprise 2000 really is an enterprise, you know, that’s kind of still mid market, right?
Speaker 1 | 04:21.242
We’re enterprise just because in total, we have 11,000 people, but, uh, most of our, uh, colleagues, uh, are either sewing, uh, using, you know, using like a brother sewing machine, uh, sewing apparel or, or using some, you know, we have very, very high end, uh, cutting equipment. So, uh, we have, uh, you know, kind of robotic cutting equipment. And a lot of our employees are in charge of that or they’re in charge of the, you know, parts of the knitting mill.
Speaker 0 | 04:49.208
I’m assuming it’s a big brother machine or is it a small brother sewing machine?
Speaker 1 | 04:55.355
It’s pretty… It’s smaller than you might imagine, but it does have big brother properties in the sense that if you leave, it will start shouting at you and you have to come back to your scene.
Speaker 0 | 05:05.443
And I only say that because…
Speaker 1 | 05:06.564
And you’re on a show too. You and everyone in your knitting module, you know, someone gets kicked off at the end of the day.
Speaker 0 | 05:15.567
Complete side note, I have four girls. I have four boys and four girls, but I have, and I was never the guy that said he would have eight kids. Believe me, I was never the guy.
Speaker 1 | 05:23.851
I only have two, but I feel like, you know, you’re… You’ve basically cubed my number of kids.
Speaker 0 | 05:30.175
There’s a whole philosophy around why two kids can be harder than eight kids, just so you know. And we won’t get into that. It’s probably like a…
Speaker 1 | 05:36.880
Because the last six don’t matter.
Speaker 0 | 05:38.761
It’s, you just still, you’re doing everything for them. I mean, you’re doing everything for them. Like right now you could, I mean, I don’t know, but I don’t know what your household structure is like. And, but you know… I’m assuming some kids might get their laundry done for them. They might get fed by them for themselves. You know, they might get all these things done for them. Certainly the older one wasn’t changing the younger one’s diapers at any time. All of that is in my house. The top three oldest kids all change diapers, all do dishes, all vacuum, all. It’s just you have no choice. So in that sense, it becomes, you know, with two kids, you’re still like, hey, it’s two kids. And they kind of get, they just get the great.
Speaker 1 | 06:20.912
they get the grade of everything um so anyways really cool well congratulations that you can do that i mean uh in my house it’s basically like i didn’t say i did it well it’s my turn with the ipad no it’s not okay i’m gonna i’m gonna play the ps4 but i’m using the ipad i’m gonna play it loud so it bothers you i mean that’s basically going back and forth all day you know can i have a ps5 no we just bought the ps4 then like two hours later can i have a ps5 because i just saw you too I just saw it on YouTube. I’m like, well, you’re going to see it on YouTube for like the next five years.
Speaker 0 | 06:52.295
That happened. That happened in my house back in four kids. And there was a mutiny and there was fighting over, I think it was, I don’t know, whatever, Super Mario World at the time, whatever it was they were playing. And, you know, one was like, you pushed me off the screen and killed me. And like, there was this fight broke out and I was like, that’s it. And that was it. And I took it out. And then a couple of years later, I got rid of the TV as well. That was an interesting one. Killing the TV off in the house. of a technology person. Just imagine.
Speaker 1 | 07:19.176
I thought about it. I mean, I definitely thought about it.
Speaker 0 | 07:21.437
It was a month or two of, it was a month or two of, like, rehabilitation.
Speaker 1 | 07:27.359
Let me tell you, that’s a good segue into this TV story. Do it. So this is what happened. I mean, we, you know, we’re an SAP shop and a lot of what we do runs on Unix and the IBM flavor of Unix, which is AIX. And… Typically, it’s pretty stable. It’s like you can’t get more stable in Unix. It’s used in hospitals. It’s used by DoD. We’ve always kind of figured we’d be okay. You’re not going to get a bunch of viruses or whatever like you would with Windows. So we’re like, all right, cool. We’re good with Unix. And we run our SAP systems and our warehouse management system on Unix. And one day… Very unexpectedly, we were like, this is so weird. SAP is trying to ping DNS, and it’s not getting any response back. We’re like, what? Okay, is there something wrong with DHCP, DNS server? We looked at it, and we’re like, no, everything’s fine. Is there a firewall issue? Is there a port block? No, that’s fine. We’re like, okay, let’s tell the users that we have to bump them off. We have to restart the system. Okay, that didn’t work. We’re like, oh, we have to look at the… the physical, like, oh crap, okay, let’s go to the data center. Let’s see what’s going on. Like, all right. So we went to the Colos, which is about 10 minutes away. And we’re like, all right, is everything cool? It’s like, yeah, everything’s connected. Everything’s good. Like, what about the switches? What about the network? Like, oh, you know, and then you just keep going on and on and on. And finally we had, we had basically.
Speaker 0 | 09:01.926
How much time has passed? How much time has passed now?
Speaker 1 | 09:05.088
I would say like a good four hours. Now the system is not down. It’s just. acting really weird, but it’s basically like, because SAP is pretty good at keeping itself up, even if weird network things are happening. So it was just not working as expected, right? Like, you know, our users tell them that and, and because they tell them that and it makes it a lot more resilient to like network issues, but people were complaining and, you know, it was down, you know, when we, when we brought it down and, um, It was very unexpected because typically our system is up 100% because SAP is like that. I mean, it’s really reliable, right? So then, you know, our team is pretty amazing. And they’ve gotten used to thinking. very creatively as to what could be causing the problem. So I started thinking, you know what? We’ve talked to IBM. We’ve talked to Oracle because it was on an Oracle database. We’ve talked to SAP. We’ve talked to whoever. I think it was an IBM P server. We talked to everyone. Cisco for the switches. Nobody can figure it out. They’re like, is there something just really basic? that’s going on. Something just like, let’s get back to basics. This started with something DNS related where it just couldn’t ping local hosts. What the hell? How do you not ping local hosts? That’s just so random. Why would that even happen? It’s like, what if local hosts is messed up? And so we were meeting, we’re like, what does that even mean? Local hosts is messed up. We’re like, that doesn’t happen. It’s just It never changes, man. So we’re like, well, maybe it does. And so one guy had this idea. He was like, what if there’s a device on the network that decided to call itself localhost?
Speaker 0 | 11:07.968
And why?
Speaker 1 | 11:09.869
Why? Like, why would you do that? That makes no sense. That would be completely disruptive. Like, we would never do that. You know, we would never set up something that did that. So we started scanning the network. I was trying to look to see, like… Like, is there any chance that there’s something that could be doing this? And lo and behold, there’s a TV that we haven’t even installed yet. It had just been ordered. It had just arrived at the office. And somebody just had plugged it in, right? Like, we hadn’t even set it up. Like, it wasn’t even on our network. We didn’t even put it on our network. I mean, I guess maybe it’s, like, started connecting to the guest network or something.
Speaker 0 | 11:45.010
Like searching or something?
Speaker 1 | 11:46.691
I don’t know. But the point is that it was called Localhost. And… We were like, what? Like, what is going on? So we turned it off and the problem was like done. Everything was fixed. Like as soon as we turned that TV off. Right. So we were like, oh God, what do we do? Like we, like somebody ordered this TV. Like they, you know, they need this TV. We obviously, we need to do something about it, but we couldn’t get into like the settings that actually called it local host because it was kind of like hard coded in there.
Speaker 0 | 12:18.413
Do you think this was done intentionally by someone laughing at it? No. I don’t care.
Speaker 1 | 12:25.395
But the story gets better because six months later, our warehouse management system starts acting up in another kind of weird way. And it’s also Unix-based. It’s also AIX-based. And it starts saying, cannot find DNS server. And we just look at each other and we’re like, where’s that TV? Where is that TV? Because we had said this TV has to be sent back. Um, we like, we were like, this TV is possessed. It must be sent back. So then we’re like, what happened? And then, um, we started calling our different offices. It turns out that our off someone had set the TV to one of our other offices. And when they received it, they didn’t realize it was like a demon, you know, evil TV. And they, you know, they plugged it in and boom, same thing happened. You know, local host started like crashing everything. So I was like,
Speaker 0 | 13:17.949
was this like in another geographic location entirely?
Speaker 1 | 13:20.870
It was in Arkansas. And, but you know, part of our MPLS network. So, so I was like, you know what, this is ridiculous. So I, I, I called IBM security, AIX security team in Austin. And I was like, guys, like, this is no good. Like, can you imagine like if, if you have like a Samsung, you know, smartwatches that are calling themselves local hosts and people are walking through hospitals. And these hospitals run on AIX and they’re just going to stop working. Like, this is a problem. I mean, and plus not to mention, like, it’s an easily exploitable, you know, bug that could create like massive problems for all people who run on Unix. So they were like, oh, my God, yes. Like, this is crazy. We like this is so insane. We’re going to, you know, we’re going to talk to Samsung about it. So hopefully, you know. Hopefully they did something. I think they did. They seemed pretty freaked out. So I think they talked to Samsung and hopefully they took care of it.
Speaker 0 | 14:21.700
And we have TVs that are probably manufactured by the thousands.
Speaker 1 | 14:26.263
Right. I mean, who knows? Who knows how local hosts got in there? But it did. Of course, I started thinking to myself, what else could you do? What other crazy IoT things could you do? What if I name my smartwatch… mail deadline? Will the Exchange server try to hit it when it’s looking for mail? And I was like, actually, I think it will. You can name your IoT devices things that are standard within TCP IP or within DNS architecture. And before you know it, weird things can happen. I guess it’s such an easily exploitable bug for enterprise IT. It started really scaring me. Because we’re always thinking about security and we typically don’t think about things like this because it just seems so… I mean, it’s like the last thing you’re going to think about is someone’s going to mess with your DNS entries so that things don’t work. But yeah, we’re a lot more…
Speaker 0 | 15:33.783
I think the interesting thing is how you tracked it down. I think the interesting thing is how you tracked it down. Like someone just like was smart enough to think that up. Like what if?
Speaker 1 | 15:42.249
Yeah. Yeah. I think what happened is like we went through like all the typical like scenarios, right? Like we always say like, okay, like it could be either network, database, physical. application like you know um there’s a hamster inside the server or we whatever um and once once we go through all of that then we’re like all right some there’s something like abnormal like there’s something supernatural happening you know like
Speaker 0 | 16:10.290
there’s a model there’s like a monolith inside the server you know we have to you’re literally reminding me of like the old poltergeist like like poster where like the girls like staring at the like the snow on the tv yeah
Speaker 1 | 16:24.434
Yeah, I mean, that’s basically what happened. It’s like, you know, in Japan, people pray to their server room before they go on vacation. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 0 | 16:34.598
Do they pray to it or do they pray for it?
Speaker 1 | 16:36.719
They pray for it, yeah. That’s like, you know, I’ve seen a lot of pictures of it. I haven’t seen it in person, but I’ve been to Japan and it seems like something that definitely would happen. So…
Speaker 0 | 16:55.454
That brings up a good point. What do we do about IT guys on vacation? What’s the end game for them?
Speaker 1 | 17:04.160
Oh, man. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 17:04.740
you’re doing stuff for fun right now. Like, you’re doing stuff for fun on the side. You’re totally involved. You’ve got a job at the same time.
Speaker 1 | 17:10.084
That’s a great question. So, and it’s something, you know, that has kind of plagued me and my colleagues, you know, throughout our IT careers. I think the easy answer is there is no vacation for IT.
Speaker 0 | 17:29.737
Terrible, man.
Speaker 1 | 17:31.137
And I think that what you need.
Speaker 0 | 17:33.279
Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 17:35.100
I mean, it’s sort of like, look, man, the sun’s going to explode one day. Like, I don’t know how else to put it to you, right? It’s going to happen.
Speaker 0 | 17:45.906
Yeah, but that’s exactly the reason why you should probably go on vacation.
Speaker 1 | 17:52.934
The way that I try to see it is like, my goal is if you’re in my organization, I want your vacation to be as pleasant as possible. But you need to understand that if something comes up and it’s an emergency and you are the person that fixes it, it will be your responsibility. Right. And that applies to me as well. So, you know, obviously the best way to do that is to cross train as much as you can, you know, trying to cross train internally as opposed to… opposed to cross training with consultants, because if you cross train with consultants, you know, what guarantee do you have that they’re not going to be on vacation? Right. Um, they’re definitely,
Speaker 0 | 18:30.190
they’re always on vacation. I speak from experience. I speak from experience, always on vacation and always not on vacation. You know what I mean? It’s like always working, always not working. It’s one or the other.
Speaker 1 | 18:46.119
Um, you got to cross train. I mean, it’s, uh, I think that’s really important. And, uh, if If there’s somebody who takes vacation and everybody panics, you know that as a leader, you haven’t cross-trained well enough, right? And I think a lot of IT leaders think to themselves, we’re like, you know what, it’s fine because I’m in charge and I have a technical understanding of the way this SD-WAN network works. So if one of the links in this network goes down, I can log into the SD-WAN. log in and I can figure it out and I can make sure that everything is going correctly. And it’s like, no, that’s not your job. Like if you’re a team lead, if you’re running a department, like your job is not to log into systems and, you know, and, you know, put in commands as much as you would love to do it. Cause that’s what you did. Like, you know, for your previous life, like you need to make sure that somehow it’s covered. Um, so in the end, like there is no real vacation for it unless you are so good at cross training or your team is so good at cross training that And like, there’s nothing that they can’t do. Right. And that’s the best possible situation.
Speaker 0 | 20:00.549
At which point we don’t need you anymore. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 | 20:03.150
At which point we don’t need you. So I think you can take it forever. Yeah. So if something goes down and you’re on vacation and we don’t need you, then you’ve just proven to us that you can stay on vacation.
Speaker 0 | 20:15.217
This must be constantly engineering new ways to save and make the company money plus cross train and engineer yourself out of the system. That’s kind of like the four hour work week model. You know, he was just like. constantly engineering himself out of the machine, even though the whole idea of it, of Tim Ferriss’four-hour workweek is a complete lie, because he definitely does not work four hours a week.
Speaker 1 | 20:37.885
Well, it probably took more than four hours a week to write the book, right?
Speaker 0 | 20:41.046
Yeah, I mean, the whole, you know, but I get it. And it saved me from having to go into an office and standing meetings from seven o’clock to eight, because reading that book alone was smart enough to make me go to my boss and say, look, I will produce 10% more, just let me work from home. He’s like, okay.
Speaker 1 | 20:57.338
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s true. I mean, now, now with the pandemic, everybody realizes that working from home actually is harder, right? Cause then it’s like no commute. So you’re expected to be working while you would have been commuting.
Speaker 0 | 21:08.742
They killed it for all the real people that were smart enough to do it ahead of time. They just killed it.
Speaker 1 | 21:13.483
It’s kind of like, you know, it was like green day after they, you know, they, you know, had their first big, big release. It was like, there weren’t cool anymore. Right? Like if you knew about them, you know, before. before like the first few big hits or reminding me of you’re my there’s things flashing into my head right now uh yeah i think actually i think dookie was my first cd that i bought um
Speaker 0 | 21:39.764
like with my own money um well at least it was a cd now now you’re dating yourself you know at least it wasn’t like you know vinyl no no it wasn’t vinyl was was already i mean you could still get it
Speaker 1 | 21:53.786
Um, it was still something you can go to specs and you can go to, you know, get, get it. But CDs were, you know, that was the most common thing. You put it into your iOS system. It had six, you know, six spinning, you know, CDs and, you know, you felt awesome because you could have six different bands that you could choose from at any time.
Speaker 0 | 22:11.450
And I’m glad that you brought this up. Okay. Because I interviewed this guy, Jack, uh, uh, Jack Seuss the other day, who’s basically been at university of Baltimore. Um, he’s going to get mad if I say this wrong. University of Baltimore County. And he’d been there for 35 years and like, you know, his first computer, you know, in the work environment, you know, was working on, you know, was working on punch cards. Right. So, and I asked him the other day, like, what was the biggest turning point technology for him? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So it makes me want to ask you, cause I asked him, you know, is there hope for millennials? Is there hope for people that, um, were never around prior to the age of the internet. You know, like I can honestly say, like there was no internet. It still blows my mind talking to the kids. Like there was no internet. Like no Google. It was like, you know, we used to joke.
Speaker 1 | 23:07.565
That’s what I tell my kids. I’m like, imagine the world where there’s no internet. It’s like the beginning. It’s like the beginning of a horror movie, right? It’s like, imagine a world where there is no internet. And they just look at me like, do you mean there’s no iPad? I’m like, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 0 | 23:21.529
No cell phone.
Speaker 1 | 23:22.846
There is literally nothing to go to your iPad. They’re like, so there’s no…
Speaker 0 | 23:27.149
There was the Dewey Decimal System. Remember Conan, the librarian?
Speaker 1 | 23:32.092
Yeah. When my kids realized that the internet was transferable, that it didn’t live on a device, it was like… I think it happened around the age of four. For both of them, they were like, don’t take away the iPad. That’s where the internet is. I was like, actually, I’m about to blow your mind. The internet is… everywhere like you can see the same video on my computer they’re like what the internet is on your computer so imagine not taking that away from them saying imagine there is no internet like it doesn’t even exist right i mean i think it was my four-year-old or whatever i can’t remember who said it last night completely blew my mind like um
Speaker 0 | 24:11.651
is that is there an app for that like is that an app and i was like what like the fact that you’re even speaking the fact i can’t remember what it was the fact that you’re even speaking in that like like terminology, the fact that you’re speaking in application terminology at this age is just, so, so here’s the thing.
Speaker 1 | 24:30.656
Is there a serverless app that can run, you know, that can run on containers using Kubernetes and like, you know, I watched that and I, you know, like all these one letter word, you know, systems that always have to kind of slightly remind you of like someone you’ve met, like, it’s like Jenkins. Do I know somebody called Jenkins? Like, but that is a framework, isn’t it?
Speaker 0 | 24:54.865
You’re way above me. I’ll be honest with you. You’re way above me. I’m just a layman. So the question was, well, here’s my question. What was your first computer? Secondly, is there hope for today’s modern technology, people growing up in technology nowadays? Will they not have enough history and kind of backbone or what’s going to happen?
Speaker 1 | 25:21.302
So it was a tie between the Tandy and… the Commodore.
Speaker 0 | 25:25.432
Okay. So you’re plenty old enough then you’re in the, you’re in that age group. You’re in the,
Speaker 1 | 25:29.514
yeah, I’m a X, X annual, um, kind of like end of genetics, beginning of millennial. Um, I would say no, there is no hope. I think, I think basically our kids, whatever,
Speaker 0 | 25:43.579
whatever you tell it, how it is,
Speaker 1 | 25:45.560
whatever generation it is, I think we’ll be basically like the, the, the, the generation where like the internet just kind of became part, part of our biological systems. Like, you know, when they’re detached from the internet, I mean, it’s literally, it’s like in the matrix, like when you, you know, take the plug out. You know, I really think that starting with, I don’t know, maybe probably kids that are older, but definitely like, you know, kids who are now, you know, 10 years old, they are going to be completely attached to to the internet, whatever that is, right? It could be like augmented reality. It could be internet of things. I mean, or it could just be your standard plane, TCP, IP, internet, whatever that’s going to, they’re going to need to have it. Um, I don’t think that they’re going to be able to survive without it. I really don’t. It’s like air conditioning in Florida. Like, I don’t know how people live here in Florida without air conditioning. I just, I, it boggles the mind.
Speaker 0 | 26:46.507
It’s true. And they did it at one time. There’s people walking in the face of the earth with like, you know, Huts. It’s crazy, right? It’s absolutely nuts because I know exactly what you’re talking about. But now… I went on a trip to Egypt last year. I was in Saudi Arabia and I was in areas where I was like, man, there were people that lived here. There was people that lived here with no air conditioning. Like, no air conditioning. That’s just crazy.
Speaker 1 | 27:16.629
And they actually got shit done too. Like… I don’t know. Started a religion, you know, in the middle of the desert.
Speaker 0 | 27:27.716
And still took naps every day, midday, you know, I mean, hey, you know.
Speaker 1 | 27:32.921
Now we have air conditioning, right? You can’t live without it.
Speaker 0 | 27:36.364
You just made me think of, I mean, you’re really, I think you speak almost in movies, because you said there’s no hope, but maybe there’s going to be like this mass escape in migration, like you’re escaping the network, literally. Yeah. from the Matrix back to nature.
Speaker 1 | 27:52.405
I think so.
Speaker 0 | 27:53.366
It’s interesting because when I took the TV away, my kids became obsessed with books. I mean, for real, it’s a real thing. Like, they read books. I didn’t read books as a kid. I wanted, you know, like, The Nest came out. I didn’t care about that. I’d read Nintendo Power, whatever it was, you know? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 28:09.618
that’s what I remember,
Speaker 0 | 28:10.879
yeah. You know, I was, like, obsessed with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and how do I get past, you know, I don’t know, Soda Pumpkin. whatever it was you know my kids are reading books and obviously they have devices so they’re not completely detached but um i noticed that uh my son is like you know like really into surfing and there’s a unique group of kids that he’s like connected with on instagram and they’re all like they’re i’m like well like do they talk about like xbox they talk about playstation he’s like no i’m talking about like when there’s no waves it’s like you know where are we going mountain biking
Speaker 1 | 28:47.176
I was like,
Speaker 0 | 28:48.336
so there’s like another extreme, there’s like another extreme nature group, you know, that I don’t know, maybe there’ll be like,
Speaker 1 | 28:54.138
you know, what’s ironic is that there will be tech for that. Like somebody in Boulder right now is starting a company that creates tech that stops you from using tech.
Speaker 0 | 29:04.161
And it’s funny that you picked Boulder because I went to CSU and we picked on them a lot for all this.
Speaker 1 | 29:10.382
I mean, Boulder’s an, you know, it’s an outdoor place, right? Like you go there like. If you’re not,
Speaker 0 | 29:16.373
if you’re not. Well, first, you’re in Miami right now. Have you been to Boulder?
Speaker 1 | 29:20.055
Yeah, yeah. I love Colorado. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 29:24.337
there’s that whole scene. There’s that whole downtown scene in Boulder. It’s probably even worse now that like, you know, marijuana has been legalized. I left before marijuana was legalized. It was, you know, one thing back then, but now the scenes have got to be like, you know. I know someone told me that like one, like there’s just areas that are completely overrun with panhandling now. Anyways, it’s a whole other subject. It’s a whole nother subject. But anyways, my cousin.
Speaker 1 | 29:48.291
But they are trying to find a way to get away from tech. So it will be destroyed from the inside. I mean, which, you know, pretty much every like sci-fi movie ever, you know, has, you know, is like, it gets destroyed from the inside, right? There’s always somebody who says, no, like this is controlling our lives. And it’s usually the creator. And they’re like, you know, I need to, I need to leave the mothership and destroy it. Or. nothing good will come of this.
Speaker 0 | 30:13.953
Well, to play on your actual… I’m just going to say, no, that’s not going to happen. It’s going to come like… it’s going to get darker and darker. There’s going to be no escape.
Speaker 1 | 30:31.183
Well, we tend to underestimate negative outcomes. I mean, that’s something that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his, by far, my favorite book about economics, which is Thinking Fast and Slow. And one of the things in Thinking Fast and Slow is that we tend to severely underestimate the possibility of negative outcomes. Absolutely. And when they do happen, like, you know, pandemic, you’re like, whoa, that’s unprecedented. Like, actually, no, like the earth got hit by an asteroid and everything on it died. It’s not unprecedented. It’s pretty shitty. But dude, like worse things have happened, man. Negative outcomes are real. You just maybe haven’t dealt with them.
Speaker 0 | 31:14.347
Yeah. Yeah. And or you might have had the privilege of just growing up in this country, period. It’s one of those. I’m like. Every, again, back to the kids and I hate the, you know, I don’t need to use so many of these, but it’s just like you become your parents and you start saying things that everyone said, and you’re like, oh, really? So this, your life’s miserable, huh? Well, I can drop you out of a, out of a, you know, helicopter in the middle of a sub-Saharan Africa, or let’s see, we’ll drop you down in India. And then, you know, let me know in a month how that’s going.
Speaker 1 | 31:45.091
Like,
Speaker 0 | 31:45.451
we’ll, we’ll do an exchange program. Okay. We’ll swap you out with somebody else and we’ll see who’s happy after a month. So, what’s your advice to people to, I guess, up and coming IT?
Speaker 1 | 32:06.654
Okay, I think that was an example of negative outcomes.
Speaker 0 | 32:09.715
Oh, that’s perfect. See, I’m just still talking. I didn’t even know. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 32:13.637
I think it was on, was it on my side? Now I have to worry about, you know, did I mess something up on my network? You know, because if it’s my network, you know, now my anxiety is rising, but everything looks good.
Speaker 0 | 32:26.960
Is it your network as in your work from home network? No,
Speaker 1 | 32:30.041
my work network.
Speaker 0 | 32:31.941
Oh, then it’s definitely you.
Speaker 1 | 32:33.242
If it was at home, I could carry a lot of this. But if it’s at work and I’m like, okay, I got kicked out of my Zoom call at work. Look at the straight.
Speaker 0 | 32:42.844
So far, based on what I have taken from things that you have said, you said MPLS and you said SD-WAN. So you should be aggregating internet connectivity and Zoom. Maybe you lost a connection and Zoom is not one of your applications that’s stacked high enough. Are you doing VeloCloud? Are you doing some kind of equipment? SD-WAN, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 | 33:04.655
No, we do an SD-WAN. It’s managed by Fujitsu, provided by AT&T on Silver Peak equipment.
Speaker 0 | 33:15.582
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 33:16.123
And not to mention, it has a fantastic name, which is SD-WAN-ass. I know.
Speaker 0 | 33:24.948
I think I might have mentioned this. No, I didn’t. I was talking about this on the side and we won’t, we won’t go too much more into this. But when VoIP, you know, VoIP, when VoIP first came out, I remember this particular company that sold, Oh no, no, no. Cause VoIP, the internet wasn’t made for like QoS back in the day. So the first kind of cloud like voice providers were, you know, could have all kinds of, yeah, yeah. All kinds of jitter and latency issues and choppy calls. And I, and, It was all about every time a salesperson went out, it was, oh, no, no, no, don’t even talk to me about VoIP. So-and-so told me about that. It never worked. No, get out of here.
Speaker 1 | 34:03.285
No,
Speaker 0 | 34:03.626
give me my Avire, my Samsung Toshiba, PBX, analog, whatever. And so this one company came out, and their objection killer to that was like, no, no, no, we’re not VoIP. We’re VoP. We’re V-O-P. We’re not voice over IP. We’re voice over PI. We’re voiceover private internet. And that was just their crazy pitch for, we’re going to charge you for an MPLS tail, aka T1, back to our data center where we’re hosting our gen band server. So instead of running it, we’re actually going to single thread you back to Equinix. And every time that T1 goes down, you’re going to lose everything. And it’s still going to be questionable.
Speaker 1 | 34:51.784
And you’re going to be happy because we branded it differently.
Speaker 0 | 34:54.644
Voice over PI or vote PI.
Speaker 1 | 34:56.905
As the WAN asks. That’s what we do. As the WAN asks.
Speaker 0 | 35:01.926
Yeah. This is new, man. This is a new one. This is great.
Speaker 1 | 35:03.487
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 35:04.787
Okay. So I could talk with you forever. I’ll be completely honest with you. Give me something. What we need to give back to the listeners out there, everyone listening, you know, other IT managers, other IT directors. I think you said something. That might have been, you know, how you discover problems or how you break things down or something. What would be your biggest, or even what was your biggest jump that helped you jump to the level you’re at right now? Was there an aha moment for you at some point in your life? Like I need to, I don’t know, care about end users or not treat them like a number or in your case, it would probably be the opposite. It’d probably be the opposite. You’re probably like, no, all end users are idiots and definitely manage them to the lowest common denominator. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 35:49.520
That’s funny because you could take, we could take one of the two approaches. I take more of the humanistic approach, but I definitely have more of like, yeah. And users are just, no, they’re just nodes. And, you know, make sure that node is, you know, operational. I mean, I, I think there’s a couple, there’s a couple of things that I could take from that question. The first thing is like, how, how do you solve problems? Right. And a lot of times, you know, I tell my team, I, we are the only scientists in this company, right? Our company’s job is to make apparel. And we make really good apparel and the salespeople sell it well. The marketers come up with awesome designs. And the operations people make sure that it gets manufactured and distributed and sold. But we are the only ones that actually have to do science. And science is different from business. And the thing about science that you might not expect is that it typically doesn’t work out as expected. If you think about… you know, Newton’s law of gravity, like for so long, people were like, sure, you know, that works. Until Einstein was like, no, it actually doesn’t. But in very, very, very, very, very small scenarios that you probably aren’t going to encounter, but by the way, it just doesn’t work. It’s wrong. So it’s kind of the same with IT. Like we’re the only scientists in the group. So we need to think differently from the rest of the company. We can’t, we are not going to be able to fix problems by just screaming at each other and saying, do it, make it happen. you know, uh, or kind of like the, the pickup, the phone say, are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet? You know, that, that might work, uh, in another department where it’s all about motivation or, you know, getting enough people, uh, on the floor or getting enough people on the, uh, you know, in the factory for us, we have to be scientists. And what that means is we have to follow a scientific method. Right. So, um, and I kind of take it back super old school, right, right back to kindergarten. And I’m like, look, what is your hypothesis? Um, And so I might be talking to our head of infrastructure, say, what is your hypothesis for why this Cisco network has a jitter level that is higher than our SLA? We’re like, well, here is why I think it’s happening. And I’d be like, okay, can you go test out that hypothesis and tell me if it’s true or not? And a lot of times, people will be like, what? What do you mean test out the hypothesis? Your typical thing, if you’re dealing with a software consultant, but I go… There is no way to recreate the issue. We can’t recreate it on our local machine. Sorry, like impossible. But no, that’s what you need to do. You need to figure it out and you need to test it. And by the way, there are ways of testing networks, just like there are ways of testing applications or anything else, you know, just like you test your code, right? So in IT, you need to test like multiple, large, complex systems that are tied in together. Whether it be your VoIP network with your applications, with your infrastructure, with your data center, with your firewalls, all that stuff is kind of working together. And you need to find where the error is. And you need to have a hypothesis. And you need to basically go in and say, can I prove that my hypothesis is correct or not? And if you can’t, move on to the next one. And then you kind of come up with, you know, you don’t really come up with a theory that gets, you know, tested and then becomes like, okay, this is the theory of like when the database dies and the backup tends to be up and the Cisco phone had nothing to do with it. But you do come up with experience. And then just like with the local host situation, it’s like the hypothesis was there’s something on the network calling itself local host. It was improbable, but it turned out to be true. So now we have, so now we know that. Right. So, and that’s, that’s what I tell my team. It’s like, you know, it’s two in the morning and you’re trying to get a system back up or, or it’s just a normal project that you’re not sure why it’s not working. Sort of like you think of it like a scientist, like think you’re, think like you’re in a lab and, you know, or, or for people who are like really into like kind of messing around with the equipment and the switches and the routers and stuff like. Imagine you’re right there with the equipment and you’re trying to figure out which one of these plugs is it. Like where you’re like, you know, you’re, you’re tracing that line through the, through the data center, you know, you’re in your element, but maybe you’re, you’re not, you’re in your, you’re in your seat, you’re in an office, but think about it that way and start eliminating, you know, one thing after another, um, and be scientific about it. And if you don’t have data, then I don’t want to hear it. Right. Like it’s fine. If non IT people come to me with non database complaints, right? Like The CEO can come to me and say, this isn’t working. And it’s a subjective point of view. If it doesn’t work for him, I’m not doing my job. But it’s not okay if my security person comes to me and says, I think we’re not secure. Like, show me the data. Where is the data?
Speaker 0 | 41:03.313
Love it. I would love to have you back on the show to talk just about team management in general, to be honest with you. There’s a lot of… There’s a lot of things, but I’d love to just hear your philosophy on how you manage a team, how you drive that.
Speaker 1 | 41:19.782
It gets me excited. It’s something that I think that over the years, I’ve definitely changed the way that I interact with my team. It’s definitely become more sort of a… kind of consensus-based decision-making. At the beginning, when I first, like the first time that I got a position where somebody was reporting to me, I think I was like 23, and I was working on this large project for the Department of Defense. And I was a consultant with Deloitte, and they assigned a bunch of other consultants from different companies to me. And I think at that point, I thought to myself, like, I need to show that I always know, that I always have the answer, right? So that was sort of, I thought like to be a team lead means you know more than the other people. And I learned pretty quickly because I was way younger than the people who were reporting to me. And if they weren’t even on the company, so they had no problem telling me like, dude, it’s not about you knowing more. You need to tell me what to do. And I’m like, what do you mean? Like that isn’t IT. Like IT is I go in, I download a file, I do a pivot table. I like do some weird shit and then I give it to someone else. Like, no, no, no, no. Like I need to do a, I need to know what my priorities are. And I’m like, whoa, like something like the world has changed. Like there’s, there’s like a different, there’s a different laser quantum fluctuation that has changed everything. What did I get myself into?
Speaker 0 | 42:55.981
It’s not about knowing anything. It’s about ordering people around. I love it.
Speaker 1 | 43:02.468
Love it. Yeah. Or helping them to find their own path, right?
Speaker 0 | 43:05.330
I understand. I understand. I just like, you know, I like to put it in this, I like to, you know, the Michael Scott terms, you know, I manage it. This is called management by walking around. You know?
Speaker 1 | 43:19.040
Yeah. Best boss cup, right?
Speaker 0 | 43:21.982
Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 | 43:26.565
Yeah. It’s been absolutely my pleasure. We can do it. We could do it every Tuesday at the same time. No problem.
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