Show Notes

Join us as we dive into the tech career journey of Erick Dimalanta, from video game enthusiast to senior systems engineer. Discover how passion, continuous learning, and community involvement can propel your IT career to new heights.

Show Notes:

• 
  
• Erick’s gaming roots and transition to IT
  
• Breaking into enterprise IT at Wynn Las Vegas
  
• The importance of showing initiative in tech roles
  
• Specializing in VMware and creating a home lab
  
• Leveraging VMUG for problem-solving and networking
  
• Starting a tech blog and its unexpected impact
  
• Strategies for career progression in IT
  
• Navigating workplace dynamics and office politics
  
• The jump from systems engineer to senior role
  
• Following opportunities and knowing when to move on
  

Key Takeaways:

• 
  
• Continuous learning is crucial in the fast-paced tech industry
  
• Community involvement can accelerate career growth and problem-solving
  
• Documenting your journey benefits both you and others in the field
  

Featured in this episode:

Erick Dimalanta

Resources mentioned:

VMware User Group (VMUG)

A+ Certification

Cisco UCS

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Transcription

Manuel: So, welcome everybody to another episode of Career Downloads. Today’s episode, I have Erick Dimalanta with us today, and he’s going to be talking and sharing some of his experiences, kind of his, the way that he’s navigated his career. So really, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you can do me a favor and just go ahead and follow us on all the socials, do all the stuff that you need to do to make sure that you’re notified, really help us grow the channel and then interact with us on the social platforms to help us understand, you know, what type of content that you’re looking for, right, what types of roles, what type of people you want on here, so it’d be really beneficial. So with that, go ahead and plug in and download the knowledge. So thank you, Erick.

Erick: Yeah. No, thank you for having me.

Manuel: No, I appreciate it. And I’m really excited. So I know that we know each other. We’ve never actually worked together. We’ve met together a few times through a user group.

Erick: Yep. Through the VMUG, yeah.

Manuel: Through the VMUG. That’s the topic that I definitely want to get into and just kind of give your thoughts on, you know, those types of groups.

Erick: Yeah.

Manuel: And as we get started, again, nothing too in-depth, but if you can just kind of give me a brief summary of kind of your background, you know, kind of where you grew up and then slowly how you decided, you know, if you were always into tech or what kind of got you into, you know, exploring technology.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah, no. Sure. Happy to do it. So, I mean, I’m not sure how far we want to kind of dial it back, but essentially I’ve always been that kind of video game nerd. I’ve always just, I mean, once I had a controller in my hand, me against my brother playing Street Fighter, anything like that, it was just this is, you know, growing up in that era, this is something that really resonated and stuck with me. So I proceeded to go through life. I lived in a few places. My father was in the military, so we moved around a little bit, lived in Hawaii, California, now here. And when I was here, you know, I started going to high school and during that time, you try to figure out and navigate kind of who you are, what you want to do, and, you know, there’s all those career fairs and things that try to set you up, but you never really know. At that time, still a big nerd, right? Like I still, as the biggest video game nerd, always hung out with like certain groups of people in school in that zone. Well, from that, you know, I finished high school, go a little bit of college route, meet my wife there, but I ended up landing a job at GameStop. And it was just interesting. I was like, I had a buddy who worked there, and he’s like, hey man, you should, you know, where we’re hiring, did you need a job? And prior to that, I was working at a casino at the Mirage as a mini bar technician. And so I left that, I decided to jump into GameStop, I’m like, man, I love video games, this is it. And now I get to sell it, now I get to tell people why they’re wrong, on what video games are good and what’s not. And you know, from just working there, I shot up pretty quick during my tenure there, I was pretty decent at, I guess like just retail sales. And I was promoted into like they had like a key holder and then ultimately a store manager. And it was interesting because, you know, I’d get on forecast calls every week talking about sales, I’d be responsible for hiring, and firing people, and I was a young guy at that time, so I didn’t really know what was going on. So it was all new to me. I’ve moved through different stores. But anyway, while I was there, I was like, you know what, this is, I’m not sure if I like this. You know, when people say their job’s hard, it sucks working like a Black Friday for retail because it’s tough dealing with all the customer service people. Anyway, so I grabbed an A+ book and I was like, I need to change this, I can’t do this. So this was, I don’t even know, maybe circa 2005-ish or so. I grabbed an A+ book, I started studying it. Around the same time, it just so happened that my buddy got a job at Geek Squad and they were hiring. And I consider Geek Squad my first foray into like kind of IT, right? So I went into Geek Squad, I left GameStop, went into Geek Squad, and it was cool, right? Like we, I mean, we basically, people bring their computers in and there’s so many crazy stories that I have from that. [Laughter] But they’ll bring their computers in and they’re like, hey, I need this fixed, right? Like I remember this, not to get off too much on a tangent, but I remember this woman brought in her computer and she’s like, oh, my computer doesn’t work. And I’m like, okay. I was like, yeah, if you bring it in, that’d be great. She’s like, oh, it’s right here. But it was just a monitor. And I was like, oh, no, no, we need the tower. Like and you know, just people that don’t know at the time. And so I’ve just had some interesting interactions there. But what’s funny is from Geek Squad, they expected us to not only troubleshoot and restore machines back up, but they also wanted us to do some sales, right? Because ultimately it’s a retail giant that wants to sell products and services. I was like number one in the district for selling kind of in-home consultation services, which is funny because it brings me back to sales, right? And so I sold, they sent me out to California to tell people what my secret was and I just told them, I just talked to people and just find out what they really need.

Manuel: So there’s no secret sauce, no special pitch?

Erick: No, and I wouldn’t say a special pitch exactly, but it’s more of how can we alleviate you having to set all this up yourself, right? It’s like, hey, listen, we can just do this for you and this is your bill out the door and we’ll handle it all. And for the most part, you know, when you’re targeting a lot of, like, not really targeting, but just you have those that aren’t very computer savvy and they need that kind of help, they rather pay the money, right? And in my life sometimes, if the money can solve it and I could save me like a day or two of like trying to figure things out, then it’s fine. But anyway, while I was there, I met this lawyer and at the time I was trying to marry my wife and this lawyer, he, we started talking, he brought his computer in for repair and we just started chit-chatting, but he actually wanted a side guy like to do IT work with and I was like, yeah, I’m happy to like, you know, do some stuff and we started talking, so I started going over doing a little bit of side work for him here and there, but you might recognize his name. It’s Farhan Naqvi, like Naqvi, like the billboards. So yeah, like I was probably his like second employee. He had like a paralegal and him and his wife and me, we all like had this office. I was like his kind of admin guy. So during the time I was at Geek Squad, I was like partially working there as well.

Manuel: So I’m assuming this is because his services, sorry, his business has grown a lot. I’m assuming this is when he was just kind of starting his name.

Erick: Yep, very beginning. Very beginning. Yeah, he hadn’t even really launched too much yet and yeah, we, you know, it was cool because we kept in touch for a little while, you know, he wanted me to fix his kid’s computer, but anyway. So I was working both jobs at the time and I really wanted to get like real IT, right? Like I was doing like sys admin stuff for him. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just Googling things like I do today at work, but you know, just all that stuff and then working at Geek Squad, it was still retail even though it was like part technical. And so I started looking at other roles and there was a role for one of the major casinos which was Wynn.

Manuel: So just real quick before you kind of get too much into the Wynn part. Now you mentioned you started studying for, you picked up the A+ book.

Erick: Yes.

Manuel: Did you actually go through and get the certification? Did you just read and apply the information that you had learned both at Best Buy and at Farhan Naqvi?

Erick: Yeah, no, glad you asked me. Yeah, yeah, circling back around to that. So I picked up that book when I was at GameStop. And working through Geek Squad, a lot of the concepts within the book started just materializing and making sense because I’m like, oh, this is what the book is talking about. I didn’t have a lab at home or anything like that at the time. I didn’t take it to get the job at Geek Squad. I got Geek Squad because it was like who you know type of deal. So I did get the certification ultimately while I was in Geek Squad just because I wanted to stand out a little bit from the other technicians. I ended up eventually becoming the Lead Bench Technician when I was there. But then ultimately I left to work with Farhan. And then working with him was great, great guy. But for me, I wanted something more in depth on a bigger scale, like an enterprise scale. I started looking at what’s around town. And there was a job opening for a help desk at Wynn Las Vegas. And I was like, okay, what does the help desk do? And so that was my, you know, like I applied at the Wynn. And I would say that at that point in my career, that was the only job I got at that point in my career that I didn’t know somebody. So I actually went through all the interview process and had to sell myself.

Manuel: And just doing that, I’m assuming just with your application, your resume, just body of work. Okay.

Erick: Yep. Just with the Geek Squad, just with like Sys Admin work, working for Farhan Naqvi, you know, it got me in the door. And ultimately, you know, I did land the role and I didn’t know what I was doing. Like most people that jump in IT jobs, especially in the enterprise, I’m like, wait, what do you mean RDP into this? What does that even mean? Right? So there’s so much stuff that kind of came at me quick and, you know, from there, that’s where I spent the bulk of my career at Wynn, moving through various roles, which, you know, happy to talk through, but then it ultimately, you know, I ended up leaving there.

Manuel: So yeah, and I did see so similar. You said that you moved up kind of through the ranks at GameStop. It sounds like you did something very similar at Best Buy, right? Like you didn’t, doesn’t sound like the same position where, granted, it is more sales, it is that, but I do see a lot of progression. I started to see a bit of a theme kind of looking through your job history. So as you got into the Wynn and now, like you said, you’re getting ready, you’re just starting out, you’re picking up these skills at any point when you just started, did you start to get intentional with what you wanted to do? Did you say, hey, I’m in enterprise? It was your goal to move up through ranks through Wynn, similar to what you had done at some of the other places, or is it just something that, based on your worth ethic, your personality, it’s just something that comes natural to you?

Erick: So I know I did. When I first joined there as Help Desk, I always envied the Sys Engineers. And I knew that’s where I wanted to go. And throughout my tenure there, there are various kind of other opportunity paths that presented themselves that I opted not to pursue because I didn’t want to look like I was jumping around to different roles, whether it was like App Support, whether it was like Networking or like a DBA role or like in the data side, I wanted to be like Systems Engineer. And so I kind of stayed focused on that path. I mean, I was in the Help Desk for about nine months or so. And what I did that helped me out in my progression through that portion was we had a NOC there. And the NOC would send us over tickets.

Manuel: And the NOC is the Network Operation Center.

Erick: Yes, I’m sorry, Network Operation Center. So they would send us tickets, we’d have a lot of dialogue between them. And I knew if I went through that path, it could help me get the knowledge to getting to where the systems engineers were. So what I did was every time I got off of work for an hour, I spent time with the guys at the NOC. And as some of them were, we became friends along the way, but just like, hey, show me what you’re doing. Like show me. I know I can’t touch it. I mean, I’ll drive if you want me to, but show me like, here’s a ticket that I sent over and you guys always resolve it and you put in the notes, but I kind of want to see it in action. Show me what’s going on there. And to me, I think that was a big turning point into me getting a little bit deeper into IT and just kind of grasping it and really wanting to go more and get further. And so I ended up moving from help desk into the NOC in a role.

Manuel: And is that something that a position came open or did they recommend you? Did you have to apply? I know each organization is a little bit different in how they handle promotions. Did you have to kind of wait for somebody? Did they see you, I’m assuming at some point, I know you said you made friends, but are managers aware that you’re doing this spending time on your own?

Erick: Yeah, they are. Managers were in there at the time and I had to okay it with both our managers that it was okay that I could be there. And it was something I offered up. I thought it was really important. I didn’t know anybody that was doing it around the time, but for me, I didn’t know any other way to get that practical knowledge without just being in the fire. And so back to your original question, they didn’t open a position for me. Somebody did leave eventually. I did apply. I didn’t get the job the first time. I interviewed really well from what I understand, but somebody like a boomerang, like another person just came back. So he would hit the ground running and so they put him on. I think a little bit later, another opportunity presented itself. And I had to go through the dance re-applied, but at that time I did finally get the role. And it was great. Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. I mean, we’re a big Extreme shop and just learning all the commands and just dealing with backups and just the everyday minutiae.

Manuel: So in that NOC role, because again, each organization is a little bit different. Do you, are you doing more monitoring? It sounds like you’re doing more trouble tickets. And is it focused more just on the networking side? Is there a server side? What, just, again, you don’t have to go too in depth, but just give me a brief understanding of what that role was like.

Erick: So over there in that role, we were kind of a little bit of a catch-all for a lot of the technologies. We did both systems and network stuff. You know, obviously the flow starts from user calls or maybe there’s an outage, but the help desk gets something, routes it over to the NOC unless we see it first, right? We did have a bunch of screens where we did monitor things, but we were in charge of Exchange and just all the network technologies that we had deployed at the time. A little bit of application stuff, which we shot over to the apps team, but I did, I felt like, you know, when I was at the help desk, I’m like, whoa, this is like a lot of stuff that, you know, I got to put in my brain. And I didn’t really have too much crazy formal training, but it was kind of just, you know, jump in and swim. At the NOC, it just got bigger and the world just keeps kind of expanding, right? So have you heard of like the Dunning-Kruger scale?

Manuel: Yes.

Erick: Where it’s like your competence or your confidence and like your competence where it goes up. The more you know, you think like, oh, I got this, but then the more you start really knowing you’re like, I have no idea what I’m doing, right? And then it starts slowly going down. And that’s one of the things I feel like I battled with throughout my career. But yeah.

Manuel: And when you say battled with, battled with kind of like, I’ve heard this from other people is, are you battling imposter syndrome? Are you battling with just trying to know everything and then realizing that you’re not going to? Kind of what’s that battle?

Manuel: Yeah. So, I mean, you said it right the first time. It is the imposter syndrome. I think everybody in every high performing role will deal with like, am I knowing what the hell I’m going to do here? I mean, I still deal with imposter syndrome today, which I think it’s good. For me, I feel like it’s an actual, it’s like more of a strength. I don’t like the internal feeling in my brain because it sucks, but it just tells me that I really want to understand and learn more. And that’s why I feel this way. So I have to keep shooting for that. You know, sitting here thinking about it now, the knowledge I had back then, which I kind of, you know, this culmination of everything I’ve learned over time, you know, helped me to get to where I am today. But like all the stuff back then, like I couldn’t even tell you, there’s like so many little things that we did that I don’t know if my brain has enough room to fit everything in it, you know, but anyway, continuing on that. So yeah, I mean, so I was in a NOC, we took care of all that stuff, it was a lot of monitoring. I moved up again in, in my career, I figured there’s like a two to three year where you should stay in a role, and then you should start looking to either move into another role or leave the company, right? So at that time, I had my sights on where I wanted to be next before I went to the systems engineers and we had two individuals and they were called NOC engineers. And I was a NOC technician. So I’m like, how do I get to that level to what they do? So a lot of the same, I did the same formula. Like I sat with them, I became friends, and you know, there is a little bit of politics there where, you know, they would be like, hey, what are you guys doing tonight? Let’s go for a drink, right? And so you get to know people and it wasn’t any kind of malicious, like I just want to get to know you because I want the job type of deal. You know, I genuinely, that I still talk to today, people that are my friends there. But yeah, I wanted to get to that role and, you know, eventually something opened up and I interviewed and it worked out.

Manuel: And I don’t think it’s malicious, right? I mean, obviously you developed a friendship. You’re trying to just, you know, assimilate to those people you’re trying to learn. And that’s, you know, I’m sure you’ve kind of heard that phrase, you know, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room, right? So I just, when I hear you say like, hey, I’m trying to go with them. I’m trying to assimilate. I’m trying to get there. It’s not that you’re trying to be malicious and be like, hey, pick me because you are genuinely interested in just trying to learn. Now at the same time, hey, am I going to try and develop a friendship there or at least an understanding and have them also understand who you are?

Erick: Yeah.

Manuel: Right? And just say, okay, hey, we know he’s a NOC technician. Now they get to know you and say, oh, this guy obviously is putting in an effort on his own time to learn he’s seems like a good guy, right? You have a good personality. So I mean, I definitely wouldn’t say it’s a malicious thing.

Erick: Yeah. And just thinking through that, it’s funny because around the time there was other individuals that I worked with that I had because I’m sitting with them because I’ve gone to this role just within the short amount of time, there was kind of a little bit of like a hatred from just other individuals that I worked with and they’ll never admit it. But I’ve seen text messages, I’ve seen, and it’s okay, right? It’s one of those things where it’s like, well, I mean, nothing’s stopping you from doing it. So, you know, I’m just going to do what I do, right?

Manuel: And these people, and I ask because I know that I’ve had situations like that, do you think it’s more that the, were these people that had been there for a longer tenure?

Erick: It was.

Manuel: So they just felt that, hey, I’ve been here longer, why is this person moving who’s been here a shorter amount of time?

Erick: Yeah, very military-like.

Manuel: Yeah, and it’s very much the level of effort too, right? And it’s like, I’ve come across that and I just don’t know, apart from here, if you’ve seen that where people who just expect, I’ve been here for four years, I should get promoted over Erick who’s only been here two years. But the level of effort, the amount of work that Erick is doing is probably equates to maybe five years.

Erick: Yeah, you know, on top of the level of effort of work, I would also say it also depends on how you show up, right? There’s a lot of, I mean, you can always hire the smartest guy in the room to do the task, but sometimes I don’t want to work with that person. You know, that person is very aggressive. Sometimes they like to work in like their own little world and get things done in a certain way, which is not always that tasteful.

Manuel: Or condescending, come across that a lot where they’re just…

Erick: That is IT in a nutshell. There are so many that are like that. And I don’t know what it is. I really don’t. It’s almost like they have to assert some kind of pseudo dominance to show that this is why I’m smart and this is why I’m in this role. And I don’t go around thinking like, why are they in that position kind of deal? It’s a kind of weird thing, but I’m just not wired that way. I always envy people that are in a position above somewhere I want to be because I’m like, what did you do? Like, how did you get there? Like, you know, your journey. And so that’s kind of… I know I went off on a rant from like the malicious thing, but that’s, you know, there are some haters out there that… But I would just say, don’t let it stop you, right? Like, just do what you need to do to get the knowledge in here that you keep, right? Like everybody else can hate and…

Manuel: And set those goals. And it’s awesome to hear you set goals, right? And just say, hey, this is where I want to aspire to be. This is what I want to do. And then achieving it.

Erick: Yeah. And it was the biggest breakthrough. So when I was in the… As a NOC engineer, it was a strange role because we would deal with a lot of down times. But in that role, particularly, we would be this next level escalation from what the NOC technicians can’t figure out or don’t want to do. They don’t have the access. And so whether it’s like a deeper Exchange problem or, you know, working with some of our middleware developers, fixing something that went wrong with whatever’s wrong with translational data. But yeah, it was a different type of job. And I wouldn’t say it was… I would definitely say it wasn’t as busy as the previous… Like as like a help desk or a NOC, but the critical thinking, it mattered a lot more. And I knew from being in that role that the next level getting into the systems engineering role would be even further, right? Like it would be another portion of a lot more critical thinking. So from that role, I ended up talking with the hiring manager for the systems engineers. And you know, I started saying, hey, can I have some VMware access? In terms of that particular technology, I seem to have an affinity for it. I kind of gravitated towards that way. And so he… I think they granted me very basic like read level access just so I could poke around and look at it and we were running, I don’t know, like vSphere 5.0 at the time or something like that. But from there, I really… I wanted to show him like that I had the grit I had, you know, what it takes to be in the role. And mind you, at the time, when I would talk to them about certain things that are broken or wrong and they’re explaining it to like either a vendor or something, I’m like, I have no idea what they’re saying. Like this is like way over my head and it just seems so high to try to get there. And I was like, no, but I just kept at it, you know, it’s one of those…

Manuel: And when you’re hearing all these types of terminology or concepts and you’re not understanding how did you go about figuring out what they’re talking about? Are you talking to them? Are you going through researching on your own, taking notes? Just what’s that process? Because we’ve all been there, right?

Erick: Yeah.

Manuel: Maybe I have a slight idea of what you’re talking about. And other times we were just like, that’s totally foreign.

Erick: Exactly.

Manuel: So how did you deal with that?

Erick: So I did talk with them. I mean, I hear them on the phone and all I hear is nothing but acronyms. And I’m like, what does that mean? Is this the right acronym I’m looking up? And you know, the acronyms in IT, acronyms in medical, acronyms in any industry, they all have the same ones, but they all mean something different. I did end up talking to them saying, hey, tell me how this works. Like why did this break? How did you fix it? And they would explain it to me. And I would get a little bit of more knowledge from their explanation. Sometimes I’ll have to have someone else explain it and use different words. But I would take a little bit away from that. And then I would research on my own and just not understanding the full scale of how they fixed it because I felt like I wasn’t just intellectually there yet. I just wanted to grab as much information as I could. And I mean, that’s how I did it. You know, I would research from like the tickets and they would put their explanations and I’m like, what does that mean? And I’m like Googling it. And at the time I’m like, is this how that worked? Is that how? Because there are times where I have to explain that to my, you know, my management. Like, oh, the system engineer said this. And this is because for me, this was a ticket I route over to the systems engineers from the NOC engineers. But so from there, you know, like I think I spent about two years or so in that role and a position ended up popping up for the system engineer. Now, there was me and my buddy that were in the same role, right? And my buddy, he was the one that trained me in the NOC, trained me to do all this stuff. So, and he’s been there, I don’t even know, maybe five plus years longer than I have. So I started strategically thinking, what can I do that sets me apart from him that he does not have? And at the time, he didn’t really have too many certifications. And I was like, you know what, let me get like my Network+, right? Like at the time I was like, let me do Net+. And I remember, you know, I went through the training and I passed it on the first time, which was already amazing enough. I think I just skimmed it.

Manuel: And this is something you, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

Erick: Sure.

Manuel: Did you pay for the training and all that on your own?

Erick: I did.

Manuel: Did you request work? OK, no, that’s good to know.

Erick: It’s at work. I didn’t even know that I could ask for that, for that to be paid for, which is funny because they sent us on trainings, but that particular exam, now every subsequent exam afterwards, they’ve definitely, you know, I’ve leveraged like education dollars that work to pay for, but I didn’t know. So I got that and then, you know, we had the bake off kind of interview between us, right? And it was, I don’t know, maybe like a month or two later. And, you know, I had a little bit of body of work to just kind of prove like this is why I think, you know, I should be hired over this individual. And it was nothing, you know, it was more friendly competition between us. So it’s still cool. It’s funny because we just, I just got off the phone with him a minute ago before I got here. But, yeah, you know, like I ended up landing the role and I remember, I thought in my head, like this, I’ve finally here, this is what I want to do. And like I want to be systems engineer. Obviously there were seniors that I’m like, okay, this is the next level and this is where I need to go to. But for now, I think like there’s a lot and a wealth of knowledge I need to gain from these people here. And I think I spent a good chunk amount of time on systems engineering, just dealing with all the stuff we dealt with there. But, yeah.

Manuel: And from a progression standpoint, as you’re kind of moving up, is the amount of people that you’re working with at each role, is it kind of a pyramid? Like would you say that there were more help desk and then NOC technicians? Are you, as you’re moving up, are there less people, the same amount of people?

Erick: So I would, there’s definitely less people than they were on the front lines when we’re like answering tickets and phones and things like that. They get a little bit more specialized. And I think that’s maybe likely by design because they get paid a certain amount higher than the entry level people that are in the industry. But I would say it dwindles down a little bit more, definitely.

Manuel: Just trying to understand the level, you mentioned level competition, things like that. So I mean, here there’s two of you going for this one position where maybe when you were going for the NOC engineer, four or five, just more people at that role.

Erick: Yeah. Well, I mean, another thing I would say that for every role that I left, individual, like I would be asked input on who should replace me, like who would be a good candidate. Sometimes a little bit of the politics slash the work effort kind of falls into there. Like if you’re standing out, you’re helping me or you’re helping the overall team, you’re going to be somebody that comes top of mind when those decisions are made. And that little sentence of like, oh, I think this individual will be great for the role. That resonates with people who hired you. So they would be like, all right, well, we’ll give them a look. And that can make or break career sometimes.

Manuel: How long did you spend in that system engineering role and did you end up moving into senior?

Erick: I did. Yeah. So I was in the systems engineering role for, I think about three-ish years or so. I was at that pinnacle almost like, oh my God, I need to move up into something else. And I’d have to tell you that for a long time, I don’t think I, like, I was at Wynn for such a long time. So I was comfortable in terms of the people I knew, but in the role itself, there was a long period of time where I just wasn’t comfortable in my skin because I wasn’t really sure that I could accomplish certain tasks because I didn’t know. And because when we’d have like a big outage, right, like, I mean, everybody and their mom will get involved. We’re all on the phone. We’re all trying to figure it out and we’re all dialing in. And, you know, there’s a lot that comes on to our plate that we’re like, hey, you know, is it the OS? Is it storage? Is it the fabric? It was like, like, what is it? Is it a VM? Something. And so there was a lot to look at. It felt a little overwhelming, but as you’re there for a longer period of time and going through the steps I did, you know, you just kind of see where the traffic flows and where there could be some kind of weird bottleneck. So you start investigating just around that area. But anyway, so from there, yeah, I stayed at my pinnacle, like, three-ish years and I was, I mean, I was really on the cusp of like, man, I need to do something else. I need to move up because the two guys that were seniors, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

Manuel: In that role, what, you know, you kind of mentioned, hey, is it storage? Is it the VM? Is it this? What are some of the responsibilities that you’re doing there in that sys engineer role? Because you kind of mentioned the tickets on some of the other positions, which just helped me understand what are you doing?

Erick: At Wynn systems engineers, we were responsible for everything basically kind of OS level and down. So all the infrastructure that stands everything up from all the virtualized infrastructure that we had, we had a ton of physical boxes as well. But that was, that was our thing.

Manuel: Storage. Did you do it?

Erick: Yeah, we did. We got HPE 3Par shop.

Manuel: And you were in charge of the storage or did you have storage admins?

Erick: We did not.

Manuel: Okay.

Erick: Yeah. So it was all us. So storage, all the OS virtualization.

Manuel: And are you in this role? So basically infrastructure that way, what other types of engineers are there? So I’m assuming you guys had network engineers.

Erick: We did. There’s no storage.

Manuel: So is it just systems and network?

Erick: Yeah. When I was there at the time, there was just the two teams.

Manuel: Okay.

Erick: It was just our systems and network and there was senior systems and then there was senior network guys. We didn’t even have, I mean, we served as the architects. When we were, you know, we’d get a project from the project managers and the vendor would list out, hey, these are the specs. This is something we need to build to support this application. So we would jointly look at it and saying, okay, what’s the best way we can do this? And you know, where is this going to live? Where is this going to grow? So we had to think about that around the time just because we didn’t have that separation of duties. But at the time I was there, that was one of the things. And when I was in the system engineering, there was something there, which I feel like just launched my career to where it is here. That for me was kind of a turning point because I used systems engineering to kind of brand myself as like the VMware type person within my company, right? So like in terms of taking all the education dollars and spending it on, you know, doing the classes, getting the certifications and, you know, just when we’re in meetings and we’re thinking about things, I’m like, oh, well, you know, I just learned this the other day and, you know, and just offering it up to the team for just like different suggestions on things that, you know, we’d usually call the vendor in about.

Manuel: And that’s, I’m glad you touched on that because you, I mean, you teed it up perfectly for the next couple, the next two questions that I want to ask you. And you kind of tell me which one came first, if they kind of were together. So you’re getting into VMware, you’re establishing yourself as the VMware person in your role. Now around that time, and again, this is just my own personal knowledge and information, there’s two things that I think are also not happening around this time. One is you’re starting to at least attend or get involved in the VMUG, which is the VMware users group.

Erick: Right.

Manuel: So it’s a user group for Las Vegas. And the other thing that I know that you were doing was you started blogging.

Erick: Yes.

Manuel: So how did those two things come about in establishing yourself as your brand? Was that part of it? What led you to that? Just provide me some context.

Erick: No, no. So I found out when I started digging a little bit deeper into just VMware, I fell in love with the technology. I thought it was like magic. I’m like, we can, what? This is ridiculous. We can just move servers. And like it was, it was insane. And so at the time, I was, I thought, I need to really do this and really dig deep. And so that’s when I created like a home lab. And it was, initially I used a bunch of Intel NUCs. And I created a little three node virtualized cluster and had some VMs on there. And it was fun. Eventually I started moving to bigger and better gear, but I used that as a stepping stone of just kind of learning different ways you can do things in VMware and playing around with it. The VMUG piece, that came up because there were certain problems that we had in the enterprise that I was trying to solve that I couldn’t get from, like, if I just posted it on the forums. I mean, I’d get a bunch of different responses, but I wanted to talk to people. So like I consider myself like an ambivert, which is a little bit of an extrovert and a little bit of introvert. And so there are times when I just want to be at home and not talk to anybody, but there are times where I do, you know, the people aspect of the world is what drives me. And I do like talking with people. And so because of the VMUG, I’m like, oh, these guys get together and they have these little events and they’ll have like a vendor come and talk to stuff. And mind you, on systems engineering, every vendor is trying to sell us everything. So we have free lunches all day long. So it’s great, right? So it’s like, oh, okay, they want to take us out to lunch and show us their new technology. So I think that’s where we met around that time was maybe around the VMUG scene. But I leveraged that to just ask individuals in that area like, hey, have you ever came across like a certain problem, like this problem that we’re dealing with? I was dealing with like, you know, at the time, they had a fling for like cross vCenter vMotion, but I was dealing with moving VMs from dissimilar hardware to like an upgrade that we’re doing and without like EVC and all that stuff. But not to get too far into in the weeds. I just, I didn’t know how to do it with like virtually zero downtime, right? Like I didn’t want to have to take the outages. And so I leveraged a community for help there. At the same time, using my home lab, you know, there was ways I was trying to figure out how do I can simulate what we’re trying to do at work. And this was all while I was a sys engineer. So because of that, you know, I was, I get really excited whenever I find out something new and something I like. So I go and tell my buddy at work, like my peers, I go tell my boss and say, hey, you know, this is, this is something new I found out. And I was just playing around with this and they’re like, oh man, that’s amazing, whatever. And you know, dialing it back a little bit, going back to the comments of like people that are envious or they’re getting mad about you in that role. At that level, there was nothing like that. Like we all, at the systems engineering level, at least where I worked, the network engineers, the system engineers, we all were like one team, one dream. And it was great because you checked your ego at the door. There’s no bad questions and we’re just trying to figure stuff out and everyone’s on the same because I think everyone went through a similar path to getting there. So they understand all that stuff that happens beforehand. But anyway, yeah, you know, we collaborate all the time and, and I just, I really just wanted to find out how to get things done.

Manuel: So without having to read and just kind of bounce ideas off of people because I’ve done that quite a bit, both the VMUGs and other people that I’ve understand or know have a specific expertise, right? There’s something valuable about just talking through an idea, bouncing something off of somebody else. Sometimes they might suggest something that you didn’t think about, right? I can Google all day, but I only have my limited knowledge. You will bring up something. I never thought about that. Okay, now let me go research that. The other thing, and I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, is you start asking somebody else a question. You start bouncing ideas off of them and it’s happened to me quite a bit. I’ll answer my own question, right? Just that back and forth dialogue, I’m like, you know what? What if I did this or, hey, I didn’t think about this other problem. Like I have a friend of mine, Oscar, and him and I were notorious for this. I would call him up all the time, like, hey, do you have five minutes? Yeah. Excuse me. I have this problem. I’m trying to do this. Here’s what I’ve done, you know, and I’ll explain everything that I’m doing, and almost before he can give me an answer, I’m like, you know what it is? It’s probably X, Y, and Z. Does this sound like it would work? And he’s like, yep, that sounds like it. Just something about verbally talking about it with somebody else does wonders.

Erick: It does. Yeah, and I think you need to vocalize it because in your head, you know, you are your own worst enemy and you don’t see past some of the blockers there. The peer that I worked with on the engineering side, much like your friend, I would call him all the time. Like we were attached at the hip and even after work, like I’m in the shower and I’m thinking like, oh crap, like I think I figured it out. Maybe let me go ask him. So I’ll give him a buzz. I’m like, hey man. What do you think about this? Hey, hey, let me get your opinion on this, right? Like sometimes it’s all in your approach because I feel like some people, if you’re like, hey, I need your help with something or hey, hey, can you like, you know, I’m struggling with something. It depends on how you approach it. But if you’re like, hey, let me get your opinion on this. More people are more welcoming to that and they want to kind of engage. They’re like, oh yeah, like I’m all about opinions, right? Like IT people, they have so many opinions. So they’re like, yeah, yeah, let me do it. But yeah, we’ve talked through so many things just like what you described and yeah, there are probably are a lot of scenarios where I’ve talked myself into like, oh, I think I know what the problem is.

Manuel: And it’s funny you mentioned that, right? I think you’re 100% right with the approach where a lot of people are like, can you help me with this? Can you help me with this, right? Almost sounds like, and I’ve encountered this with certain people when they’re like, hey, can you help me with this? They basically want you to do it. Or just give them the answer. Hey, can you help me with this? Tell me what I need to do so I can just be done because I’m tired of struggling or I don’t want to deal with it as opposed to, hey, can you give me your opinion? Oh, you’re interested, you’re trying to learn 100%. I will all day and you’re right. I think I’ve done the same thing where I go through and I’ll approach it with, hey, let me bounce an idea off of you. Let me ask you for your opinion without consciously knowing that that’s the approach I’m taking.

Erick: Right. Yeah, no, for sure. It really is all in the approach and, you know, there are certain aspects of being, so when I was in the role in the system engineering role, there were certain things, certain etiquette that I feel like in, at least in the organization from what I experienced like you had to follow. There were certain people that you’re like, hey, you know, I can’t, I can’t ping this machine like, you know, what’s, what’s the deal? And you’re like talking to the network guys and they’re like, did you try this? Did you try this? Did you try this? One of the things I learned pretty early on was they want you, they want to see some type of effort before you send something over the wall, right? They say, hey, if you approach it a little different way saying, hey, I can’t get any kind of response from this machine, this is what I’ve tried. Like what else, what else can I do? And there are a lot more, you know, because then they don’t have to go back and recycle and think about like, did you check the firewall settings? Did you make sure that was off? Did you, you know, like before they get into the switch and look at why it’s not, not working. But, and that’s just one, one example, but there’s, there’s so many things where there has to be some type of effort before sending things over the wall. And I think that’s what differentiated me between a lot of those individuals that stayed in the same spot was because, you know, they were on autopilot, right? They’re like, oh, I don’t know what this is. I’m just going to, you know, this looks like a network engineering task. I’m going to kick it over and I’m like, well, did you try anything? Like did you, maybe it’s up now, maybe it’s working and we could close it. And like, you know, just those little things. But I think, I think that effort and then approaching people that way is a little bit better.

Manuel: Nice.

Erick: Yeah.

Manuel: And where did you, where did blogging kind of start to fall into that?

Erick: So when I had the home lab, thanks for circling back around to that because I almost forgot, but when I had the home lab, I thought in my head, you know what, I need to document this. And I was already blogging in terms of my own personal blog, which is like stuff that I liked, right? Like, and not like, I wouldn’t say it’s like a diary, but it was just like, you know, movies I like this, like video games that I played, like things like that. And it’s, you know, sometimes I’ll look back on it and be like, man, I was right, like, what was I thinking? Like, why did I do that? But it’s, you know, from that, I was like, well, maybe I should start something and help other people that are trying to do the same thing that I did. And that’s primarily the exact thought. And so, you know, I spun up a blog and I documented kind of just like me building the lab. And then from there, I just, you know, it started spinning me into other people that had blogs and learning from them and what they did. But I had, you know, my own set of hardware and my particular problems, so I’m like, oh, maybe other people have my setup as well and they want to figure out how to do this. And so, I, you know, there was, I just kind of wanted to give back a little bit and that’s, you know, kind of why I started it.

Manuel: Yeah, I did one for a while and the exact same thing. I wanted to document because I would come up with something and I would spend all this time troubleshooting, figuring it out. And then lo and behold, something would happen, I’d probably blow the lab out and come back and I’d run into that same issue and I was like, God, what did I do, what did I do?

Erick: Yes.

Manuel: What did I do to fix this? I was going through that process again and that’s what ultimately started me going through and blogging and saying, hey, you know what, I’m going to go through. So instead of me Googling, I was going straight to my blog and I’m like, I know I created something on the Cisco UCS on how to, you know, the fabric interconnects. I had this issue and I documented it and boom, there it is. And it’s funny, the whole give back thing, I thought, oh, no one’s really going to, who’s going to know it’s obscure, no one’s going to care. Eventually I hooked up Google Analytics to it and I started looking at what was, what were people trending, what were the things that, the pages that were getting views, how were they getting there? And it was amazing to me. That Cisco UCS fabric issue that I had where the way that those work, if you’re not familiar, so there’s like an A and a B fabric, right? There’s primary, secondary. And there’s times where it would fail over and it would get stuck. That IP address that you would use for the cluster would get stuck in transition. And there’s manual commands that you had to go in.

Erick: No shut or something?

Manuel: No, it wasn’t even no shut, no, actually I can look up the blog and tell you exactly what it is, right? I’ll probably post the link to it. But I would go through and I was like, oh, now I know what I need to do. And that one for the longest time was one of the ones that got hit the highest, right? And it was short. Hey, I ran into this problem. Here’s the commands I ran. Boom. I mean, it was, you didn’t have to scroll anything. It was just short, quick, here’s the commands. And just all the time. So I’m assuming it’s something that would happen common and I was just like, oh man, seeing that made me want to get back into it. And I started doing it again for a little while. The problem that I ran into is I dislike writing. I like documentation, so I did it at work. I would document things that I did, systems that I set up. And my motivation was there is I want to hand this off to somebody else. The way that you mentioned, hey, I want to move up, I’m learning. I would do the same thing like, hey, somebody’s going to take over for me. I went through all this trouble of setting this up, figuring it out, because I don’t know if you ran into this where you would step into a role and you’re like, how is this set up? Why does this work this way? And

Erick: Yes.

Manuel: it’s all in people’s heads.

Erick: It is.

Manuel: So that was what got me is like, I’m going to document all this stuff at work so that that way I can hand it off and free me up. I want to learn VMware. Well, I have to do all this other basics of here. You take care of this that’s documented. I get to go figure out and troubleshoot and play with the new stuff. The issue I ran into it blogging is it was all homelab, it was personal. I did document like the Cisco UCS, some things that I did at work, but it was just, I just dislike writing.

Erick: Yeah. See, I think we’re a little different there because I didn’t mind it. I made it a little fun in my sense only because, I mean, I write basically kind of how I talk, but then I love putting all the little gifs and little things. I just made it, I thought in my head, man, when I’m reading these blogs, they seem very dry and to the point and I always had this, I mean, I joke around a lot at work and I think it just makes the environment that much more lively and so I wanted to showcase a little bit of my personality in there. I remember having that thought when I started it and so that was one of the things and on top of the documentation because I forget things all the time. I’m like, did I, this seems so familiar, did I do this before? Let me look. And there are times where I’ll go back to it and find an article of something that I wrote. But yeah, it is strange because just like you were saying, people still comment on stuff like on my blog that’s just sitting there and it’s so old, the tech is not even, it’s not even supported on the VMware side anymore, but some companies that can’t move as fast, they’re still running into certain things and no, it’s kind of nice to be able to just kind of reply back and be helpful there, but on top of that, I think that was one of the other just byproducts of me being promoted into the senior role as well in the enterprise I was in at Wynn and I continued on with it. Not much changed from me going other than like the pay bump from going from a sys engineer to a senior. Honestly, just thinking about it now, there wasn’t, yeah, the other sys engineers there would look to us, but we were already doing that anyway, so I don’t think it really moved the needle too much on that portion. There was a lot more, I would say, architecture discussions about how we should design something, but another thing I would say is having a really good leader at the time, because the manager I had, both of them at the time, they both used to be in my previous position and that I think really helps because, A, they know when you’re BSing them on how long it takes to do something, but, B, they know what it’s like in your shoes, so they have empathy for you and they know just the struggles you’re going through, but, yeah, having that good solid management foundation, I think, is really helpful and it helped me around that time. But continuing on, because of that connection I had with management, ultimately I ended up leaving, right, I ended up leaving Wynn, and so I ended up leaving because there was another opportunity and at the time there was no position above mine at where I was at in the Wynn in our enterprise, we didn’t have architects and I didn’t want to go into a different route or become management, so ultimately, I ended up following my manager and leaving to another company and at that time, that company, I was there for a short period of time, but there was a bunch of chaos that happened because I just had a kid around, shortly before I joined that time, COVID happened, so this is 2020 now, and at the time, the demands for that job, I wouldn’t really say demands, but I would say just the way that job was structured and just the culture around it didn’t really resonate with me, so I ultimately decided to move on

Manuel: And you mentioned that you kind of followed a manager, so is that something he or she reached out to you and said, hey, I’m over here, you’d be a good fit, did you start looking and kind of reach out to them, what was that interaction like?

Erick: Yeah, so they were approached by somebody that was previously also at Wynn and there was an opportunity that was there and for them, it was an uplift from management to another level to director and usually when management leaves, they like to bring along the engineers that they work with, that they know they can rely on and we’ve worked in the trenches for such a long time and in spending about a decade at Wynn, everything we’ve built there, so ultimately, yeah, it was a conversation to where he was building his team there and he needed two engineers, so me and the guy that I would ping when I’m trying to figure things out, he took us both along and it was kind of weird because we still had to interview with some of the individuals there, but ultimately, we ended up all working together over there, but it was a very short live for me.

Manuel: Man, this has been a great conversation. I almost wish we had another hour or so to keep going, but definitely, if you would be interested, I know that there’s still part of your journey that we haven’t covered, we haven’t covered topics on certification, study, interview process, there’s just so much to go, but definitely, it was a pleasure. I’m humbled and I appreciate that you decided to come on and be a guest on the show and I hope that at some point in the near future, you don’t mind coming back on.

Manuel: Yeah, definitely not. Let’s do it. Happy to finish out the story and I’m happy to share what I’ve learned along the way.

Manuel: Cool. Well, I appreciate it.

Erick: Yeah.

Manuel: Good having you.

Erick: For sure.

Manuel: Take it easy.

Erick: Thanks.