Show Notes

In this episode of Career Downloads, host Manuel Martinez welcomes James Oravec, a Senior Manager for Software Engineering, who shares his inspiring journey through the tech industry. From his early days in tech support to building a successful e-commerce venture and eventually leading software engineering teams, James offers a wealth of insights for anyone navigating their career in technology.

Key topics discussed:

1. 
   
2. James’s introduction to technology and his first job in tech support
   
3. The creation and growth of War Toys, James’s e-commerce business
   
4. Innovative warehouse optimization techniques developed for e-commerce operations
   
5. Transitioning from entrepreneurship to corporate software engineering roles
   
6. The patent development process at IBM and the value of continuous learning
   
7. Recent experiences with job searching in the current tech market
   

James shares valuable lessons on perseverance, adaptability, and the importance of pursuing your passions in the tech industry. Whether you’re just starting your career or looking to advance to leadership roles, this episode offers practical advice and inspiration to help you succeed in the ever-evolving world of technology.

Tune in to learn how James turned a $15/hour side hustle into a thriving business, developed creative solutions for e-commerce operations, and navigated the challenges of job searching in today’s competitive market. This episode is packed with actionable insights to help you take control of your tech career and achieve your professional goals.

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone. So this is Career Downloads and my name is Manuel Martinez, where every episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a new guest to understand more about their career. So we’ll dive into their background and try to uncover any actionable items for you and really try to understand what the different guests have used, you know, different techniques, tips that they’ve used to manage their career. And for today’s episode, I have with me James Oravec and we’re going to dig into his background. So this is something that’s of interest to me. So he is on the software side. So software engineer, software developer, I spent most of my time on the infrastructure side. So I know a lot of infrastructure people, networking, storage, things of that nature. So again, I’m really excited and interested to get to know a little bit more about James. So welcome James.

James: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Manuel: No, I appreciate you coming on. So one of the first things that I want to do is if you can just, and again, we don’t have to get into detail at this point, but if you can just tell me what your current role is now and just like a brief summary of what it is that you do, and then we’ll work our way, you know, to that point.

James: Sure. So currently, I am a Senior Manager for Software Engineering, oversee a team of developers, overseeing a number of products, which we have to go through the normal release process cycles. And that’s everything from coding new features to fixing defects to security patches. And then outside of that, main goal is to wow our customers and give them something delightful to use.

Manuel: That’s awesome. So now the next part that I want to get into is if you can just kind of give me a little bit of background about kind of where you grew up and eventually what got you interested into technology, like have you always had a passion for it? Again, we don’t have to go into detail, but just like a summary, you know, were you that kind of kid that, you know, had a computer at the age of five and that drove you or, you know, was it later on in life?

James: Its’s an interesting question because there’s just so much that has transpired in maybe different directions I could have gone. So I’ll even go back to as far back as I remember. When I was a kid, like elementary school, first job I wanted to be was a cop. My dad kind of talked me out of that, then I wanted to be a dentist. And then after that, why I don’t know why I want to be a dentist, but I think it was just hey make some money and things of that nature. And then one day my mom who was working as a checker, she was talking about some guy who came in and was fixing either an ATM machine or something of that nature, something to do with computers. And at the time, this was a real long time ago, he was making $50 an hour to do this. And I was like, oh, wow, that’s a lot of money. So I was like, I want to get into computers. So that’s what kind of shifted me into that kind of mindset. As far as what got me or kept me there, I think when I was a kid, I was exposed to computers. Started with the Apple IIe, like way back in the early 80s. So the big actual floppy disk and you got to do two.

Manuel: The three, you know, like the five inch.

James: A five and a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. A five and a quarter, right? Three and a half. Five and a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn’t like the eight inch ones. It was the five inch ones. So I did that and I enjoyed it and my dad was taking like college courses. So he was writing programs that my brother and I would be playing. So it would be like guess a number or guess an animal and kind of go through that. So I kind of enjoyed that, wasn’t opposed or, it didn’t feel unfamiliar to me to say the least. When I went through middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, they had some technology courses and some computer courses and I ended up getting the computer medal for the school in my eighth grade. And I was actually kind of curious why and I ended up finding out that I had the highest percentage of all the students of all the different classes that took it. So that was how I ended up getting that. In my early teens, I’d say probably about 13 or so, my dad signed my mom up for some courses to learn just general computer skills. So at the time, instead of like Microsoft like Word and the suite that you would be, at the time Lotus was popular. So you had like Lotus 1, 2, 3 instead of Excel, you had Amnipro instead of Microsoft Word, etc. So what occurred was my dad negotiated to get it so that my brother and I could get the courses for free if he signed up for my mom. So through his sales tactics, he got it so that I got all the courses for free and then I ended up over the course of the summer taking like every course that they had to offer. Like every day, like five days a week go there, take the course. So they had beginning, intermediate and advanced. That then led to where I started to find little side jobs like in the neighborhood where someone’s computer wouldn’t work or something of that nature. So this was probably mid-90s and I would charge like $15 an hour, which was a fantastic deal for the people because if they went to a Circuit City or Best Buy or anything at the time, I think they charge somewhere between $50 to $75 an hour. So you could do the neighborhood kid at $15 an hour, which was great money for me, or you could try it. So I ended up getting a decent amount of work, helped tutor, train, helped fix.

Manuel: And this was all just word of mouth. Once you got a reputation for like one or two people, were you going and actually marketing or is it just widespread?

James: I think probably what occurred was my dad was like in sales for most of his life. So he would always be talking to people and as they would talk, if they had like a computer issue or something, he’d be like, oh yeah, my son can, so I actually had like a sales person always there looking out and then word of mouth after that because now you get one person that you help that says, oh yeah, I know someone and then next thing you know, you get a decent amount of side money or not bad for side hustle. But yeah, the main thing was trying to have enough skills and my main thing was like a lot of the time was if I didn’t know it, that was okay. I would play with it long enough until I could figure it out and get it to fix. And for the longest time in my career, especially when I was young, my thing was if you pulled me in to help work on something, you only pay me if I fixed the problem, meaning that so my motivation is I’m going to fix your problem because otherwise I don’t get paid. And then sometimes if it was like a really tough problem, say it took me five hours, six hours, and I thought it should be more like two or three, then I would only charge for two or three hours because when I was having a higher, when I started doing the higher rates, then that’s where like I would come in at the higher, but then I would make sure that the customer always felt like they got more than what they were paying for.

Manuel: And is that, was that just kind of a way to establish a good relationship with the customer? Or did you at that time, and I understand that you were relatively young, but were you using it also as well. This is, I can’t ask them to pay me to learn, so I’ll just charge them for the time that I’m actually spent fixing their problem. Was that kind of the mindset?

James: So to give it like a more modern type deal, like if I went and I was to help someone, if I was to charge them say $110 an hour or $120 an hour now, someone’s not paying me $110 or $120 an hour to learn at that rate. It’s already expected that I know whatever it is. So as a software engineer, for most of my career, and then like I’ve been pretty fungible where I’ve had to learn a lot of cross training, so some of the infrastructure, like when I had my War Toys business, I had to set up my own servers, had to co-locate them, even had to T1 lines at one point. So there’s a lot that goes into it. Excuse me. So the main thing though is like if I’m charging someone for the rate, I’m not going to put around for 10 hours when it should be something that’s going to be an hour or twos worth of work. And if I did put around with that, then that kind of ruins some of my own reputation for that repeat or where the customers come back. And normally I’m so busy that it’s very rare that I’m doing side work now that it’s normally like I make really good money with what I currently do. So it’s put the time and effort into the main job. And then normally if like a friend’s got a company or something and they need help or support, then that’s where this kind of comes into play. But the main thing is like I’m not looking to charge or overgouge. It’s about building and maintaining those relationships.

Manuel: Nice. So you did that for I’m assuming for a while, because at some point I saw that you kind of started your own business. So is that the business that you’re talking about?

James: Yeah, so I’ll transition or I’ll fill in some more of the gaps. So that was my about mid teens. And then after the mid teens, in my teens, my best friend from high school, we were both into computers and we were like, Hey, let’s become hackers or whatever. So we got really into not only computers, but actual phone technology and stuff of that nature. So and then in high school, I was doing a part time thing where half the school was my normal schooling and then half the time was a trade school. So I did electronics and then computer tech. So I got exposure had exposure to like alligator clips and soldering and all that stuff. So make like a beige box with a ringing tip and then like open up the wall socket and when they had the landlines and be able to make phone calls and do all sorts of craziness. And then so with that, that’s where I ended up going to the library, kind of getting all the different books I could read a ton of stuff on computers. So this was in addition to the stuff that I had with the training courses that I got from, I think they were called New Horizon at the time. And then after that, graduated high school. After I graduated high school, I went and I took two certificate or two certificates. I got my A+ certification and I got my certified Novell Administrator. So that was my first, first, first certifications. And then it was weird because like if I was to go back in time, I graduated with a 4.166 GPA. I should have applied to places, but I don’t know that I had the guidance to apply to the good colleges when I should have and the whole process that was behind that. So with that, there was a couple of things that happened that summer after I graduated. One was like, my dad was like, are you going to get job? And then are you going to apply for a college? So I said, okay. So I went down to UNLV. And this was like three weeks before their admissions. And I remember the registrar like so much attitude, like looking at me like, oh, you’re looking to apply to get into UNLV. And when it starts in three weeks, I’m like, yeah, she’s like, okay, like, like sigh, let me see your transcripts. And it was like the 4.166. She goes, welcome to UNLV. [Laughter] So that’s when I was like, hmm, maybe I undershot what I because it was like so much sass and so much attitude. And then having a strong GPA reflected well. Then in parallel of that, I was looking to try to get my my first job. Well, my actually my first job was putting together computers at a little local computer shop. So actually, like a symbol of computers, put the chips on the motherboards and all that stuff. And then after I did that for a winter, like a winter break for my senior year. So then my first what I’d say real job because extended period of time was doing tech support for Fluor Daniel. And I ended up doing that over MicroAge. And they became UPS Teleservices. While I was there, they got bought out. So that was interesting. Because I didn’t know how to apply or how to do a resume or whatever it was. So instead of having like a standard one, two, maybe three pages resume, my resume at the age of 18 was I think 12 pages. [Laughter] So so but it listed. So this is where I was using like my I knew how to do the different fonts and all that stuff. So I created this thing that listed all the different courses that I took. And I was faxing it to them. And I get a phone call like two or three minutes like into it and say, Hey, are you available to to to interview? And I was like, my resume come all the way through. It was still printing on their side because it was so so long. But it was pretty funny because though and the way that I got this lead was when I was going to the cert certification places, they had a billboard that had potential jobs. So they had three jobs that had three different amounts. And they actually showed the dollar amount. And I think if memory serves me correctly at the time, this entry level, first level tech support was paying $10.58. So and I mentioned that because parallel of everything going on, I have in high school, I did ROTC for four years became the battalion commander, so the highest ranked. And I still had people from the military trying to talk to me into joining and all that stuff. And when I was talking to them, they were saying, Hey, yeah, you come, we’ll pay for your college, you’ll become a second lieutenant after four years of college, and then you’ll make $20,000 a year. And I’m like center, I’m thinking, so you tell me I have to come in, go through college for four years, and they get paid less than what I can make now doing tech. And I’m like, nothank you. So so so that was kind of like my my clear way of making sure that I was going into tech. And then doing the tech support. I remember the manager who first hired me. So this is what was also interesting is I started at the very end or the cusp of the age cutoff. So when I was applying for the job, I was 17, almost 18. So I wasn’t 18 yet. So I couldn’t be treated like as an adult. So my manager, when he was interviewing me, he goes, Hey, yeah, my like, impressive resume, I like what I see. My biggest concern is around reliability and commitment for like young age. So he said, if you give me your word, that you’ll stick to this for two years, and you’ll do this. And then we that were pretty much like at the end, it was like that was the final conversation we had said, absolutely. So like, I really made sure that it was like two years, I will, I will make sure I stay true to my word. And he was a funny guy. So he, he, when we first met, his first question, he goes, can you tell me how you changed the oil of the CMOS? And I’m like, sit there, I’m thinking, well, the CMOS, and, and I’m, and I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, and like, my brain’s trying to piece it together because he just gave me like one of those things that doesn’t go together. So at Circuit City, I remember they had like, Internet Oil Exchange, which was like some application for helping like clean up the browsers and the cookies and all that stuff like way back when, and I was like, sit there and I started talking, I was like, I know this, and I know the CMOS and the BIOS and stuff. But I have no clue how they come together. And so he was testing me out to see if I would bulls**t my way through like some sort of answer, or if I would give some sort of context. And I took things very literal at that time. So it took me a while to like understand, and then afterwards it was like a series of things. He took me through the office. And while we were walking through, someone was having an issue. So he ended up like pulling up the terminal started to ping to try to like troubleshoot like real time. And I, and this was around the time where like prior is like lots of dialups, and I was just starting to get into the network. So I didn’t even know what ping was at the time. So I got to learn to see what it was. And I was very eager to learn because I want to learn more. So I think that was like a good sign of just showing the interest in learning. And that went a long way. So sorry, that was a bit of a story. So that got me my tech support job. I ended up taking that serious. They gave us a script that was like, Hey, this is your intro. This is and then this is how you handle the middle part. And then this is your final part. And they had a quality control with that where if you didn’t do these certain things, you don’t get the points. And if they listen in and you do all these things, then you get like a punch card and the punch card would go from $5 McDonald’s to like a $10 gift card for something else all the way up to like $100 gift card. And then part of my question was what happens after that? And the found out that it resets. So then you go back to $5 and then you go all the way back all the way back up to the $100. But I just went through seemed like it was very straightforward. They started to nickname me the robot because I was so systematic with how I did it.

Manuel: And that script was it just because it sounded if I understood correctly, it’s like I Helpdesk type job. And the script was just to try and understand what the problem is.

James: Welcome to Fluor Daniel. My name is James Oravec. How may I help you today?

Manuel: Got it. So it’s that type of script. It’s not like, Hey, this is the problem or having tried to reboot. And it wasn’t something like that. It wasn’t a troubleshooting script. It was like an introductory like, Hey, introduce yourself. Make sure your answer and the question and at the end.

James: Yeah. And they had things like, so it’d be like, during the call, it’d be like, man, get your name. You say Manuel, I say, Oh, nice to meet you Manuel. How can I help you today? I got your name, I think three to five times. I forget what the number was during the call. So what would occur is then it made it more personal. And then at the end, it was like, thank you for calling the Fluor Daniel help desk. Hope you have a wonderful day. And it was something around those lines. And I apologize. If I messed up the QA guy may ding me these days.

Manuel: No, and that’s fine. And then that’s, that’s helpful to understand. So he, it sounds like he really wanted to make sure that the whoever was calling in was getting a, I’m assuming like a consistent experience. They felt like they were being heard and, and not just somebody that’s getting most places you call through right now, like, Hey, how’s it going? Okay, great. What’s the problem? Right? It wasn’t like a like a fast food drive through line where they’re just trying to shovel people through. He wanted to make sure.

James: So, so they did look at metrics outside of the quality. So the quality was a big portion of this. But what the management would also look at is the throughput of how long does it take you to do your calls? So even if you got a five star on your quality review, if you’re averaging 20 minutes to solve or help customers, that’s a lot longer than, than, than otherwise. So between my consistent on the quality, then it became a question of how long does it take to resolve the issues? So they had it’s unfortunate because I don’t think that everybody else was as engaged as I was or taking it as serious. So I think my average call volume was or call length was about six minutes, six and a half minutes or something of that nature. So it was like really small compared to the rest of the team. And because that and the high quality, they had these larger prizes where I ended up getting the high performer award for the company because of the volume plus the how many times I got the quality stuff. So I guess taking it serious, trying to actually connect with the customers, give them a good experience and solve the problems was, was key for, for this particular role. While I was working there, this is when I started my first side business. And that started because we went to see my parents insurance, I guess he was my insurance guy too for for my car. And he was in there and he was telling me he’s had this problem on his computer for about three weeks. So I ended up going into MSConfig and removing some of the startup stuff and it was solved within like two, three minutes. And he was like super impressed. So he goes, do you do websites? And this is like at the very world wide webs just first coming out and everything else. And I heard stories that Bill Gates, who didn’t have the stuff before he did, but figured he could figure it out or wherever it was. So I said, I don’t know, but I can, I’ll figure it out. So this ended up getting me introduced to to a chiropractor who wanted to create a website called war-toys.com or I’m sorry, World War Toys was his. So he wanted to create World War Toys. He had the domain reserved already. And it was a question of like, what would it take to do like a shopping cart? So, you know, this is me coming out of high school doing my $15 an hour thinking, okay, well, probably take about 20 hours or something. I don’t know how long it would take. Had no clue how long it would take. So I ended up quoting him $300. He jumped all over it. And then I ended up spending about three months figuring it out and buying a different like a shopping cart program out there, figuring out how to connect and set it up and do all that. So I ended up spending about 350 bucks. So net negative 50 bucks. But what it ended up happening was I set it up so that I was getting the monthly co hosting like type fees. So I ended up getting a monthly.

Manuel: Like a residual.

James: Residual that was always positive, which made up for the fact that I went negative at the very get go because long term I was getting making money month over month to help maintain and look in patch and all that stuff. So that was fun. So that was A. learned how to do some co co-locating stuff back in the day where it’s not not the five minutes. You spin up a EC2 instance like nowadays. This was like you actually had to have hardware or find hardware or find someone who had that so that you can co-locate etc.

Manuel: And is that at that point that sounds like it’s probably the first like a first introduction to the software side, right? And when I say software, meaning more software development, right? Like how to build a website as opposed to software like the OS level like troubleshooting.

James: Yeah. Yeah. I think in high school, there was I had very limited exposure where we had some basic type code for tracking some grades and stuff like an ROTC. But as far as actual like real code or exposure, this this this was it. And it was classic ASP and they used or connected to an Access database. And that was entertaining because eventually World War Toys was going and the owner was making so much money doing chiropractic doing chiropractic that it didn’t make sense to continue as the side business. So I said, Hey, can I buy your business? And then I talked to my dad said, Hey, can you in essence finance and then I’ll do the tech side of it. So my dad said yes. So we ended up pretty much buying the company for pretty much all of his inventory at cost. And that helped him just clear out and get out of the business. So he didn’t want to do anything. But we didn’t know if there was any pending customer orders or things of that nature. So we wanted to do like a rebrand and kind of like start off like a new new company. So this is where we reserved the domain war-toys.com and then started build that in between there. There was a stint where I was trying to run my own business, which was programming like websites and things of that nature. It seemed like everybody in their brother wanted to have a website, web presence. But they didn’t really know why. So it was like, Hey, you can create this web page that says this information, it’s sitting there, but then they don’t have anybody like coming to it or driving business or getting anything actionable out of that. And that was a concern because what was occurring was I found that as I was meeting new customers, I was going through the same spiel of saying, Hey, this is why you want to do it. Because like you need to be able to drive the business, you need to be able to do something. And if you’re not doing that, you’re not making money, which like what is the purpose of the website at that point. So.

Manuel: It just becomes a billboard that nobody’s probably paying attention to as they’re driving by something like that.

James: Exactly. Exactly. And that was interesting because now I have to explain the thing and I refer to it as like pulling teeth because it was just really painful having to go through the same thing over and over. And then on the flip side, at the time, I had a those side car magnets because we’re talking about people doing different things. I got zero phone calls from the side car magnets with the advertising like the billboards you’re talking about that everybody ignores. So I don’t know if anybody else has had luck with getting actual customers to call off of us. But that was a couple hundred bucks and just wasted. But I figured I’d mention it because you’re talking about the billboards. So going from World War or from.

Manuel: I don’t mean to interrupt you here, but real quick. So then if you’re telling everybody else, build a website, drive traffic, you know, you mentioned you bought the little car magnets, I do remember like my dad had his business and he threw them on there. Did you have a website for your business at that point?

James: I did.

Manuel: And was that help kind of contrasting? Do you think that that helped drive business to you or it didn’t either?

James: No, it was the same. Like I think I may had two or three people kind of ping or reach out. But just about everybody and their brother were like, Oh, hey, I can build your website or build a website for $99 or whatever it was. So short of the word of mouth or the network that I had, I wasn’t getting any real connections. And then the the input or the feedback or the connections I was getting, it was like so painful to try to make any money, because you’d have to align to like what the scope of work would be, etc. And it was just painful. So this is where the shift or the pivot from that idea to how can I apply what I’ve been trying to tell everybody onto my own actual website for selling with the ecommerce. So numbers to put in perspective, the number of orders that World War Toys did in a year, we were getting that in less than a week at one point. So the scale that we ended up doing, and we had this was early times where things weren’t really programmed yet. So even so I’ll talk through some of the stuff where so, okay, I guess, I’ll give a little bit more details into this because it was like, mom, pop shop, selling action figures online. The aspect, the unique aspect of the business was that the action figures could be broke down. And then you can sell the uniforms separate from the weapons separate from the figures. And then what that did was increased how much you sold everything for. So going from like a 30% profit margin to like a 300%. But it took time. And in that process, then somebody coming to the website to buy can put together a unique squad of figures. So like if they served in the military or something, and they wanted to recreate the squad that they served with, they could do that. So this is where that flexibility, like it was a win win for for how the model worked. When we first started, though, there was a lot of pain points, because we had the Avery two by five printouts for the sticky labels that we’d put on the boxes. So we had to figure out like how do you do the shipping. So just doing the address in itself, people would get the printed out piece of paper, retype the address. And that was taking time, where if you looked at how much time every day, it was five, 10 minutes, every time that somebody was going through this. So I was like, okay, I need to program or I need to automate this. So I went through figured out how to create a template that I could copy and paste into the Avery template, and then do and then I could print and to get it so that it would actually align so that if I reprinted four that I could print to the next six, etc. So that is where I started to look at, I think some of the business operations aspects. And so it was not just, Hey, here’s the technical aspect as like a software engineer, but also how does this affect operations? Where do we put the time? So I always had like a two page list of items. And I’d have to try to force rank to say, Hey, this is going to save us the most time if I did this first, if I did this. So we ended up, I did some pretty cool stuff for the time. So the printing of the labels, and then getting it so that we then connect into like USPS so that we can get the tracking codes and all that stuff. So those were like some of the shipping aspects for the logistics.

Manuel: And during that time, so as you’re going through, and like you mentioned the business operations, that’s just something that is it still just you doing all the operations during this time? Or did you have a group of people like I’m just curious to scale because yeah, you know, as a single individual, I can understand we’re like, Okay, this is this is terrible, right? This is taking me a long time. I want to automate this part. I want to improve this. And having a list is, I mean, it’s almost like a, if you think at it now, it’s almost like a mini like, think of like scrum or like project, not almost like a project plan, but like on a smaller.

James: Like a roadmap.

Manuel: Like a roadmap. Yeah. So was it just you trying to improve and not have to spend as much time doing this yourself? Or you mentioned it was 12x the amount of, you know, orders that you’re getting. So I’m wondering, did you start to kind of hire somebody and say, Hey, you’re taking too long?

James: Well, so, so I’ll get to some of the numbers and the skills that we got to. And I can talk freely about this because it’s my own business. You had a couple of questions. One of the questions was who was who was it? So I partnered with my dad, which then meant that my dad, my mom, myself, and my brother were helping. So in our house, we started, we took over the two car garage, lined it up with shelving that had like four or five tiers all around the outside that we had center things. And then after we took over the garage, then we took over the living room, part of the family room, and then we took over the loft, which had all the computer stuff. So the number of hours that were going into this or well, so I started this when I was doing my tech support job. So this was a side hustle. And then the side hustle got to the point where I was making so much money doing more on the side hustle. I was like, Hey, does it make sense that I’m still working my real job when I can put that time into this business instead? So we got aligned, now does it makes sense to do it full time. But even.

Manuel: And this is after your two years of commitment?

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so I did my two years. And then in that time period, it was interesting because when the business first started, I was telling them oh, yeah, I’m learning how to do this stuff on my own or on the side. And I ended up getting promoted to second level. And when I got promoted to second level, that impacted me. Because because of the performance that I was telling you about, I ended up getting the first pick of like what shift I wanted. So the shift I ended up picking was I think 10 a.m. to midnight or like 11 a.m. to midnight, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, every other Friday they they had off. So you didn’t get a huge volume of calls over the weekend. So it was just like a skeleton crew. But we still had to be there. You had to so is normally like, who really knows their stuff can help provide that support. So since we didn’t have a huge call volume that provided me the opportunity to have books that I could read. So this is where I could read like SQL and all that stuff. So it wasn’t me just sitting there being idle or wherever it is, I had to like get myself engaged and how to do this. And then that knowledge allowed me to like understand how to do the programming a little bit deeper, how to understand like SQL inquiries and data and things of that nature. And that’s kind of like where things started to go. Then when I got promoted, they wanted me more through like a Monday through Friday type shift, which then gave me a larger call volume as well. And then it took away from my ability to study on my own. So I got like super busy with that. So so so at that point, that shifted my ability to continue to learn. So I had to like make the choice one or the other. So I forget what was two and a half or three years into it, ended up quitting. Then I focused full time on my war toys, which was already producing money. Then that was fun because that that took me from 40 hour weeks to like 80 hour weeks. [Laughter] But but I used to tell people I said I’d rather work 80 hours for myself than 40 hours for someone else. And that took a lot, but I learned so much. We went from co-locating to Access could only support so many connections at a time. So we grew the business to the point where Access could not serve as the database anymore. And I was co-locating or working with someone else, and they weren’t able to help fix it. So I ended up buying my own server from Dell, figuring out how to configure set up the DNS and all that like the whole web server with physical hardware, pinged a couple buddies who had some ideas of the things. And so it was very like network. I don’t know this, but we’ll figure it out. I went through the process to get it set up. And then I set up my own co-locating with I don’t remember the name of the company. But they had some house over off of I think Eastern and Russell or something like over there. It was just some co-location thing. It was like literally a house where they had all the fibers. So I went in there, put my server on makeshift or so not like a real rack like a like here’s a shelf in essence. So I put it there, connect and put my Linksys router on top of that as my firewall connected it. And then, you know, got our static IPs and often running.

Manuel: So that’s interesting. So just out of a house, I’m assuming it’s just probably just wire shelves and you’re just seeing equipment everywhere and.

James: No, no, it’d be. Yeah. So if you had this room and say it was mostly empty, and then you had like three shelves at the back, that that’s what it was. So it was this shell the house that had the data. And I think what what occurred was they had a bigger data provider or network provider that came through and bought them out. So they were still offering as like a co location for their old customers, etc. But yeah, it was weird times late late 90s early 2000s. So once I had my own server, then it was a question of how do I get the shopping cart system off of Access into something that can support something better. So I ended up going from Access to MS SQL. And the reason why I did that was because the shopping cart was using VB script with classic ASP. So it was a Windows based type solution. So I had to pay a bunch of money for the license for SQL. But then the syntax changes slightly between when you’re accessing through when you’re getting data from Access versus

Manuel: SQL.

James: SQL, like the date formats a little bit different and things that nature. So I had to go through the whole code base, find out all the different entry points of what variants were there, made all the different code updates, got it so that started running. And then after that, we didn’t have the database locking issues anymore because MS SQL was able to support the number of connections for the customers that we’re running into.

Manuel: And that that figuring out that the differences, are you just trial and error? I know you mentioned before that you’re a big reader. So did you read and try to understand? I’m just curious what the thought process was or how you went about trying to figure something like that out because it’s newer, right at that. There’s no Google, you can’t just Google, hey, what are the differences that spits it out? Yeah, chat, GPT, hey, what are the differences? How do I code this differently? Yeah, it’s more a manual process.

James: Yeah, I don’t 100% know when Google came out. But this was either right around the time Google was coming out, which means it wasn’t that great yet.

Manuel: Or it’s probably still Yahoo.

James: Yeah. Well, yeah, you still we had Yahoo, Alta Vista, and several others. And like even the web page, optimization into try to get your SEO type stuff. So I had to go through like different series of all that stuff too. But your question of how did I figure that out was when I tried to connect it to the new database, things weren’t working, and it was giving an error, and it would say the error was around whatever the date was. So ended up having, I think I had three different SQL books, pretty like really thick books. And the first time I went through to teach myself, I went through a big SQL book where it’s mostly syntax and things of that nature. So it wasn’t doesn’t sound as terrible, but I read that in the course of a weekend. So I just went through and it’s like, you know, 30 hours, we get through the book and go from there. Then I had the foundation. I knew where kind of like an index of where things were. And then as I went back through, I probably ended up reading that book probably three or four times. And then in addition, they had like W3 Schools and things of that nature. So I went through like the SQL training on that multiple times. Fantastic tool, even today. Anytime I want to brush up on HTML, CCS, JavaScript.

Manuel: Even SQL commands. I’ve used that a few times just for SQL commands. I know I know how to do this. I remember the command. It’s been a little while. Just like you said, it’s a good refresher.

James: Yep. So I don’t know if W3, I know that I’ve used it several times, but I don’t know at the time that I was doing the conversion, that I was aware of it or that it was around. So the books were the main thing figuring it out. And it was like, they used to sell Mountain Dew in the 24 packs, the cube. So you give me that and let me, you know, work on stuff from 8pm until 3am. Like, there tends to be a lot of magic that can happen in that time period.

Manuel: And you bring up something I know early on in both of our careers and many other people I’ve talked to is, you know, reading books. Now there’s videos. There’s all kinds of different ways to kind of learn skill sets, learn applications. Do you still see value in reading a book on a particular technology?

James: So I will probably take this a step deeper, because as I’ve progressed in my career, and I’ve got to meet a lot of very successful people, the most successful people I know tend to read a book a week. So some things can be technical, some things don’t have to be technical. For me, what I started to do and I really enjoy is Audible. And it’s because I can listen and I can process better audibly, Audible versus like visual. So I’m a little bit slower reader. I still comprehend like really well, but it takes me a lot longer to digest with reading versus Audible. So I got over like 100 books on my Audible. And those kind of books can help you like from the management, from the leadership, from understanding different techniques, items, whatever it is, you want to learn something about AI, they got books on AI, they got books on just about everything. You want clean architecture, they got that. So your question I think in general is if you’re trying to learn something, your intent or your goal should be to try to be the best at whatever you do. And the reason why you want to be the best at whatever you do is whoever is the best tends to make the most money. So if you’re looking at it from like a competitive or from a financial reward, it’s one thing that if you have like an entry level cert, but if you got some mega corporation that needs to do like a big data center or they got to do something, they will pay the money to have the people who really know what the hell they’re doing to perform that. And this is the reason like in tech, like you can get entry level positions, maybe 65,000, you can go to like mid tier, maybe 100, 120, your seniors, maybe your 150, 175, 180 or thereabouts, the staff and principal engineers goes up and maybe you’re in the 200s. But if you look at like your FANG type companies, your Facebook, your Amazon, your Apple, your Netflix, your Google, I know Facebook’s Meta now, but it’s still the fang acronym I like. If you go to levels.fyi, that to me is one of the best salary indications where people put in information, you can see the salary ranges of these very large type companies. And when you see the compensation, like if you can get to like principal engineer level and like Google or Meta or any of these type of companies, you can make over a million dollars a year. So the difference of, Hey, here’s $100,000 job versus Hey, here’s a million dollars a year job, where most of that comes in the form of RSU or something like that form. That’s, that’s pretty significant. So I mentioned that because the, that intent to become the best is going to pay you the path to get there. And then if you are doing this, it’s a question of how many different ways can you learn or be exposed to what you’re trying to learn. So part of that is reading, part of it is conversations and interactions with others. Part of it is doing so doing the hands-on. Sometimes if you watch the video versus if you listen to Audible versus if you read a book, these are all different ways that we can intake and learn that information. And I would say, and I apologize if it seems like I’m rambling, but they got a, Jim Kwik has a book, I believe it’s called Limitless. And he goes through the details of saying, these are things that you could do to actually learn and how to learn in effective, quick, type way. And I believe in that book, he even, he’s, he also suggests reading the book every week. So I recommend that book for anybody who wants to learn it because that, like if you really want to be like the best in what you do, like competitions, like tough.

Manuel: Right. And, and I’m glad you brought it up. And you mentioned like a lot of different things. And, and it’s true, right? People learn differently. They process information differently. But even if you do, I think, you know, if you’re focusing on something specific, right? Like you mentioned AI, hey, I want to understand AI. Can I watch a video about it and understand it? Sure. Could I read a book about it? Yes. Can I also listen to something? Most definitely. But to your point, like if you want to be the best, if you’re seeing, and I think this is where people in tech are looking to move, make a jump, sometimes maybe you have to do all three, right? And I think now with the, the fact that we’re able to get information so quickly, right? Well, I can just Google that. But you can, you can get the answer, but you can’t get extensive knowledge, right? To be the best, to be these people. And I know that right now, especially cybersecurity is like the hot topic, right? Cybersecurity. Oh, I’m going to get into cybersecurity. Sure. You can. And a lot of times I’ve seen, you know, boot camps pop up everywhere. People are like, Oh, you know, I want to get into cybersecurity. And that’s question I’ve gotten asked a lot. Like, well, how do I get in there? Hey, we’re, I don’t see a lot of these entry level jobs. I’m like, okay, they’re there. I’m sure there are. I don’t, I don’t think that boot camps are necessarily a bad thing, right? I mean, it’s, it’s a quick way to get exposure. But I think the misconception is I get through this boot camp, and I’m going to have enough to land an entry level job. And I would say that that’s it. And I’m very interested to give your opinion. I don’t think that’s the case. Again, let’s say even it’s a three months, three months is not enough time to say, okay, I am a cybersecurity expert. I really understand this.

James: Yeah. Yeah. So I agree with what you’re saying. And the reason why I look at this is my degree’s in computer science. And at the time, the very serious degree, STEM oriented, going through this, not, not something easy. So every week, you’re putting in maybe 50, 60 hours, going through all the course work, plus the take homes, plus the programming assignments, etc. So if you do that over the course of four years, and then you think that you can somehow dwindle that down into eight weeks, you’re being a little silly. And over the course of that extended period of time of learning, you’re getting deeper insights to these different items or these aspects, or you understand things at a deeper level. I think from like a bootcamp perspective, if it’s like a refresher, or it’s specific to like a particular technology or topic or something, that may actually be cool to complement something like four year degree. But it by itself is going to be hard. Now, by I pause, and I’m hesitant on this, because I know some people that never got a degree, that actually became very successful as well. But they you, you are up against trying to get your foot in the door, to be able to prove that you can perform and you can do like, if I’m the hiring manager, and I’m looking at you, do you have the qualifications, do you have the personality traits, that I know that if I give you something that it’s going to be done successfully in the proper way. And if all you have is a certificate or a six-week bootcamp or eight-week bootcamp or something of that nature, that becomes a lot more risky for me versus me saying, hey, I can spend a little bit more, someone who has a degree or whatever it is, and I can hire that. So it’s like a risk management type perspective. And you just put yourself in the perspective of the person hiring or and say, what would they do? Now, the question is, and I think the first two years, even with a four-year degree, it becomes very difficult because you need to get your foot in the door somewhere to be able to get paid decently. And then I think that after you have two years under your belt, plus your degree, you now have enough foundation that when you go to apply to other places, they’ll take you more seriously because you’ve now been in that you have industry experience in addition to the college, which means that you should have a lot of the foundations in place.

Manuel: Yeah. And the only thing I would add to that is probably, I know a few people, like you mentioned, that don’t have the degree that have been successful, but it’s similar. It took them a while to get in. And I don’t know many people. So I think that these are kind of more unique cases.

James: Yes.

Manuel: Is where they’ve gone through. And instead of spending the two years, let’s say going to college, they might have spent that year or that time building something and really learning technology. It’s not like, Hey, I went through a boot camp. It’s okay. Hey, I want to be, I want to know cybersecurity. Okay. Well, I’m learning networking, understanding that they’re reading those books. And I think there’s a huge advantage now. Like when you talked about first getting in like a website, right? It was basic HTML. You couldn’t do a lot of, you know, if you wanted to spin up a server, you touched on it at one point, right? You couldn’t just spin up an EC2 instance and have it run in and test whatever you want. Now I think you have the advantage. I think a lot of people, whether you’re just starting or you’ve been in it for a while is if I want to get into cybersecurity, I can dedicate the time. I can read and build something. So even though I’m not working in that industry, you can have something visual to your point. If I send you as a hiring manager, okay, this person has a degree, they’ve got two years experience. Okay, this person, maybe they picked up a certificate or two, but look, they’ve got a link to a website. They’re explaining what they’ve built. That makes it easier for somebody. Again, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the manager hiring side, but I would think that something like that would be almost just as appealing. It makes it a little bit more difficult where maybe you bring both people in and now you’re talking to them to find out, okay, on paper, this is what I see, but now talking to you, let me go through and see, okay, this website that they spun up, did they just copy paste a lot of code where they just following, or did they actually take the time to learn it and understand it and speak to it?

James: Yes. And I would say you touch on something which I think is really key is at the very initial get go. How do you distinguish yourself from the others? And if you have side projects or you have a portfolio where you can say, hey, here’s a demo of a website that I built, if that demo is impressive, that gives you a much better chance of getting hired. And I know at one of the places where I was working, I wasn’t a manager, but I was a more like a lead engineer. And so I was involved in some of the interview process. And the person, like I wasn’t impressed with the resume, etc. But they had their laptop and say, here’s my portfolio. And they showed me some of the websites they developed. And I was looking through this, I was like, this is pretty nice. This is pretty awesome. So that then got them through to the next steps to do some additional interviews, and they ended up getting hired. So, so I would say, initially, if you’re going down the road of not having the degree or the boot camp, you need to have a really strong portfolio of something that you can demo that helps convey to the hiring manager that you will be able to be successful in that role in that position. And if your presentation is something mediocre, you’re probably not going to get it. But if you present, and it looks like, oh, yeah, you’re at the top, I think I’ll we shoot for the top 10% if not higher. And if you can present at that level, then that’s going to make your interviews a lot easier.

Manuel: And, you know, I apologize, I know I kind of sidetracked you a little bit, and you know, we started talking about, you know, how you learn, but I think that everything you provided is, I mean, it’s extremely beneficial. So we don’t have to jump all the way back. But now, at some point, you, you know, growing your business, you’re learning all these new skills, you’re doing this, what makes you decide to not continue building that because, and I apologize, I don’t remember exactly how long I know it was quite a while that you ran that business. But at some point, you decide to kind of split ways and go work for somebody else. So what made you either make that decision, have the confidence to do it?

James: Yeah, so, so I’ll continue. So War Toys was fantastic, ended up building up the company. We ended up having a storefront over here off of Torrey Pines and Sahara, so like not too far away. And there is a 1200 square foot storefront. So we had ended up working so much out of our house and always being surrounded in the business that it’d be like, hey, wake up, shower, work, and then work until like 11 p.m. go to bed. And then it got to the point where I think we’d normally take Christmas off. So as far as the year goes, as far as the startup goes, imagine one day a year that you actually take off. After a couple years, that became very taxing, and we wanted to have like some separation. So we ended up saying we need to get to a storefront. So we ended up getting in the storefront so we can move everything out of the house and actually have like our own separate home versus like where we’re working. So we were always thinking or stressed. From there, as part of the lessons learned was we were seeing some various things with inventory. And we weren’t sure if it was the software or if it was sometimes people would want to walk around and look at the inventory. So you had the risk that somebody could be shoplifting, etc. So what we ended up doing is created a small area up front, which had a couple of computers where you could use the website, order the stuff, and then we would pick the order and then we’d bring it to you and deliver. As the business continued to grow, right behind there, there’s a storage unit place. So I think we had seven storage units at one point. And we ended up, when I did the calculations, like most successful businesses turn the inventory about once a year, we were turning our inventory over seven times a year. So the scale of the stuff was pretty massive. We started to realize this when we had a senior VP from Blue Box Toys that called my dad and was trying to talk with him and everything else. And he would talk to him regularly. So my dad was like, hey, why are you talking? And he goes, well, you’re, you’re our, so Blue Box was our second biggest category of sales, where our first one was about three, four times bigger. And he let us know that we were their second largest customer, only second to KB Toys, who had the 200 locations in all the malls across the country. So we’re like, oh, okay, so we’re, so we’re starting to put together, oh, hey, we actually have the volume, we’re doing stuff, we’re doing well. We’re, we’re at the point where we’re trying to I bought an H2 Hummer and put War Toys on the side. So at that point, I used that because the Hummer weighed over 6,000 pounds. So we could actually use that as a business deduction and start to write it off. So we started things like this were occurring. And this is like in my early 20s. So the business continues to grow. And then our lease is coming due at the location. And amongst all this, I’m going to college full time, so I can be covered by my, so I could be covered by insurance with my parents until I’m 24. And then I’m also trying to complete, I’m taking courses of whatever interests me that I think will be applicable to my business. So I’m not just doing computer science, I’m doing, I’m doing business courses, I’m doing marketing courses. And if I see courses like psychology of dreams, I’m taking those. So I, and I apologize because this is like a big kind of like chaos is what it kind of seems like. But I went to my council or advisor and it was CCSN at the time. And I said, hey, I’m hoping you can tell me how many degrees I have, which made them like, what do you mean? Like the awkward question. So then I presented my transcripts and I had like 178 credits at the time. So they’re like, let me take this home over the weekend, I’ll be back to you. So when we reconnected, they’re like, okay, you have three associates and you’re 12 credits shy of a fourth. Do you want to pursue the fourth? I was like, no, I need to start focusing, finish off my bachelors and go from there. So during this time, all this is going on. The lease is coming due, we tried to renew, but the hair salon place right next to it wanted to expand. And they were good customers with with the landlord. So the landlord said, hey, no, we’re not going to renew or whatever it was. So we ended up having to relocate from the storefront back to a different house, a little bit bigger house and everything else. But we did that shift. During this time, it was a question of, hey, why don’t we just do like warehouse space, because the storefront is more expensive per square foot versus the warehouse, which is how we’re actually running it. So we started going around town trying to find warehouse space. It seemed really expensive for what the cost was. So my dad, who used to be a general contractor, was like, hey, why don’t we just go buy something and build it on our own? So we ended up going and looking around to see what we do. We ended up buying five acres off of Kyle Canyon. So like towards Mount Charleston, ended up building a 5,000 square foot detached garage with 16 foot clear. So like we were doing this, we were building the house that similar to what my parents had built previously. So you had the main house where they could live, which would be separate from the business. And then you had what I was going to say, this is going to be like how we grow this to the next level. For like an idea of how much networking and stuff that was there, I put over 10,000 linear feet of category six cable through the buildings. So we would do a drop like every so often so I could have computers everywhere so people could pull up orders, do the picking, etc.

Manuel: And a lot of that was just from your experience of assuming understanding technology and then also understanding the business part of it.

James: The ops side of it.

Manuel: Understanding that if I have this huge warehouse, if I have to go look it up here and then go all the way to the other end of the warehouse to pull something out, I think you had that perfect combination of business sense and technological knowledge as well. To know that say, hey, I’m going to run all this CAT5. I’m going to have computers everywhere because this is going to help run my business more efficiently.

James: So if you had an order and the order said, widget A, you’re like, well, what the hell is widget A? That’s where someone go to the computer, pick it, look at the item so you can actually see what the visual was so you can make sure that you’re pulling the correct item.

Manuel: Was it also doing location for you at that point to say, okay, widget A is in this one?

James: So earlier in the process, when we’re talking about saving time, and I told you about the shipping labels and how I fix that, one of the things I observed was the pulling order. And the pulling order, we would go into the garage, we’d go boom, boom, boom, boom, and we’d just go all over the place to fill an order. And what was occurring is when you add multiple people, now you got people crossing and you don’t have the space and everything else. So early into the process, what I did was I got the order from the customer. And then when we went to print the order, I put it through a process that would did two things. It was referred to as my two pass. The first pass was where I had it with a special formatting for the aisles, and it would reflect for the box figure, so for the heavy items. And it was listed in a way that was like one A1, one B2, etc. And I set it up so that it would tell the location, and it allowed for a single pulling pass. So you would do like a snake through the warehouse, and then you have all your heavy items, you go drop that off at the shipping, your shipping station, then you go back for a second pass for all the loose items, which would also be a snake type pattern. So now what occurs is anybody pulling orders go through the same path, so they don’t actually bump into each other, so there’s no double backing or whatever it is. That I then also extended when we had the storefront, so that I could do the double path, so it became like a three pass, where it was the box figures, the loose figures, but also if there’s anything that was in storage in the seven storage units behind, you could go into the storage unit place behind us, which had the seven different units, and you could drive in an S-type shape to go visit the different things, stop, unlock, get the box figures or wherever else it was, put it back in, so like if we want to have multiple vehicles or people going, like…

Manuel: That’s smart, I mean that’s something that, wow, I never would have thought of something like that, to the point where, yes, labeling it, but to even define the pattern of how you’re going to go through and pick this up, I mean that’s…

James: Yep, so when we went from our house to the shop, I spent time, similar like what I would, if I was to program or something, I would say it was on the ops side, where I figured out the layout of the shop and how to optimize to get it so that we would run into these items or these problems, and then so it was like, hey, apply an engineering mindset to the actual physical infrastructure of the warehouse to do that, and to me, like when I look at these really successful, like Amazon and their fulfillment centers, that’s so amazing, like the stuff that Bezos did with Wilke, so like, The Everything Store, that’s a great book, I don’t know if you’ve read that, but that’s a great book to listen to.

Manuel: It is, so I actually did, there was somebody at, I worked with, she moved to a different role, but she recommended that book, she was like, you should read this book, it talks about their early foundings, and you know, it touches a little bit on the AWS side, but one of the things that she mentioned is, read it so that you understand the mindset of, you know, it’s the everything store, but everything that went behind it, like how they did the warehouses, that the idea behind all of it, and it was structured in a such a way, I think that now, if you look at it, everything’s automated, the robots that comes from the early beginnings, like similar to you, right, like you were thinking about that, to where if that technology was now available to you, you could probably say, okay, I can set these robots and they’re not going to crash into each other, because you have a defined path.

James: When I was at IBM, IBM acquired Trirega, one of the companies that we haven’t got to this part of the story, but when IBM acquired Trirega, they were very big on patents and things of that nature, and they had this big video that you watch, inspiration, and as they’re going through it, I had this idea of how to automate warehouses. So it was have these like linear actuators that push up and then have a transfer ball. So instead of like the rollers, like you do on the conveyor belt, it’s a sphere, and it can go in any direction. So the idea of this is if you have a box and you put it there, you can shift the box in any direction. So what I thought was what stops you from increasing or raising these up, so it slides down like a hill. Now coordinate that, so it’s like a wave, and then the box serves to wherever it is, and then