Welcome to episode 8, Back to Basics – Edwin Sarmiento. This week on the fit podcast, we spoke to Edwin Sarmiento. Edwin, who lives in Canada, is the first non-UK resident to guest on our show.  I think he deserves special thanks too because not only did he make an effort and come on as a guest and share his views and opinions with us. Due to my inability to manage diaries, Edwin was happy for us to interview him at 10 am British Summer Time(BST). This was the only time I could do that week!  Which, if you are not good at time zone maths, is five hours in front of Eastern Standard Time (EST).  He got up very early for us on Friday and was more than awake to give a great interview.

Back to Basics – Edwin Sarmiento a Summary

To summarise, Edwin thinks that most technology problems actually boil down to people problems and more specifically communication problems between different groups. The last year has been interesting for him. He talks about different types of people and classifies himself as an introvert. [Editor’s note – that doesn’t mean he isn’t good at communicating…he most certainly is!] He says that as an introvert the last year has been ideal…with the lack of social interaction, he has been getting down and doing some really good work but even as an introvert he has missed the social interaction

Some of the key points for us are

• Technology is a reflection of our humanity
• Learning how to become one with others
  Don’t become human doings…become human beings
• Be Open to new ideas
• Always go back to the basics
• We need to understand that unless we embrace the humanity within us….Technology and AI would easily replace what we do
• Every technical problem is really a people problem underneath
• Being remote, you have to learn a thing or two about how to properly talk to people, listen to people…below the surface

Episode 8 – Back to Basics – Edwin Sarmiento Links

Anchor

You can listen on Anchor and many other podcast platforms here.

YouTube

You can watch the whole show on our YouTube channel here

Previous PHIT Podcast Episodes

You can view previous episodes here:

• Episode 1 – Special Guest Mark Williams
• Episode 2 – Special Guest Simon Jones
• Episode 3 – Special Guest David Rawle
• Episode 4 – Special Guest Ben Kite
• Episode 5 – Microsoft Build Edition
• Episode 6 – Special Guests Simon Grosse and Liz Rogers
• Episode 7 – Special Guest Ben Morris

Back to Basics – Edwin Sarmiento – Transcript

The following is the transcript of the interview with Edwin

Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job role?

Edwin Sarmiento 

Thank you, thank you. I first caught up with some of your posts on LinkedIn. And you know, the title caught my attention putting humans back in technology. And for me, that’s the real gist of what technology really is about. Most people focus on the tech, I focus on the people and here’s a little bit of an introduction. I’m an independent consultant, I focus on high availability and disaster recovery solutions on-premises Azure. So I talk about you know, to SQL Server, HA, DR. stuff. I also focus on DevOps side of things where you’re containerizing SQL Server, but a lot of people think, Oh, yeah, you’re a hardcore guy, techie guy. But what I, what people don’t realize is that I focus more on the people side of tech, even when things are, like, they seem more techie, you know, people would get you on board as a consultant. And they all talk about the tech part, I don’t talk about the tech part. That part’s easy! The human part of it, the people part of it is where a lot of people struggle, and that’s what I really focus on. That’s kind of like a quick introduction of what I do.

Do you think technical people have different communication skills in a different parts of the world?

Edwin Sarmiento 

I think it’s…I find it interesting. You mentioned that because for one, I’m Asian. And when you think about the cultural aspects of the differences between North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, most Asians are not like me. And I’m an introvert, I tell people all the time, I would rather hunker down on my computer, do the stuff that I really love to do. And what I’ve realized is, when you really understand the whole gist of the technology, it would evolve, it would change.

But the one thing that stays the same is how we humans and how we people interact. I mean, it’s interesting because the whole pandemic, people are now forced to work from home and meet using teams and zoom and stuff like that. And, you know, people like me, the introverts are thinking, well, this is kind of like a dream come true for me, I’ll be at home, I don’t have to talk to the salespeople. I don’t have to talk to the marketing people. I’ll do what I do best write code deal with all of these common configuration settings and not talk to them. Next thing you know, six months down the road, people say when can I get back to the office? When can I get back to the office? We need to understand that, you know, unless we embrace the humanity within us. Technology and AI would easily replace what we do. And so even people like You know, introverts, like me who’s, you know, born and raised in a culture where, you know, even speaking up is a challenge, I had to force myself into learning all of these things, because that’s the only way that I can influence people into changing their way of thinking.

And when the nature of what I do is really all about changing the way they’re thinking, when you think about it, who wakes up at three o’clock in the morning, say, I need a high availability solution? Nobody? Yeah.

How has the last year impacted your business?

Edwin Sarmiento 

Just like most of the businesses, mine has been really affected, in the fact that I travel a lot for work, which is kind of ironic, when you think about it, you’re in tech, you should be working from home most of the time. In fact, the work from home thing is something that I’ve been doing since 2007. I’ve been working from home, on and off. Kids are home schooled. So no big deal. Right? This has been our lifestyle for the past 10-13 years now.

But what really changed was the fact that because nobody could travel, in fact, we were stuck in the Philippines for four months. Oh, pardon, what’s supposed to be a four week vacation, I was supposed to fly to the UK to do SQL bits. And then middle of March, things went south, and I had to cancel everything. And because I travel a lot for work, my business has definitely been affected. But because I’m also working with technology, right? It’s easy to switch to just doing everything online. More meetings online, more, more communications online, like these kinds of things like we live now, today, we live in, you know, to four quarters of our teams that resume and in our goto meeting sessions, sort of business has definitely been affected.

But what I saw has really changed the way I do things. I’ve always wanted to do coaching for tech professionals, mainly because I saw the trend, where when I get brought in as a consultant, I see people are struggling, not because they can’t do the work. You know, typically when a consultant gets brought in, it’s because they don’t have the skills. They don’t have, you know, the expertise, they would bring in a consultant.

But in my case, I saw that they were bringing me in not because they can’t do the work. It’s because they’re so tired and exhausted, that they can’t do anything else. Like two or three of my clients from last year. They brought me in, they were deploying SQL Server availability groups on Azure. And the guy leading the project was really smart. He’s the lead cloud engineer and, you know, three or four months into the pandemic. He hasn’t even had time to slow down. Just think about what’s going on. And the whole, the whole pandemic has made a lot of people rethink their priorities. But in our case, people working in tech, it’s even a lot worse because, you know, the lifestyle, the culture that we built into working in tech, you know, 60 plus hour weeks. That’s normal. Right? And we’ve accepted that as normal. I mean, I tell people, I’m a recovering workaholic. We accepted working 60 plus hour weeks normal, but then it blew my mind that my clients were working 80 plus hour weeks. I mean, come on. People are so exhausted, you’re so tired, that it was no longer a conversation about can you do this, it’s about can you still do what you need to do to a point where again, two or three of my clients brought me in last year, not because they can’t do the work. It’s just that they’re too exhausted.

How do “people” fit into your IT departments/business delivery model?

Edwin Sarmiento 

And in, you know, picking up on what you just said, interestingly, people are at the centre of what I do, I remember a couple of years ago, a SAS company based out of Vermont in the United States, reached out to me, they wanted me to do a, a configuration check of their high availability system. And you know, what’s interesting, because I can do what I need to do anywhere in the world, I don’t need to come there, right. But during our conversations, there’s just something about the tone of how they say things that made me feel like, I need to be there. And so I said, Look, I don’t need to be there to do what I need to do. But I feel like I need to be there in order to get your real issues dealt with. And so I said, I want to pay you a visit, I want to talk to your team, I want to you know, get a sense of what really is going on.

And the way I look at what I do is that, you know, every technical problem is really a people problem underneath. We just don’t want to look at it. It’s mostly tech, because that’s how we were trained as tech people, we are trained to look at the tech problems the way they are, I see it differently. Every single tech problem out there is first and foremost, a people problem. And so I ended up visiting them, you know, again, they brought me in, they want me to evaluate their SQL Server always on availability group. But they’re 40 minutes into the conversation. I said, Look, you don’t really have a SQL Server problem, you have a communications problem. And, you know, one guy was saying, What do you mean? Well, your developers are not talking to the SIS admins, your sis admins are not talking to your DBAs your DBAs are not talking to your network, guys. And you’re wondering why your operational procedures are so messed up? Yeah.

How have you experienced the remote aspect of the last year?

Edwin Sarmiento 

You know, it’s interesting, you ask that question because, again, working from home since 2007, you pick up some skills, you learn a few things. And, you know, as a data professional myself, you see patterns, you see patterns, you connect the dots. And it’s that data, right? For me, it’s no longer just about talking to people, on Skype, on teams, on goto meeting, on zoom, it’s about looking for or even listening to what they’re really say. And connecting the dots, because here’s the thing. We have been trained to listen to data, facts, because we’re logical people, tech people are highly logical. So we’ve been trained to listen to facts, data, right. And we, we rationalize things based on facts and data, I’ll give you a very simple example, performance tuning. People are saying, Yeah, I have performance issues. Yeah, give me the data. And we kind of work around a data so that we can make the decision that we need to make, in my case, I use, number one human data, and when I say human data, I look at patterns.

For one, I noticed since people have been working from home since last year and are forced to work from home. I know, number one, they are spending more time on on screen time, more than they they’ve done previously, you’re spending more time on their phones are spending more time on computers, they’re spending more time online. And here’s the thing, even if they want to disconnect, they’re getting pulled back in. And that’s because they feel like they’re not being productive. They’re not making any contribution. Because why would they feel that they’re making a contribution if nobody’s seeing them.

So there’s this human need to always do something. Because in the culture that we live in the doing is what makes us valuable, too, even if it’s as simple as I’m gonna respond to a noise slackness, it’s just so that they know I’m here. Right? And no, I’m just gonna respond to that email, if it’s at three o’clock in the morning, they will just respond, you know, people sleep with their phones beside them, it’s interesting, you know, they would, you know, there will be under beds. And so this kind of behaviour is something that I already know, based on, you know, working in operations for years and sleeping with my phone beside me, you know, when you know, you can’t go to sleep. So you’ll pick up your phone and then look at your emails and see whether or not you’re getting monitoring messages from your systems.

But going back to your question, with everything being remote, you have to learn a thing or two about how to properly talk to people, listen to people, you know, below the surface. We’re no longer having that face to face conversation with people.

And so you know, somebody once said, you know, AI and machine learning and automation robotics are going to take over everything we’re doing. I totally disagree. Because if we keep becoming really good at become at being humans, we will never be replaced by any automation and which is kind of ironic, because automation is also my, my, my strong set of skills that I tend to automate

How do you drive value from data /technology for your business? Are you on a cloud journey – which cloud? And are you there yet?

Edwin Sarmiento 

Well, that’s a really, really good question. You know, it’s interesting, every time a new technology would be introduced into, you know, into the market, I remember going back into the days of, you know, moving into virtual machines, there were a lot of conversations around moving from physical to virtual, and then from virtual to the cloud. And then all of these things, people tend to look at, you know, the next technology as the big thing.

And so everybody now is pushing everyone on to the cloud. Right? Yeah. And what a lot of people realize is that technology is really a reflection of humanity. When you really do think about it, you know, it’s, I say that because number one, there’s always this dividing line between Oh, yeah, we’re the purists. It’s like Windows versus Linux, or a cloud versus on premise, or physical versus virtual, or, you know, technology’s really a reflection of our humanity, because unless you become hybrid in, I’m not talking about, you know, somebody who is, is very well versed at everything I’m talking about, you know, learning how to become one with others.

What I mean by this is, I use the story of how Microsoft really nailed it, when you talk about Azure GCP, or AWS, AWS and GCP, both do not have an on premises story. And what a lot of people think, Oh, yeah, Microsoft is forcing people to go to Azure. But what they don’t realize is that Microsoft has mastered the art of hybrid. And what I mean by hybrid is, they know for a fact that they cannot move people from one tech to another tech in an instant. And so they can’t really force everybody to move to the cloud. But they really have a great on premises story, because that’s how Microsoft started in the first place. All on premises. Right? And so they’re at the centre. They’re the bridge between Yeah, you want to move some of your workloads to the cloud? Sure. But you want to keep some of them on premises? Sure. We have a story between on premises and the cloud. So they’re not Well, a lot of people think, yeah, your Microsoft salespeople are forcing them to go to the cloud. And so there’s no incentive to go on premises.

But here’s the thing, which ties back to what I mentioned earlier about being hybrid. Learning how to put yourselves in the shoes of somebody else is what I mean by being hybrid in Microsoft understands that your companies, startups, they’ll be more than willing to be able to cloud, and that’s okay. Because we have something for you. Oh, traditional businesses have stopped running on premises. Yeah, we have something for you, the right in the middle in our jobs as technology professionals, right. Again, I know this is a long winded way of saying, sure, people are moving to the cloud.

But you know, it’s really not an argument, whether you want to stick to on premises versus moving to the cloud. It’s really about you becoming the trusted advisor, as a consultant as a tech professional, to drive that conversation about what really is the value that you’re contributing? which ties me back to, again, the conversation around…Are we really arguing whether you want to move to the cloud, or you want to stay on prem, no, the value that we bring to the table is to be the guide? Sure. We move to the cloud here are pros and cons. And I’m here to help versus not let’s move to the cloud because I just got certified on AWS. Right, totally different conversation, which ties back to your question earlier about the value, right?

The things that we do as tech professional can be done cheaper, more efficient, I don’t want to say faster. Because you can pick and choose, it can be done cheaper, that’s for sure. I know for a fact it can be done cheaper. I come from Asia. So you’re outsourcing stuff. But what are things that we can do that cannot be outsourced? That’s thinking, we cannot outsource our thinking, we cannot outsource our creativity, we cannot outsource our humanity. And so the real value that every tech professional can bring to the table is in the hands, enhancing how they think, enhancing their creativity, and enhancing their humanity.

I forgot who mentioned earlier, the difference between thinking and doing the work that we do, as tech people is, you know, taking up so much of our time 60 plus 80 plus hour weeks, that we become human doings, not human beings. And that’s preventing us from thinking. Even taking a break. Taking a break is looked down on in tech, taking days off is looked down on what we don’t realize is that we’re not machines, we’re humans. And our productivity, our efficiency comes from the fact that we’re humans, now we’re not them, we can do more. Right? doing more is just a byproduct of the conditioning that we’ve had throughout the years. They told us, if you can do more, you can you’re valuable. Not really, because I can do more of what any anybody else can do. And I’m just a commodity. Cool.

What advice would you give your younger self or those starting out or  changing their career into the IT industry?

Edwin Sarmiento 

That’s a really interesting question. You know, it’s, it took me years to really understand why people ask those crazy questions. It’s like, I can go back to my old self and tell myself like, Hey, don’t do that, like we can. But let’s pretend that I’m going back to, like, 40 years ago, and yeah, I’m 40 Plus, I don’t look that. But let’s pretend that I can go back. What would I tell myself, the one thing that I would tell myself that I’m still telling myself is be open to new ideas.

And what I mean by be open to new ideas is not I’m looking for the next best thing, or I’m looking to the next big thing now. You know, wisdom of the generations has, you know, been generous to us. to a point where we think in order to make a difference, we need to look at the next best thing, the next big thing or the next great technology.

What I’ve learned throughout the years, is that you focus on the things that do not change, everything else will. And when you’re looking for, you know, the next best idea, the next big technology, people are so fixated on how does that work? Like for instance, when Microsoft introduced Azure arc with Kubernetes like how does that work? We forget the technology has been around for so long. That the principles and the concepts do not change them. Not much changes the concept stuff. Right?

And what I have been telling myself, ever since I realized that, yeah, nothing’s really going to change the fundamentals, the basics, is that I always go back to the basics. Not the latest, not the greatest. And I usually tell the story of how smart Microsoft is. Well, you know, being a global leader in software, you know, would attract a lot of really smart people. But the features they’re introducing in the next release the next version, the, you know, the higher editions, were actually based on existing features, which means what I’ve learned in SQL Server 6.5, what I’ve learned in SQL, SQL Server seven still applies today.

But most people ignore the fact that you know something, you already know something. And so in order for you to adapt to the next big thing, the next best technology that you could ever think of…is not letting go of the fundamentals, is not letting go of the basics, is embracing more of the fundamentals and basics, which, again, is it’s really a general philosophy.

If you if you think about, you know, we talk about business practices, we talk about principles like Agile, for instance, we talk about all of these things, and what a lot of people don’t realize it’s really all about becoming a better human being. Knowing how to communicate, knowing how to care for other people, you know, what will you know, better DevOps practice do to your company, if you don’t even talk to each other? Because you know, we’re better than you are you know, it, it’s not going to help. That’s going back to the basics is what I would tell my old self. Cool.

Tell me a fun fact about yourself that perhaps nobody else knows about you?

Edwin Sarmiento 

You know, that it took me a while to really think about what is something that a lot of people don’t know about me, and I’m not, you know, I’m not like most people who would post everything that they’re doing on social media, I’m not that kind of person. And so, there’s so many things that a lot of people don’t know about me, but one thing that they do know about me is I’m a musician, I’m a jazz piano player. And in my spare time, which happened, which happens to be almost every day, is I would sit down and play the piano. And, you know, this is interestingly, because, you know, as tech professionals, in everything that we do, we, we become so logical that we forget to enjoy what we’re doing.

And so fun fact about me is, yeah, I do play piano whenever I feel like it, but instead of really enjoying the music, I would like analyze everything that I do. And then you know, 45 minutes in I was thought myself, Hey, can you just enjoy the music, and stop analyzing what you’re doing. And that’s what I do on my spare time. Sometimes I play around with my music workstation, where I create tracks for my own listening pleasure. They’re not for sale, but you know, something to really expand my creativity because again, one of the things that I bring to the table is the creativity, the thought process, and if I can enhance that in everything that I do, whether it’s taking photos, playing music, or being creative, and just about anything, just don’t ask me to cook I’m a really bad cook, but in just about anything, just apply that creativity and enhance that creativity, creativity, because it’s not something that can easily be replaced by anything or anybody.