Speaker 0 | 00:09.563
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have Diane Huff on the line with us. I really shouldn’t be calling you a nerd. I should just be calling you popular because that’s what you are.
Speaker 1 | 00:24.869
I’m still a nerd. I take nerd and geek. equal clarity for myself.
Speaker 0 | 00:32.072
So, so I was trying to push the limits a little bit the other day by, by sending, I sent out this email blast and post on LinkedIn that got a little bit of response as to, you know, why I don’t work with women. And quite frankly, there just aren’t any women for me to work with. And when I came from retail, before I ever got into technology, there was like almost two decades ago, I was actually the only guy. So I don’t know what that means or has to say about anything, but that’s what we’re talking about today. Right. So. You’ve been in technology for quite a while. Why don’t we just start with, you know, how you got started? Like, you know, what was your first computer growing up or kind of what was the story of, you know, how did you end up in this space?
Speaker 1 | 01:11.536
Well, I grew up in a time where no one had a computer growing up. So the first computer I got was in, I think it was 1985. A friend gave me a fairly modified Commodore 64. A modified?
Speaker 0 | 01:26.966
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 01:27.427
That’s how I mean it. Well, my friends were nerds, and it was actually one of those things that I saw how he modified it, and it got me very interested in technology. My first computer that I ever owned on my own was a used IBM 5150 with the dual floppy drives, and I used that almost exclusively. I had WordPerfect on a floppy, used it almost exclusively for word processing. And then… I also had Lotus 1, 2, 3 on. So I didn’t get anything high powered until the 90s when I built it myself. But that’s what sparked my interest. But it wasn’t my field of study. I was studying to be a psychologist. And I was going to school to work in criminal psychology. And just happened to be working for a value-added reseller as a receptionist. Making comments. reading books. And one day the guy who did the rack and stack and throwing cable, and they asked me if I wanted to learn. And I guess they had, you know, manpower shortage, and they grabbed the first person they could find. And I learned how to build, I’m really going to date myself, Cat3 cable and token ring networks. I did it for about four months. And then the guy who broke his arm. came back to work and they said, oh, you’re free to go back to doing what you’re doing. And I said, oh, my God, what am I doing with my life? I love this. I hate what I’m doing. Because technology has an A to Z. It always has, projects have a beginning and an end to them. And you can build technology. I mean, technology is dynamic and you’re always going to have to add additions and upgrades, but you can always see the beginning and the end. It’s like, you’re going to be crazy. You know, you’re just, you’re going to be crazy. There is no… not being crazy at the end of the day. And criminal psychology, they may not always be nice. So you just, they don’t tell you when you’re studying criminal psychology that criminals are bad people.
Speaker 0 | 03:33.532
And you just have to-And you’re only going to be working with bad people for the rest of your life and seeing how screwed up the world is.
Speaker 1 | 03:39.497
Right, in technology, only half the people are bad. So, you know, it was a better division of personalities.
Speaker 0 | 03:45.042
Well, we could get it, we could go down the path of, you know, psychological evaluation of IT guys and typing them, you know, anytime you want.
Speaker 1 | 03:52.124
Oh, I’ve done that many, many times, just sitting at my desk, looking at my team. So I’m there.
Speaker 0 | 03:57.587
And people still have cat three, by the way, and RJ 11 cabling everywhere. That’s what I would like to solve that problem once and for all. Well, yeah, you make a good point. I mean, technology is the growth is it’s not slowing down. It’s exponentially growing. And it’s, you know, one of the themes that’s been coming up a lot lately is the successful technology leader. has to really be always one step ahead, like, you know, two versions ahead of the versions before they come out type of thing. Right.
Speaker 1 | 04:28.840
And if you’re not going to afford that,
Speaker 0 | 04:31.242
yeah, no one can afford it. And if you’re constantly catching up, you’re kind of lost. So it’s kind of like, how do we engineer this and do, you know, do as much as we can with as little as we’re given. But before we get there, talk to me a little bit about, okay, so, well. Where were you at that time? When you were, when you kind of like migrated into this position due to broken arm guy, what, like, were you still going to school at that time? Or was this like, what were you doing? Where were you at in your career?
Speaker 1 | 04:59.296
I was. I was still going to school. I was working on my PhD, and I spent years and years working in technology. A PhD is just not overnight. And I never, you know, even though I had the grants, PhDs take a long time. So when I finished my PhD, I quit my job, worked in technology. I worked for this value-added reseller, a small one out of North Carolina, a great guy, one of the best mentors I’ve ever had, a very quiet, patient man who just genuinely taught me everything I needed to know. about Novell Networking. He encouraged me to, when Windows Networking came out, he encouraged me to be a Windows engineer. He encouraged me to become a C&E and a master C&E. He encouraged me to be a CCIE. And he kept telling me, you know, he said, you can throw a rock and hit a man in technology, he said, but you’re the only woman I’ve ever seen. And he pushed me and encouraged me. But then when I got
Speaker 0 | 05:54.704
Hold on one second there, because I like talking about mentors, because that’s something that’s been coming up lately. Sure. And you said you had a really good mentor. And a lot of people don’t know, well, you know, mentors are kind of like just something that happens or like I fall into. And I just happen to be, you know, people always say like, you always know who that great teacher was. If I asked you like, you know, who your favorite teacher was in high school, there’s immediately someone that pops in the head or like who you hate, right? There’s someone that pops in your head. What do you think were some of those key factors that made this? you said patient or very, you know, calm or whatever. Okay. So that’s not me, but what’s, what, what would you think, what do you think it was or the key factors? Was it good suggestions? Was it believing in you? What was it?
Speaker 1 | 06:37.549
Oh, his name is Gary Allen. He’s actually passed away now, but his, he taught me something that I have carried with me throughout my career. And that is that people are not perfect and you make mistakes. As long as you take those mistakes and make those a teachable moment for yourself and for your team around you, then you make mistakes together as a team and not one person is held accountable and, you know, eviscerated in the town square and there’s no self-flagellation that has to go on. It’s a team or a group and we make these mistakes and we learn and we move forward. And I have carried that with me in kind of almost everything. And. marriages that didn’t work out. I’m like, oh, it was a team effort that didn’t work out. In friendships, but particularly in a team environment for a company, because, you know, the worst thing you can do is have your employees constantly operating out of fear. And if they realize that they can be human, that they can make mistakes, it works. And it makes for a happier workplace. I’ve had a lot of really happy, solid teams. It’s not to say that if you continue to make the same mistake over and over again, I won’t put you in the head or give you enough rope to hang yourself. But, you know, as a technology leader and as someone who’s had as many years of experience as I have, you know, I want to help them grow. And part of growth is making mistakes. So I valued and carried that with me. Now, I’m not. He was a patient, wonderful man. And he was a. He was a minister on the weekends. I don’t have any of those qualities. But I’m just very forward and candid and outgoing. But every once in a while, I try to get that Zen moment. I like to call it my Gary moment and just, you know, speak to one of my employees and say, OK, you made a mistake. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to learn from it. And he was just fantastic with that. And I’ve had very few leaders moving forward who have been that. quality of a person and that quality of a leader. I’ve had some great leaders, but I would consider him to be one of my strongest mentors. And then I have another one quite recently that is a mentor who taught me about, it was David Strobel. He was my CIO at Models. He taught me about how to be, in a completely different fashion though, he taught me how to be calculating in my career and the things that I do, the people that I interact with. And I don’t want that to sound cold. I want that to sound, you know, he said, you’ve gotten to a certain level. Maybe you need to be a little bit more calculating in some of your moves. And I, a lot of the things that he said resonated with me because I had just sort of allowed my career to grow on like topsy. And he actually taught me a lot about how to make particular moves and how to, you know, address people in a different way, how to communicate a little differently and how to network in a way that. would further my career. And I have nothing but, you know, very, you know, strong, positive feelings about my time with him because of that too. So it was very yin and yang. My two mentors were very yin and yang for me.
Speaker 0 | 09:55.535
Now, when you say… And I’m just curious, I just want to dig a little bit deeper. When he said, I’d be more calculating, is that more of a kind of presenting a, I guess, a vision of yourself and then making decisions that fall in alignment with that vision?
Speaker 1 | 10:14.161
Exactly. And, you know, for instance, I have been a leader who’s been very involved with my team and I become very, my team and I become very insulated in this. group dynamic, but that doesn’t give me any visibility in my workplace. And he helped me to encourage me to spend more time networking with my peers and networking out in the community with peers from other organizations or into retail organizations or go to conferences and try not to be so fixated on my job that I’m not also. uh concerned about my career because they’re two different things your job is what you do on a daily basis but your career is your path moving forward and he taught me very much that you’ve got to focus on your career and how you present yourself and how you want to move forward rather than just focus on a job well done because i’m in it operations and in it operations and infrastructure if it works it’s supposed to work and if it’s broken it’s your fault there’s no glory in that job so There’s no way to…
Speaker 0 | 11:24.948
Quite unforgiving.
Speaker 1 | 11:26.189
Exactly. There’s really no way to get ahead unless you go from job to job to job. And there’s no way to go from job and company and company, you know, place to place unless you focus on that outward appearance and that…
Speaker 0 | 11:39.574
Yeah, I would argue that. Yeah, I would argue there that that’s what everyone thinks the typical job description is. But if you really want to stand out as a technology leader, then you understand the bottom line. you understand gross margin, operating costs, and you know how to use technology as kind of a driving factor to leverage the company and make it more profitable and at least save money in some areas, at least drive productivity. So when you’re stepping in kind of in that extra role that’s outside of just making sure everything works, then you’re more valuable because you’re actually doing it.
Speaker 1 | 12:18.628
And that’s one of the reasons why you have a lot of CIOs who don’t have a lot of technical background, but they have an MBA and they understand the business of technology and they can align your technology goals. Maybe they don’t understand it completely. They can align your technology goals, you know, along with the business and grow the business. I learned that more nowhere more than when I worked at Fairportal, which the bottom line was our OKRs, our KPIs were dollar driven. And being down in infrastructure, that’s a cost center and has always been a cost center. It was one of the places where I learned that you have to adjust your KPIs and your goals to help them meet those dollars, meet those sales, meet those requirements. And it was another valuable lesson for me and another place to work where I learned more about business than I had ever learned before and how to make technology a part of that business rather than just.
Speaker 0 | 13:15.788
um just keep the keep the wheel it’s surprising sometimes how many mbas are in like cto or cio roles but really don’t have much of a technology background or aren’t skilled at like like they couldn’t step in and like handle the tickets let’s just put it that way right and i
Speaker 1 | 13:33.297
work you know infrastructure reports to a lot of ctos who have a software development background and just have no knowledge of it operations and infrastructure and then i have a lot of cios who come from you you know, development backgrounds who have no idea about infrastructure and IT operations. And so they need someone like me to come in and sort of step in. I don’t, I don’t have that MBA. I don’t have a PhD in criminal psychology is not going to give me the business acumen.
Speaker 0 | 14:00.486
I don’t think you need it though. I mean, to be honest with you, I mean, personally, I don’t think people need an MBA. I just think an MBA is kind of like one of those things where some companies are like, oh, he has an MBA. You are now qualified. You know, like I don’t think it should be like, some people won’t. even look at you unless you have an MBA. But if you have significant business experience, where you can show that you have, you know, driven profitable revenue, you know, if you have things like that, like, you know, shotgun shells in your shotgun to like, prove that, then I think it doesn’t really matter. Because I don’t think it’s rocket science at the end of the day. At least for me, I don’t think it is.
Speaker 1 | 14:37.248
Right.
Speaker 0 | 14:37.909
It’s hard to prove. I think I think what it, what it means, what it says more is for the people that do have the technology background, that do have that kind of, that do have all of those skills, there is an opening for you to really kind of like take over because you’ve, you’ve got the technology skills and the business acumen, you’re going to have to have that. And if you layer that in, that makes you now very, very desirable. So, but let’s get to the, let’s get to the feminine aspect of this. Um, you know, cause you. told me you had never worked with a woman until 2014.
Speaker 1 | 15:10.587
I had never worked with a woman. I worked with my first woman on my IT team in 2014. She was a telephony administrator. She’s still there. The first crew engineer I had ever worked with was in 2016 at Fairportal, which I’ll give a shout out to Kritika Gupta, who’s one of the strongest technology engineers. She knows data centers. She knows… routing and switching. She knows storage. And she is the ultimate besides, I think maybe besides myself, the ultimate purple squirrel.
Speaker 0 | 15:43.351
Send me her contact information after this so I can tag her on this as well.
Speaker 1 | 15:48.215
Well, she is one of the very first technology, she’s a manager. She was one of the very first technology managers that I had worked with. She came as an engineer and I made her a manager because I recognized that anything that I was talking to her about, The light was shining in her eyes of pure understanding. She had the knowledge and any task that I would give her, she was able to do it. She one day will run some technology organization because she’s just, you know, all she needs is a little bit of mentoring on the business side of it and the leadership. But, you know, she’s young, but I’m telling you, in 10 years, she’s going to be running some organization. But she is, like I said, a purple squirrel.
Speaker 0 | 16:30.182
Why is this? Honestly, my thoughts are that when I was growing up and when you were growing up, and I’m not too far behind, but when I was growing up, it was just like the guys that played with computers and the people that can play with computers really were nerds. And was that reserved for guys? And that’s why we have such a kind of offset? Or what do you think it is? And then what’s the problem? Why aren’t more women involved in technology? And is there, you know, you spoke of a glass ceiling, and I kind of want to know, like, how real that is. But maybe just, I don’t know, where do you want to start with that one? Maybe let’s just start with why is there not so many women, more women in technology?
Speaker 1 | 17:13.342
Well, I mean, we can start from the beginning of my time during, when I was coming up, there were very few technology degrees. And in order to get those technology degrees, you had to do just a ton of math. And that was… kind of part of the, listen, when I was growing up, women just didn’t focus on math. We focused on the social sciences and, you know, psychology and the domestic sciences and nursing and things like that. And it wasn’t something that was impressed upon us. Like I said, I fell into the career, but never once had anybody even, even when I was at Duke and I was, you know, scoring, you know. I was taking multivariable platform calculus and kicking its ass. No professor ever came up to me and said, hey, you should transition into computer sciences. Never. They never recommended that I go into physics or math or anything. It just wasn’t part of our culture at that particular time. Then as technology became part of the overall environment, even I being right after, you know, I left that that value added reseller and I went to another company. I had the experience to be a full-on manager, but I was still an admin, and I had a great manager then who said, you should focus on your work to become a project manager, because you’re never going to break that glass ceiling. Men just aren’t going to listen to a woman in technology until you’re in charge of a project. So I became a project manager. I went to school, took my PMI certification, my PMP, and became a project manager. So that I could get people to understand not only my project manager, but I understand the technology behind it. And then I was able to sort of transcend that that ceiling that I had hit the glass ceiling, but just transcend the environment, transcend it and go into, you know, program manager and then be a network manager.
Speaker 0 | 19:08.248
And then I kind of had to do extra work.
Speaker 1 | 19:10.569
I had to do I had to work so much harder than the men around me in order to be that way. And I had to become very assertive, but cheerful, cheerful and assertive. At the same time, because, you know, a man can be very patient and be very domineering and he can be very forward and direct and candid. A woman is a bitch.
Speaker 0 | 19:27.809
Are you saying IT directors are domineering and forward? You just said that they’re like domineering, outgoing, like forward, like all these other things that I just don’t, you know, like it’s kind of like the stereotype is that no, the IT guy like hides in the closet. And, you know, Aaron Siemens, when I interviewed him, he said, no, it’s just like slide some food under the door. Like those days.
Speaker 1 | 19:48.018
No, that’s very much it. Most of the managers, when I was coming up, had a very gruff exterior. They were very direct. you know, the first response was always no, no. Can I get no? Will you no? It was just no. And they, you know, they would generally sit in a data center.
Speaker 0 | 20:10.136
Like an arrogant no. Like how dare you make that suggestion? No.
Speaker 1 | 20:14.620
They sit in an office full of crap, you know, of old hard drives and books from 10 years before. And then, you know, along, you know, comes Diane and she’s. happy and cheerful and upbeat and I have a very positive nature and it just did not compute. It did not compute in any way. And still to this day, I know that I’ve told you this story, but I had an interview with a company while I was on the market and I interviewed with a company seven times and everyone lied to me. And then I had an interview with the CEO. We had a great conversation. There’s nothing cool about me. I’m just… very direct and candid and goofy. And, um, but I know what I’m talking about and I’m, and I have a lot of skills and experience. And at the end of the interview, he said, I just want to tell you right up front that you didn’t get the job. And I said, Oh, uh, why is that? And he said, you know what? You’re very positive and cheerful. And he said, and that just translates. Not very serious. I don’t think you have any.
Speaker 0 | 21:15.012
You don’t have any white. Wait, I’m sorry. What was that? You don’t have any, what? Any.
Speaker 1 | 21:19.734
gravitas, any gravitas whatsoever that people would take me seriously, that I could not get a message in a way that people would find very serious. They didn’t think that my positive sort of upbeat nature, which I can’t stop, you know, there’s nothing cool about me, but I, you know, it just, it didn’t, it didn’t compute for him. And so I talked to him about it for a minute and I said, are you, are you sure about this? I definitely don’t have the job. And he said, yeah, you definitely don’t have the job. And I’m my language. I said, okay, well, keep it. Because I said IT operations is a place where you need an infrastructure where you need someone positive, where you need someone to be up to speed and who’s going to get your team over the hump, especially in your dated environment where you’ve been building the plane as you take off. A lot of this stuff is going to have to be pulled apart and compressed. You have to minimize your footprint. It’s a lot of work. So you need somebody positive and upbeat who can do that and someone who also has the background experience and the skills to do it.
Speaker 0 | 22:18.862
Plus you deal with all kinds of end users and you deal with all kinds of other people in the company that pretty much normally look down upon IT and see them as kind of like the… You want to choose that reputation.
Speaker 1 | 22:28.530
You want somebody who’s going to be that positive influence, who’s going to be very visible.
Speaker 0 | 22:34.114
Except in interviews? Who goes to interviews? Do you think everyone would?
Speaker 1 | 22:40.599
I left and hired somebody different and then they called me back about a month later and said that person didn’t work out and would I be willing to come back in? for, you know, to speak again. I was like,
Speaker 0 | 22:50.771
they called me back after you told them to F off.
Speaker 1 | 22:53.572
Yeah, they called me back, but the first time that’s happened, but with other people who say, yeah, I know this female and she’s been trying to be the director, but you know, it’s not what they want for the job. They don’t want that extrovert for the job. They want, it’s just not part, they consider it to be, they consider it to be very serious. And, and For someone like me, it’s been tough to break that glass ceiling because I’m not, you know, very, you know, and women are, we’re pushed, you know, even today, women are, you know, and young girls through the STEM program are kind of pushed into development and not into, you know, into infrastructure. I’ve spoken at many STEM schools, spoken to a lot of young girls, and they, over the last year, it’s been a lot of the things that I do. And they look at me like I’ve grown a third head when I start talking about, I guess that’d be the second one. But they look at me and say, I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about, about engineering, because the whole world has sort of gone into a development mode. You know, every little kid knows how to develop. Every teenager knows a little bit about Python scripting. Everybody can write their own apps. No one’s talking about the infrastructure that’s being built on. And they’re all saying, oh, we just put it in the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else’s computer. in network i mean think about it so no one’s pushing women to or not pushing but encouraging women to become you know infrastructure engineers or routing and switching or data center gurus no one’s forcing that no one’s saying hey you can you know learn a lot about terraforming and build aws environments like i did over the past few months no one’s encouraging that and they’re especially not and i don’t know why but it’s you know women have a long way to go in technology not in development because they’re writing their own tickets right now in coding and development and building data architecture. And they’re writing their own tickets when it comes to project management. But when it comes to infrastructure. I can still go to conferences and meet four women who are on my level. Four. You know, there’s the CIOs, but every female CIO that I meet doesn’t have a background in infrastructure. You know, and the CTOs that I meet, they have a background in development. So we’re still a long way to go. And, you know, you’re probably going to put this out there and there’s going to be tons of women who say, no, no, no, what about me? What about me? And I’m going to say, okay, well.
Speaker 0 | 25:25.472
That’s fine. There’s still 1%. It’s still 1%. I focus specifically kind of like in the mid-market space. So most of the companies that I work with are like 200 end users, upwards of like 5,000 end users.
Speaker 1 | 25:40.864
As do I.
Speaker 0 | 25:41.685
Okay. And quite often, here’s the other crazy, crazy factor. It’s usually like one… one IT director to a hundred end users. So if you have like 500 end users, there’s like a team of like, like four to five people supporting them. And to me, that’s absolutely insane because I’ve never, because a, so much runs off of technology these days, so much runs off of like the network. There’s just so many things that that team has to take care of. How is it realistic or how is it realistic to ask one or five people to handle and support that many people, especially when technology requires so much training and understanding from a huge mixed bag of end users these days. I think it’s crazy. And in that particular situation, I think, you know, if we’re going to, you know, stereotype and pigeonhole women into the, hey, women can talk and women can put together a presentation and be the cheerleaders and get excited, you know, these are some of the reasons why you said when we talked before, like why women should get up. excited about technology, you know, if they’re the opposite of kind of the type engineering type IT guy who’s, you know, gruff and doesn’t talk to people or when he does, he’s, you know, pisses people off and whatever it is. If that’s the reason why women should get excited, then in the mid-market space, you could do a lot of damage in a good way because, you know, end users and people in the company that are trying to do something with technology are going to be very happy to talk to you.
Speaker 1 | 27:15.127
It would make sense. it’s just um it’s just part of our culture part of our society even when you look at television and you look at jobs that people have and you know like the it crowd they they got some woman you know who took over who knew nothing about technology with these you know guys you rarely if ever see anybody on even in the mainstream culture of movies or television you never see them and it’s just you know it’s it’s a It’s a cliche, I guess, because it’s true or, you know, it’s a stereotype because it’s true. It’s still true. As far as organizations, you know, there was before 2008, before the market crashed and technology, you know, post the technology boom and previous to the market crash around 2008, you had a lot of large IT teams. And you’re… numbers, you know, your support numbers where you had IT support person versus end users was very thin. You know, it was, you know, one person for every 50 or one person. But after that market crash and companies skidded out and thinned out their teams, and then they realized, you know, we have 600 people and we have three IT support people and it’s working. That’s the unfortunate side effect of it is that. You know, we as IT professionals, we busted our hump to make the wheels still turn on the bus to keep the environment up. We work longer hours. We still work long hours. And we made this happen. And we transitioned all of our support from, you know, certain people get some support and others get white glove support. Everyone was getting white glove support and screwed ourselves. We literally screwed ourselves by doing that. And, you know, there’s. There’s nothing sexy about, like I said, there’s no glory in the job. There’s nothing sexy about the role. And you just have to be okay with that, which I have always been okay with that because I like that. I don’t, I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. Just, you know, whatever.
Speaker 0 | 29:27.684
Well, so what can you do to have a life then and be in IT at the same time? Are you telling me you don’t know that answer?
Speaker 1 | 29:33.447
I do know the answer. I have learned through Buddhism not to, you know, not to sleep with my. phone beside my ear 24-7. I’ve learned to delegate more than I’ve ever delegated in the past. I think my delegating, you know, I had a VP of IT Ops at Fairportal. who, Glenn, who just kept saying, you got to delegate. Why are you doing this? You got to delegate this. You got to delegate this. I learned more about delegation from him than probably anybody in my career. And I just had to learn how to take a step back. And I kind of pushed that down to all of my managers to delegate that and to not take them on so much because as managers, as directors, as VPs, we have grown up in a culture of… I don’t know if you ever saw that Saturday Night Live episode where I think it was Jimmy Fallon was the IT guy.
Speaker 0 | 30:32.731
Of course.
Speaker 1 | 30:33.912
Right. And he would sit down and try to tell somebody how to do it, and they would not do it. So he would just say move and he would bring them over and do it. We are all part of that in IT. We have that. We, especially managers and directors, instead of delegating and teaching, having that teachable moment, we have a tendency to say move. And so. One of the things that I’ve learned over the last 10 years is I can’t do that. I have to teach my team how to do it with lunch and learn sessions and to sit down and say, here, let me show you something. I do that all the time with Office 365 or with VMware or with AWS. Here, let me show you how. Let me show you what I’m doing as I’m doing it. So you’ll learn it for the next time. I’ll do a little desk side. You know,
Speaker 0 | 31:17.122
lunch and learn is vastly underused. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 31:18.923
yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 31:20.684
More lunch and learns. Exactly.
Speaker 1 | 31:24.266
It doesn’t help that I have all this knowledge in my head and they have none of it. The best mentor and the best managers, the best directors are the teams that teach their teams more than they know. You want a team to know more than you do. And so as much as you can dump out to them, you should do it so that they can grow. Because in IT, it’s all about learning. You know, we’re nerds. We want to learn. That’s it. And so the more you can teach them and the more they learn, sure, they’re going to leave eventually. You know, that’s just par for the course. But, you know, you get a new, young, eager person in, and they learn and grow and grow. That’s what you want. You want your team to know more than you do, and you want to give them as much knowledge as you possibly can. You want to give them as much training as you can. You want them to grow and learn and make you look good.
Speaker 0 | 32:10.340
Sure. Any final advice, secret weapons, tactics, anything for anyone out there listening that they can take away from this and use and or get excited about?
Speaker 1 | 32:23.045
You know, speaking to most of the women out there who are struggling to break that glass ceiling, who can’t get the job because they are a woman. And just to be fair, about 60 percent of it is because you’re a woman. I wouldn’t give up. And there, you know, I was just recently in the job market looking and I ran into the same sexism and the same sideways look that I’ve. left jobs, I’d come and gone in technology. But I’ve got a good reputation. And as being a chaos wrangler and to make things happen, and don’t squash your personality, don’t shut yourself down, smile and be as happy as you want to be. And don’t let a man tell you that you’re not serious about your job because you refuse to, you know, sit in the data center in the back, surrounded in books and be the sweaty guy in the basement. You don’t need to be that way. At the same time, you don’t always have to smile and be happy and jolly. And the first guy that tells you to smile at work one day when you’re having a bad day, pick up the first heavy thing you can, give him a good pop in the chops, and go on about your business. Your job is not to make, smile, and be cute and be happy. Your job is to do your job. So don’t let a man tell you that.
Speaker 0 | 33:44.865
Diane, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was a pleasure. Please send me… uh please send me uh your other friend colleague’s name as well um so i i can tag her and maybe ask her first before i do that okay um thank you so much and um have a wonderful day you too
