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129. Identify Vendor Flags Using These Simple Questions with George Bica · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: So in 91, the regime collapsed and I got a chance to look at my. At the first computers back then probably 286 is my guess. It was black and white. I played chess on it and then I fell in love. So that was it. Was it good enough?
• 0:17
  Speaker B: Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it, was it hard enough that you couldn't beat the computer? All. Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds today. Talking with George Bika. Did I pronounce that correctly?
• 0:41
  Speaker A: Close it up.
• 0:42
  Speaker B: All right, well you pronounce it so we get it right, because I can't do, you know.
• 0:47
  Speaker A: Pizza? It sounds like pizza, but with a B.
• 0:50
  Speaker B: Pizza. George Pizza, Director of Information Technology. And you are currently. Are you in Raleigh? It's nice down there. I've got snow up here. Yeah, yeah. So why don't you just give me. And just for everyone knowing if I sound a little bit, I don't know, hoarse or weird. This is officially Phil Howard's first podcast under the influence of COVID 19. I tested positive two days ago and all of my kids, every single person in my family tested positive except for my one 11 year old who had recently just gotten her tonsils out. So I don't know if that affects Covid. Maybe getting your tonsils out helps you not get Covid, but I'm about two days into this thing and it's some ups and downs. I'm not too out of it. I think I sound all right. We can still do this podcast, right? It makes it more. Yeah.
• 1:52
  Speaker A: I hope everybody is gonna be okay and you get all the mild symptoms and nothing else.
• 1:58
  Speaker B: Yes, yes, God willing. So they're almost all, they're almost all cured already. I'm the last one that's, that's following through on this. So give me. Let's start off with, with your day job and what you're doing right now, you're in, you know, some sort of electrical manufacturing which is pretty simple, you know, what's. What are we doing on it? What are we doing on a daily basis? That was me being sarcastic by the way. Electrical in case anyone.
• 2:28
  Speaker A: Different. I deal with vendors, I deal with large scale projects and day to day problems that users have. I have a large staff of it's but most of them are actually outside the United States, mostly in China. But I also have staff in Vietnam and as well as us so I make sure that they work. Right now, for example, it's performance review time. So I gotta prep and get ready for 2022 performance reviews and how much money we're all gonna get out of this, if any, if any.
• 3:07
  Speaker B: Is there. What's the language gap? Is there any language gap? Working with a staff? And I mean, obviously we know there's a time difference, but is there a language gap with China and Vietnam and how does that work?
• 3:19
  Speaker A: It is somewhat of a language gap, but it's definitely overcome. They speak English. Most staff are pretty decent at speaking English. I try to be very simple when I communicate with them. So that's very important. Keep it simple, use simple words even though we're talking technical. They are brilliant guys. But I don't think the English language barrier is not a big deal.
• 3:49
  Speaker B: And it. And I'm assuming obviously China and Vietnam because of manufacturing. And I'm assuming there's a lot of manufacturing going on over there.
• 3:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, most of the manufacturing is happening there and the headquarters is actually located here in Raleigh, North Carolina.
• 4:05
  Speaker B: And how about the Great Wall of China? Is there a firewall? Any firewall issues? How do you get around that?
• 4:11
  Speaker A: Yes, the Great Firewall of China.
• 4:15
  Speaker B: It's the first thing that we think about.
• 4:16
  Speaker A: We talk about healing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been dealing with that on and off ever since the company started and started manufacturing in China. We have somewhat overcome it by a variety of methods. The primary one is that now China telecom providers, China Telecom and China Unicom are the two bigger providers of China Internet services. They allow what they are called Internet fast lane Internet lines. So what they do is they have less checks and they go through less filtering than normal Internet. It's a little slower speeds than what you would get if you got like a vanilla Internet access for a business in China. But it actually has better performance for international.
• 5:11
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 5:12
  Speaker A: And then the second layer that we use is we use VPN side to side VPNs to connect to our cloud hosting, public cloud hosting in Japan and anywhere outside China. So that helps. By using those two layers, we kind of bypass most of the restrictions of the Grace firewall.
• 5:36
  Speaker B: The I have a few customers with manufacturing in China that have helped in the past get around the Chinese firewall. I don't know if you've heard of Cato Networks. It's kind of like a global SD WAN provider on their own network. So we've got basically colocation in mainland China and then we basically go from there to Hong Kong and then we actually use the Cato network, which is like a multi gig global network, kind of like a private MPLS backbone. So we use that as the kind of SD WAN option for traversing back to United States, India, India, uk, you know, all over the place. And that was one thing. Yeah, that was, that was one thing because what was happening was a lot of these manufacturers, you know, China would Congress or whatever it was, would go into like, you know, do something and they would shut down like the international like, you know, VPNs or firewalls or something and they would lose all their connection to the warehouse, to the manufacturing warehouses, whatever we call it over there. So we had to find a way around it that way. But yeah, China Telecom helpful, 49% ownership, whatever. However you have ownership in China, you can only have 49%. So. Cool. How many employees? I guess employees. Not the. We don't want to say headcount. We don't want to say employees. How big is your team?
• 7:00
  Speaker A: I've got six people reporting to me and, and then we are about 500 employees total as a company.
• 7:08
  Speaker B: So that's good. That's a, that's about the. You're a little bit over the ratio. I always, whenever I've talked with, looked at mid market, I'd call it mid market manufacturing. That would be anywhere from 200 employees maybe to 10,000. The ratio of, of IT leadership to end users is usually like 1 to 100. So you're a little bit over that ratio if you've got seven people and about 500. So that's doing well. You must be doing something well with the budget there. And imagine the budget, you must be good at asking for money. I had an interesting note from you when you took my quiz on the website that you kind of got into this industry by fault, like you were gonna become a dentist. That's like me. I was gonna become a doctor, but that just never happened. I think I realized how hard it was and that my, my passion for being a doctor, you really have to be passionate for that. And that just wasn't there. So, so what happened there? What, you were gonna become a dentist and then now you're. Now you're in IT manufacturing?
• 8:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. So this goes back to my early high school days. I'm Gen X and born like late 70s. And when I went to high school, I came across my first computer and I was born outside of the United States. As you probably would have guessed, I have an accent. So I was born in Albania, which is in Southeast Europe and we were under the Iron Curtain, similar to North Korea.
• 8:58
  Speaker B: Do you speak Russian there? Is that what we speak? Is that we speak Russian there?
• 9:04
  Speaker A: No. Albania is a distinct, unique Indo European language. We have our own very unique to Indo European languages. Actually it's one of the four unique languages that are spoken in Europe. One other one is being Greek. I think Armenian is another one. I forget which last one is spoken less unique to the region. But so yes, my father spoke Greek and he also spoke Russian. He had to learn Russian in school because we had a lot of dealings with Russians. But Albania speaks pure Albanian. It's a very unique language. But back to my computer. In 91 the regime collapsed and I got a chance to look at my. At the first computers back then, probably 286 is my guess. It was black and white. I played chess on it and then I fell in love. So that was it. Was it good enough?
• 10:05
  Speaker B: Was it impossible to beat the chess? Was it, was it hard enough that you couldn't beat the computer?
• 10:10
  Speaker A: I was never a good chess player, but I enjoyed the game. I think, I think I lost, but I don't remember.
• 10:17
  Speaker B: If you put the computer on the hardest level, it's like almost impossible to win. It's just, it's ridiculous even on medium level. Wait, so were you. So you got a 286?
• 10:28
  Speaker A: No, I just. It was somebody else that had that computer and. And then two years later, my parents were lucky to come to the United States as visitor to visit some family. And from there they brought a compact 486 back at my request. And I was the lucky owner of a compact 486 for a couple years. And that furthered my interest in computers.
• 10:57
  Speaker B: How many people like, did you live in the country? Did you live in the city? Was it like sub, like, what was it like where you lived? How was it like?
• 11:08
  Speaker A: Crowded. I lived in a city. Yes.
• 11:12
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 11:12
  Speaker A: I live in the city population.
• 11:14
  Speaker B: I'm just, I'm going somewhere there. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this. So back then your parents bring back a compact 46?
• 11:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:23
  Speaker B: How many people lived in your. Was it like thousands? Like what was the population where you lived?
• 11:29
  Speaker A: No, I mean it was 60,000, so.
• 11:34
  Speaker B: 60,000. Size of the 60,000, how many people had a, had a computer?
• 11:42
  Speaker A: Oh, I probably say in the whole country there were probably less than 10 computers.
• 11:48
  Speaker B: That's wild. That's absolutely amazing. And how old are you? And you're the, you were the, how old were you when you got this computer?
• 11:56
  Speaker A: I was, I'm gonna say 14, maybe 15 at the time.
• 12:01
  Speaker B: So you're a 15 year old with one of the, one of the 10 computers out of maybe 60,000 people?
• 12:09
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 12:10
  Speaker B: That must have made you pretty popular.
• 12:13
  Speaker A: Well, not really.
• 12:16
  Speaker B: See, why was it not cool? It was still not cool. Are you telling me it was still not cool to be a nerd back then? It was still not cool. See, that's the thing. No one cared. I was talking with my sister yesterday. She said, remember punch cards? She was like, oh. I was like, why do I have to do this stupid punch card program? They made My sister, who is older than us, she was born in like the 60s, right? They used to make her do punch cards in high school. And she's like, this is the dumbest thing ever. Why are they making us do that? And then now we have computers. So there was a big difference back then. It was kind of like one of those things. But here you are, one of the very few people with a computer. What was that like? Was it like, powerful for you back then? Was it like, did you show it to people like, hey, check this out. Or I just want to go back in time and know what that was like.
• 13:11
  Speaker A: It was exciting. There was a small group of people that did have interactions with the computers, but everybody else was ambivalent to them. They didn't really care. They didn't understand the power of the computers. When I got it, it was running like DOS 6, I think maybe 6.2.2, if I recall correctly. And then I upgraded it to Windows 95. I was playing like the basic games that were built in there, you know, Gorilla Lemmings, if I recall correctly, and a bunch of other games.
• 13:48
  Speaker B: Lemmings was awesome. People don't know, but Lemmings was like. That was like high end graphics back then if you had Lemmings.
• 13:55
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, it was.
• 13:56
  Speaker B: It was cool. And you had to Upgrade to Windows 95. Meaning. Meaning I don't. Most people don't understand. Like, it was like not a command prompt. Like it was Windows.
• 14:08
  Speaker A: Yes, Well, I was lucky to actually interact with another computer. I worked as an IT consultant. This is my first gig. I worked as an IT consultant for a jeweler. He's a very famous jeweler right now. Makes one of the best custom jewelers, I think, in Europe. But at the time he just started out and he was all into tech and he still is. And he actually had a computer and needed help with running his. I believe it was some kind of 3D engraving capability that drove.
• 14:41
  Speaker B: See, this is a beautiful example. This is a beautiful example of how technology is a business force multiplier. He was one of the very, very few jewelers. Well, one of the very Few business owners forget the fact that he was a jeweler that had a computer and used it. And now he's like one of the best jewelers in the world, you're saying.
• 15:02
  Speaker A: That's right. That's right. I mean, he designs beautiful custom jewelry even to this day. But I remember back then he needed help with running the computer because he still didn't understand this. Like, he understood that the technology was the future, but he didn't have the expertise. So he brought me in. He was a friend of my dad, and I helped him out with setting up the computer, running the tool, and he was creating wax mold out of this 3D engraver, all custom made and handmade by him.
• 15:34
  Speaker B: So you're consulting back in computers before it even happened. So at what point were you like, you know, forget dentistry? At this point where you, like, forget dentistry?
• 15:46
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I already gave up on that point. I was thinking I was going to go into dentistry before I even touched. The moment I touched, I completely forgot about dentistry. It was not my thing to do, although I would have been a good dentist.
• 16:04
  Speaker B: What. So what happened? So how'd you end up over. So how'd you end up over here? How do you end up over as IT leader in America? Maybe. Maybe the short story. Just give me the exciting parts.
• 16:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. I came into the United states as an F1 student. My father was kind enough to sponsor me for the first year of my college. And then I had to kind of piece together the rest of the years, but that's a long story. And so in 1996, I came to the United States. I landed in Michigan to a small college there. And then I know you're going to ask me about my wife and how I met her. And what caught me all.
• 16:51
  Speaker B: Okay, yeah, yeah, let's get to the. Let's get to the important stuff. So, yeah, so anyways, yeah. How did you meet your wife?
• 16:57
  Speaker A: So, yeah, so I came to the United States in 1996, and I needed an email address at that time, and I went to the college library and I signed up for a hotmail. Hotmail at the time just had just launched, or it was very fresh and you could look up anybody in the directory because there was no spam.
• 17:16
  Speaker B: That's crazy.
• 17:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. And then I believe a couple months later, my. I checked my inbox and sure enough, I get an email from a friend of mine from Albania that said, hey, I don't know if this is George, but if you are, you know, I'm so and so. And we are here in Philly. And if you are really George, you know, get in touch with us, this is our phone number, you know, and call us. So sure enough, I'm like, yeah, that's her. So I call them and sure enough, those two friends were in Philly. I got in touch with them, I spoke for a long time back and forth and then I went to visit them for Christmas and one thing led to another and I married one of the girls.
• 18:05
  Speaker B: So we're gonna bring back the directory for Hotmail. Imagine.
• 18:10
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 18:11
  Speaker B: People ruined it. Everyone ruined it. We used to just be able to.
• 18:14
  Speaker A: Use it like a phone.
• 18:15
  Speaker B: It was like a phone book. It was like a phone book, you know, you could just look anyone up. That's wild. I do not remember that at all. But that's crazy that, that, that used to be a feature. I really don't remember that. Which is.
• 18:29
  Speaker A: I still have, I still have my old email address from Hotmail as an alias now because it's no longer available, but it's an alias to my outlook.com email address still. So if you do still know my old email address, you can reach out to me still. And which happened. My old college buddy from that college actually reached out to me after like 20 years. Really? And he said, I don't know, George, if this email is still good. And sure enough, he lives in Ohio, he's a policeman right now. And we got in touch and I was like, wow, blast from the past. I can't believe it. You kept my email address. So Hotmail twice for keeping in touch. Forget Facebook.
• 19:16
  Speaker B: So yeah, good. We're on a heavily weighted Microsoft platform anyways, considering that this is going to be released on LinkedIn. So yes. So everything. Microsoft. Microsoft for the win everywhere. Which begs the question, I'm assuming, are you guys on Microsoft? Are you on teams?
• 19:42
  Speaker A: We are Microsoft. We are on Teams, yes. Office 365, or I should say Microsoft 365 now is a big platform, big collaboration tool for us. We are all cloud based. Most of our services are all cloud. I think the only thing that we run are some in house tools for engineering and erp. Everything else is cloud.
• 20:05
  Speaker B: Remember when cloud was the enemy? It wasn't too long ago, like two years ago. Like the cloud. Like no, remember that.
• 20:11
  Speaker A: I think people abused the cloud. They saw the potential but they didn't realize the cost.
• 20:17
  Speaker B: It was like insecure. People were worried we're going to lose everything.
• 20:23
  Speaker A: It does take a little bit of a faith to give everything you have to somebody else and hope that they are doing backups, following correct processes.
• 20:32
  Speaker B: Well, I don't think hope shouldn't be a. I don't think hope should ever be a strategy. What do you think?
• 20:40
  Speaker A: No, definitely not.
• 20:45
  Speaker B: I mean, let's. I'm just, you know, I'm gonna hope my way that this doesn't happen. So what do you do in that situation? What kind of. I'm just out of curiosity. Any, any best practices that you have as IT director, IT manager, leader? It. I always say IT Director because it's just a common thing that I think.
• 21:04
  Speaker A: When I've been in this business for now, for a long time, and there is certainly some flags and some questions that you can ask a vendor regarding their security and operational best practices.
• 21:22
  Speaker B: Vendor flags, you can.
• 21:25
  Speaker A: The biggest indicator is certifications when it comes to compliance, whether it's some kind of SOC or some other compliance that they can provide to you. That means that somebody has audited them, make sure that they're doing their correct disaster recovery, they're following procedures for backups and all that. Correct. You know, they're taking care of security, they're using encryption.
• 21:54
  Speaker B: What's the biggest red flag? What's the biggest red flag you ever ran into on a vendor? What was the biggest, like, cover up? What was the biggest cover up?
• 22:04
  Speaker A: The biggest cover up? I'll have to look into this. Usually, I mean, I.
• 22:09
  Speaker B: Here's what I find. Usually the red flag is covered up with a strength. This is our strength. That's. That's what I found. And really, that's just them like, selling around like a hole in their system. Like, like I remember some guy saying, we're not voiceover. We're not voiceover Internet protocol. No, that's not us. We're VoiceOver PI. We're VoiceOver Private Internet. We're like, what, like, what are you talking about? And really what they meant was, is you have to buy an MPLS circuit and have a point to point back to our data center in order for this stuff to work, if that makes sense. So they turned it into a strength. No, no, no. We're not voiceover Internet protocol. We're voiceover private Internet and much more expensive. That's why. So questions to ask. Red flags. So, yeah, SOC1 to HIPAA compliance. Some sort of essay, some sort of.
• 23:01
  Speaker A: Government, I think like this.
• 23:03
  Speaker B: Okay, okay, okay.
• 23:05
  Speaker A: If they follow any, any, any, you know, like government compliance audits, what are their security best practices, Disaster recovery, how frequent they do it. If they don't follow, if they don't have any certification, doesn't mean that they are actually bad, but you could ask them a questionnaire. We fairly often used to get questionnaires when I used to work at a company that did provide Internet services. And we didn't really have compliance per se in a lot of the services, but we had that covered with robust backup and disaster recovery testing and all that other stuff.
• 23:48
  Speaker B: Gotcha.
• 23:48
  Speaker A: I think it's, it's a degree of, you know, if a customer wants to test you, make sure that if you claim something, you better be able to back that up. If you say that you've got disaster recovery and the customer says, well, show me your disaster recovery that you did from six months ago or the last one you did, you better have some documentation you did that work.
• 24:10
  Speaker B: Life balance. As an IT director, we have people that work like crazy and work all hours of the night and there's. How do you, how do you manage that considering there's really no end in mind when it comes to technology? Or have you gotten to the point where it is automated and you feel like you're like just steering the ship, so to speak?
• 24:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a, that's a tough one. It's a personal choice. And you as a person have a responsibility to live first and then work to be able to provide for that living. This is my philosophy in life. So my thinking is my baseline is 40 hours. If I can do 35 hours for the week, that's great. But baseline is 40 hours. I'll do extra hours on a one off, but I won't commit to 60 or 80 hours every single week. So for example, you mentioned that there's a time gap between me and my team in Asia. So how do I communicate with them? Well, I have one on one meetings with them every week. I dedicate about 20 minutes for each person and we speak every Monday night for me, which is Tuesday morning for them. And then I have, on Thursday I have a group scrum that's about, I'll say 40 minutes long that we talk about all our projects and all that. Again, that's on Thursday.
• 25:42
  Speaker B: That's on Thursday.
• 25:44
  Speaker A: Okay, yeah. Thursday night for myself, it's Friday morning for them. So how does that. Those hours that I have to spend, it's about an hour and a half that I spend on Monday and about an hour that I spent on Thursday. How does that get in on my work schedule? Well, I leave a little early on Monday and I leave a little early on Thursday. That's the end of it. I mean, I don't have to Commit eight hours in the office and then do an extra hour and a half on top of that on Monday. So I have to find that balance. And this is my philosophy. If you are working consistently 60 hours or more, that means you are, you need somebody else, you need to hire somebody else because you're not really. It's a disservice to yourself and really, you're gonna end up burning out. Unfortunately, in IT burnouts are fairly common if you don't really follow that good life work balance. I've never been able to say that, you know, I've been burned out by a job. I've been to jobs that are fairly intensive and I worked. But the most part you need to find a job. You need to speak to your supervisor, your manager or somebody else and explain the situation, that this is not sustainable. 40 hours I think is very reasonable to work and no more unless absolutely necessary. And this includes on call, by the way. If you are working on call, there should be some kind of compensation, either monetary or some other compensation time wise. If you're doing on call service, nothing is free.
• 27:33
  Speaker B: What? No. But I never turned down a free lunch.
• 27:39
  Speaker A: Yeah. From a vendor.
• 27:42
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 27:43
  Speaker A: You don't have to unless it's a violation of some kind of law or policy.
• 27:48
  Speaker B: I never turn down burritos. For anyone out there listening, what is.
• 28:00
  Speaker A: It's.
• 28:00
  Speaker B: There's a difficult kind of weird conundrum for IT leadership, meaning only in the last two decades has it become a real job. Two decades? Maybe more than that. Maybe three decades. We'll give it 30 years. Really? 20 years. In the last 10 years it's really gotten crazy. Amazon blows me away. I'm just shocked When I look at. It's a gui, right? It's an interface. It's just amazing to me how people and things have grown with technology. It's quite amazing to me. So with that, it's like a whole new frontier of, you know, I don't know, you know, what to do or like, what's, what's the end game? You know, I think doctors had an end game. Retirement of some sort. Lawyers had an end game. Right. What's the IT leaders end game? Is it the same now? Is it just like. I don't think it's going to be that. I don't, I think 10 years from now when people can't work anymore or don't want to work or whatever, do IT leaders. And people have an end game in mind. Do they have a clear route to the future or is it. I'm Just showing up to work every day?
• 29:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a loaded question. Because it has a lot of nuances to it. So first of all, you're absolutely right. Ten or 20 years ago, the IT landscape was much more simple. You could have people that knew a bunch of technologies and they were comfortable with running a whole IT department. Nowadays, you are more likely to be siloed into a specific role, especially if you're in a larger organization. You're going to be only dealing with storage, or you're only going to do security. You're only going to do virtualization for desktops. You can narrow that down and then you compartmentalize these departments so much that it becomes like a turf where, where is my job that ends and who else is going to do the rest of the job? So if you want a project done in it, then you are going to have to involve and direct all these people from different IT departments to kind of work together and complete the project. That's the complexity of, of an IT manager when it comes to IT staff themselves and what's their end goal? I think the outlook in life should be such that you really need to think about your skill set down the line. If you are a young person now and you're doing help desk or some basic level, is that what you really want to do when you are about to retire? How expendable are you compared to a hungry young man that is willing to do your job for like a lot less than you? So your only option is to grow your skill set, become better, and become somebody with better skill set than just doing help desk, you know, late in your life, before retirement. Firstly, it's not going to provide you that retirement goal that you want. And second, you're gonna find yourself out of a job very quickly and it's gonna be tough to find that job if you, if you don't have the skill set at that age. So my advice is develop those skill set while you're young. Make yourself learn the back end, whether it's servers and networking, security, and then, you know, figure out what's your end goal based on that Your, your only.
• 31:55
  Speaker B: Option is to relentlessly grow.
• 31:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, unfortunately, as somebody has said, technology changes every couple of years, which is still true, although I would say less so now. Maybe, maybe every three years technology changes, but it still changes radically. So you still have to keep up with endless changes, constant changes all the time. Nothing is static in this world. I look back at technology, even three years ago, it was so different than today. You got to keep up with everything. Always learn. Otherwise you're going to fall behind and you're going to be discarded. Employees or employers are ruthless in that regard.
• 32:40
  Speaker B: Nothing is static.
• 32:41
  Speaker A: If you're overpaid and under qualified.
• 32:45
  Speaker B: Nothing is static. Even your IP addresses, they're not.
• 32:48
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 32:50
  Speaker B: There should be some coin that quote or something. There's got to be some quote there. It's not right because we're going like. They're just not. They're going to disappear. There's going to be no more static IP addresses. IPv4 and IPv6.
• 33:01
  Speaker A: Exactly. People are not learning IPv6 now. They are going to be obsolete at some point.
• 33:07
  Speaker B: Nothing is static. Even your 29. I like that. I feel like we should coin that. I wonder if that's ever been done. I wonder if that's ever even been said before. I like that a lot. The manufacturing. I never even thought about this, but I would think how's the supply chain and how's the supply chain affecting. You didn't sound too excited.
• 33:33
  Speaker A: We're suffering, I could say. I mean we, we are embedded in the, in the manufacturing supply chain. We don't actually produce anything per se, but we are part of a larger electronic manufacturing flow. So any chip shortage, any Covid situation impacts our production lines and our bottom lines directly. It has been difficult couple of years. Most of the time the factories tend to close down for a week or two if there is a COVID infection. Plus the chip shortage has slowed down manufacturing of the products for our vendors. I'm sorry for our clients. So it has impacted our bottom line for sure. I used to have a larger team actually and I've had to let go of some of my team members even though it was tough. But unfortunately it was required because we shrank down as a business. And I'm hoping that 2022 is gonna change things around. The semiconductor industry just announced like a crazy. I think it was 500 billion dollar profit this year even though there's a chip shortage. So I'm assuming 2022 is gonna turn this around and it's just gonna be up from here.
• 34:58
  Speaker B: Do you think that profit was because. Is that profit just due to supply and demand? Like just people could charge more money like I want to go buy probably.
• 35:07
  Speaker A: So I mean you look at, you know, you look at the car industry, for example.
• 35:11
  Speaker B: I was, you just, you reread my mind because I'm going to, I was like, I'm gonna buy. You know, I just want a new, I don't know, diesel Chevy? Heck no. It's 120,000 for a car to buy.
• 35:23
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So right now, the price of a car from 2019 to 2022, it has jumped up by $10,000. This is the average car price.
• 35:34
  Speaker B: It's crazy.
• 35:35
  Speaker A: $35,000 or 30 some thousand dollars in 2019. It is now $43,000 in 2022. And this is a new car average.
• 35:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 35:47
  Speaker A: And if you go anywhere, if you go to any dealer, you're lucky to find five cars in the whole lot. When I went there, I was shocked. I thought they were remodeling and they had moved the car somewhere and they said, no, no, no, this is all we got. And if you don't buy this right now, in two hours, I'm gonna sell this to somebody else.
• 36:07
  Speaker B: It's like the sales guy's easiest job ever. Yeah, okay.
• 36:11
  Speaker A: Right now. Right now. But I don't know, in next year. I think you look at the parking lot fields somewhere in Texas or Michigan where all these cars are parked, they are waiting for chips to be put in. And they're going to be sitting there for a couple years with no chips. And then once they put the chips in, they're going to flood the market. So we're going to have, in my opinion, a flood of new cars. And the prices of new cars are going to come down significantly from this competition. But it's going to be look bad for, for the sales people at that time. I don't know.
• 36:45
  Speaker B: I mean, the sales people never have it bad. Like they do well in a down market, they do well in an up market. So they'll just sell more. They'll just go for quantity. They'll just go for quantity at that point.
• 36:56
  Speaker A: Who is gonna buy these cars that have been sitting in the parking lot for two, three years though?
• 37:00
  Speaker B: I don't know if I got a good deal. You better give me a good deal.
• 37:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
• 37:08
  Speaker B: We need to do is get. Pull the chips out of the car. Can't we just go back to making cars simple? You know, I've never been more disappointed by this.
• 37:15
  Speaker A: There was a discussion, you know, like, let's do cars that are back with the carburetor and no few, you know, electronics.
• 37:21
  Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it.
• 37:23
  Speaker A: I'm like, you know, is it cold? The car won't start.
• 37:27
  Speaker B: We're not driving anywhere anyways.
• 37:29
  Speaker A: The car won't start. The carburetor has all kinds of other problems. You know, computers are really good at making cars fuel efficient and keeping up with the Standards, definitely.
• 37:42
  Speaker B: Well, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. If you had any one piece of advice, major piece of advice to people out there listening. As a person who somehow convinced his parents to bring a 486 back on the plane. I'm assuming it was on the plane, back on the plane to Albania, all the way back and then to come all the way to America, find your wife via Hotmail, which is really cool and been through quite a bit of growth and I would say minor tribulations. What is your piece of advice to people out there listening.
• 38:25
  Speaker A: For the IT managers that are looking to get their budgets field I say and this, I don't know exactly what the exact US expression is, but my expression is if you want a bunny, ask for the donkey.
• 38:46
  Speaker B: I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's funny. Okay, so you're saying just ask for.
• 38:52
  Speaker A: More than what you really need so you can fill in your budget for the, for the regular hands on folks. You know, keep your work life balance with your family in mind. That's the most important thing in life. And it's not the job. Job should only be there to support you for your life events. So be there for the family. Time flies by really fast.
• 39:17
  Speaker B: It's easy to let stress. Yeah, man.
• 39:19
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 39:20
  Speaker B: It's easy to let stress and the. A sense of. And when I say sense, it's merely a sense urgency and impending events and all kinds of crap going on in your life. It's easy to get wrapped up in a sense of, oh, I'm just so overwhelmed. Right. But I think what. And I've just found this from my own periods in life where I just said I don't give a crap and I'm just gonna ignore everything. What I found is that when I did that, not much changed. I still did okay. In fact, I did better. In fact, I did better.
• 39:59
  Speaker A: You know, you've got your, you come back from vacation and you've got an inbox full of emails. You can just select all and delete the people really care to follow up with you, they're gonna email you back.
• 40:11
  Speaker B: It's true. Ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore. Don't watch the news. Don't, don't listen to the news. I threw the TV away years ago. I think it was in the four hour work week or something. One of those Tim Ferriss books I read, he's like, don't worry. He has all these different step out of your comfort zone little exercises when you read the book. One is, I think he Said just lay down in the street and play dead in the middle of New York. And you just have to sit there for a minute and play dead to get out of your comfort zone. Just the feeling of people staring at you and like, what the heck is this guy doing? You know? And another one was no news, like, for a week. Don't worry. Basically he said. Basically he said, like, don't worry, like, if something important happens, like, you'll hear about it. Did you hear about that?
• 41:01
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 41:02
  Speaker B: And anyways, it's true.
• 41:05
  Speaker A: So my philosophy is the less social media, the better. The only thing I have in terms of social media is LinkedIn and Reddit. That's it. I have no Twitter, I have no Facebook, I have no WhatsApp. I have no TikTok or anything else. That's it. LinkedIn and Reddit, these are the only two.
• 41:28
  Speaker B: TikTok. I wouldn't even know what to do with TikTok. That just. It's just weird to me. I wouldn't even want it.
• 41:33
  Speaker A: Can you believe that that is the number one most heavily used website in the world? It surpassed Google for a while. It is ridiculous.
• 41:44
  Speaker B: Help us.
• 41:45
  Speaker A: I don't even know. It's so bad. I want to block it for all my kids.
• 41:55
  Speaker B: And this is why. And people are going to. People are going to bash me for this. But this is why democracy is doomed to fail, because it is a replacement. It is a government by the people, for the people, of the people. And if the majority of the people are on TikTok, we're screwed.
• 42:13
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was lucky to be born in a country that was completely totalitarian. And I've lived in the greatest democracy of them all. And I can say there's pros and cons to both. Somewhere in the middle is the good part. I just don't know where that is.
• 42:32
  Speaker B: Somewhere between totalitarian control and complete and utter representative freedom of humans desires, of human desires. Somewhere in between, there is a happy medium. So it's. It's like, yes, if we just let our kids do anything and everything all the time and vote. If the kids voted on what they would have for dinner, then it'd be ice cream every night. Let's be honest. If the kids voted. If I let the kids vote, we'd all be. They'd all be like, done. They'd be stupid, unhealthy, and who knows, numerous other things. Maybe we should. Maybe should do a test on that, you know, control groups.
• 43:14
  Speaker A: In my family, Phil, in my family, I call this a benevolent dictatorship. This is what it's called.
• 43:24
  Speaker B: Love it. Writing this one down. Benevolent dictatorship. I am running that. Go ahead. I'm going to. I think I'm going to upgrade from meritocracy because I run a meritocracy to benevolent dictatorship. I like this better.
• 43:37
  Speaker A: Yeah, you basically are a dictator, but you do all the good things, you know, for your constituents. But they need to listen to you because you. You are the dictator.
• 43:49
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 43:50
  Speaker A: It should be.
• 43:50
  Speaker B: Yes. Trust me. Trust me.
• 43:53
  Speaker A: This is good for you.
• 43:54
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 43:55
  Speaker A: Yes, you'll know better.
• 43:56
  Speaker B: Yes. Hate me now, love me later. Something like that. Is that right? Yeah.
• 44:00
  Speaker A: I believe if you follow that, if you follow that, your kids will appreciate it when they're grown up and understand because right now they think that they are right. Especially if they are teenagers, they are right and we're wrong. And when they become dads and mothers, then they'll say, you know what? My parents were right.
• 44:22
  Speaker B: No, I'm one of those homeschooler people that's completely sheltered his child from all over the world and taking all their devices away and keep them held up inside a house. Not really. Not entirely. But it is amazing how adults tell me my kids are mature and can hold a normal conversation, which is cool. Thank you very much. These shows always get so great at the end. I wish we could start there. I wish we could do the show in reverse. I wish we could start with Benevolent dictatorship. That would just be great. The shows just seem to get so good towards the end.
• 44:53
  Speaker A: Well, sir, hopefully all the listeners have not got bored and missed the good part. Yeah.
• 44:58
  Speaker B: If they've made it this far, they know that dictatorship is the way to go.
• 45:03
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 45:05
  Speaker B: Have an absolute. Well, I hope the year. I hope this year turns out better for the microchip shortage. And I hope that we do get a flood of cheap cars, at least for my sake.
• 45:15
  Speaker A: Yes. And for my sake. And thank you, Phil, for hosting me at your podcast. It has been a pleasure.
• 45:22
  Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to it, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing and improving.