Sustained Interest: A Formula for Technical Mastery with Tad Reeves (1/3)

Nerd Journey

What do you love most about your job? Give that some thought before you answer. Have you forgotten what brought you into this industry in the first place?

Tad Reeves, our guest this week in episode 296, has been consistently reminded of the things he loves about technology throughout his career. Tad originally pursued mechanical engineering but made a change to graphic design. Soon he fell into technology and worked for an internet service provider in the early days of the internet. Tad was driven to learn technological concepts at a deeper level and to nurture his interests, letting these behaviors guide him through different jobs and into large scale environments. In this discussion you’ll hear about how doing phone support made Tad’s troubleshooting and communication skills better and prepared him for later roles, thoughts on the role of the technical lead, and how an impromptu dinner meeting led to a job as a systems administrator.

Original Recording Date: 09-12-2024

Topics – Mechanical Engineering and Graphic Design, Supporting the Early Internet, A Level of Interest Drives Deeper Understanding, The Move to Webtrends, Landing Something Bigger, The Technical Lead, Relocation and a Love for Big Gear

2:09 – Mechanical Engineering and Graphic Design

• Tad Reeves is a principal architect for Arbory Digital. Arbory Digital is a consulting firm which specializes in working with enterprises using content management systems, specifically Adobe Experience Manager.
  • Tad is a technologist at heart but has focused on Adobe Experience Manager in the last 15 years or so.
• Why did Tad decide to study graphic arts in school?
  • When Tad was in high school, he wanted to design cars and refers to his young self as a “complete car nerd.” Tad still has a ton of car knowledge.
  • Tad was on the fence between the art side of design (i.e. visual design) or the engineering side of design. After getting into the mechanical engineering school at Oregon State, Tad started an internship with someone who was a seismic engineer, specializing in doing retrofits for buildings.
    • After helping the seismic engineer with some of his work, Tad came to a harsh realization.
    • “And I saw what being an engineer is day to day…. And I’m looking at these pages of Calculus and all that kind of stuff…I don’t want to do that. That’s not what I want to spend the rest of my life doing…. I’m going to have to tell everybody I know that I’m not going to be an engineer anymore because I don’t want to do that.” – Tad Reeves, on the realization that mechanical engineering wasn’t so interesting
    • Though Tad was initially afraid of his parents being angry with his decision to pursue a different career, they supported his choice to pursue something more interesting.
    • Tad’s mother was a nurse and his dad an electrician.
  • Tad already had an interest in design and would design newsletters, for example. He selected graphic design.
    • “I’ll do graphic design. So I did that for a year in college, but then at the same time, I was spending all my spare time fixing stuff. I was always tinkering with computers and stuff. That wasn’t my original interest, but it was one that drew me.” – Tad Reeves

5:42 – Supporting the Early Internet

• Tad shares the story of getting a job doing technical support for a small, local internet service provider (ISP) with about 1000 subscribers in Tigert, Oregon.
  • “The pay…that’s not what I’m here for, but the problems I was solving were genuinely cool. They had my interest… Having the rush come in and seeing that thing just light up with subscribers, that was my first moment of…making stuff that a bunch of people use…that’s cool. Graphic design is awesome. It’s a lot of fun, but this is really awesome…. That was where I kind of switched gears and said ok, I want a career doing computer stuff.” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad remembers building a modem rack for the ISP using USR 336 modems. These would have been 33.6 Kbps speed modems.
  • The type of work was interesting to Tad, and he recognized the technology was still new, meaning not many people understood this area of technology.
• Was the original choice of mechanical engineering work not making enough impact or not providing enough return on Tad’s efforts?
  • With the right people in his life earlier on, some of his decisions about engineering may have turned out different.
  • In engineering school, there were math and physics classes in which Tad felt out of his depth. When speaking to his professors about this feeling, he was told these were weed out classes used to get rid of anyone who truly didn’t want to pursue that field of study. This did not sit well with Tad.
  • Reflecting back, Tad thinks he might have been happy with a career in mechanical engineering.
• Maybe organizing / designing the layout of the closet isn’t so different than going and working on a car in your spare time?
• Tad says there is the design element and then the presentation aspect.
  • During the time Tad worked for the ISP, the internet was new to many people. They would come to classes Tad taught to learn about it.
  • As part of the experience for potential new subscribers, Tad would give them a tour of the “show closet” containing all the modems. It was something that really impressed people and perhaps a humble beginning to what we now know as datacenter tours.
• How did the phone support impact Tad’s troubleshooting skills?
  • Tad feels like most anyone in technology should take on a support role at some point in their life. Speaking more broadly, Tad thinks almost everyone should experience a customer service job because of the skills we can learn.
    • Working in support / customer service type roles helps us to focus on serving the customer and control our reactions to different situations.
    • “That takes drilling, and as a kid you don’t know how to do that. So there’s a lot of maturing that you do.” – Tad Reeves, on support and customer service roles making us better
    • Tad shares the story of a caller he spoke to once whose power was out and had called him on a cell phone. The person did not realize they needed power to use the internet. Listen to the way Tad handled the conversation.
  • Sometimes Tad would need to drive out to someone’s house to provide support, but it was not extremely often.

10:40 – A Level of Interest Drives Deeper Understanding

• “I should dive into this hard. If I’m going to not have a $6 per hour tech support job, I’m going to need to get good at stuff. I think that was where my career started to change.” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad could not afford much working at the ISP and was living with his dad at the time. Necessity drove him to take action.
  • Tad bought some networking books to help him understand concepts at a deeper level about how the internet worked. He realized putting in the work would allow him to get a job somewhere other than the ISP (somewhere bigger).
• Tad had practical experience with some of the technologies before he began to learn them at a deeper level. Did this order of learning affect his learning process over time or the way he studies for certification exams?
  • Tad says it is more known today that certifications like the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) are a pathway to get better jobs. During the time Tad started his studies, career paths via certifications were much less known or clear.
  • “Whatever I was supposed to do was not known. What I did know is that I loved the internet, and I didn’t understand how it worked…. I really liked the idea of running a mail server…and Exchange was interesting…. But then I just had to keep backtracking and backtracking until I was just sitting in internet fundamentals.” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad would be troubleshooting and hear terms he didn’t understand. There were fundamental concepts he needed to understand to gain a full understanding of some of the terminology.
  • Tad studied books of material but never went for any kind of certification exam at this time. He wasn’t trying to get a certification but merely trying to understand. At the end of his studies, Tad felt he was a much more effective troubleshooter instead of shooting in the dark like before.
• Nick says we can follow our interests and learn things at a deeper level wherever we are in our career. But it can be difficult to decide where to place that focus with so many technologies.
  • Tad has gone back to his old high school in Oregon a few times to give talks on technology careers to the students.
  • The teenager in high school is looking forward to a career and seeking options for their future. But when you are in a career, you might forget what drew you to your field in the first place until you need to explain it to someone.
    • In IT Operations, there are problems with burnout, and there are prevailing thoughts that it can be drudgery.
    • “You sometimes forget what got you into this in the first place until you go to a school and some innocent kid asks you ‘what do you love the most about your job?’” – Tad Reeves
    • Tad says answering the question above can remind us to be appreciative of what we do.
  • Tad says nurturing and paying attention to our level of interest will ultimately help us get and keep jobs.
    • “I feel like this is a theme that I could probably come back to again and again…. I don’t feel like I’m the most technically superior person in the room a lot of the time, but there’s a lot of times where I’m the most interested and the most willing to communicate about it. And there’s a lot of times there’s somebody who might be technically much more proficient, but they’re bored. They want to go home. Which one of us is going to end up in the lead role? …It’s that level of interest and picking something that you want to be interested in and then really just nurturing that.” – Tad Reeves
  • Nick feels like people notice it when you are the person most interested in a topic. Was Tad’s answer to what he loved most about his job that he gets to follow what is interesting?
    • Tad says his interests have been different at different times. He has worn many hats as it relates to large site work over time.
    • “This one thing that does continue to drive me is this love of making stuff that people use and then watching a bunch of people use it. It must be analogous to the joy that must be felt to somebody who designs a bridge…. It’s that creation for others and then watching it then unfold.” – Tad Reeves

18:56 – The Move to Webtrends

• How did Tad progress from the ISP to bigger environments after taking the time to learn foundational concepts?
  • Tad didn’t quite know how to get a better job. This was before LinkedIn, Careerbuilder, and Monster.com. Tad printed copies of his resume and would walk into businesses in the area to share he was looking for a job.
  • Tad responded to a newspaper article for a role in tech support for Webtrends, headquartered in Portland.
    • Webtrends was a leader in web analytics during this time, and their solution would provide customers insights into web traffic volume.
    • Much of the role was spent doing phone support. Customers would often send Tad log files for analysis. In 1998, e-mail could be used to send 600 MB log files!
    • For local customers, Tad would often make site visits to help. This was his first exposure to enterprise datacenters. During this role he learned about the need for clusters web servers.
    • And Tad’s interests continued to drive him. When he heard about things like Netscape Enterprise Server, for example, he wanted to know what it was and how to set it up.
    • During this time, Tad created his own home lab environment to tinker with made up of old laptops, etc. He even got a dedicated ISDN line at his house to support the lab.
• Did Tad target Webtrends because of the impact they were making, or was that something he benefitted from only later?
  • Tad says statistics and analytics are fascinating to him, and one gets a great deal of exposure to these in IT operations roles. He enjoyed supporting a product many companies were using to gain insight from web logs as well.
  • Also, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was in its infancy during this time.
  • The role overall was made up of several things Tad really enjoyed.

22:56 – Landing Something Bigger

• How did Tad decide what to do next? “So I didn’t decide. All I knew was for sure I needed something bigger.” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad says he had a travel itch and wanted to get out of his hometown.
  • “This is one of these other ones that I think is a theme that I could probably come back to a few times…of things that changed my career and were more of a factor than other things. It wasn’t just that I was a better developer at this than somebody else or something like that. One of those things is a set of well-honed written and verbal communication skills and a willingness to use them…a willingness to just go and talk to somebody, even if it seems weird…. Just do it.” – Tad Reeves
  • Tad wanted a change but wasn’t sure how. While visiting a friend in Omaha, he ended up connecting with someone who conducted Cisco training that needed a systems administrator.
    • Tad was honest about his skills and interests, but this person wanted to interview Tad in person and said he was teaching a course in Wichita, Kansas. Tad rented a car right after getting off the phone and drove to meet this guy for dinner in Wichita.
    • The dinner meeting went really well, and the person Tad met landed him a job with State Farm Insurance as a Windows NT Systems Administrator.
  • “It was awesome that I landed this job. I was in pure terror…. Basically as soon as I landed this job I went and found somebody who had…a bunch of installation CDs, and I just went crazy hitting the books so that I could arrive at least sounding like I wasn’t a fake. Once again it’s this interest thing. I wanted to solve all the problems. I may not have the answer. I’m totally going to find it.” – Tad Reeves
    • The job was a level 3 systems administrator, and at this time State Farm had the largest Windows NT Server deployment in the world (around 33,000 of them).
    • For several months Tad would go home and study after work until he felt confident and competent enough.
    • “I’m trying harder than everybody else, and nobody else is trying. So I’m actually ok.” – Tad Reeves, on beginning to feel competent in his new role in systems administration
• Tad feels like the telephone tech support for the ISP and at Webtrends prepared him well for what came next. He became confident in being able to figure out most any problem if the need arose.
• The role at Webtrends had exposed Tad to outage type situations that were of a more critical nature. These were businesses calling in for support and not consumers who needed help with their internet. A business could have been losing money due to a system outage / problem.
  • Tad had to deal with escalation / urgent calls in the Webtrends role as well.
• At State Farm there were outages, and Tad and the team he worked on were an escalation point for outages.
  • Tad doesn’t think he had yet gained skill in communication around outages at this point in his career.
  • Later in his career Tad had to deal with some outages and would further hone those communication skills out of necessity and responsibility to deliver. Tad recognized the need for improving in this area and took action.
  • Tad worked on a team of 4 other engineers. In addition to the engineers there was a project manager, Tad’s boss, and a Microsoft representative. Systems administrators / engineers worked together to solve problems but may not individually own a system’s uptime.
    • “A lot of the outages and so forth we had to just explain to our supervisor or to the project manager. We didn’t necessarily have to explain them directly to the customer. …I was in some meetings where things had to be explained…. It must be wild to be in a hot seat like that, but I wasn’t yet in the hot seat. That was to come, but at that particular job I was just focused on technology.” – Tad Reeves

29:30 – The Technical Lead

• Being in the hot seat may mean someone has moved from technical contributor to more of a technical lead / technical owner. How has this played out in the roles Tad has held?
  • “There the concept of responsibility for a job, for an individual unit of work, and then there’s a responsibility for your area, your field, the service itself that you support, the whole system you support, the website you support, and so forth…these spheres of responsibility.” – Tad Reeves
  • An individual contributor is often responsible for completing work given to them and by extension has a shared responsibility for the uptime or performance of a service or system.
  • “As a lead, now the buck is stopping with you. And so now you not only are still contributing as an individual, but you have by extension a responsibility for the products that the people by you are also producing. And what is unacceptable at that point in time is for you to point to them as an excuse for your lack of success…. What’s acceptable is keep the site up. Keep your sphere running…. It’s on you to fix it. It’s on you to do those postmortems or to figure out how an inefficient process needs to be more efficient.” – Tad Reeves
  • The technical lead has to answer for whatever problem which is within their responsibility to solve. The task may be to make something affordable that previously was not, for example.
  • Tad emphasizes he was able to make the transition to technical lead once he was able to excel in his technical role. Then he could feel comfortable taking on responsibility for more than just himself.
• What makes someone want to take on the technical lead role or take on the extra responsibility?
  • Tad has observed people who got into leadership because they like the feeling of superiority or enjoy giving orders. These are not things Tad enjoys.
  • “In any group of people, if you see people going in random directions or you see something that is out of control / that’s not being controlled… either it’s just going to explode and die, or somebody’s going to pick it up and deal with it. Somebody’s going to say…‘I got this. I’m going to handle this.’ And I think that’s the same in any job anywhere. Somebody’s going to say ‘I’ll run this. I’ll make this come right. I’ll turn this around. I’ll deal with this, and I’ll let you know when it’s done.’ Somebody has to take ownership.” – Tad Reeves
  • When someone asks for a plan of action, either there is no plan, or someone will speak up.
  • Tad has found himself in a lead role because he decided to be the one to speak up when no one else would.
    • Volunteering when no one else would is a common theme among our guests.
  • Nick’s opinion is we can take ownership of something, but we may need help from others to solve the problem. It doesn’t have to be just you that applies a fix even if you own a problem.
  • Tad says the effective leader is one who can play to the strengths of others, recognizing who is best suited to complete each type of work.
    • “If you think that you’re going to win because you’re the best at everything and you’re just going to do it and everybody’s going to watch you and cheer or something like that, that’s not leading.” – Tad Reeves

34:31 – Relocation and a Love for Big Gear

• Tad tells the story of moving to Washington, DC. He worked for UUNET in Ashburn, Virginia as part of their enterprise hosting group. At the time UUNET was the world’s largest internet provider in the world and was running all dial-up services for America Online.
  • Tad mentions this was his first time to get very hands on with what he calls “big gear” in supporting environments for very large customers. He learned about purpose-built applications for Windows, load balancers, and various server OEM hardware.
  • “I love big gear. Big gear is so cool. You know, little kids with their Lamborghini posters on the wall and stuff like that? I would have put Sun and SGI posters on my wall. Some of that gear was so cool. I love to watch it go.” – Tad Reeves
  • At State Farm Tad was supporting internal business facing systems mostly. At UUNET, it was all externally facing for different customers (big site launches).
  • Tad was involved in some of his first datacenter moves during this time as well as some of his first website creation and migration projects.
    • Tad was involved in the launch of the PlayStation 2 for which he built a server cluster and Webtrends cluster (part of a greater project team focused on the implementation). He shares the story of everyone being forced to go live when the systems were not yet ready.
    • “After PlayStation went live, that was my first time of a big website go live. And watching the live traffic come into that thing where suddenly we had 10,000 visitors crawling all over that thing…I will remember that moment forever. It was exhilarating. Midnight…I actually got in my car and went over to the datacenter just so I could go and watch those lights…. This is a beautiful thing.” – Tad Reeves, on seeing the PlayStation 2 launch

Mentioned in the Outro

• Do you have a list of the things you like about the work you do?
  • Tad liked to build things that make an impact on others (something people will use), but your list may be different. You might enjoy a system you work with, a programming language you use, the people you work with, etc.
  • If you don’t have a written list of your likes, you might not be as prepared for that next job as you could be.
  • In Episode 290 and Episode 291, we spoke to Kat Troyer and Liz Bronson (the hosts of RealJobTalk) about layoffs in tech. They shared a resource called the Must Have List that helps you determine your ideal job. Many of the questions are about the things you like in your work.
    • If we list out what we like, we can be looking for those things in new opportunities and think through how we can get more of those things in the work we do now.
• If you’re thinking of taking on the role of a technical lead, check out Episode 279 – Change Management: The Hardest Leap and Developing People with Marni Coffey (2/3).
• For other episodes like this one, we would recommend the following:
  • Episode 148 – The Magic of Building with Chris Wahl (1/2)
    • Tad, much like Chris, seems to be a builder.
  • Episode 149 – Find Your Gratitude, Find Your Joy with Chris Wahl (2/2)
    • Making a list of things we enjoy can help us find our gratitude for what we do each day.
  • Episode 177 – Follow the Excitement, Follow the Challenge with Stephanie Wong (1/2)
    • Stephanie Wong let her interests guide her career decisions, much like Tad.
  • [Episode 178 – Being a Great Generalist and Finding Your Voice with Stephanie Wong (2/2)](https://nerd-journey.com/being-a-great-generalist-and-finding-your-voice-with-stephanie-wong-2-2/
  • Episode 283 – Educate and Advocate: Certifications and Community Responsibility as a Joy with Jason Belk (1/2)
    • Jason Belk shares how each of us has to advocate for this industry by sharing what we do and some of the reasons we continue to do it.

Contact the Hosts

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