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355- Mental Bandwidth by Fernando Higuera · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:05
  Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of Dissecting popular IT Nerds. Today we've got Fernando Iguera joining us. Fernando, you've got a bit of experience in cloud native architecture, and then you've done some stuff with the AI. So why don't you do me a favor and introduce yourself and, and tell us a little about what brought you into or what got you excited about technology in the first place.
• 0:33
  Speaker A: Sure. No, appreciated the introduction and I'm happy to be here with, with everybody. Well, I mean, it has been a very. It has been a very joyful journey to be an it. Like, it's. It's a joy of discovering and making things go. I will say I started fiddling with things when I was in high school. The very first thing that I. That I put my hands on, it was a soldering gun. Even earlier than that. Like at junior high, I had a class dedicated for electronics. We call it mechatronics. So we created circuits, we created different varietals. I mean, we manipulated electronic boards and just, just failing with things like that. Spark, light up, sound, things like that.
• 1:26
  Speaker B: So because like my education, I never had a chance to do any of the true electronics. And, and even in all of my studies, it was more around coding or, or the visual effects versus the actual circuit boards and circuitry and, and understanding the flow of electricity and how on and off does everything right.
• 1:49
  Speaker A: Like the ones and zeros, how it starts, those ones and zeros, the logic in the certain boards, it was just fantastic. So that piqued curiosity and I started to fiddle with more things. So the next thing that I put my hands on was the EMV prepaid calling cards. So I don't know, I don't think we have them here in America anymore. I grew up in a different country, so that's how we used to call home for parents to take us up from school. So just thinking about it, it's like, all right, I gotta put money in this thing, so how can I do something about this so I don't reload it? How can I bypass the system? How can I do. How can I fiddle with this? So after a couple weeks, and I think it was. Took me a couple of months to iterate and just kind of creating a bypass on the chip, I was able, that I was able to bypass the money subtraction from the account. So I will insert my calling card and I will say that I have X number of money. I'll make a call and the money will never go out of my account. That's when my interest was boomed into like, I was able to do this, then what else can I do for that? And I start playing around with cell phones. I turn one of those Motorola start tech. And for any folks in Motorola, I had the opportunity to work at Motorola for a few months. They're phenomenal. They have great products. I fiddled with their systems, I fiddled with their cell phones. And using the start tag, through a sequence of codes, pressing the buttons and holding some buttons down, I turned a single start tag into, into a receiving tower so I could receive calls from all their cell phones, listen to those calls, disconnect the calls, do so many stuff. I mean, I'm 16 years old, 15, 16, 17. I want to just mess with people.
• 3:40
  Speaker B: I look at you and I'm making a few judgments here that you're on the younger side of where I'm at. Because I was thinking about it and I can see retirement, whether it's by a financial goal or by age. But I wonder, do you know what the term freaking means? P H R E A K. Freaking.
• 4:04
  Speaker A: No, it's personal.
• 4:05
  Speaker B: So freaking is where hacking originated from. So the, the first hackers, actually what they did was they were using the phone system and they recognized that the touch tones were how the, the system recognized whether you put money into the, the pay phone or not. And there was certain frequencies. So they learned to blow tones into the phones that would then recognize the phone, would then recognize that money's been added and they could make long distance calls. So the original hackers were called freakers. And, and they did almost the exact same thing you did, except that they did it using like a whistle that came from Captain Crunch from the serial because it blew at the specific megahertz that the phone companies used. So interesting little parallel there. And, and I wondered whether you knew that history or not.
• 5:06
  Speaker A: There you go. It's fantastic. I mean, you know, it's, it's all about curiosity, I think, for all of us that are in it. We're engineers, we're curious minds. We want to make things going, we want to understand how things work. And that's what took me from there. So that's fast forward. I did my undergrad and while I was still in my undergrad, I was freelancing. Around 2006, I started, I landed a project, a really large project to create a restful application or API or one of the car manufacturers in Latin America. And they asked me like, hey, just have a trouble with our inventory management system. You help us. And I mentioned my Hands on Java, build this restful API and off we go. Then I started working on some security authentication and notification systems for company in Argentina as well. And from there on, I mean, it was just like, this is my field. Interesting enough. While I was in high school, I landed full rice scholarship. Yeah. Berkeley or medical. Specifically in the field of neuroscience. That has been my. Kind of like my, my unicorn. I love, I love to lore how the brain process information, how we interact. What happens after you present the user or a human data. How do we process internally? I want to know the ones and zeros in our head and how those triggers and those neurons, they just communicate to each other. But I still decided to pursue engineering. It's a, it's an amazing field. It has its ups and downs. It's as stressful as any other job as well. We're humans and I think a big part of the distress comes from us humans that we just trying to push too hard and sometimes we just don't know and we're. We're afraid of the unknowns. So that took my career to the auto industry. I get to put. I get my hands on creating mobile applications. Then at that point I moved to the full enterprise world where I get.
• 7:17
  Speaker B: Let me jump in for just a second. So 2006, you're starting to do some of the stuff, the inventory management with, with an auto manufacturer. 2006, we're just on the verge of Google coming out with the Android phone. I think iPhone was already on scene, but it was still in its infancy. It was only the. The iPhone, what, two? Or was it still the. The original iPhone in 2006? So just trying to perspective.
• 7:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, iPhone two. Actually the original iPhone was 2009 and I have one of the original iPhones disappear around the moves. Also very fun to play with because at the beginning they were like, you have to break or jailbreak them so you can use the data in your computers. I had to do that for a couple times. But you can change the. I mean that was. Those were the years. But so 2012, that's when I joined the auto industry, where I get to start working on mobile applications. It wasn't just as web applications. Now we're moving into building mobile applications. The highlight of that point in my career is I get to work with the brightest minds at Hyundai. They were phenomenal people because they wanted to push the boundaries of like, hey, this is what an auto experience is today. But we want to go further. How can we go further here? And one of the things that we did Together was for the 2013 fleet. We selected and help you select Android Auto out of four Outro automobile for their infotainment system. There were key benefits for us to use it faster experience for the driver non laggy you can track things around. This was before Snapdragon was even a thing on the on the GPUs and CPUs for infotainments. But the most important part for me was like there has to be a better experience for the driver. So I was merging two concepts Engineering. How do we create this product with user experience. How do we create a great experience for the user not just from a technical perspect and the outcome of this is car care. So an ability for on the product owner to see the vehicle experience what it is to have a vehicle not knowing how to maintain for it but the vehicle itself took care of the maintenance process even the maintenance it will help you auto schedule that directly in the infotainment system and created this two steering experience. And we put on the table an augmented reality experience where you can take your phone Archer app scan your engine and they will tell you hey this is a problem right here. Like you gotta replace this air filter.
• 10:07
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• 10:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, we started to finally as consumers we finally started to get those fault codes and and the information from the ECM or the what whatever version you call it, but the engine control module, electronic computer module. There's I've heard multiple definitions of IT but for us to be able to do that we didn't have to take it into the technician and have them plug into it. And about that time we're starting to get the Bluetooth dongles that we can plug into the OBD2 port. So even if we don't have something with the infotainment system like Hyundai has now we're starting to be able to get apps, mobile apps on our devices that can start to scan and get that information. And I started, I leveraged that like crazy. I'd see that little light come on. I'd like now I want to know more besides just the fact that that little check engine light came on and there were so many times I was able to do the work myself. So you're helping make that happen back in 2012, 2013.
• 12:07
  Speaker A: So we were just laying the groundwork there. The other work that I did during that time is machine to machine communication from two vehicles talk to each other. Imagine driving down the road and another vehicle that is part of this, I would say cluster, a mobile network tells you I'm slowing down. Now it's happening with Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze. It tells you what's happening. That's what took it to the next level. And I remember the early years went to up for the thing. I was in the works with Fisker for the work we acquire. And we talk about this about like, hey, your vehicle can communicate to the other and say like hey, there's traffic down here, so slow down. Or even the sensors in the vehicle can detect like this is a rough road, so slow down. Because the pat ahead is just terrible road conditions or so slippery, whatever it is, road conditions that we can communicate without having to rely on other systems other than the machines telling us the data. And then the vehicles themselves made those decisions, helped us make some decisions. For us, it was a wild idea. We presented different clients and it was not ready. And I totally understand, we were.
• 13:17
  Speaker B: We still don't have it. We still, I mean, yeah, those sensors, we've gotten more sensors. We've got better capabilities, we've got more data flowing or the capability for more data to flow through the systems. And we still don't have these things. Because I'm involved with transportation. That's my, my day to day job. And so, you know, I remember those early times in, in the 2010s in that, that realm where we were talking about our trucks being able to talk to the other trucks and use that so that they could like daisy chain that information and get it when we were out in an area that had no cellular coverage, that potentially we could talk to another truck that was a little further up the road, pass the data to that truck, that truck would pass it to the next truck and then finally it gets to a truck that has connectivity and then it sends it through. So you know, extending that network at that time so and now that I'm.
• 14:15
  Speaker A: Looking at it and like, I mean the problems that you're talking about like now with the technology that we have, I mean we can easily do that with very simple IoT's but if we don't have that open, open call ID triangulating the position of those devices and help us to understand where they are, it's magical how we can make these things happen. Right. It's just that we're not ready there. Like we can't visualize it just yet. And that's the job of the engineers. Help visualize what the future looks like and that the future ahead of us, it's bright, it's incredible.
• 14:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, it can be. Now when we were doing our pre call you mentioned that you had run into a couple of struggles in your career and you wanted to, you wanted to bring that out as a talking point and, and so let's, let's talk about that a little bit. Tell me, tell me a little bit more of what kind of happened and led to the, the events in your life that helped change some of, of your vision of how work or the work environment and so please, I appreciate that.
• 15:24
  Speaker A: Thank you. Let me take you to 26, 2017. At this point I moved from auto industry. I moved to the telecom. Then I moved to consulting. I started early in consulting as the lead for IoT. That was my initial roles. So the IoT practice was not ready yet. So they asked me is there any other practice they would like to take on and I took extra technique. Technology services specifically on E commerce has been one of the things that I enjoy the most. So that took me on weekly trips all over the American continent, North America and South America to help one of the largest imaging and digital cameras producers to go from a. This is our idea of E commerce to now here's how it is fully orchestrated to go from or so we have the starting Japan. We're present in those different countries and make that a reality and on top of that help the business teams manage innovation faster than the traditional waterfall process that they had. I did my exit from there into a small company which started as by designers really just doing user experience and user interfaces design. My goal and my role was to build the development practice, the IT development practice. So we had zero. I was the first engineer and the first leader in the IT department there and had to grow this team. We landed a couple clients. One of them was a substantial client in Latin America and Mexico. This client is a leading. IT is the leading retailer in the country we took their digital experience, their E commerce from we are high risk concoction SAP high risk concoction and we brought them into Flutter so that way we can produce a mobile application that is iOS and Android native without having to manage two different code bases. Okay, the difference, the cultural difference there is that in some of these countries you will face the harsh reality that payments are not the same as in America. You have a name, Voice that is net 30. You're expecting to get that payment net 30. I at that point I was managing all the accounts, multiple clients in North America, growing IT deliveries in North America as well and other regions of the world, growing the team. So I had a couple meetings in Mexico schedule this client specifically, haven't paid the bills for over 90 days. We're at the bridge, rather bridge of losing our whole development team because again, this is a practice that I started in Latin America to cover people's culprits all over. So I got people that were in the bad shape. The client was terrible to work with, had to manage the relationship, had to make things work. So I'm sitting on an airplane, Mexico City airport. I couldn't get out of the plane. My ears are ringing, my hand is in a complete blank. Everybody just deep plane. The stewardess came in and said, hey sir, it's time to deplane. You remember here. That was just a blank on my mind. The stress of carrying the building of this practice and the people underneath it and just trying to make it happen. And on top of that, be an engineer and then have a personal life on the other end with all the struggles with everything that happens around life, it just took me like it put me out. I was completely out. I remember just deeply calling a doctor and I went to the doctor. Thankfully my family was in the country and I spent a couple of days just focusing on my mental health. So from imbalance of my brain's ability to receive and create the happiness hormone and I was running on pure stress.
• 19:16
  Speaker B: I'm wondering how many hours a day were you putting in at that point? And obviously you go ahead.
• 19:24
  Speaker A: I was putting over 12 hours a day. Sometimes I will put even 20 hours a day, like just the sleep on the sleep on the plane. Like it was a four hour. I was flying from Boston to Mexico City was a four and a half hours. If I could, I will sleep the flight during the flight. Sometimes I need a half. I just have to. I might just put together presentations or work on budgets or something. We have to make the business go and that's the hard reality that sometimes when you go into leadership, you have to fix it. You don't see that when you are handsome keyboard and you're, you're only focused on delivering, but when you are leading this group of people, it's a people that they trust you, that you will do what's best for them. And that was an eye opener for me. No, Mike.
• 20:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Because I mean that's, that's a great point on that because there's. So you were doing that role too. You were, you were trying to do coding when you could. You're trying to lead the team, you're trying to manage them, help them, you're trying to protect them so that they can focus and spend that time. Because developers or code writers, as they're working engineers, I'm sure too, they, they get into this mental place where they're focused and those distractions take away from their productivity. And so you're doing your best to shield them. You're also trying to do your best to get into that same spot and you're also trying to sell the products. You're trying to meet the financial burdens of developing and starting the whole thing and 20 hours a day. Oh my gosh. But no wonder you got to that point of just. Yeah. With and, And I don't know about you, I've tried to sleep on planes but. But I find myself more tired even though all I'm doing is sitting and, and you know, even when I do get some sleep, it's not restful sleep. It is. Yeah, it's closing your eyes and just kind of checking out for a while. But it's not real sleep.
• 21:30
  Speaker A: Absolutely sounds, I mean, cortisol levels where through the roof in my life, my oxytocin, I mean it was non existent up to this day. It's not, it's almost non existent because all this, it's something that once thing happens, you don't bring it. You cannot bring it back. It's unfortunate sometimes and it's case by case.
• 21:50
  Speaker B: Right.
• 21:50
  Speaker A: In my case, I need to do things different in order to help my body to regular and to make sure that I don't go back to the same spot. Because we're, we're humans, we're not meant to live off cortisol. I mean we have a balance in our system. So that struggle in my life gave me the insight that look, we're humans and the only thing that can sell or take the most is myself. If, if I'm not doing anything different to protect myself and Ensure that I'm doing my best. There's not going to be anything left over that I can use and apply to carry this team. I mean, I'm, I'm very passionate about the people that I work with. They don't, they don't work under me. I work with them. I had the privilege to work with them, to be so much to shoulder and create the solutions with them. You said it right. I tried code. I didn't have enough time. And by the time that you are like putting 20 hours to break and think about the solutions, you're just doing, staring at the screen and you can't code anymore. You're just too tired. So that brought me to the point of like, all right, I need to sit out of this pattern. We drew the business to a good position with good point. We had the relationships with SAP, we got relationships with Oracle and other big players in the industry and leverage that and just focus on the people to keep the progression. And I flip the pyramid, as I normally call it, in me, instead of working through all this. So show them how to do it and let, and let them, let the people do it. Trust that they will get it. And it's hard because you want things to move fast. And in order for them to move fast, you have to do it yourself. Not really. You have to trust the people. You have to hire people that you can trust. Give me the insights this whole op, CEO, give me the insights of how to hire people the right way, how to invest in people the right way. What am I looking for? When I'm looking for a person that's going to work with me, it's going to be someone that has the skills but doesn't have the intelligence, emotional intelligence, to take on the battles. Because I'm going to be the one taking on those battles, not the person. So I need them to be equal in that area so that way they can move the needle. For as a team, I, you know.
• 24:09
  Speaker B: I, I honestly ran into a bit of the same challenge that, that change from being the doer to allowing the next generation to do and to try to help enable and empower them to do. While I stood at the front trying to take all of the, the only way I can articulate it is take all of the bullets to sit there and to take the frustration of the consumers of what we're producing and be able to capture that, translate that, share that with the team so that the team could then find the solution or create the solution and move forward. But to get out of that Mentality of move aside, just let me fix it. And sometimes it is so hard to do that. I've met many people in my career, they can't do that, that haven't and they, they get to a ceiling and they can't pass that. They can't. And they can't go beyond that because they're, they have to have that control over it. And learning to let go of that control and then, and then finding your happiness in doing that, oh man, those are some struggles.
• 25:30
  Speaker A: Those aren't the struggles, but the Saint Embassy, that's the happy path. I mean some of us, we learn it the critical way, like we learn it the hard way that like oh man, I should have done this better. Um, thinking about the strategy, right? Like my personal strategy to maintain mental well being in a high pressure environment. It takes me in this journey of AI because again all this happened in Mondale. We grew the practice, we went through some, I went through some of the equity that I had in the company, sell it to a different company and just kind of find my way out so I can focus on the thing that I like the most in this case was AI. I kind of started doing the buzzwords AI, AI machine learning around 2017, 2018. And that's when I was already into it with a micro startup dedicated to take orders. Like think about like a small business, right, that they don't have the, the budget, the capacity of Starbucks or the big brand too, being this drive through experience. So what if we could create a drive through experience that you can call whatever it is and an AI agent takes you over there, you pay for it and you just show up, pick it up. The idea came in when I was at a coffee shop in Dallas. This person, this lady came in, she was just struggling because she had two baby carriers and had a little kid with her and she was trying to get a cup of coffee, coffee. And the struggle was real. And I'm like, there's better ways to leave this. The strategy here for maintaining mental health with well being is that when decide to discover my true passion about like what I want to do here and I want to create this new system, but it's not all myself. I can do that. I need the people, I need teams behind me to form and to do the things that sometimes I not have enough time to do it or the things that I can do it myself, they can do it with me. So one of the strategies that I empower it really is to inspire the people. Here's the thing though. When People feel inspired and doing what they do, they will find, they will dig deeper in themselves not only to go above and beyond, but they will find their true meaning of the work that they're doing and when they find that meaning. And it's an incredible thing to see. Started seeing it with a small team that I brought to build this AI company so we can start iterating very very fast. We started with decision streams, then we move into moving to the very first nlps. So reset one of the first items of one of the first SaaS that we started using NL use and NLP stands for natural language processing and natural language understanding in context. ChatGPT that most, most of us use is NLP transformer. So it understands and then they're adding another layer of neuro linguistic signings and processing so it understands the feelings that you're trying to communicate and that you're communicating to the machine. So we're laying out all these elements to create but the idea here is or my approach was to inspire the team. Like look, I don't know the answers just yet but I need you to go with me and research it. I need you to help me research it so we can do this together. That's the strategy that I took with me in the rest of my roles. Again I've been able to meet phenomenal developers, some incredible event driven architects that build this insane system for enterprise grade solutions and they just needed a drop of inspiration to go into the wildness and create the systems that are over reliant or another DevOps engineer that I got the opportunity to work as a manager guy, inspire him to just look the future is infrastructure as code. Here's how we do it, Take the gloves off, do it with them, teach them, show them, inspire them to here's how we use technologies and then see the spark going and going into their teams and creating the processes. And now we have SRES and IHC and then we have fully automations and orchestration of systems that we are developer platforms. You know, had to create all that myself. It's the process of inspiring them to push the boundaries to be shoulder to shoulder of what they can do. It's not your curriculum, it's not where you graduated from or the places that you have been. It really is what sparks in your mind and how do you make it go from 0 to 1? Doesn't matter if it has just go right.
• 30:04
  Speaker B: And so I've kind of found that you know I, my ability is to, to be able to see that that extra step and that, that next connection, I don't necessarily know how I'm going to get from where I'm at today to where what the goal is, but when I can share what the goal is, that usually helps those people that we're trying to inspire. Like you're talking about, give them the freedom. Give them the freedom, try to help. Give them the education if they need it and give them the other things so that they can put all of those things together and, and figure out the, the true path from A to B. But being able to recognize B and provide that goal for them, it sounds like almost the, the same thing.
• 30:52
  Speaker A: So absolutely, you're, you're into the same path. I mean it's, it's right provided not just tell them like this is our goal because we can create lofty goals. I mean we are pushed by the boards to create this insane goals that we need. We call them stretch goals. While they, while achievable goals. If you want to achieve, if you want to stretch them and achieve the unbelievable. You have to inspire them to reach deeper. And again, I want to, I want to make sure that I'm highlighting this, that reaching deep doesn't mean that they, you have to put 80, 80 hours each week or you have to work, be working like 20 hours a day. It's not that. It really is just being strategic. Give them tools to learn, to learn fast. And when they fail, when people fail, we don't, as leaders, we don't tell them, well, that was wrong. I told you so. It's okay. Look, what did you learn? We learned one way that doesn't work. So let's go. And probably the rating. You're in the pad. Let's do it again. That's a strategy there. And I'm saying the other part to keep this balance from a mental perspective is set the boundaries like at the end, not even at the end of the day. I started a ritual lately that I set on my to do list. We got different buckets. I call it the connect connect with you, connect with your wife, connect, connect with your kids, your career and so on. And different buckets that are important to me because again, they're not a to do list of things to do, but it's a reminder that the end of the day, my work to do list, it's insane, but if I prioritize, it's always there and it's going to go with that. But if you don't prioritize those connections with the people that matter, we run into the situation that we're going to work in. And that's, that's it. So prioritizing what makes you you.
• 32:49
  Speaker B: I was going to ask. Go ahead, keep going. Well, I was going to ask how, how have you balanced and how do you maintain that balance today? Because like, you know, I heard you talk about you exited from the environment that you were in when you found yourself in the back of the plane and just not able to even move. And so you took some time to recover from that and then you realized that this isn't sustainable. So you got away from that environment, you found a new inspiration. But we have a tendency to overdo it. We have a tendency to throw ourselves fully into this thing that sparks and interests us and, and those around us. Like you're talking about family, the loved ones, the wife, the kids, the parents. We pass up opportunities to connect, like you said, you know, the connection time. We pass up those opportunities to be with them because we feel like, oh, I've got to stay focused, I've got to keep doing this. And how did you learn to set those boundaries? And what were the things that inspired you to start making, making it okay for you to use to set that time, that connection time? What, how did you find that inspiration? Or what, how did you give yourself permission? Because I think that's one of the things that we as technical people struggle with is giving ourselves permission. We, we get this perception of what we think others expect of us. And so we, I struggle to meet that perception that I think that they had and they've never communicated it to me, I've never asked about it, and I have a tendency to overdo it. So how did you find that permission within yourself? How did you become okay with.
• 34:43
  Speaker A: Might sound a little bit cliche. Do you remember the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford from the early 2000s? Yes, that is the great equalizer. So when we find ourselves, I find myself that I miss my grand couple of my grandparents funerals. That is a great equalizer. So at the end of the day, I can be, I can work, I can deliver this crazy amazing stuff, work on AI, work on quantum computing, the boundaries of what we thought about technology. But I'm finite. One day I'm going to die. One day my parents are going to die. One day my wife is going to need me and not there, my kids are going to need me. So that is the great equalizer. That is my permission to say it's okay for me to step out and to focus on things that make me better, that make me human. Because If I'm not okay, if I just keep pushing 120, 150% all the time, what's going to happen is everything that makes me a person is going to explode and then I have to go back and pick all those pieces. And now I'm not able to deliver on what I was brought to do. So now you have to carry the load for me. That's my permission to say I'm drawing the line here. I'm going to take care of myself so I can be better, so I can deliver on what I was brought to. I did that not only in the VIX roles, I did that with the AI company again. We built an AI company in the property tech. I was able to sell the IP to a company in Israel, exit from there, sit on the board for, with them. But at the same time, it's like I couldn't keep going. I couldn't keep being a serial investor and a serial funder and just go for the next idea and keep going. But that would take me away from starting a family, having time with my kids. It's not easy. You're. You're going into this startup world, you're going to burn the candle and build it for at least five years, nonstop, at least. And that is, and sometimes many times, you will have nothing to show up for. And that's the Saturn. So the company, the ideas will always be there. Ideas will always happen. What we don't have is us, and what we don't have is the time so we can recover that. So everybody should give that permission to say, like, I just need a time. For me, my time sometimes means like, hey, for a lunch, I just want to take a quick bike ride. I wish it could be outside, but if I just have to mount my bike on the back, I know that is my time for me to push my mental boundaries and to deconstruct what makes me and push the boundaries so I can come back, refresh with a new perspective and hit it and try to solve not only the problems that we have had, but also be centered for the people that works with me and that depend on me as well.
• 37:32
  Speaker B: Oh, that's, that's some great advice. And you know, I've learned that it's important for me to, to have those breaks and, and to set those boundaries. But, but taking that, taking those breaks and getting that refreshed perspective or, or at least hitting the pause button long enough to, to allow yourself to jump on the bike, to get that exercise to stay healthy, and it does. I'VE found that I, you know, I. It's that time where those things that are percolating in the back of my mind suddenly gel and, and I get some of that inspiration from. I'm allowing myself to do that. But I also find joy in being able to say, you know what, eight to five, okay, it's five o'clock, I'm done. And, and if I can set it aside, there's always, there's always an emergency. And, and, and it's recognizing what's. Yeah. What's the real emergency and what's. Somebody's level of stress. Because, you know, when I used to manage the help desk team directly, the whatever problem somebody was bringing to us was always the critical thing to them. And so for us, everything was critical. But it's, you know, what, what.
• 38:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, you know, Mike, it's also reflects into the leadership that you work with because if you are full, collected, you get a good grip of the situation at the same time. But again, it all that happens. Not. It's not just magically. It's not just like, oh, that's how he is a person. We're all humans. We have the same hormones and we have all this, the systems in there in ourselves, that we're equal. But when you give yourself that ability to bring your mind out of the problems and just deconstruct it, going back to yourself, again, it goes back to the leadership, to other teams, and they know, like, they got it. I got to experience that at HDR with a couple, like, really hard situations. We got cybersecurity threats that we had to face. It was a very legacy system. So I gave the calls and I get to communicate to the peers, the cfo, the coo, and then I get to communicate to the point of director, this is what's happening. You have to be calm and collect, but at the same time understand that if we are not, it's okay to say we don't know. Also, like, by the way, it's okay because we don't know just yet. But being able to inject yourself and know, like, it's not the end of the world. We will go get through this, they will see that and they will understand. Like, I remember that we had this smear with West European hacking group metaphor systems, and they sent us a payload of like, hey, this is what we see in your system. And I was like, oh, good, you shouldn't be able to see that. You shouldn't be able to see order code or send this to the board. I said, like, look, how about I get here? I don't know yet but we will find out right now. But we did is we locked every single system down or teams are going to be impacted. They're not going to be able to use the website. This capabilities of the website. So please bear with us. We will keep you updated up to the moment that everything is back to the case and that collectness and again bringing everybody and my team just shifting from we're developing new things to now we're groundfield optimizing. Tell them more to say, okay, you guys know what you're doing. Keep us updated. Don't have, don't feel that you have to rush and do this like every single hour and tell us what's going on. Like we trust that you have a good hand on here. That's the point that you want to get because again if we just start jumping into the oh man, oh man, oh man. A man thinks on fire, everybody else is going to be on fire even though they're not the ones that are dealing directly so well.
• 41:34
  Speaker B: And so not only I have found that not only do I have to be okay saying that sometimes I don't know, I'm learning, I'm figuring it out, we're working towards a solution. But. But you mentioned something else that's highly critical that that that helps us maintain that trust that that they provide. When they say okay, we understand you don't know to work on it but communicate because God, if, if I don't communicate, if my team doesn't communicate, if we don't share where we are even if it's. We have no known progress since the last update because I've seen that many of us in the technical field if we don't have progress since our last update, we don't want to provide a new update and we're afraid to say and or they just don't recognize the progress that they've made. Because back towards the example you gave of, of failing at something that's progress. If I find a way that doesn't work, I have progressed. I now know not to go that path more. And so you know, it's, it's being comfortable with communicating that okay, we haven't solved it yet and these are the five things that we did since our last discussion and communicating that because so many teams don't want to. They don't want to communicate when they haven't succeeded and they think that success is only winning, not making progress.
• 43:11
  Speaker A: You are a spot in there. And I wanted to augment on that message. Adding that the analogy of a faucet. So communication is just water that is running. But the trust in your team is bigger than the faucet that allows you to how much water flows. So the, the more trust that you have and your team has, the higher your flow of communication, you'll have the better quality of communication. So again, it's about the trust that you have in your teams. And they ask me like, not just tell them I trust you because sometimes that implies an extra overwhelming sensation that like, oh man, I need to do better. It's really trusting them. Right? Like giving them those degrees of freedom that they need to do the work and if they fail, it's okay to fail. Like we just learned that that wasn't the right way. It's the trust and the communication. Because if they, they trust you and you trust them, you will have the perfectly. They are the right amount of communication that you need to, to communicate to the rest of the industry. So if you think about like, oh, I'm just a single, just, I don't know, like a IT help desk person and my work is not leadership. I'm not changing policies or anything. The level of trust that you have with your manager and your other peers, that reflects exponentially when it goes up the way to the chain and the rest of the organization. Because now that trust allows us to have the right information that we need to make the right decisions and act fast or not and impacts the risk of the company. So yes, every person that's important, they may sound like a cliche, but every single one of them is important. And that's the communication data that I think technology companies can better help the people understand. And we as leaders, we need to make sure not just talk it, but walk it. Like walk the line. Walk what you say, then demonstrate that you really trust your teams. Build a trust.
• 45:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Because as I build that trust or as we build that trust, they feel more comfortable and then they, they're okay with saying, hey, we've done these, we've made this progress, but we haven't crossed the finish line yet.
• 45:19
  Speaker A: Exactly. And I think that's when we can tie the two concepts here of mental health with what can we do as IT companies to support for employees mental state. It really is that part. I mean we don't need the fancy coffee machines or the coffee shops in the lobby. We don't need to have lunch every day. Those are great. I mean that's fun. But what people care the most is that freedom. Degrees of freedom. The Trust the ability to know. Like hey, I'm inspired. They trust what I say. Like if I have an idea, my idea matters, my idea count. I'm not just another number in Excel. So leaders, I think we need to start flipping the paradigm. And don't lead with a spreadsheet, lead with your heart because people are seeing that. I remember hearing that from a good friend of mine. It's like we gotta, we gotta lead away from the spreadsheets and lead with the hire. That's, that's the, that's the message for the tech companies and non tech companies. Like just if you, if we talk about mental health, you don't have to get them this crazy expensive mental health plans and systems and give them a deep, a free day that they can do X, Y or Z. What people really, really want is be able to do their work, be effective and efficient, whether it is from home, whatever it is, just let us, let them do the work. Trust that they're doing the work. And of course if they're not doing it, you will find out, they will find. System normalizes.
• 46:50
  Speaker B: It becomes obvious and more obvious than a lot of people like to think. Do you have any thoughts or resources that people can look at? So if, if there's somebody out there listening to our discussion today and, and they're feeling that stress or feeling that lack of the now what did you say was the oxytocin? And, and yeah, if they're, if they're struggling with that, where do you, where would you suggest that they start? Is this because, you know, I've had my struggles and I've been it through my struggles. Where, where did you start? Besides how, if you're, if you saw a junior member of your team struggling and you could recognize it because of your experiences, how would you start to have that discussion with them? How would you, where would you point them for resources?
• 47:48
  Speaker A: The first thing that I will do is let's go for a walk, take them away from the stressor, let's go for a walk. Or if they are remote, I will tell them like look, life is messy. We're going to go walk, go take a walk, do something different from work. Work will be here, the moment, brief. Then I will tell them go watch some TED lesson. You need some TED lesson in your life. You need that positivity to help bring a little bit of balance back into yourself and others say for the conflict of Apple, Android and whatnot. The idea is find new positive self. Because if you don't find a positive self, everything will Continue to be negative, negative and then you kind of continue to slip and the further you go, the more difficult it is to come back. And lastly, I always point into, understand how your mind works. There's a lot of good system material along edX and Coursera that talks about like psychology. There's a good course from the psychology of happiness. Very, very, very powerful message about like understanding what goes behind your brain that triggers those happy moments, how you can harness, harness them in your life to make a change or good in the areas that you want. So I always point them to those that specific course. In the last one, it really is one, one documentary that I saw and say zero Sushi of three zero Dreams of Sushi, which is this person that is like very old. I think it's like 80, 90 years old. Japanese sushi maker. An amazing graph. After you find yourself again, dive back into your craft. Find what makes you happy. If technology is not what makes you happy, pursue what makes you happy. Because ultimately, like if you are not happy in this field, what does it matter the salary that you receive? You're just being, you're, you're giving it away to someone else. You're giving it away to medicines and all that stuff. Find a happy moment for you. Few people that I had the opportunity to do the struggle conversations, some of them, they left the field, some of them, they still in the field and that's okay if you need to leave the field, not a big deal. There's many other things that are, that are as good as creating new technology. Like if you can build a home from the ground up, more power to you. I can't do that. I can barely put together a picture on the wall.
• 50:07
  Speaker B: So yeah, you know, in my industry we, we've got the, the guys that work on the trucks and the mechanics and they look at us and as the technology people and they're like, oh, I can't do all of that stuff with computers. And I, and I look at them and I go, I have the same level of respect for you because there is no way I can rebuild an engine like you're doing, let alone, you know, the, the huge diesel ones. And so, you know, and yeah, that expertise and, and that thing that feeds your soul.
• 50:41
  Speaker A: Feed your soul, exactly. Be back to yourself again. That's. Think about like when you, when you were 8 years old, why were you dreaming that one? And try to make a little person doing it or. I wanted to be an astronaut. Am I an astronaut? Not really, but I'm building cool stuff so that my 8 year old so looks at me like he's building some cool stuff in there. So that's, that's kind of cool. That's not what I will think. That's my, my advice to everybody again, just find a moment to breathe, get back to yourself, whatever it is. If you need to go for a walk, if you need to go on a bike ride or just listen to some tunes, find a dark closet, listen to some tunes, just take yourself into, take yourself out of the stressors into yourself again. It's gonna find the positivity on your craft and push forward. Be, be curious on what go really.
• 51:40
  Speaker B: And be okay with being happy.
• 51:43
  Speaker A: It's.
• 51:44
  Speaker B: Give yourself permission to do that. And always because you know, I just, I always found myself pushing, trying to meet others needs versus my own and always pushing, putting other people's priorities ahead of mine. And, and now that I've finally gotten to that point in my life where I'm like no, it's my turn, my turn. And find that, find that thing that feeds the soul and gives you, brings you joy.
• 52:14
  Speaker A: I think I want to also kind of see an opportunity for AI to expand into that area. I think companies are looking into AI as mentioned, for example, it's a combination of transformers with natural language processing and understanding. But now science is helping us to understand what goes behind the mind and then we can convert those ideas into algorithms that we can use into the system. So another class for Those listening is MIT's class on algorithms. I took that class a few months ago. And it helps you look into life and everything that happens and create those algorithms of how things work. If, if, if you are into math, if you are into adding some things. I think my, my specific pattern is the theory of chaos. Even when we think like it's pure chaos, there's nothing, it seems random, it seems disturbing to disconnect. There is a pattern and there's an algorithm behind it that make it happen. So what I'm headed here is that I think AI is heading into that area of society. Many people, many people, they need a way to express what's going on in their minds. They need to have that opportunity to communicate out without overburden others. One practice that I did is before I to someone about like, hey, this is bothering me. It's like ask, do you have the mental bandwidth today? Because if I just kind of start busting what's going on with me and the other person doesn't have the bandwidth, all that I'm doing is just creating that friction. But AI has ability, right? I mean it's scalable, it's elastic, doesn't have feelings, but not understands those feelings and can help us communicate. So potentially impact on society that AI has is what we want to use them. Do we want to use them just to answer specific questions? Do we want to use them to do the job of other people? I don't think AI is going to replace the jobs. It's helping us to augment our capacities to do what we do best. We are the ones that put a man on the moon. We are the ones that build those rockets to go back and forth. Not AI, not machine learning. We use those tools, those are our tools in our trade to make that happen. So use that AI as a society in areas that we're exploring. We're trying to upload some of the human part of us and just help me communicate. Like if I need to bend out bent out to the AI and tell them what's going on in your mind, it's just gonna tell like hey, thank you or whatever it is, it's gonna analyze it and tell you like, maybe you need to go for a bike ride, maybe you need to go on a walk after, it's fine.
• 54:57
  Speaker B: Interesting. I had never thought of leveraging the large language models to do something like that. It's a very interesting thought. I may have to try a couple of those queries or those prompts and see what the results are.
• 55:14
  Speaker A: There's many companies like mental health companies that are invested heavily in gen AI agents because they know we don't have enough psychologists in psychiatrists to have those conversations with people. We live in a time where we are stressed. Our own political, economic speaking, you name it. There's any number of cases that stress us. So we work, we have limited resources. But if we train AI, we use AI to help us on those areas. I think as a society we could better outlook because again, we're penting. This is all pent up, just anger that keeps building and building, building. And if we able, if we make AI even more accessible at those levels for mental health, then we could start seeing things descaling, de escalating into more magical situations.
• 56:11
  Speaker B: Wow. Okay. Again, another really interesting way of, of leveraging and that I hadn't, I didn't know that they were, that they were working on those things and looking into that and doing that. I do see how AI would be better able to recognize more of those patterns inside of that chaos. Because to the majority of us that looks like a lot of chaos. And to find the patterns in there is is very interesting. What other so here's the moment for you to spotlight more around you and your career or anything else that you want to bring to the spotlight. Tell is there anything that you want to highlight and to bring to the audience's attention?
• 56:58
  Speaker A: For me, it's more about helping the audience to also connect at that point of like, hey, when I'm going through that or similar case, right? Like, I see this as an opportunity to break the traditional of like, here are the problems in tech, here's the old technology, how we struggle with that rather than we're the humans behind the technology. It is our struggles in life. Things that I would like to bring to the spotlight again, I think we touched base on that is give yourself permission to do things differently. If you give an opportunity to lead people, take that opportunity to inspire the people to really create that inspiration for them and find ways to communicate that it's not about lying, but it really is about using the right words to create this goosebumps type of feeling in everybody. That what we're doing as team is a significant impact in the future is just generating revenue for an organization. We're changing things. We're doing history in some cases and anywhere really if you think about it, well, I'm migrating from very old system. I'm migrating from Java 13 to Java 19 or Java 20. Whoop. To do nothing really amazing about that. But if you peel the onion and start thinking about that, it's like we're making our lives a little bit a lot easier. Java 13 is our only lifecycle support now. We're going to Java 20. We can do better things faster. We can X, Y or Z. Right? It's those moments that help us to stay nimble and to keep putting ourselves forward. For those listening that are like, how can we keep our momentum going? Like our ideas, like, how do you took that idea of AI and built it? Like, who taught you that? Nobody. Didn't have a mentor. It became my own mentor. I became my own self, myself and tell myself like, okay, great, now how are you going to build it? How are you going to make it happen? You don't have to have a mentor to have an idea and to build it. If you have an idea for a startup company or something that you want to put together, do it, put it together. You never know. Like, your idea may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if you're waiting for validation from someone else to tell you that that's not gonna happen, you're competing against hundreds of thousands and millions trying to do the same. So the space is saturated. Just execute it. Don't put together, don't spend your time in Dex trying to sell the idea of the value. Put in code, build it up. If it fails, you know that there's always in the way. Try it again. And keep learning, Keep learning, keep learning.
• 59:41
  Speaker B: Keep making progress like we, like we've been talking about. It's not the success, it's the progress and doing that.
• 59:48
  Speaker A: Our journey is not, it's not over until we give our last breath. We still have a journey ahead of us. So stay nimble, stay hungry, Find new ways to learn. For me, right now has been quantum computing. AI is apex. Everybody's talking about AI. Every company is trying to invest in AI. They don't know how to leverage AI. In so many cases, we don't know yet either. We know that it's a tool that we have our best position. It's up to replace people. I want to make sure that we communicate that clear. AI is not going to replace people. It's going to help us do better work, faster and more efficient. But for the rest of us and the next, and the next foundry, the next challenge. Today's AI, what's it going to be tomorrow? I believe a quantum is going to be the next leap that we will take. We don't know yet because the science behind quantum is too hard to comprehend. But as we are learning more about it and we make, we're streamlining it and we're making it more accessible to everybody. Mindset going to start connecting the dots about like, oh, so now we can use qubits instead of ones and zeros to do better calculations of the app possible outcomes. We can start creating better models to train or lll gen AI application because now we can train it on the positive and negative and in between the gray scales, what happens, how that is.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker B: A bit to consume, but it is to me very interesting. I mean, I love the thoughts and the way that you're approaching this. You know, I still think that we've got so much room to grow or so many ways that we can leverage that machine learning, that AI and to do things. But the way that I look at it is of, of ways to take away the mundane. You know, let, let it handle the mundane for us so that I can go investigate those new interesting things and, and the thought of, of giving it the, you know, now I'm starting to try to blend AI and quantum and what, what kind of thoughts will AI come up with when we start giving it quantum capabilities and and what will we come up with when we start really leveraging that quantum capability? It's still an exciting world. We have not run out of ideas and things to do.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker A: It's a great equalizer when we think about the possibilities of Quantum of what it can do. Quick example that I put my hands on. I mean Fortune 500 company we got millions of customers in our code. It had to search for a specific pricing contracting pricing that we had for every customer. So all that it hundreds of thousands of lines to our searching engine per customer. So think about it like there's a hundred thousand lines of code for Mike. That's another 100,000 lines of code for me and so on customers. Exactly. The ability of quantum that can do is you tell them these are the logic mapping the in into the quantum mapping into the circuit. This is the logic that we follow. Now you tell me what are going to be the different outcomes it outposts the different results of like hey this product iPhone or for you is $900 for me is $800. Now it is of course everything based on every single customer that we have on using the circuit and the different attributes. And just again we went this PoC is something that I took it personally and just kind of creating this inside of and we start applying it in real life. I mean it's just a POC. Can we push it to production and see how it starts performing. Because we were talking about like sub seconds search now I mean we went from seconds to now sub seconds. Given the power of quantum to be yes, no and in between.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker B: Very interesting final thoughts Fernando final thoughts.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker A: Has been for all of us to stay stay hungry. I know that there's. We have very limited time but I'm happy to take home to take more conversations with anybody interested the fields that I work on. Again it's enterprise transformation changing the idea of this is what we have today. We don't know where we want to go. Can somebody show us how to go forward? Always happy to set the pace there building the next generation of leaders. Again leadership is not about commanding. It's about standing with the people with you and being hands on and going the miles with them. The very last thing is find your happy place, find your happy self. Make sure that you look into that eight year old of yourself and when he sees your life he's like that's quite the light. That's quite the stuff that he has been doing or she has been doing.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker B: Right on. I love that message there too because you know, in all honesty, I haven't looked back and talked to that 8 year old and I need to find him and I need to dig a little deeper to find out what he thinks of where, where we've ended up today.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker A: But ice Friday. So take your all, take him for an ice cream for sure. I appreciate it.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker B: That sounds like a great idea. What, what ways can, can our listeners find you? How, how can they get in touch with you if they, if they really want to find you and get in touch?
• 1:05:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, of course I'm the Most active on LinkedIn. I don't publish many posts or articles but when it comes to one on one conversations, I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm also have my personal, like through LinkedIn they can find my personal email and keep the conversation going and from there on, I mean I think we have created some good relationships throughout the years from that network. Sometimes I will post something on text or Twitter, but not really. And if someone is very interested to see, hey, what, what does your look your normal life looks like always on Instagram too. Like I can take a look at like what, what chaos must my kids get into? Okay, I enjoy getting into those hunt with them.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker B: All right, well we'll make sure to share that LinkedIn profile with everybody and, and you know, we're actually starting up a whole new environment trying to get digital leaders like ourselves together and to have more of these conversations. And so I'd love for you to join that, any of the listeners out there to join that and take a look for it. What it is is Digital Transformation leaders Circle so and so DTL Digital Transformation leaders. And we're just trying to build a community for us to talk to us and you know, you mentioned a couple of other things that are really important like that mentorship because you had to become your own mentor. I've had to become my own mentor. And but you know, we've, we've had that experience. We can now share that experience with others. And you know what, that's one of the things that helps me smile, makes me happy, is providing that, that, that chance to one let them learn from my mistakes or to help hopefully help them from hurting themselves learning the same things that I did.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker A: So yeah, absolutely. I think they, what is it called, the Fireside Chats or the Bonfire chats? Yeah, Fireside chats. They're amazing because again, we don't have to talk about all the technical situations that are going in our lives. We talk about being human. It's okay. To be human, where the people behind those technical scenarios and technologies in systems.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker B: Yeah. And. And that's one of the things that I loved about dissecting popularity nerds. Because I found my community that I could talk to technical stuff, and they recognized the human that's doing these things too. Because, you know, I. I've talked about it multiple times before I start talking about technology. My wife's eyes glaze over. Start talking to her about the politics and the challenges that I face with employee management and working with the executive team. Then. Then she lights up. She's in on that.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker A: But.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker B: But when I start telling her about the zeros and ones and quantum and AI and she doesn't. She's not in for those parts of the conversation.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker A: I enjoy my wife, when she tells me about the medical field. She's in the medical field and tells me about, like, surgeries and stuff, I'm like, that sounds fantastic. I don't know what's going on. Some of those muscle names and nurse and whatever they are, how to even pronounce them, but that sounds amazing.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker B: So. Yeah. And I don't quite catch what you're trying to tell me. So what are the nuances of dealing that nerve bundle and those muscles when they were doing that. That surgery?
• 1:09:14
  Speaker A: So, yeah, it's like I pick English and Spanish, but whatever we're talking about right now, I don't know, probably is less.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker B: Oh, man. Well, thank you very much for the time today.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker A: Appreciate the time for having me a great conversation again. Happy to continue the fireside cast. I think that's one thing that help us a lot. Just bring the human side to you while what's the struggles working together. We're nerds. We look at. We look after each other.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker B: Right on. Well, thank you very much again. We'll send you that information for the. And be in touch with you soon. Thank you, sir.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker A: Thank you, Mike. Have a great day.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker B: You too, sir.