Working From Home at Scale - CTO Advisor Episode 117

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Hey, you're listening to episode 117 of the CTO Advisor podcast. I don't know if I've had Nate Avery from Not Your Dad's IT on before. I've definitely had him on the CTO Dose. Nate, have you ever been on the podcast? No, sir. No, I think this is the first time. Well, welcome to the podcast. I hope you and your lovely wife and family have hunkered down during these uncertain times you're in. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Yeah. We're we're all in the house. We're good. We're we're here. We're together. And, you know, we're just kind of powering through. So we're going to take kind of a lighter note for this CTO Advisor podcast. It's really weird as I've been entering that interacting with coworkers and colleagues and customers. Nate, I don't know if you've experienced this, but people are kind of all over the place on, you know, business as usual to. Oh, my God.

These are unprecedented times. I can't believe you're talking about work. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just sort of this atmosphere that we're in. And I believe it depends on your your personality a little bit and maybe even whether or not you've ever attempted to work from home before. For some people, it's a it's a fairly straightforward process. Other people, it's just what the heck do I do? What does this mean? As well as that whole, you know, air quotes work from home thing that that some people put out into the into the ether.

Yeah, it's really weird. And I think it's one. I see these people. I see a bunch of people posting. Oh, now that you have all this extra time that you're working from home, you should, you know, catch up on this Netflix show or do X or Y. T. workers, we're we're accustomed to working from home, quote unquote. And with that, you know, our day really hasn't changed. I don't think much with the coronavirus going around. But are you experiencing in your network of people that they just have a glut of free time now that they work from home?

No, no, no, it's it's not. T. is a little bit unique in that way, especially if you've ever worked an on call shift. You kind of have a routine. You probably have a place already set aside. You know, you can pop your laptop up and they just start jamming away. And most people have figured out how to make that happen. So and even if you haven't worked that remote support in a while, it is like like riding a bike.

It comes back to you and maybe you have to throw in some headphones or something else. But, you know, you find out what it is that it takes for you to focus on the task and you just knock it out. So let's talk about like some technology related topics to working from home. S. federal government throughout your career, correct? Correct. Yeah. So tell me, what's the general cultural reaction to federal workers working? A lot of them working from home for the first time.

C. area. The federal government for a while now has had some version of telework for federal employees. They'll usually have a Friday or Monday or heck, maybe a Wednesday. And those employees have a day every either once a week or once every two weeks or whatever. Their cycle is that they work out their management. So most federal workers here have some experience with that. So it isn't really a brand new thing. And that's some that's one of those areas where the government is actually probably ahead of some commercial entities in that way, that they've already been working with that in some limited capacity.

Wow. So that's really amazing. C. area and one was a funny story. She lives with where her mom lives with her. Her mom moved in with her, I think, maybe about a year ago. And she works from home once a week, typically. But now she's working from home from an extended period of time. And I didn't think about the the inverse reaction that everyone has. You know, people have kids in China trying to juggle having kids at home.

Well, having an elderly parent at home is pretty interesting as well. She had this long Facebook post about her interaction with, you know, her mom getting up and saying, hey, darling, what's for breakfast? Mom, I'm at work. Hey, darling, you want to go for a walk? Mom, I'm at work. Hey, let's run to the mall. Mom, I'm at work. And, you know, that going to the end of the day and and she's drinking a glass of wine and her mom said, I thought you were going to lighten up on the wine.

And we all had a good chuckle. So with the you know, we learned that everything breaks at scale. I tell that story. She worked from home one day a week and now she's working from home five days a week and everything breaks at scale. Culture and technology. What have you seen from the technology perspective? Has the tech broken? Yes. Now, I can't say that this has been a thing with any of my customers. So just just some stuff that I've been hearing in other places.

But companies quickly find out the limitations of their gear. They find out how many how many connections are licensed for. They find out how well they scale their infrastructure. For instance, hey, you have people want to do a teleconference and you do it all hands. Well, do you have enough licenses to pull it off? Do you have enough licenses? And I know I said that before, but that really is a thing in this case. Since so many services are cloud based, it's just a matter of whipping out the credit card and doing it.

But for those guys who still have on prem gear, that can be a challenge, too, because it gets back to decisions that were probably made your infrastructure a heck of a long time ago. When you thought your office was going to be X large and only so many percentage would be ever on the on the phones at once. So all that kind of comes back to you and you figure out real quick where your technical debt lies when it comes to telephony and messaging and meeting.

You also start to discover this, like you say, the issues that scale around culture. How many of those people really feel comfortable using the software? Because in an office, you can kind of fake it a little bit. Right. You can say, you know, maybe you go into a conference room and someone else starts up the conference for you. So you never have to actually push those buttons. Well, if you're teleworking, that's now on you and you have to know what to click.

You have to set your mind. You have to set video maybe. And and that's one of those things where, you know, I think we're all starting to learn a little bit more about where our workforce really is in terms of preparedness. Yeah. You know, you make a pretty interesting point. My daughter was retelling a story to me about a co-worker. Who was having this challenge doing some routine thing they do every day in their job. And she just simply didn't know how to do it.

And they are working from home five days a week now. And she's deeming my daughter like, hey, how do you how do you file the TPS report? And she was like, Susan, like we do that every day. How do you have you been working from home for the past year for one day a week and not filing the TPS report? So, yeah, I just did it when I got back into the office the next day. So there's a lot of like practical things.

I was really surprised I was talking to a group of office workers yesterday and there was they were retelling stories of how their companies have allowed their employees to actually take home their PCs because they're they don't have a laptop program, a loaner program. They don't have enough laptops. So people are literally taking the PC off their desk and bringing it home and plugging it up. And all the logistics around IT support with people actually hooking up desktop computers to their home network.

So how does that work? Are they also sending out the IT staff to help plug them up? No. So, you know, it's it's like in office training that, you know, a day or two before everyone is working from home. It's hey, here's the you know, let's let's walk you through what you're going to do when you get home. This is how you do it. And then the onslaught of calls. So the next day or two as people either fudge, you know, it's it's it's not as picking up a PC isn't as bad as when, you know, you had the two PS2 style connectors for your mouse and keyboard anymore.

But it's still not as bonehead simple as you would like it to be. And so, you know, they're running to practical challenges. One practical challenge is it's a desktop and not a laptop. So VPN software isn't necessarily on the machine because it's a desktop. Yeah. Yeah. They would not have installed it. It wouldn't have been a part of a of a standard image build if that's how they're rolling out their fleet. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of the reality of the world now, you start to maybe look at how things are run and you say, you know what, that desktop might save a hundred bucks per machine.

But golly, next time you need to do a refresh, maybe you just buy everyone laptops and call it a day. Right. Yeah, I think my last full time job was at the I'm almost certain that a hundred percent of the end user devices were laptops. So everyone just had a laptop. It was laptop and docking station. There were no desktops. T. T. assets that I basically built into I had the desktop guys built into the laptops, basically a self destruct.

So at the end of the lease terms or at the end of the end of life of that machine, you basically executed the self destruct. And that person, whoever had that laptop, just took it home with them. Nice. Welcome. You can because I did the math. It was cheaper for me to give away the machine to an employee than it was for me to either return it or dispose of it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's pretty sad because I know people say, well, golly, why wouldn't you just have donated them?

But sometimes it's so difficult to do that. And depending on how long you're holding on to the gear. Schools might not want it. Yeah. You got you have to get it back. It has to be shipped back. It has to be disposed of. Then I have the accounting and this may sound harsh and. It is a little bit I have the accounting problem of donating the machine. So it's easier for me to go to my CFO and say, hey, Susan, can you just write this charity of our choosing a check than it is for me to donate a machine?

I've had the same problem with my data center project, which, you know, for those of you don't know, I'm building a data center. And Intel is sponsoring the build of the data center. Thanks, Intel. And it's mainly a exercise in content so that I can show the process of what it's like to deploy a data center and make it a hybrid infrastructure by connecting it to the public cloud. And someone said, well, Keith, you have all of these idle compute cycles.

Why don't you donate services to a to a not for profit? And I said, you know what? The problem isn't me giving capacity to the not for profit because AWS gives away compute to NFP. The problem is them having the talent to take advantage of it. So, yeah, I'm not just the them having raw compute isn't the problem is them having the talent, the people talent to execute, which gets us to kind of the my next set of questions for you and this work from home scenario we're dealing with.

What are people reactions to using Zoom teams and all of these collaboration tools that most people don't use throughout their day? I think that's getting a little bit easier. Fortunately, you know, it's a. T. is a thing. So some of those technologies have been trojan horsed into into corporations already. So it's not too big of a stretch. It's just you have some people who are already comfortable with it and they're just spreading the word. And said, hey, how about we do this when it comes to Microsoft teams?

Now it's I know you may have used it once or twice for for a meeting, but did you know it could also do these other things? For instance, we can now record the meeting so that if someone, for whatever reason, has a conflict, they can't be there. We can replay it for them. Did you know that we can not only record the meeting, but we can have it transcribe that meeting. And so now we even have a full record of it that's in text form.

It's those sort of things. Right. And you start to figure out how to take even more advantage of the tools that were already there. You start to say, well, maybe we'll play around. We'll have some custom custom rooms and some other things like that. And it's a time for people to to to really expand their horizon and see where the limitations are. I think what's going to happen is you'll see companies like Microsoft and Google and all of these guys who provide these tools.

I suspect you're going to get flooded with feature requests from from everyone who's doing this on the scale. Yes. We're not geeks using it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like now you have the real the real public on this stuff. Right. Especially since you see Slack and Microsoft saying, hey, we're going to give away this many licenses or whatever. And you can use the pro versions. And you start seeing the numbers that they're putting out saying, hey, 7000 new people have started subscribing to our service or 4000 or whatever the numbers are.

Well, with that many real people using it and using it in a way that their business depends on it. I could see some some things happen in there. Some people saying, well, hey, we really need if I could do X, Y or Z because it doesn't appear to be as easy as it could be currently. So here's a for instance. Let's say you're in teams and you want to do something very simple like have it export an Excel file of everyone who attended the meeting.

I thought it was already built in. I wind up looking it up. And sure enough, there's a request in there and it's a fairly high number of users out there have said, hey, can you please make sure that this thing happens. And based on some of the traffic on it, I think that that's something that they're working on. But, yeah, you figure out what really matters to to people out there. So let's set of questions. T. What have you done to kind of stay connected with the community?

I know I know you don't go to as many conferences, et cetera, as I do. But like what what have you done to kind of stay connected with the extended community? Honestly, it's Twitter is probably the main tool out there. You know, you take a break every now and then jump on, see how people are doing, reengaging occasionally a vendor out there like they'll have a tweet chat. And that's kind of a neat way to kind of keep up and see how people are doing things.

YouTube is also great, seeing all the content that people out there like yourself and others put out. Tech field data was a lot of really good stuff that came out of the last one. And just trying to keep up that way, seeing how people are doing, not just with the tech, but just the personal life. You know, it seems like there's maybe a little more personal stuff than normal flowing into Twitter, but that's expected, you know, given what's what's happening. Yeah, I think I've had to keep in mind as I'm doing a bunch of stuff.

Obviously, I make my money from content and I've always been a bit more transparent than other analysts. But I've found even myself, I'm leaning more towards creating a lot more personal content because people it's really interesting. I go back to the you know, one of my earlier comments. There's a really wide spectrum of some people who are like, yeah, business as usual. I got to meet quota to some people who are who have been on the complete opposite of the spectrum.

And like, I can't believe you're actually talking tech at a time like this. So I've tried to balance it a bit because, you know, we still need to do our jobs. We still need to support our families. But at the same time, and this has cost a lot of people quite a bit of anxiety. I'm looking at a Twitter poll that I put up and X, you know, kind of that those two extremes. Is it business as usual or have you shut it down or should people shut it down?

And consistently, it's been about 75 percent people saying business as usual, 25 percent saying people shut it down. And it's almost about 100 respondents. And I think it will trend towards that. Exactly. So let's leave it off with you giving some advice. What as you know, people are dealing with this shift that we're going through. What whether it's technology or personal, what advice do you have for folks listening? I would say that one of the things that you can do is just take a look at that time and figure out what it what it means to you.

If you could get two hours a day back because you figure the average commute is about an hour each way. If you had two extra hours per day, what would you do with them? And do something meaningful, whether that's training, spending the time with your family, working out whatever that needs to be. Just go ahead and use it that way. All right, Nate, that was great advice. I'll take the extra minute that I'm gaining by delaying my commute downstairs to my home office and do some meditation.

I think it is weird because me and my wife, Melissa, are kind of weird because our our routine hasn't changed at all. And she has a little fear of missing out. So she posted to Facebook the other day. Like if this man doesn't stay out the refrigerator, those snacks are for the next two weeks. Sweetie, what are you talking about? Not none of our life hasn't changed at all. We we've been practicing social isolation for the past year. So, yeah, I think I owe my daughter's another bag of cookies.

I found them in the pantry. Yeah, I bought a bag of fig newtons that was supposed to last me about three or four days. And the next day I'm like, hey, who ate all the fig newtons? And I had to kind of raise my hand. This is me talking to myself like I'm raising my hand. I got it. I did. So, yeah, there's that. So what can people find you on the Interwebs? You can find me on Twitter.

I'm Nathaniel underscore Avery on Twitter. T. Dotcom. All right. And you can find this where you can find other fine podcast. We were ranked by someone. I got to look them up as one of the top 11 podcasts for CTOs. That's a little niche, I know, but I'll take it. You can find us on the web, the CTO advisor dotcom. You can find me on Twitter at CTO advisor. Talk to you next. CTO advisor podcast.