Latest / You've Been Heard / 359- Implementing AI With Kevin Kuttin

Transcript

359- Implementing AI With Kevin Kuttin · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Now you're getting to the point where you can ask it to do code for you and then take that code and turn it into something else. So like I could, I could use an AI agent in my SQL database and say, hey, I want you to spit me out this information. And then it gives me that table of information with all the inner joins and outer joins and all that kind of crazy stuff and then take that same code and go drop it into an AI bot for power bi and go now make me report off of it. Which. Fantastic. That's, that is such a time saver and talking about, you know, the difference between kind of old pe. Older engineers and new engineers, like the, the future ones aren't even going to know how to use the, the website to click the button. It's going to be why I couldn't tell the AI agent that because it didn't work. And I, I don't know how to make that work. Like, oh, okay, we're gonna end up in a, in a new situation. We may not get that bad, but it's, it's going to be a new and different.
• 0:59
  Speaker B: Kevin Cooten, everyone. Welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT nerds. This is like a soft start today. And works for ReGenesis, a medical equipment manufacturing, remove pain without the drugs type of thing. Which is, I'm sure your marketing department would love that. How I just, how I ripped that off. You know what I mean? Don't need the drugs. I'm here.
• 1:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, no, that's, that's it. I mean, like, I mean, this really is a, you know, it's marketed at veterans specifically to help with the, you know, an alternative to the opioids. You know, so they, you know, they don't have a lot of, with opioids in general. Not, not a lot of people have a lot of good reactions with it. There's a ton of side effects. And so this is one of those things where, where our device is basically equivalent. Now I don't work in the regulatory department, so I don't, I don't sell this for a living. So I'm probably saying things that are very wrong, but it's, that's what we aim to do. That's what we aim to. Exactly. It's, you know, this is not medical advice and I am not a salesperson, but the, you know, it's, it's one of those things where it works basically equivocally to help, you know, get, you know, pain management and to give these people their, their lives. Back. So it's, it's really great. Like, I, I think it's, I think it's a really great cause and I think it's a really great company to work with, so.
• 2:16
  Speaker B: And the only reason why is because I went down a dark hole the other day because for those of you listening, I did a lot of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, surfing and lifting in my days, and I don't know, it's taking its toll. And yes, I have a C7, C6 herniated disc, probably what looks like also a C6, C5 now. And I've been in like, excruciating pain. And the worst thing you can probably do is go on a Reddit forum and start looking at other people with back pain because you've got a lot of people that are like, I want to kill myself. I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you. It's bad. If you've ever had back pain or pain, it's. It's really bad. And, and people like, yeah, just become a heroin addict, like, for real, because that's the only choice that you have. And so, I don't know, I'm. You guys can send one of these to me if you want. Let me know how I can buy this thing. I'm not that bad yet, really. I mean, I, I hope I never get that bad, but it's, you know, there's days where I was like, I've never experienced pain like this before. So this is an IT show, however, and this is a. But IT guys have bad posture. So the other thing is, what really causes. Is probably not Jiu Jitsu and surfing, all those things that probably actually did me some good. It's probably sitting in a desk all day, hunched, bad posture, using cell phones and things like this, which is this. Now this is how we make the. This is how we make the connection. So please, sir, tell me how you got into this. I want your story. Let's go back to story time. How'd you get into this thing? What was your first computer? I don't know. Life altering experience with a Nintendo or something.
• 3:46
  Speaker A: Oh my gosh. Well, I mean, so, I mean, it was. Oh, gosh, it was a long time ago in a land far, far away that the. Honestly, I mean, I got into computers and stuff was, well, with. With my grandfather. We used to, On Friday nights, we used to go to my grandparents. My grandmas would go shopping and I would go to Barrel of Fun, which was an arcade that was right outside the particular department store they love to shop in.
• 4:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 4:15
  Speaker A: And so we'd go and do that and whenever he had enough of me, you know, spending thousands of dollars for a 25 set spider ring, we would go across the way to uh, Radio Shack. They still existed way back in the day and you know, and I played with the computers there and it was, it was Minesweeper was like the big gigantic thing. And of course there were some other little, little games out there. Tetris I think was one that, you know, kind of, they always had one up, you know, kind of in an area they knew kids were going to come in and play and stuff like that. So, so it was getting into it that way and really finding a love of it. And then that just grew over time and you know, I mean, and along the way I found things I don't like about computers. Like I'm, I'm not a programmer. It's, it's not my thing. I mean when I went to college that was a bunch of classes were programming and, and I, this is not what I'm good at. I mean like I can do it, but I often tell people there's, there's not seven figure paychecks that make me do that. So they, they usually back off of that real quick. But, but you know what I have a passion for is, is the, the administrative side, the server side and, and I've come to it the long way. I mean I started on the help desk and moved from help desk to systems admin to handling the servers themselves from more of an engineering perspective and then got into business continuity and disaster recovery and being an exchange admin for a while and, and then eventually moved into managing international help desks for, for one of our companies and then kept on moving into management and, and now I'm here I sit an executive director biomedical company in the IT department. So yay.
• 5:59
  Speaker B: At dissecting popular IT nerds. We expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is Internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing Internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your Internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending. From unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It's like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one's patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office, support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime. I know. That's just how it is. You know, I was creative writing major. I was, I, I minored in poetry. And here I am and I'm seeing the people with the C thick books in their rooms. What's that? I was like, I don't know, but it's not what I'm doing. But here I am. The. You know, there's this, you mentioned this interesting gap when we, when we sift and sort and try to find the right IT leaders to have on the show. You mentioned this, a gap. And I noticed it even more yesterday when we had our very secret AI use case form without the vendor hype, whatever we want to call that. But the gap that has begun, I think this gap that you spoke about, the gap maybe between what you had mentioned was there's a gap between kind of the old technology people and the new technology people. The new technology people have no clue really what the Internet, where the Internet came from or any of that. They don't know. Maybe they do. I'm just making that up. They might say, how dare you? Of course I studied that. But never maybe kind of experienced the dawn of this new era which really isn't that long ago. What is frustrating or difficult about that?
• 8:00
  Speaker A: Well, you know, I mean, it's, it is interesting because like I, I've got people that, that work for me that, you know, haven't come through all of that. So. So like case in point one, one of the guys that works for me is, is my cloud engineer and, and he's brilliant at the cloud part of it. And, and, and he understands the server part of it for our physical servers that are, that are still on site. But whenever you have to go back and like hunt down bigger issues that are, that are deeper and wider and more nuanced, that that's kind of where it falls apart and that's not. He'll end up listening to this and be so mad at me. But the.
• 8:40
  Speaker B: Let's bring him in.
• 8:41
  Speaker A: Is he nearby?
• 8:42
  Speaker B: Get him on the mic right now. Let's have a flight.
• 8:44
  Speaker A: Luckily he is working from home today. The. Whenever he listens to this, he will come into my office and slap me. But the, you know, it's, it's one of those things where, you know, when you kind of dive into the server side of things and really get further back into, you know, server architecture and, and you know, where Windows has come from over the years especially, you know, a problem that he can't find a solution to. I can eventually get there. I'm not going to say I can do it in five minutes but you know, it's, it's one of those, we can't get to those points. I do it in five.
• 9:20
  Speaker B: No, yeah. Why can you do something that he can't? And obviously he can do many things that you cannot do. That's why you're, that's why you're in the position you're in leadership.
• 9:29
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you know, and I, I think it's because I've come through, you know.
• 9:35
  Speaker B: Like it's got to be some like. Did you think about this? Did you think about this? And he's like oh, I didn't know that even existed. Or I mean what is it?
• 9:41
  Speaker A: You know, you know, it's that, it's, it's, you know. Oh, you know, I remember that we had this problem way back when and there's this setting over here in is that we need to go flip and it's like, well, we're not even using is on that server. I know, but that's where the setting happens to be, you know, kind of thing. You know, so it's, it's things like that and you know, like we had a, when we were trying to get Windows hello to, to work for our full enterprise, our certificates just were not working. And it, and it took me going back to some very old notes for some very far away companies to go.
• 10:17
  Speaker B: Some Lotus Notes, maybe.
• 10:18
  Speaker A: Some Lotus exactly. Like here, here's where these, you know, here's where these, this certificate problem might be coming from. And then lo and behold, after working on it for three days, it was like, oh yep, that was it and found it and now we can actually move forward.
• 10:31
  Speaker B: Weird.
• 10:32
  Speaker A: You know, but it's, it's knowing, you know, it's, it's not, there's, there's nothing wrong with, with the knowledge that people are coming into, to the business with. I mean and it's, and it's not their fault because you know, people are much more cloud centric now and much more virtualized now. And, and you're, you know, you're removing the, the back end works of a server from, you know, now they just get an admin center to go to. Oh, I'm going to go to this website and I'm going to configure these settings and it either does or doesn't work. And you know, I mean and I know that like Microsoft and AWS and all them do a whole bunch of coding under the hood to just make that little radio button or that checkbox work.
• 11:10
  Speaker B: That weird. That still blows my mind. Still blows my mind if you actually saw. Well, first I want to get off talking, because I bet you there's something popped into my mind that would just be like this great session for a show and. Or I mean, section for the show, and I'd be like, I bet you there's a prompt for that. I bet you there's a prompt for you, like an. Like an AI prompt for that. And it would have to be one of those scenario ones where you're like, pretend you're an old IT guy that grew up in IT from back in the day and you worked on all these servers and you knew you worked on Windows, this, this, and this, and this is your current problem. Where do you think it could be? I wonder if that would work. Wonder.
• 11:47
  Speaker A: Good question. Like, I have not thought about that. That is quite a possibility.
• 11:51
  Speaker B: I wonder. We should try that one out. If we're doing the show live, like we should be right now, which we're getting, by the way. Everyone listening, you've got to go follow us on YouTube. Never done YouTube. I think we got nine followers. Okay. We've. I've got 17,000 on LinkedIn. Nine on YouTube. Okay. And I think we've got a few thousand on our LinkedIn page. So go follow YouTube right now. And the reason why you should do that is it's gonna be really cool. Get on these live panels and it'll be fun. We'll talk about crazy things and people will see the. This guy that's speaking right now, My name is Phil Howard. You'll see me in the real live flesh. And we'll do it live on YouTube and we'll do things like, who's got the prompt? What's the prompt? Right now we'll have like the prompt team and I don't know, we could just figure out this prompt right now. You're a IT guy that was born sub 1980. I hope I didn't just make you too older. Sub 1985. You look younger than. You look younger than me. So sub 1985 and you had experience with, I don't know, in college, people were doing C. You were around at the invention of email and you know things that other people don't know. This is the problem going on. Help pretend to be this person. I don't know, fix it. That just. To me, that would be really cool. And kind of completely forgot where we were going with that other thing before this. But there was another. There was another segue to something really cool. But that would have been like the section of the show that we didn't do called what's the prompt for that? What's the AI prompt for that? So this gap is interesting. So we have this big gap. We have the gap between the old school and the new school. And you're gonna get slapped later for that.
• 13:21
  Speaker A: Probably.
• 13:25
  Speaker B: One other thing that made me think about this whole thing, when you mentioned the AWS and the cloud. Remember the cloud? Remember when the cloud was important? Did you ever notice how, like, vendors and salespeople and marketing, we just. When something gets old, we just change the name for it?
• 13:38
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 13:38
  Speaker B: For example, it's no longer the cloud, it's IaaS, or infrastructure as a Service.
• 13:45
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 13:45
  Speaker B: What the hell is that? Oh, that's the Cloud, by the way. We just had to change the name because, I don't know, the cloud's old now, so now we're going to call it Infrastructure as a Service, which I think is the same thing. Isn't it the same thing as the cloud, or is it a little bit more nuanced?
• 13:59
  Speaker A: I think it's really the same thing. I mean, at the end of the day, some marketing person got paid a lot of money to figure that out.
• 14:07
  Speaker B: Ucas Unified Communications in a service which used to be. What did you cas used to be?
• 14:11
  Speaker A: Oh, I. VoIP.
• 14:14
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 14:15
  Speaker A: Void.
• 14:18
  Speaker B: Voice. Voice. Voice over. Yeah. And then we have the vp. We have the vp, people of the world, all you. I core people out there that when you came up and their VoIP wasn't strong yet, and there was no QLS on the Internet, everything they called out, no, we're VO P. We're voiceover Private Tinder. Meaning. But you have to buy an expensive MPLS circuit in order for our crap to work.
• 14:38
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 14:39
  Speaker B: But we're going to make it sound like it's. No, no, no, don't go voip. Never go voip. You got to go vote. Pete, voice OVER Private Sorry, that just was hilarious. The things that I've seen people come up with. Over. What's the. What's the craziest thing you've ever seen someone try to sell you? It was like, really like. Like it was. You were being sold the, I don't know, newest Millennium Falcon, but it was really like, I don't know, not. The Millennium Falcon is really old now, so I don't know what, you know, you were being sold a Lamborghini, but it was really, I don't know, 1987 Nova.
• 15:15
  Speaker A: In green, no go in Spanish, which is why I did, oh my God. The, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm not really recalling anything major like, like that but, but I will tell you, I just, I just came back from, from a Microsoft fabric conference up in Vegas and, and it was a great conference. Highly recommend it for, for those in the community that, that you know, need the information or using in your business. But the, the interesting thing that, that I found a lot of vendors up there trying to sell was they wanted to make it their spin and how they had the secret sauce on something to do in fabric pick, you know, whatever your favorite thing is, Power Bi or the actual fabric itself or SQL or whatever Azure database or whatever the case may be. And they wanted to sell you their secret sauce. And when you took just half a second and looked at their secret sauce, all they were doing was using what you already have access to in fabric or Power Bi or you know, whichever program of interest you were looking at, they were just implementing it for you but calling it something fabulous and wonderful and it's like I can go click the box too. It's fine. Like.
• 16:27
  Speaker B: That could have been banged out in a, in a white paper.
• 16:30
  Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, I mean, and it wasn't even like the, it, it wasn't like the fast track type stuff like, okay, you have none of this going to come in and help you, you know, get your data in place and figure it out. So I think, I think those are wonderful, very valuable tools. I've taken advantage of them many times. But you know, literally marketing to me, I'm gonna, you know, this secret sauce thing and it's like, yeah, that, that's a checkbox, that's, that, that's a script that's readily available on the Internet that I can run myself. Like that kind of stuff. It's like, no, I don't, I don't need to pay you thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars to do something I can do.
• 17:05
  Speaker B: Isn't that the same thing with AI now? Isn't there like a big difference between like a learning model or a language model and just someone else's spin on prompting? And then we just stamped it out on our website and did it as an add on, as a product?
• 17:17
  Speaker A: I think that, that, that is beginning to happen. I mean people are seeing a great way to be able to, to use that. I mean, you know, and it's more.
• 17:25
  Speaker B: Legitimate there maybe than this, this other thing because there is a lot. Oh yeah, and someone could, you could I mean, I think it's more someone you would hire someone for. Like I need an, an, an AI automation expert or something. Is there, is there such a title yet? Like automation guy?
• 17:43
  Speaker A: They're definitely coming, that's for sure. I mean, you know, AI as we know it now is, you know, still in its infancy and it's, it's coming around. But you know, but I think that, I think that's why those things exist. Like people are, I mean people are scared of it. Like, you know, I mean I'm lucky that I work for a company that that's all, you know, gung ho about using it and you know, of course how do with all the right regulations and all that kind of stuff. But you know, coming from actually just talking to people at the, at that conference a few weeks ago, like it, it's companies that are scared to death of using it and you know, it's like, oh my gosh, this is gonna, you know, this is gonna take all of our data and give it to, to Google or Microsoft or wherever or just gonna just post it on the Internet. It's like, no, that's not how it really works. I mean, yeah, you could go rogue and do some things, but that's not really how it works and like those kind of things. So like, I mean I think that there, there, you know, a coming age of, of the, some of it is snake oil salesman for like, oh, I've created this prompt and it can do all these things for you. Well all they did was just load the knowledge in kind of thing. I mean and there's value in that. But it's, it's going to be very interesting to watch all of this continue to, to morph and change over you know, the next several years as it, as it really, you know, takes hold and goes crazy. Yeah, we are going to end up with people who are AI in prompting engineers or AI engineers or whatever it will turn into.
• 19:07
  Speaker B: Yeah, just someone really good at using all of the tools and I don't know, maybe we'll call them, call them operations. He'll be under operations.
• 19:16
  Speaker A: One of the things that I think is going to be interesting to see because now you're getting to the point where you can ask it to do code for you and then take that code and turn it into something else. So like I could say, you know, I could use an AI agent in my SQL database and say, hey, I want you to spit me out this information. And then it gives me that table of information with all the inner joins and Outer joins and all that kind of crazy stuff, and then take that same code and go drop it into an AI bot for power bi and go. Now make me a report off of it. Which. Fantastic. That is such a time saver and really great way to do things. But back to our earlier conversation, talking about the difference between older engineers and new engineers. The future ones aren't even going to know how to use the, the website to click the button. It's going to be. Well, I, I couldn't tell the AI agent that because it didn't work. And I, I don't know how to make that work. Like, oh, okay, we're gonna end up in a new situation. We may not get that bad, but it's, it's going to be a, A new and different learning gap.
• 20:20
  Speaker B: Why? Yeah, why wouldn't we get that? Lazy. I think it's going to be a matter of, like, create. No, but really, I think it's gonna be a matter of creativity. Is the uncreative person gonna just, you know what's going to happen or.
• 20:31
  Speaker A: No, it's going to be interesting. I mean, the uncreative person is. Is going to, I don't know, be. Become the mediocre engineer, I guess. I, I don't know.
• 20:42
  Speaker B: I mean, it's just going to be. It's. It's really quite. And then the gap might be. The gap might grow larger between America and other. Just other countries in general. Like, I'm in. I'm in Morocco right now in one of our studios in Morocco, because I have. And which is interesting is the reason why I'm here is because I did an AI and development team here. They're all expats. You know, Greg's from. From France. He's got a beautiful French accent and he's like, ridiculously on top of like, every new thing that comes out in a. I don't even know, like, I know that, like, the whole podcast is like, kind of automated, like the production process and there's like all these gears running on a single pane of glass somewhere. And this app is using this app and there's. We don't even use Zapier anymore because it's some other thing that's, you know, so he's like, genius at that. And it would take. It's something that would normally take, you know, probably numerous people I don't know to do or would just take longer. It would just take longer. Kind of more. Yeah, it's more time to do things. So. But then I walk out and I Walk down the street and I look and I go into a store and I realize there's no receipts, there's no POS system, there's no computer. I look at construction material being delivered, I look at things doing this. There's no ERP system, there's no, none of that. It's old books and papers and pens, writing. And I just see the gap. The gap could get very large for some places.
• 22:13
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I, I definitely think that's going to happen. You know, it's, it AI is getting to be so pervasive, especially with going in like your iPhone and now obviously with, with Google's piece of IT and IT going into Android and, And you know, everybody seems to be coming up with their own flavor of AI. But, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out, you know, globally, you know, is, you know, is China or America or both going to become very popular with AI and then it's going to be, you know, kind of the way of the future. And then other emerging countries from a technology perspective are not nearly as quick and it's going to be a much larger gap or are they going to, you know, all of a sudden, you know, just go from ostensibly the dark ages to current modern infrastructure? Like, I, you know, it's, it's a very interesting thing that may happen to us.
• 23:09
  Speaker B: You mention mentoring and I, I guess what I'd be curious to see how you. The space in general, the IT leadership space in general. How is all of this affecting the temperature or the aura? I'm trying to think of the right word, the, the market space of IT leadership jobs or the job space. And what, what would your advice be to other IT leaders that may maybe worried about, I don't know, getting a new job, finding a job, finishing a career up, growing in their career? Are we, Is there like something going on right now? You know, I'm getting a lot of requests lately. I'm getting a lot of requests lately for just, you know, it just seems like the job market, like the, the IT job market is kind of in a weird position right now. I don't, I don't want to say negative. I don't want to go too negative. It gets bad and people are losing their jobs and the, and the right, you know, the pay is going down and all of this, but that's kind of what I'm hearing.
• 24:10
  Speaker A: You know, I, I think, I mean, just, just looking at things and kind of keeping my ear to the ground just in, in terms of having to hire people to, to work for me over, you know, various projects we're doing or stuff like that. And then just talking to people, you, you know, various channels. The. We have come to an interesting time though. Seemingly everyone says that about every March, April, May, because all of a sudden Q1 budgets are released. People got their, people got their bonuses. People, you know, didn't get a raise, didn't get a bonus, whatever. They're looking to jump ship, those kind of things. And so like everything fluctuates about right now anyway, you know, good or bad, you know, it kind of fluctuates right now. Is that, that great job change, jump period of time or something? Yeah, you know, seasonally kind of thing. But then I think, you know, the, the, the, the bigger things that are going on in the world are all of a sudden these IT guys that are being dumped out of Facebook and Google and, and Meta and all of the, you know, the big giant silicon companies that, you know, that they're all of a sudden they've hit the streets and you know, and, and it's true, you know, they're not common 250, 300, $400,000 salaries when now there's a glut of these people on the market and it's like, oh well, I worked for Google or I worked for, for Facebook. Well, that's great. It's super nice. We're not those people.
• 25:35
  Speaker B: What'd you do there? Did you get a ticket for the men's hand dryer in the bathroom? That needs to be fixed.
• 25:40
  Speaker A: Right, like that, you know, does the, you know, so like that is obviously happening and, and I think that that is changing the, the market it to a degree, you know, but at the end of the day, talent is still talent. And you know, when you can find the right person for your job that has, you know, the right skill set, you know, be that soft skills or arts, you know, you, you're willing to pay for that now? I mean, that's not saying that, you know, you know, we're all going to go break our budget all of a sudden. But you know, I, I think that, that being honest, whenever you're, you know, setting up a salary range for a job is, is very good and then using your salary range, you know, like if I make, you know, our, our finance department and our human resources department aware that, you know, hey, the, the range for this job is, I don't know, let's say 70 to 100 and I find the right candidate and I got to pay them 99. Well, we're going to pay them 99. Like that's, that's what we're going to do. You know, it's, it's. But then we have a, you know, we have an employee that's satisfied. We have an employee that's happy. They're producing good work, they want to stay with the company. Like I have longevity. I don' two year hop like it. It's, you know, you, you, I don't have somebody trying to do my job and look for the next job that pays them more money kind of thing. You know, you, you have a much better, you know, quality of work out of that person. They're also much happier with their, their job and so they have a better quality life and all those kind of things, you know. But, but that also is to say you have to keep learning and understanding what's going on in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean certifications or going back to school to get a. You.
• 27:20
  Speaker B: Or put it this way, let's put it this way. What do most people come to you for advice on? I don't even care if it's not it related, but you've got, there's, there's people that come to me and they always come to me for certain things. And what do they come to you for? When they come to you, what do they come for? What do they ask?
• 27:39
  Speaker A: How can we fix this problem with our employee? How can we get the right person in the right seat? What do we do to keep the, to keep them happy?
• 27:47
  Speaker B: Okay, so what do you do to keep people happy? What's the, what's the typical like, scenario? Like what's going on?
• 27:51
  Speaker A: Well, it's paying them what they're worth that starts, you know, everybody wants money. Then the next one is, is, you know, it really centers around a work life balance and benefits and, and you know, and it moves beyond, you know, work life balance. You know, we, we all talk about it, but, but finding a company that actually follows what they, you know, what.
• 28:09
  Speaker B: Is work life balance? Like, what is it really? Is it I can do whatever the heck I want, whenever I want, and if I feel like working today, I will. I mean, what is it?
• 28:15
  Speaker A: I mean, I, I don't think that we've gone that far yet. That's the ideal. Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure, that's the ideal, you know, but, but I mean, I think it, you know, the work life balance is, is obviously something that, that works for everybody, you know, like, I mean, if, if I've got, you know, an Employee that needs to go to a doctor's appointment at 11 o'clock in the morning. I don't need them to take eight hours of PTO to do that. I need you to go to your doctor's appointment and we'll figure it out. You know, like it's not the end of life. You know, you being gone for an hour isn't making or breaking anything. Especially, you know, I mean obviously I'm talking about good performing employees here. I'm not talking about, you know, the problem child employee.
• 28:51
  Speaker B: The guy that has a, has a doctor's appointment every other day.
• 28:54
  Speaker A: Right, exactly. You know, like the, you know, we're going to figure it out, you know, because I, I feel like whenever you have a work life balance it, you, you watch the clock less, you know, and that's not to say that, you know, you know, I won't want you to give me something that you know, you're not getting paid for. I don't want that by any stretch. But you know, but if you're working on a project, it's like, okay, you know, it isn't slam laptop shut at 5 o' clock. It's like, okay, well I got to work on this for about another hour. And you do kind of thing. It's like, great, fantastic. That's wonderful.
• 29:22
  Speaker B: Hey, work life balance. Pay them what they're worth. Work life balance. So that they actually do enjoy kind of what they're doing, which is probably another thing is how do you make sure people enjoy what they're doing? I guess it's make sure the right people are in.
• 29:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 29:36
  Speaker B: The right seat.
• 29:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 29:38
  Speaker B: Okay. Benefits. Why are people coming to you for this?
• 29:42
  Speaker A: Because we seem to do it pretty well over here.
• 29:45
  Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
• 29:46
  Speaker A: You know, it's, it, it's, it's one of those things where one, one of the things that, that I've been, I say I'm lucky. I, I certainly don't think that I, I've been the, I don't think that I've, you know, cornered the market on any secret sauce by any stretch. But you know, I've got a lot of, of employees over the years that, that have either followed or you know, wanted recommendations on where to go work or, or you know, I've been able to, you know, say their names whenever they weren't even in the room and go, oh, you know who you should call? You should call this person that they can, they can probably help you out. Like, you know, whether you hire them or not, at least go give them an interview. They're they're worth your time, you know, that kind of thing. And then, you know, like I, I've been incredibly lucky, you know, in my last two or three jobs that we've, we've had a pretty good retention rate that, you know, has done much better than the overall company's retention. Because I believe in those things. Pay them what they're worth, give them a work life balance. And then, you know, it's, it's benefits beyond just, you know, health and dental and medical and, you know, those kind of things. It's, you know, those are kind of table stakes. It really starts coming to work at home and working remotely and that's a big one in the IT world. I mean.
• 30:56
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, that's huge. It's huge. I was gonna say Taco Tuesdays, but you just said work at home, so.
• 31:01
  Speaker A: So yeah, you know, I mean, Taco Tuesday is great too, but should the, you know, it's working at home, working remote. I mean like we, we've all said it for years. I absolutely have said it. Why do I have to be in this office where you can see me and then guaranteed some, some VP's answer always is, well, that's where the servers are. Yeah, obviously you don't know where the servers are. They're three and a half hours away from here. Behind a locked door in another building.
• 31:23
  Speaker B: I do find a cake. I do find. So all of my guys are pretty much remote, but we have an office. It's kind of like a, like a, what do you call it? Like a, one of those like offices where you can come and go do whatever you want. We've got other people that come. Like sometimes their friends come, like, hey, who are you? Like, okay, you know, but what I have found is that even if we just get together once a quarter for like a week or four days of just like pow wow, like goal setting and going through the plans and two week sprints and things like that, that's like really help. So like the norm is work from home. The non norm is like we get together and then we're like, oh man, this is awesome. Like we need to do this more often actually. Like, you know, get together and plan and work. But I think we don't need to be like on top of each other all the time either.
• 32:09
  Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Like that's. I do believe that there is value in getting together. I do believe there's value in coming to the office, whatever the office is kind of thing, you know, seeing your co workers, seeing other people in the in the company as well. I think there's. I think there's value to that. I also think that sometimes you can get to a decision a lot quicker if you sit at a table together. It is very easy to go. Well, you know, we've been on this Zoom call for an hour, and we hadn't got anything, really decided, let's have another Zoom call next week. And then we just keep kicking this can down the road. And when we could have done an hour in a conference room and got this knocked out.
• 32:47
  Speaker B: Marker boards and. Marker boards and pizza.
• 32:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, you know, we. We can certainly do that. But, you know, like. Like, for me, this particular company is. Is very lenient with their work from home policy. And so. And I've worked with some that aren't. So, I mean, I have to say this particular company, but, you know, I require my people to be in three days a month. Pick your three days. Actually, two of them are up to you. One of them is up to our CEO. He does a. He does a monthly update for everybody, and he likes everybody in the building. So you get one day that I'm telling you when to be in the building. Two other days, always pick, and then other than that. Yeah. Now, on the whole, most of my people are in two to three days a week, not because I make them, but because they want to be.
• 33:29
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 33:30
  Speaker A: You know, and so it's. And. And what I have found, you know, I'm in my third year working here. What I have found here is that. That they themselves start coordinating, like, oh, you know, you're going to be in the office, and we need to work on something. I'll make sure I'm in the office that day. So. So we can do that, and let's figure out how to get some lunch and, you know, things like that. So it becomes much more of a culture of, hey, I want to be around my coworker, and, hey, we got problems to solve, and there's value in, you know, sitting, you know, around a conference table and figuring this out, or sitting at our desks and figuring this out, you know, so it's. It's a really nice way to do that. And I think that that's something that every single person that I interview for any job, they always ask about work from home, how much can I work from home? When can I work from home? How. How do I get to work?
• 34:17
  Speaker B: How far away can I work? So. So do you really care where I'm at as long as I have a. I have another guy that works for A very big company, Siemens. Amazing, brilliant, brilliant engineer. And he's like, yeah, you know, I'm just, I'm hoping they just don't care that I'm not in like Dubai anymore. And like, I'm hoping they're okay that I'm over here right now. But how I'm, it's just kind of an interesting topic. Does it is work from home, work from anywhere or is it. No, you have to be a geograph geographically, somewhere. I'm, I mean, I'm sure there's going to be some, some issues there anyways. Pay them, give them benefits, work from home, what else?
• 34:58
  Speaker A: Really? Those are the, those are the big ones. You know, when you find somebody who, who can, you know, when you find a company that you can work for, that, that meets those, those things. So that's generally what people are wanting. At least what I've seen out of my interviewing. You generally find a happy employee and then the next piece of it is, you know, it's much more about the, the interviewer and the company itself than it is about the, the person you're trying to fill the seat up. I believe being honest and open about what I expect you to do in your job is huge because you find people that go, oh, I don't want to do that. Well, I mean, like in my case, I, I don't want to code. You know, I mean, obviously we, we've reached the point in life that you probably wouldn't want to let me near a machine to code anyway. But the, you know, it's, it's, it's one of those things where the, you know, the people. I, I don't want to sell somebody a bag of goods. That's not true. I want you to take the job because this is what you want to do and you want to do it for this company and you want to do it working for me.
• 35:55
  Speaker B: What happens, what happens when things change?
• 35:58
  Speaker A: My, my senior vice president of sales loves to call that promoting them outwardly.
• 36:04
  Speaker B: I'm just saying sometimes there's a, I don't know, a consolidation or there's a what? There's a merger and acquisition or there's a something and look, you were hired for this, but we also need this. Or I guess it's a kind of a two part question. First of all, how do you find the right people? Or be specific. I guess it's like we need coders to do coding and it's really boring coding. I just want to let you know ahead of time. But you can work from Home and you get burritos every Tuesday.
• 36:38
  Speaker A: Right.
• 36:38
  Speaker B: And the code needs to be done well and fast and somewhat bug free and okay, the. I guess that. Okay. So setting the right expectations. But what happens when things change? Promote. What happens when we promote outwardly?
• 36:53
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean, when things change, you know, if it's, if it's new job responsibilities, you know, I, whenever I'm sitting around, you know, a table from an executive perspective, looking at that and going, hey, we need to, you know, we've got to add this particular skill set to the team or something like that. I generally try to start with who, who I think is capable to do it, you know, and also like, generally like between their one on ones and reviews and things like that, like I've heard, oh, I'd like more responsibilities or oh, I'm really interested in this thing that, you know, we don't really have right now, but I've been studying this if an opportunity ever comes along, like.
• 37:26
  Speaker B: AI AI or something. Okay. The reason why I'm thinking is because once you've done infrastructure as a service, we don't need an infrastructure guy anymore. So what do we do with them?
• 37:38
  Speaker A: Right. You know, you move them into other things that they, they either are passionate about or they want to learn, you know, or, and, and it absolutely happens they need to go somewhere else.
• 37:48
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 37:49
  Speaker A: You know, like I, I had a, I had a guy who worked for me several years ago and his skills were amazing for what he did. And when the direction of the IT department changed, which was 100% my fault, let's just call it what it was, I had to meet business needs and, and we had to kind of make a left hand turn, learn. His skill set did not transfer. And so, you know, we had the conversations of, hey, we need to, you know, we need to get you some classes. Are you interested in doing this? Those kind of things. And, and I was hearing, I'm very interested, but the actions were not meeting those words exactly.
• 38:28
  Speaker B: It's like it wasn't a talent. It was like, I'll do it, I want to, but I cannot do it.
• 38:34
  Speaker A: Yeah. Or you know, oh, I really just don't want to learn that. Like I have these skills and they're valuable. And, and you know, it, it was a hard conversation to sit him down and go, I understand these skills are valuable. Let me help you find somewhere that your skills are valuable. Like what you do is very. And, and honestly, I mean like genius at making servers sing and hum and do all the things they needed to do. And doing it on a shoestring budget, all kinds of things like I mean genius at making things happen. But I just didn't need that anymore. And so it was, you know, but I know there's 10 companies within a three mile radius that do. And so it's like, let's find you the right place to. He quit in a huff right before Christmas one year. But that, that's his own business.
• 39:21
  Speaker B: Yes, but do you think everyone should have some sort of an entrepreneurial mindset.
• 39:28
  Speaker A: It in today's world for some people but I don't think it's required for all people. You know, it's it, you know, at everyone going down this whole like, oh my gosh, you know, everybody should be an entrepreneur. It's like, well that's great. But some people don't want to be that. Some people want to be told, I need you to do X, Y and Z. I need it by so and so date, please have this happen. And they will. And it will be on time and perfect and gorgeous and wrapped with a bow and sitting on my desk.
• 39:51
  Speaker B: I have realized that so well that I just love taking order some days. And there's just some days I wish I could be like, why am I doing this crazy out just really a thousand moving parts. I just want to go back to taking orders. Okay. I'm really good at taking orders and executing and doing one or two tasks really, really well. I'm super ADD and this is driving me nuts.
• 40:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I mean like I've got, I've got a, I've got a business analyst that used to be a huge director for a call center and 10 15,000 employee kind of situation. And he is really good at project managing and at business analyst work. That's what he really developed a passion for over years working at his previous company. And then whenever he, he applied to, to work, you know, in this, the position that I had, it was, you know, here's my qualification, here's my skills. And you know, we went through that whole entire thing and he was the right person for the job. And the very first thing he tells me is I do not want to be a manager, I do not want to supervise, I do not want to be a director. Not what I want to do anymore in my life. And I went right, great, because I don't need you to do those things, you know. And, and he's worked for me now for about two and a half years or so and, and about 30 days ago he goes, if you ever need somebody to supervise I'm probably at a point where I could think about doing that again.
• 41:08
  Speaker B: I. I can. Might be able to mentally handle it.
• 41:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm like, great. I will keep that in mind. You know, and. And then, like, you know, on the other hand, like, I've got a. I've got a. A newly minted project manager that came on as an operation operations business analyst. Like, he. He started, you know, doing business processes for me and documenting them and, and getting them into shape and streamlining them and all that stuff with, you know, with Six Sigma and, you know, Lean and, you know, pick the next buzzword of the year and. And he. He went through all that and then goes, I've always wanted to be a project manager, and I'm willing to go do and put in the work. And I went, great, go get your. Your PMP and we'll have that conversation. And in November of last year, he walked into my office and goes, here's my pmp. I went, fantastic. We'll make it happen. Like, beautiful. Like, you know, I need this. You fill the need. We can move you into those kind of things.
• 42:00
  Speaker B: That's my old nickname, Fill the need. I'm serious. It is.
• 42:06
  Speaker A: I love it. I love it.
• 42:11
  Speaker B: It's been outstanding. I. Yeah, I wish I could summarize. I wish I could summarize what the entity is, but I guess what it is is there's some people that are just. We're all naturally good at certain things. And you said. You said, I've just been lucky, but it's really not luck. What I found is that it's. It's something that if you're in the right position or you're in the right place, if you're doing what you're doing and you feel like, dude, this is just common sense. Like, I really am not special at whatever this is, but everyone else looks to it and they're like, no, you don't understand. You are like, if it's like, I don't know, it just seems like common sense and, like, really easy to me. Trust me, it's. It's really not a big deal what I do. And though that's. You know what I mean? Like that. And you're kind of like, so for me, sometimes it's like people coming to me, they're always coming to me, ask me about business ideas, and I'm like, no, it's garbage. No, definitely don't do that. Nope, don't do it. Nope, nope, nope. I'm just like, the business, like, shoot down guy. Like, no. Are you sure you want to, like, you want to open up a restaurant? No. Let me tell you what a restaurant's like. You're me counting slices of pepperoni at the end of the night, slices of bacon. You're going to be. Be. You're going to have. You have to count all this food. You're going to have to do the schedule. You're gonna have to do this. You're gonna hate. And you're doing it because you want to cook. No, you're gonna hate cooking again. No, you're gonna hate life. Trust me. And then you have to do this. You have to do this. You have to work hours. You have leftover food, you gotta throw it away. You gotta donate this. There's gonna be shrinkage. Order the paper products. But cup wrong. Cups are gonna come. We have to go somewhere else and get cups. And everyone's mad because they're in line waiting for the medium cups and you only have small cups. Yeah, I used to work for Starbucks.
• 43:42
  Speaker A: I was like, I know this is going somewhere.
• 43:45
  Speaker B: Trust me. It's. Trust me, I don't want to manage people anymore. Trust me, I don't want to manage people. I don't do this. I just want to stand behind the coffee machine, make coffee and talk with everyone that comes up that you're making their day happy. Because now they've got a bunch of caffeine in them and I want to go home. So I understand that guy. I really do. I really do. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Any. Anything that, any one thing, like really mind blowing thing that you've learned over the career, your, over your career that you want to share with someone. Maybe it's like a teaching moment or something like, I don't know, I don't know. What is it?
• 44:17
  Speaker A: Treat everybody like you treat yourself like you know, there is no one that is. That I get. Okay. It's two pieces of advice. Treat everybody decent. I treat the janitor the same way I treat the CEO. You know, it's. It just is what it is. It takes you, it takes you really far in this world.
• 44:35
  Speaker B: I might treat the janitor better, to be honest with you. On like head janitor. That's what I sign, page paperwork on when they're like, hey, can you. You need to sign. Authorize this head janitor.
• 44:45
  Speaker A: Yep. No, it's. You know it. You know, you, you, you get a long way doing that. You get a lot of. I found over the years, you get a lot of respect doing because it's, it's not, I'm not better than anybody else. I have a position. That is what it is. But I, I'm not better than anybody. And then the other thing that I think is, is, is a really big, it was, it was a huge turning point for me early in my career. And a CEO said it to me. He goes, kevin, I get up and do the same thing that you do every morning. I put my pants on the exact same thing way. And I mean, there's, there's a hundred thousand jokes. I'm like, well then, I mean, obviously you just get out of bed and jump into a pair of pants.
• 45:19
  Speaker B: I just get out of bed because my pants are still on from the night before.
• 45:21
  Speaker A: But, you know, so it, but, but I mean that, that was one of those things that like, it was eye opening to me. It was like, well, you know, yes, you know, they are the CEO of a company and they sign my paycheck. They could fire me at any given second they wanted to. But they're human and they're the same person too. Like, they've been, they've been in the game longer, they have a different position. That was their path in life. Life. So I mean, I really would say those two things. Like I, you know, I'm, I'm not particularly scared of, you know, a board of directors or a CEO or you know, some vice president because, you know, I mean, especially when you're on like the help desk or you're an engineer or something like that, they love to go, oh, oh, well the CEO wants this done right now. Well, that's great. And if the CEO can do it right now, he's more than welcome to come over here and do that. But I'm going to guess he can't because he's the CEO of this company.
• 46:05
  Speaker B: Do you not know? I hold the passwords like, you know.
• 46:08
  Speaker A: I mean, but, you know, but I mean, but then, then that whole, you know, then then there's the other stuff side of that coin, you know, being, being that cocky, arrogant IT guy doesn't get you very far. It gets you on the street. But you know, so I mean, those are the two things that, that have been eye opening for me and really helped me in my career. I would definitely say treat everybody really well and everybody puts their pants on the same way.
• 46:31
  Speaker B: That, that one's actually really, really important because a lot of people get scared of like the hierarchy or, or something like that. They get stressed out, they have anxiety. And in reality, you've got to Be able to go connect and conn with people. And you have to understand that the, whatever the C level executives, the executives are probably under a crap ton of stress and they would really love somebody, they would really love somebody to ask them, when it comes to the IT department, what's your single biggest frustration, problem or concern or what's your anxiety? What's really keeping you up at night? What do you, what, what can we help you with? That's really what that person wants because they have a way more responsibility and load sitting on them than you could possibly imagine. Because they've got all these people that they're responsible for. They're responsible for all their lives, they're responsible for their families and it's actually quite a, quite a heavy load for a lot of people that have ever been in a leadership position if you are responsible for other people's lives, if you fail, you failed all these other people. So that's why a lot of people just say no. I just, look, I just, I want a job and I want to clock in and clock out and talk with you guys and have fun and connect. I don't want that. It's too much for some people.
• 47:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I mean, honestly, like I have found that a lot of CEOs, you know, you know, especially earlier in my IT career, like it was, you know, you, you had CEOs that would, or you know, just higher level people, higher level on the org chart, vice presidents, you know, whatever. We go, oh, you know, I just, I just, I didn't just go make this happen. That's your job. Go figure it out. And, and we absolutely, all of us listening to this can shake their head and go, yeah, I know that we all, we all do. And, but realistically, when you take a step back from that, it's, they don't necessarily know how to solve it. They don't want to solve it. And, and like what you said, they have much, much, much bigger issues to worry about. And, and they need, you know, in this case, the IT guy to go just solve this problem and come back when there, when there is a solution, you know, and, and I've made a career out of doing that, so I'm happy with that.
• 48:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, Made a lord above help them. Yeah. Because that's usually where that type of thing comes from, is high level anxiety and, and stuff and. Yeah, yeah, well, there really are some, there really are some jerks out there. There.
• 48:44
  Speaker A: Oh, of course there are. I mean that, that you're going to run up against those all the time. And you know, and, and, you know, I mean, I've worked for them. I, I do say frequently I've learned more from bad bosses than I have good bosses. And generally that's just how not to be them. To be honest.
• 48:59
  Speaker B: I learned nothing from that good boss. What's his name again?
• 49:05
  Speaker A: Years and years and years ago. I mean, we're talking going on 20 years now. I had a ball. He worked in Virginia and I was in North Carolina. He flew in on my first day and he goes, I just. The first words out of my mouth I need to tell you is I cannot do your job. I do not know how to do. That's why I hired.
• 49:22
  Speaker B: I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's kind of cool, actually.
• 49:25
  Speaker A: It was great. Like, we. That's awesome how we were going to have our interactions like it was. I need you to be the expert that I hired you to be. And then he, you know, he took me to lunch, then he flew back to Virginia. I thought once a year on my review. He was a happy person. You know, I work with that. You know, I mean, you know, it was great. It was great.
• 49:45
  Speaker B: This brought me to the second part of the AI part of the show, which is how do we use. How do we use. My happy place is Claude when it comes to writing stuff for. For my. For like any type of, I don't know, writing stuff. And I was trying to find. I was like, can you. Can you come up with like 10 ideas for. For. For memes for like it leadership. And I can't remember what it was. And AI and hype and Gartner and all the. Can you mix it all together? And I can't remember what the long prompt was. And it came up with. It said, oh, I know it's. It leaderships like speaking to the, to the board and convincing. With convincing executive management to invest in the budget, but you can't be technical. And you know, was like. It was like you must use at least one sports metaphor per every. Like, like complicated it. Like, you know, explanation. Like, it was like, we need to upgrade the ERP to do this or the API for the whatever. You must put that into a sports metaphor.
• 50:47
  Speaker A: Right?
• 50:48
  Speaker B: Cannot do your job. You do not know how to do your job. But we can talk a lot about the Dallas Cowboys. Kevin, been a pleasure. Pleasure having you on the show. We. We want you back. We want you to give us updates on, I don't know any of these new things. That have. Have come about and maybe it's an the AI future or something. Anything for us before we go?
• 51:12
  Speaker A: No, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for the opportunity and. And would love to be back when. Whenever you want to hear from me again, Ra.