Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast. In this podcast we'll explore tools, technologies and technology keeping. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sense and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering. I am AJ Murray at no Blinky Blinky and tonight I am excited to be joined by Tim Bertino. He is at Tim Bertino. Tim, how are you doing?

Speaker 2: 0:33

Good AJ, good to see you. Can I can I rant for a minute?

Speaker 1: 0:37

Oh please, I love, I love Tim Rantz.

Speaker 2: 0:39

And this will be so. It's about snowblowers and it will be extremely timely when this releases in July. But so we we moved into this house last summer of 22. And in the fall of 2022, I said I'm going to get a snowblower because I just don't want to do this by shovel. So we got a snowblower. I got to use it like once in the winter of 22 into 23. So I was ready to go, had it ready for this season. First big snow rolls through, I get a bot done with it and the snowblower just starts gushing oil. So I've used this thing like twice and popped a seal or something. So just got it back today from. Luckily it was covered under warranty. So I got it back in, you know, just about in time for it to be time to start mowing. So I'm ready to go. Better luck next year, I guess.

Speaker 1: 1:39

What's going on?

Speaker 2: 1:39

with you, man.

Speaker 1: 1:40

It's, it's wild man. Normally February is like the coldest, snowiest month here in the Northeast, particularly here in Vermont, and everyone else around us is getting hit with snow and we got nothing. In fact, it was 40s this past weekend and all the snow that we had melted and it feels like spring man. I'm serious, it feels like April or May, not not February. I'm excited because we have a new co-host joining us tonight. If you've been listening to the show, you've heard, on a previous episode we interviewed Kevin, a Jason node on TikTok. We had so much fun interviewing him. We asked him do you want to come back and do it again and again, and again? And he said yes. And so now he's joined the co-host team with us. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 2:27

Hang on, hang on, hang on All right. Yes, we had a lot of fun. It was a great interview, but it was the mustache that put it over the edge Of course, of course, I don't blame you at all.

Speaker 3: 2:39

It's it precedes me everywhere I go. Yeah, so you know, thank you guys for having me back. This is awesome. You know. It's one of those things where you guys asked me to be on the show and I could not say no. I had so much fun. You guys are awesome, so I'm happy to be here and ready for more fun.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Awesome, awesome. We're real excited to have you. So thanks for coming back, kevin. This is this is great Also joining us, so so I want to. I want to proceed this conversation with. We had a lot of people fill out our listener survey and we had some great recommendations, one of which was to start bringing back some folks that we had early on in in the series and see where they are today, and so we decided to reach out to Taylor Harris, a good friend of mine. He was originally episode six, titled 24, which was Taylor's age at the time of the recording. He has accomplished an awful lot. By the time he was 24. And I can't wait to hear what he has accomplished in the last four years. We originally interviewed Taylor in August of 2020, shortly after we kicked this thing off, and here we are in early 2024. Taylor, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 4: 3:49

Thanks all. Am I the first one to go or to come back?

Speaker 1: 3:54

I mean, we've had repeat people on the show for various other topics, but you are the first person to come back as like a hey, we want to. We want to catch up with with a previous guest and see where they where they are today, cool.

Speaker 4: 4:07

And and for the record, tim, I'm not having snubler issues, even though we just got almost 14 inches of snow outside 14 inches.

Speaker 3: 4:17

And that's why we're right there. Geez, I think that's more than we've gotten the entire winter in.

Speaker 4: 4:22

That's too, much, that's a lot I think we're supposed to get a little bit more tonight into tomorrow, but not as big as the other day.

Speaker 3: 4:31

When it, when it dips down to 60, that's too cold for me. I don't know how you guys do it.

Speaker 2: 4:36

I was waiting for you to speak out.

Speaker 1: 4:40

And in New England, when it's 40, people got their windows down. They're wearing shorts people you know summertime if there's no ice in the road, they're pulling motorcycles out of storage. Yeah, yeah. So, taylor, you had accomplished an awful lot by the time you were 24. Let let's kind of recap what we had interviewed you shortly after you had completed several VMware certifications. Do you recall what those were?

Speaker 4: 5:05

I think it was. So it was a handful of VCPs. I think it was the network virtualization, data center virtualization whatever they're calling the VDI one, yeah, and then one other one, but I think the I mean the ones that I'm still most proud of are the, the VCI X, so the two advanced professionals that give you the implementation expert exam at the time.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Okay, All right, and at the time you were working for a VAR as a network deployment engineer. You and I were coworkers. I have since moved on from that particular one. Are you still at the same employer? I am Still at the same partner, okay, all right. Same partner and let let's. How do you want to do that? Do you want to talk about how things kind of evolved over the last few years, or do we just want to cut right to what is Taylor doing today and then talk about how you got there?

Speaker 4: 5:59

Sure, yeah. So so started out at the partner you know almost five years ago doing network deployment alongside of you and a couple of other folks. Recently or throughout that, that time period kind of moved between our enterprise networking practice to our data center practice so helped run that team with the data center engineering folks. So that's compute storage virtualization as well as data for networking. And then more recently, pretty much a year ago, moved into the SE role support in New England An SE role for pre-sales baby.

Speaker 1: 6:42

Pre-sales. Okay, all right, I wanted you to elaborate a little bit more on that for our listeners. So what's the transition from post-sales to pre-sales been like, other than the impact to your paycheck?

Speaker 4: 6:55

Who says they're paying me. Maybe I'm just doing this for fun. I think it's been somewhat. It's definitely been interesting. I think it's kind of more the non-standard transition because I'm staying within the same company and I had my hands in a lot of the post-sales delivery projects during my time on that org. So even till to this day I'm still engaged in some post-sales activities, more so on an advising role versus hands-on keyboards. So it's really been. It'll probably end up being a year and a half to two year full transition out of it, just to make sure that those post-sales projects get to the finish line and customers are happy and we get paid.

Speaker 2: 7:48

I got to ask about that, taylor, because I know how hands-on you have been and how you enjoy being that. In fact, I may or may not know the size of labs you've built in your own home. So how tough of a decision was that to go pre-sales, to become less hands-on over time.

Speaker 4: 8:11

It definitely wasn't something that was taken lightly but, at the end of the day, I value my weekends and my after hours and that was something that was really driving the overall decision. I'm trying and I've tried to still be hands-on transitioning that deployment methodology or mentality to really focus on doing proof of concept, proof of values for customers on new tech. Of course, in order to be able to do that, you still have to know the tech, you still have to be able to configure the tech. So a ton of live-in.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Yeah, that's good to hear that you had a plan for it and still plan to stay technical, because I do think that it is important for pre-sales, while we as pre-sales engineers aren't doing necessarily the implementation, we still need to be able to speak to it. Now I don't want to out you by any means, but I think you're in an interesting place in a bar, where you can be pre-sales and maybe with certain customers that you have and they have that level of trust with you, you still get a chance to be a part of some of those implementations, some of those cutovers, time to time.

Speaker 4: 9:29

Maybe, if that's something you're into, yeah, it's really up to us on how involved we want to be. We see it from end to end, from the very start of the sales cycle to when all of the deployment is done and it's ready to be invoiced. So certainly I have the freedom to stay as hands-off as I want for technologies that maybe I'm not as comfortable with, or if I want to be on the deployment calls. I certainly have the option to traditionally save those types of engagements for the more strategic customers.

Speaker 1: 10:02

I want to touch on the transition from post-sales to pre-sales. What initiated that for you? Was there a particular moment in your career where you said I want to do pre-sales? Was it always on the career map for you?

Speaker 4: 10:18

I think at some capacity. It's always been on the career map we have at the bar. We have a position we call in the design architects or the practice team. They're really the subject matter experts of the particular vertical. That's really been my end goal for at least probably four years, if not a little bit before that. Before I even joined the company I knew if I was going to eventually grow into that type of position I would need to learn some of the sales cycle and get some of that sales experience. It made sense to make the move into the traditional pre-sales sales engineer solutions architect role to gain that foundational sales knowledge or with our sales team and build those relationships and then hopefully eventually be able to refocus and exclusively be technology first.

Speaker 1: 11:19

For that transition? Was it a conversation you had to have with a supervisor and say, hey, this is a goal of mine. Okay, great, let's put you on the path to get there. And you have to meet XYZ criteria. What do you think it takes to go from that post sales mindset to the pre-sales mindset?

Speaker 4: 11:37

You definitely. There definitely needs to be some sort of transition plan defined between both parties. Mine was pretty much defined after the fact we saw this change coming. This change had been made officially from an HR perspective. Then we backed into what that transition plan would be so that both management orders were content with finishing up what I had previously been working on and then picking up what I need to be focusing on what's been the hardest change for you in this transition.

Speaker 1: 12:14

I know Tim was saying earlier you're usually quite the hands-on person, but it sounds like there's still a lot of that for you In my mind. Going from a post sales you're really down in the nitty-gritty, configuring, hands-on. Then now you're back up at a much higher altitude, looking at the bigger picture. That's a big change. How did you navigate that transition and settle in?

Speaker 4: 12:37

Well, the first couple of months you do more than what your job role has is earmarks you to do.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Just for the first couple of months.

Speaker 4: 12:48

Just for the first couple of months. Then you realize that you're doing way too much and then you pull yourself back and then you don't do enough. Then you eventually find that happy medium, until the little quirks come out and you find yourself worrying about things that you don't need to worry about, from sending quotes to the customer or making sure quotes are formatted the exact proper way, instead of just doing engineering.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot more paperwork involved than there used to be. Now you're building the bill of materials and not just reviewing the bill of materials.

Speaker 2: 13:25

Now, taylor, it wasn't a direct move from post sales engineer to pre-sales engineer. Didn't you have a period of time where you were kind of a lead post sales engineer, where you were maybe not necessarily supervising others, but maybe you were? I can't remember what was that leadership role like for you.

Speaker 4: 13:47

Yeah, for a period of time I think it was four individuals, might have been two that I was unofficially responsible for Giving them work, being the escalation path for them and part of that lead role we more or less interface with sales to make sure that what they're selling is going to work from a delivery perspective. Sometimes we're on the calls, the pre-sales calls, with customers kind of reinforcing what we can do from a delivery side, what we have done, and potentially making recommendations to kind of adjust the statement of work or add hours, remove hours to Save or protect the company from a cost perspective. So I was certainly involved with how our sales cycle kind of worked on the delivery side so that you know that was easy information to kind of use once you're fully over to to pre-sale.

Speaker 2: 14:49

So I had spent 13 plus years as a customer and worked with many value added resellers and, I gotta tell you, probably the most valuable people On those teams for me where the pre-sales engineers, pre-sales architects because what I found is that they were very highly technical folks but also really cared about what they did in their customers and I found what really drew me to those bars was the value that those engineers provided, and I have probably countless stories of pre-sales a specific pre-sales architect who we may or may not have had on the show before that would get involved in questions that I would have, even if they weren't initiatives that directly related to a post sales engagement and that's where I really found that value is because they invested their time back into their customers, even if there wasn't a specific dollar amount associated to it, so I really appreciated that. I know, kevin, I know you are still in the customer space. Do you have any stories of working with pre-sales engineers and architects on bars?

Speaker 3: 16:10

Yeah and they haven't. They haven't all been great, to be honest. So my experience with pre-sales a lot is the over promise and then you know we get the actual product and it's not delivered the way it was it was promised. So actually my question for Taylor would have been how you know, after being the post deployment in the weeds doing it, now you're selling it essentially. Do you approach it differently, having you know that technical background, versus someone who would be you know, I don't know straight from sales into you know that that makes sense yeah, so I've also been the customer and I've also been over promised from a sales perspective.

Speaker 2: 16:55

I'm sure AJ remembers that incident, which one hang on hang on hang on was the one that was doing it.

Speaker 4: 17:04

No no no, we were both in the customer side okay.

Speaker 4: 17:10

My mentality is if I don't know how to do it, I'm not selling it or I'm not putting my name as the one that's responsible for engineering the solution. So you know, for doing something you know SharePoint related, I can barely sell SharePoint, let's be honest. So I'll end up pulling in someone else that helps scope and make sure that's that's done correctly and we're not going to, you know, over promise and deliver. But you know a data center network. You know UCS deployment. I'm owning that all day long and I'm trying, I try to write my statements of work to the level of degree where A deployment engineer that has done or worked with the product before can just follow it step by step and that's that's their deployment task list. Some people say that's two details on. People say it's just enough, that it's just what I do.

Speaker 3: 18:03

Have you found since transitioning to your new role that you have to gain customers trust? That's my biggest thing is like what I when I being sold something, I immediately distrust the person and they have to kind of gain my trust. They have to prove the value to me and I'm curious how you navigate that.

Speaker 4: 18:21

Yeah, I had a few customers that are like that so far. Most of the time I I try to just do engineer to engineer. For the most part, the folks that I'm talking to are the folks that are going to be needy to the trenches once it's deployed or once it's sold. So I want to be able to build some whatever relationships, so you know, so that if they run into issues they have some level of confidence, even if it's very little that you know. If they should question over to me, I'll be able to help them or direct someone else. I try to leave the sales stuff to the sales person. Doesn't always work that way, but you know, that's kind of the methodology I'm trying to run with currently and it's Seems to have been working so far.

Speaker 1: 19:11

I want to touch on that. So you know, typically in organizations like this it's not a one to one relationship. You're usually supporting multiple. You know essays or account managers it's their term different things at different companies. You know what does that look like for you?

Speaker 4: 19:29

Great question it's not very clear. We have a very small team in the Northeast. There's four of us in the New England area and then there's another individual in Texas and we cover I think it's 13 a Total so, and in this instance, this account executive, and it's like the account manager.

Speaker 4: 19:50

Yeah, thank you. So, really, like through the numbers, it's a three to one mapping, I believe it is. But the reality is is the way that our team is structured? Is we really play to our strengths? So data center networking stuff may come to me so I may be interacting with all of our account executives, whereas another member may be taking the wireless or collaboration elements really so that we can just give the best product out there without wasting the motorcycles. The reality is, I think there's about four to five account executives that I work with on almost a weekly basis.

Speaker 1: 20:30

What is that workload like? It sounds like on your team, everybody has to be kind of a generalist and then, as you alluded to, when you start to get into conversations that are outside of your wheelhouse, you can pull in another team member to help back you up and support you. So is that a crazy amount of work? Do you think there's room for more AEs or more pre-sales engineers? What's the workload like?

Speaker 4: 20:55

It's hard to determine that because it ebbs and flows. There are some weeks where it's absolute chaos, but then there are the weeks where you don't know what to do with yourself. You feel like there's a lot of other opportunities going around, but none of them are yours to run down. They're perfect training weeks. They're perfect just taking a break, taking a breath and waiting for the next crazy week, but I probably feel like we always need more engineers. We're always running short on engineer resources during those crazy weeks, but the company probably thinks the other way. We need more sales reps.

Speaker 2: 21:36

So let's talk about pre-sales versus post-sales a little bit. So on the post-sale side, where you would come out of, you would take work that would come in, projects that would come in from the pre-sales team, and you would go and implement them. On the pre-sale side, you're probably much less waiting for that work to come in from your customers. You're probably you and the account executives are more forward-facing, reaching out to existing and new customers to see what's going on. So do you have certain customers that you keep a cadence with to see where they're at in their journey and if they need anything, or if they're new, any new projects, or do you just reach out to them to see, hey, vmware's got this new offering or Cisco's got this new product, juniper, et cetera. What's the balance of that? Look like.

Speaker 4: 22:27

So we kind of separate our customers into two buckets. There are the strategic customers and then the more transactional customers. The strategic customers at minimum once a year we will sit down with them and have somewhat of an account planning session where we kind of figure out what are your initiatives for the year or the quarter whatever that timeframe is and see what we need to do to align with what they're doing from a business standpoint. And then from there it's either bringing in new solutions it's keeping existing solutions but maybe expanding feature sets or just straight resale. They need more storage. Here's some hard drives or here's a shell for your storage.

Speaker 4: 23:13

The more transactional customers are typically are much smaller customers where they keep us honest, they trust us, they'll reach out to us. When they need a Maraki firewall or a miss AP, they'll let us know. We'll go out, do what we need to do to meet that request and then off to the next request. Sometimes, depending on the year, depending on budgets and what they're looking to do across their campuses, we may sit down with them and kind of plan out what does the year look like? Or when do we need to revisit this new email filtering solution, because Proof Point expires in a couple of years, but for the most part it's probably a 60-40% split. From a time commitment perspective, we want to be working with those more strategic, those larger enterprises, and being tied to the hip from their engineering perspective.

Speaker 2: 24:12

Do you find that you need to do more research now that you're in the pre-sales role just to make sure you're brushed up on new things and items that Red River offers that maybe you weren't necessarily aware of when you were post sales, or has any of that changed for you?

Speaker 4: 24:33

Definitely a lot more research. I think a lot of it comes down to I don't want to be wrong and I don't have the same flexibility to figure it out in the heat of the moment, because once it's sold it gets kicked to another team and I'm not responsible for it anymore. I'm just a resource to make sure it gets across the line. You have to stay up with the times. I think I was a couple of days late on realizing that Meraki or Cisco released 9,300 Ns and we had customers asking about them the day that they were released. That's that. Don't tell Mike.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Yeah, don't tell Mike.

Speaker 1: 25:17

That's great. If you don't mind, I'd like to pivot to your certifications. You were on quite the track to earn. You had recently just earned a lot, the last time we recorded. Have you earned any additional since the last time we talked? That was August of 2020. You'd earned a number of VCPs. I know that you and I had also tackled a number of just salesy engineering certifications, some Drudoper stuff. What all have you accomplished in that regard since we last spoke?

Speaker 4: 25:53

I think the big one is I have a CCNP now in Enterprise Networking. I got both of those exams done.

Speaker 2: 26:04

What was the specialty one you took? Yeah, same.

Speaker 4: 26:08

Then I have a couple of Azure certs, Azure Networking and I believe it's Azure Fundamentals.

Speaker 3: 26:16

I'm curious. The last, your last podcast you were on, you said that CCNP data center was your main goal, and I'm curious why that changed.

Speaker 4: 26:30

Changed is an interesting word for it. Honestly, I think I ended up doing Enterprise because it was lower hanging fruit. There was a Cisco live I think it was two years ago that I was at that. I started with the free test that they give you. I did one of the. It was the DC design course because it was very shortly after I did Enterprise design and it kicked my butt to the point where it scared me a little bit because I thought I've been doing Cisco data center for quite a bit of time.

Speaker 4: 27:03

In the PS world. We've done some crazy things for a couple of our customers and I walk into that exam and I'm like I can probably figure this out. I could probably reason my way through a lot of these design questions. And fiber channel is still a thing. People still leverage fiber channel for storage and I have never touched fiber channel in my career and it absolutely kicked my butt. I do need to renew my NP next year. The data center track is how I'm going to renew it and then go from there and see where the world takes me. Maybe it's an IE. There you go.

Speaker 2: 27:46

I didn't do my homework and I didn't re-listen to episode six, because that was what 120 plus episodes ago, as we've talked about, you were going heavy into VMware certifications, what really initially drove you into virtualization as an interest and what got you moving forward there.

Speaker 4: 28:10

I'm not sure I started I mean, aj probably helped with this but we started doing more and more with virtualization on the customer side and then I started to get exposed to, hey, we can virtualize the network with ASSRAX and I'm like we can just keep adding more and more and more to this physical footprint and I just kept running with it and it was just it kept being interesting. And then we started virtualizing storage and yeah, I just haven't stopped. Now it's kind of what are we doing with VMware? Is VMware still the path? Is it broadening out to Nutanix? Or I kind of hinted at the Azure certs. It's broadening out to Azure, you know, going full cloud.

Speaker 2: 28:54

What sounds like you're running out of things that you could jump into.

Speaker 4: 28:58

There's always OT if I run out of things in IT.

Speaker 2: 29:03

We know a guy.

Speaker 4: 29:05

I need to go to Australia, so maybe that'll work.

Speaker 1: 29:10

Let's talk about your lab, because you've always maintained one hell of a lab that probably rivals a lot of enterprise networks. How does your lab look today? How's it kind of evolved over the past several years to cater to your learning needs, going from post sales to pre sales?

Speaker 4: 29:30

It's gotten simpler. If anything, the lab that once was you know the entire VMware SAC doesn't exist, but it's rarely ever on Most of the Now.

Speaker 1: 29:46

I just have to interject for a second. Is it barely ever on? Because now you're a homeowner and you're responsible for paying that power bill. Was that a strategic move?

Speaker 4: 29:58

No, I haven't really used it. It's the reason it's not on. There's far more I'll call them home services that are running, that are always on, but that's home prod. That's not part of the lab and that's even transitioned from. You know virtualizing VMs to just being containers and you know using Docker or Kubernetes. Most of my lab environments are centered around Azure, so someone else gets to pay for that.

Speaker 3: 30:28

Nice. So I did do my homework and listened to your podcast and one of the things that stuck out at me was how much passion you had. And passion was mentioned like 10 times in the podcast and I'm curious you were in the start of your career and now you've had four years past that. Do you still find yourself passionate about it? Do you still like get excited by the technology, or is it kind of you know the everyday thing now, when you're not as not as gun-ho about it?

Speaker 4: 30:57

I'm finding more and more. So I think I'm still passionate about it. And I say that because I'm finding more and more. When I get you know, because I'm supposed to be a generalist from an SE perspective I'm supposed to touch a lot of different technologies. But when I get the customers that want to go back and look at network infrastructure or they want to do compute storage, I start to realize that, man, I miss doing those projects.

Speaker 4: 31:25

You know, if I'm doing SharePoint, office 365 for a couple of weeks, it's like I need something to sink my teeth in. That's networking related or storage related. Like, let me figure out some BGP, like give me something. It's actually it's gotten to the point. We had our SKO last week and one of the big customers that I used to work with on the deployment side is now doing a full refresh of that environment and it doesn't fall in my territory and I actually was talking with the account executive that works for them like, hey, can I help? Is there anything I can do? I love that environment. It's a great environment. I built a lot of that environment and I want to keep that environment going. I want to see the next iteration. I want to continue working with that customer. They may be difficult, but they're great people.

Speaker 3: 32:16

Now, I've never worked at a VAR and you bring up a good point of, like you have these networks that you go into, you work for them and then you're not persistent, you don't see over the years how it progresses and staying in that network, and that's one thing that, like I don't know, I feel like the network is mine when I'm at a workplace. You know that, like it's my baby, that we grow gradually and it matures. Do you feel that you're losing something by being in a VAR and not having that you know, your baby of a network?

Speaker 4: 32:45

I don't think so. I'm still attached to a lot of environments and I still kind of go out of my way to make sure I'm still involved with those environments because they're my baby, even if I don't have anything to do with the environment.

Speaker 2: 32:59

Yeah, I share that sentiment, Kevin. I mean, that was a reason why I stuck around where I was for the longest time is because I really liked that sense of ownership. And you know, it really was my baby. I got to see it grow over time. But I guess you know, to Taylor's point, he just gets to adopt a bunch of other people, you know.

Speaker 4: 33:20

Including the problem childs.

Speaker 3: 33:24

Yeah, I mean it's cool that you get to see a bunch of different networks, a bunch of different technologies and have different challenges on each one. As a tech nerd person, that's really appealing, you know. You get to have these unique situations.

Speaker 2: 33:40

So we've mentioned, you know, being a generalist. So, taylor, I'd like you to kind of contrast your thoughts between kind of deciding to become a generalist over time versus specializing in a specific thing, because you very well could have, you know, really stuck with VMware and specialized, you know, even within VMware you could have gone down the NSX path for a long time. So, deciding to become that generalist, what was that like? What drove you to say, hey, I think I want to just become more well-rounded, I want to learn more about, you know, adjacent things to what I was doing. Where did that come from?

Speaker 4: 34:23

It's a lot of it maps back to. I feel like everyone needs to be a generalist at some point in time. Some of the best engineers that I've worked with have come from the help desk, the CIS admin route, where they're touching so many different technologies, so many different environments, that when they start to specialize in a specific area if they do, because it's okay to be a generalist in your entire career they have a better understanding of what actually could be impacting X, y or Z problems. There may be a network issue that they need to troubleshoot or design around, and if they have an understanding of how VoIP works on the wire, that may be some additional information and help with the actual troubleshooting effort versus. I'm just looking at routing tables. I'm just looking how MAC addresses are being learned across various links.

Speaker 1: 35:22

Taylor, as we kind of as always, these conversations are fun and fly by. But as we kind of come to the last 20 minutes or so, I want to touch on the soft skills that it takes to be a pre-sales engineer. Kevin kind of talked about it earlier. While you are doing the technical piece, you're still building relationships. You have to be that trusted agent, and I think that was even the case when we were in post sales as well. If a customer is going to let you in to do a bunch of work on their servers, their network or whatever, there has to, I think, be a certain amount of trust in that you know what you're doing and not just watching videos in your hotel room the night before. So you know some.

Speaker 4: 36:13

That's mean.

Speaker 1: 36:18

That was a reference to a previous project that Taylor and I that's why it's mean. Anyway, you can be a great engineer in that you know a lot of stuff technically, but I don't think that that is the only thing that's going to help you be successful in a pre-sales role or even a post-sales role. So what are some of the soft skills that you have to utilize in your role as a pre-sales engineer?

Speaker 4: 36:47

So I mean the big two is you have to be able to connect to the individual, whether that's personally or it's through the corporate environment, through the technology, and in order to do that you have to be able to listen. You know it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you can't understand and hear what they're telling you or trying to tell you, you know they'll immediately shrug you off. I also think that you know, when it comes to communicating or building that trust, if you have to show how well you know X, y or Z, you're doing it wrong. That should just come naturally through either conversation or deliverables or, you know, really just interactions. You know you shouldn't have to really dictate or explain like, yeah, I know this, I have servants, I've done this before. You just have to trust me. You know the results will validate any level of knowledge, really anything that you need to start those relationships and then primarily, just to grow up little water, little fertilizer and Little water, little bullshit.

Speaker 1: 37:54

No, I'm just kidding, it is pre-sales after all. No, no, that's great. I mean, yeah, building relationships and building trust is definitely outside of probably the normal engineering skills. So it's great to hear that you've been able to incorporate that stuff, because that definitely helps those conversations feel a lot more authentic and I think when you can be more authentic, that helps establish that trust right. So pre-sales is not for every engineer, that's for sure.

Speaker 2: 38:29

And back to when you were. That period of time when you were leading a team, what were some of the qualities in engineers that you like to see in your team really shine through? Curiosity. You didn't even have to think about that one.

Speaker 4: 38:44

No, no. The engineers that I want to work with are those that ask why I want them to challenge their own thoughts, but then I also want them to challenge the thoughts of those around you, including my own. We, as technologists, it enthusiasts we do not always have the best answer, the best solution, and the only way that we're going to get better is through some level of challenging.

Speaker 1: 39:12

I love that Be curious.

Speaker 4: 39:14

I'm like a four-year-old.

Speaker 1: 39:16

Yeah you know, get excited. I mean really like, if you're not excited, why are you even there? And I think that goes for just about any aspect of IT. Right, you got to love the tech because we put up with a lot of bullshit. Man, if you're not excited to be here, then I don't know. Taylor, here at the Art of Network Engineering you're familiar we care an awful lot about mental health. What do you do to stay sane in a very stressful position? Working with a sales accountant all day?

Speaker 4: 39:49

Recently I have become a more outdoorsy person Camping, skiing, snowmobiling, anything that you can do outside the house I seem to be gravitating towards and wanting to do.

Speaker 3: 40:05

Getting away from the PC?

Speaker 4: 40:06

yeah, which is very different than, I think, the last time that we talked and you asked a similar question and I think my answer was lab everything.

Speaker 1: 40:17

Yeah, yeah, you were following in the footsteps of Duvall and you were labbing every day. Not so much anymore. Yeah, definitely you want to do whatever you can to reduce that burnout. I mean, it sounds like you do a lot. You did a lot of hands-on in the post sales world and you continue to do a lot of labbing and continuing to soak in all that technical knowledge. So taking a break will help give your brain a little bit of a break. That's great. That's good to hear. You can go into as much or as little detail as you'd like. How's the personal life changed over the last few years since we last spoke to you? It's busy.

Speaker 4: 40:54

Between being recently engaged.

Speaker 1: 40:58

Congratulations. Thank you.

Speaker 4: 41:01

Planning that wedding. Thanks for having me. Thankfully, we have some time it's not till October of next year Managing the house that we bought right before COVID and then looking at the next step. Maybe land, maybe kids.

Speaker 1: 41:21

Very exciting stuff. That's great. You bought a house just before during COVID, and you moved away from Vermont. You left me all alone, you son of a bitch. That's why I left the company, because I couldn't hang out with my buddy, taylor anymore. No, that's not true at all. No, congratulations. I mean even at 24, you've accomplished an awful lot. And so now, of course, four years later, I expect absolutely nothing less. You've continued to just absolutely kill it. What's on the radar? Looking forward? What are your future plans? Where do you see yourself going from where you are right now?

Speaker 4: 41:59

I have two paths that I want to either go down it's likely not one or the other, both of them hopefully will happen eventually. But I want to do the sales engineering a little bit longer and eventually kind of move back into that strictly technologist role. So doing less on the actual sales side, more on the technology side, but being a resource to the sales team, so being that person that I call on for a SharePoint project, being that escalation path for those that maybe aren't as enterprise networking focused or data center focused. Maybe that'll happen at Red River at the current bar, maybe that's an OEM, because I'd love to work for another OEM or A OEM in the future.

Speaker 1: 42:57

I highly recommend it. It's fun. Yeah, awesome To the co-host team. Any questions before we? Any last questions before we wrap this up?

Speaker 2: 43:06

Yeah, I've got one. So back on the career path. What was I'm going to put you on the spot? What would you say was your favorite project as a post sales engineer? And then, conversely, what's been your favorite thing to do on the pre-sale side so far?

Speaker 4: 43:24

Favorite project is probably the one that I was involved with as I was transitioning. It was a dual data center build, active-active, Everything Cisco, you know Firepower, UCS, Pure Storage, ACI and it was right at the time when I was really starting to get into ACI and some of the concepts were actually clicking. It wasn't just kind of doing the motions to spin up ACI, it was like I finally started to understand how ACI work and how everything connected together. Unfortunate that I got to stay involved with that one and see that one through the end and everything running and pulling storage arrays out and watching everything fail over to the other data center without anything missing a beat. But that's been the best one so far.

Speaker 2: 44:16

That's a massive project. Was that Greenfield?

Speaker 4: 44:19

No.

Speaker 1: 44:21

That was a brown field. Oh, that makes it even more fun.

Speaker 4: 44:23

Yeah, one of the coolest part about it is the data centers that they built. I've never seen White cabinets, white walls. It was stunning to walk into the data centers and just see the sheer Contrast from what a typical data center looks like. Hmm, and when you went to the other data center, it was like deja vu. You walked in the door. Are we back? At the first data center? It was identical. It was like they picked up the building and moved it over as you were driving down the road.

Speaker 2: 44:54

So what about the your favorite thing to do thus far on the presale side? It's the best part of your job right now.

Speaker 4: 45:01

Um, I'm really enjoying a lot of the acquisition planning that I'm doing. I have a customer that's very heavy. You know they're in an acquisition operating model. I think they're bringing on two, three locations a month, so just bringing those into the fold, the whole IT portfolio. What's saying? What's getting replaced? Um, that's. It's been a lot of fun. It's very different from what I've been doing the past couple of years, but it's a it's a good change.

Speaker 2: 45:32

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's a lot. It's got to be a lot different than the previous role, for sure.

Speaker 1: 45:37

All right. Well, before we went on, go ahead and wrap to set. I want to remind our listeners that if you're enjoying the show, please share it with a fellow network engineer. Head on over to what is it? Apple iTunes or Apple podcasts by Spotify, anywhere that you get your Podcast. If you can leave us a review, please do. It really helps. The whole podcast module helps other people find us and Expand our audience for the show. I also want to warmly welcome Kevin again to the co-host team. Thank you so much for joining us. This is your your first episode as a co-host with us, so this one's gonna go into the books.

Speaker 1: 46:12

Taylor is the Moderator of the. It's all about the journey discord server, which is where our community hangs out and spends an awful lot of time. Taylor, thank you so much for everything you do over there and all your automations and and keeping everything Ship shape in the old discord server. Where can people find you? Are you still blogging? I don't think you're very active on social media, but you used to have a presence out there at one point.

Speaker 4: 46:36

Yeah, I, I still have a presence. I don't really use it. It's at vertailer, you know, same username as what. What my discord is? My box still out there. It should still be reachable or virtualized. Taylor calm, but I'm in the. I'm in the middle of kind of reworking that, changing the hosting provider, so that doesn't work. Don't come banging my door now.

Speaker 1: 47:00

Check back later. Yeah, awesome, I will put links to those in the show notes so you can check out Taylor's blog. I'm sure by the time this episode releases He'll have the shiny new interface and hosting services all up and ready to go, so you should be able to find the blog there. Taylor, thank you so much for joining us tonight. This has been an awful lot of fun and we'll see you guys next time on another episode of the art of network engineering podcast.

Speaker 5: 47:26

Hey there, friends. We hope you enjoyed listening to that episode just as much as we did recording it. If you want to hear more, make sure you subscribe to the show in your favorite pod catcher. You can also give that little bell rascal a little ring, a dingy, so you know when we release new episodes. If you're social like we are, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We are at art of net inch that's art of net Eng. You can also find us on that weaving web, that is the internet at art of network engineering comm. There you'll find our show notes and some blog articles from the hosts, yes, and other friends who just like getting their thoughts down on that virtual paper. Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening.