In this episode, we chat with Jordan Villarreal, a senior technical advocate for NetBox Labs.
Jordan has over 20 years of experience as a network engineer, working in various industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. He’ll share his journey from designing websites as a teenager to becoming a network engineer and a technical advocate.
We discuss how he balances his passion for technology with his communication skills, and how he helps NetBox users with their network challenges.
We’ll delve deep into burnout and how he learned to set healthy boundaries and cope with stress in his career.
Join us for this engaging and informative conversation with Jordan Villarreal.
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“When you're on call, you're on call.
But that doesn't mean that you have to also work 60 hours and be on a call.
Sometimes projects get delayed out a bit.
And that's fine.”
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Jordan's Links:
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Thanks for being an imposter - a part of the Imposter Syndrome Network (ISN)!
Make it a great day.
In this episode, we chat with Jordan Villarreal, a senior technical advocate for NetBox Labs.
Jordan has over 20 years of experience as a network engineer, working in various industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. He’ll share his journey from designing websites as a teenager to becoming a network engineer and a technical advocate.
We discuss how he balances his passion for technology with his communication skills, and how he helps NetBox users with their network challenges.
We’ll delve deep into burnout and how he learned to set healthy boundaries and cope with stress in his career.
Join us for this engaging and informative conversation with Jordan Villarreal.
-
“When you're on call, you're on call.
But that doesn't mean that you have to also work 60 hours and be on a call.
Sometimes projects get delayed out a bit.
And that's fine.”
-
Jordan's Links:
--
Thanks for being an imposter - a part of the Imposter Syndrome Network (ISN)!
Make it a great day.
Machines made this, mistakes and all...
[00:00:00] Chris: Hello and welcome to the Imposter Syndrome Network Podcast where everyone belongs, especially if you think you don't. My name is Chris Grundman and Zoe Rose is also in the house. To confuse everyone with her accent. Hey.
[00:00:25] Chris: This is the Jordan Villa Reel episode and I'm here for it. Jordan is a dedicated network engineer with about 20 years of experience and a BA in information technology from Purdue University. He's managed networks as small as a single 10 user campus and as large as a 5,000 node multi-campus multinational environment. And that work has included designing, upgrading, and implementing equipment along with growth planning, disaster recovery testing, remote site work, data center redesign, and of course active network monitoring.
[00:00:59] Chris: Hey, Jordan, would you like to introduce yourself a bit further to the imposter syndrome network?
[00:01:03] Jordan: Yeah, hi everyone. That sounded pretty complete there. That's covered about the majority of my career for about the past 20 years. I've actually pivoted out of being more of a, an active participant in configuring and deploying and monitoring networks.
[00:01:19] Jordan: Uh, in the past year or two, uh, we can talk about that a little bit more, but now I'm a senior technical advocates for NetBox at NetBox Labs, so I still get to be a network engineer, but it's more conversations that I'm having than deploying networks.
[00:01:38] Chris: Perfect. Perfect. Well, we will talk about that a little bit more in a moment, but today, I actually think we should start, uh, as we sometimes do at the very beginning or at least, uh, very beginning, as far as your career goes. What was your first ever job?
[00:01:53] Jordan: Ooh, my first ever job in tech or like, first literal ever job. Literal ever. Let's go all the, the way there literal ever was probably paperboy. We had a, uh, a little community newspaper in our neighborhood where it wasn't, it was, it was a free paper that everyone would get in the community and I would be just get a bundle of those every, came out every a couple times a week and bag 'em up and drop 'em off on people's porches.
[00:02:21] Jordan: It was fun. I got to get out, walk around, see the neighborhood, but I, I only did that for a year or two. And then...
[00:02:28] Chris: Was that something that was like your, your parents foisted upon you or, or did you go seek that out?
[00:02:33] Jordan: Yeah, it was, it was kind of, uh, my parents were more like, you know, you should, you should have a job.
[00:02:37] Jordan: You should go earn some of your own money. So, okay. That's, that's fine. I can do that. And, uh, that sort of persisted, uh, at least that mentality of go make your own money through high school, middle school and high school. For me, something that once I started getting close to driving age, my stepfather, he would repair cars that had been in accidents.
[00:03:01] Jordan: So I wanted to drive, and he always had this influx of cars so I could, I always had like a car. They were never great cars. They were always fixer uppers or in a state of being fixer upped. But I always had to pay for my insurance. So even once I got into middle school, I think maybe like 14, 15, granted, I don't think you could drive until you were 16, but the, the standard was set is you're going to pay for your own insurance.
[00:03:27] Jordan: So then I had some odd jobs through high school, like there was a. Bus boy worked at a local fast food joints, uh, bagged groceries, but pretty much started working right around there. 14, give or take. And that was kind of where I also had my first experience in a tech job was around that age as well.
[00:03:47] Zoe: Well, on further on that then, what was your first tech job and why did you start?
[00:03:53] Jordan: So I graduated high school in the year 2000. So we're coming back into like the mid nineties. Where tech is not really hot at that point in time. It's still very developing, especially the internet. And there was a local company that was looking for a website to be designed for them. And my mom was a teacher at, uh, at Purdue.
[00:04:18] Jordan: Uh, she was a guest lecturer, they called it. And they had a little jobs board where a local business was like, Hey, we're looking for a student to design a website. And my mom was like, well, I have a student at home. I mean, they didn't realize that I was, you know, middle school, high school student at that point in time.
[00:04:34] Jordan: So we went and we visited them and without going too deep into it, they sold products that weren't exactly aligned with the child demographic. And they had a 14, 15 year old sitting across from them. Well, we thought there was gonna be a student. And my mom goes, yes, here, here's the students. And it was interesting, I went through a couple iterations of the website.
[00:04:57] Jordan: They wanted to get into e-commerce. I couldn't take them there. And we parted ways, but, uh, that was my, my first job in tech was, uh, designing a website for... a website that 14 year olds shouldn't be developing.
[00:05:10] Chris: That's funny. That's cool. It's interesting to me how many folks who got involved in tech early.
[00:05:16] Chris: You know, I guess, I guess those of us in our, our relative generation right? Did some kind of website stuff in the nineties, right? Oh yeah. Um, that was like, that's, that's a theme that I've seen come along. I definitely did a little bit of that. And there's other folks who have done a little bit, uh, here and there.
[00:05:29] Chris: It's interesting.
[00:05:30] Jordan: Yeah, it was a very tangible thing at that point in time. And once the, the wizzywig, the, what you see is what you get editors. And I remember Microsoft Front page being a very, very popular one. It became easier and almost having access to it. Kind of put you at a higher level than almost everybody else, because the internet was so young at that point in time, there weren't tutorials and you know, YouTube wasn't a thing where you could go watch somebody design a website in under five minutes using ChatGPT.
[00:06:00] Jordan: Like you really had to put work in. And that was a, it was a fun thing, there's no doubt about it.
[00:06:05] Zoe: Yeah, for sure. I, I, I didn't go through that path. I went through a different path, but at one point I did also do websites. For, um, a ferret rescue, so, yeah.
[00:06:17] Jordan: Oh, that's awesome. I love ferrets.
[00:06:19] Zoe: It's a skill that if you're skilled at, I'm sure you can do something really fancy.
[00:06:23] Zoe: I did the bare minimum. Let's be honest. I was not fancy.
[00:06:27] Jordan: And that really is about the extent of my web design. I can make something function, but I've never been, uh, good at graphics like I have a good eye for photography. I do not have a good eye for web design at all.
[00:06:39] Zoe: Yeah, I mean either. Well, looking at your current role, I was very interested in the title, senior Technical Advocate.
[00:06:45] Zoe: Yes. Well, I am actually technically a stranger. So if you were going to explain your job to a stranger, uh, what would you, how would you describe it?
[00:06:55] Jordan: I advocate for things technically. No, I'm sorry. That's, that's, that's a bad joke. So my job is, So I have this career as a network engineer. I, I started as a network engineer very early, like in high school.
[00:07:09] Jordan: So we're talking 96, 97. I am somebody who was fortunate enough to be able to identify a career path that really spoke to them, and that was around the time that certifications were really becoming a, maybe not preferred, but they were becoming a very, a hot thing for people to get. So after I graduated high school, Essentially there was a choice of go to college or go obtain a cert.
[00:07:37] Jordan: And I went down this cert path and ob, obtained my certs and, and realized that nobody wanted to hire a 20 year old without a resume, at least for, for networking. So then I kind of started at the computer repair level and just built my way up into where somebody would, a company would hire me to do desktop support, worked my way up into networking and then sort of, grown from there.
[00:08:03] Jordan: So I have this 20 ish years of experience from sort of the grounds up to being a senior network engineer for a very large deployment. I know how networks work. I'm also a very vocal, I like to talk, I'm outgoing, uh, jovial personality, and there are a lot of engineers out there that don't have personalities like that.
[00:08:28] Jordan: I'm not saying close the door, you know, put me in a windowless room in the basement type. But there, I mean there are just like a lot of engineers that, that just don't have that personality type. So what that enabled me to do throughout my career was just communicate with managers, non-IT managers, I would say non-technical, even if it's within the IT department.
[00:08:49] Jordan: I understood how to have those communications. Developed the skillset that allowed me to sort of speak both languages so I could speak technical to technical folks, non-technical to non-technical folks, and then translate between them. And as I started to get closer to 20 years in industry working on live networks, I kind of got to a point where I wanted a different challenge.
[00:09:14] Jordan: I also wanted my pager to stop going off in the middle of the night and started to look at maybe not more sales roles, but more conversational architect business linked roles. And, and that's sort of what I do now as a technical advocate. So, uh, I represent a software, it's called NetBox. Uh, it's an open source network management utility or network inventory.
[00:09:39] Jordan: You can look at it through a couple different lenses because of how many different features that it. That it has. Uh, but my job is to essentially be the network engineer on the other side of those calls that I can help them understand how to use the product, how to bring it into their network, how to talk to their bosses about it, how to explain, uh, how it could gets used, how it gets leveraged.
[00:10:01] Jordan: But a real fun parts about NetBox is that it, it's an open source project. It's been out there for seven years, so we're recording on June 27th today. This is actually the seven year birthday of NetBox. It is its birthday today, and in my role I get to work with the open source community as part of NetBox Labs.
[00:10:24] Jordan: We offer hosting for NetBox. So if you don't want to host it, you know you can pay us to host it for you. But realistically, I get to talk to any engineer regardless of if they're paying us or not paying us. About NetBox and how to use it, it's kind of like a, like a presales engineer. You don't have to be paying me to have a conversation with me, so I'll
[00:10:49] Chris: Right, right.
[00:10:49] Chris: Without the sales. Yeah. The pre-sales engineer without the sales.
[00:10:53] Jordan: Yeah. I'm, I'm not commissioned or anything like that. If you say, Hey, I need help hosting, that's great. Let's have a conversation. If you say, Hey, I, I never wanna host it. I wanna run it on my own. That's, that's fabulous. We can still have, uh, an equally productive conversation.
[00:11:09] Jordan: It's a lot of fun. Uh, but that's what technical advocate is for me at NetBox Labs.
[00:11:14] Zoe: That's really interesting. It, it, I actually triggered a, a follow up question because the one thing that I noticed in my career is the more senior I get, the less hands-on I get to be. And as a, you know, historically tech person and somebody that loves technology, I feel like sometimes I have this like, I don't, I don't know how to explain it.
[00:11:37] Zoe: I feel like if I'm not technical, I'm not hands-on at my job, then I'm failing as a tech and I have to get over this like fear constantly. And this is ongoing, like in my current role, I'm, uh, I'm more in an advisor as well from a security perspective. And so whilst I know the tech and I love it, I go through this phase of am I no longer a tech?
[00:11:59] Jordan: I can definitely relate to a bit of that. Yeah. I would say the more I worked my way up into the senior type roles, I definitely was less hands-on. I had to become more aligned with the business, understands how that worked, but I still do. I still had to stay plenty technical. It's just. You're picking up new skills and you have to focus on 'em a bit.
[00:12:19] Chris: Yeah, I, I've gone back and forth and, and recently kind of more out on the entrepreneurial and doing some consulting and things I've, I've gotten to come back and, and do some, you know, really deep hands-on technical work and, uh, and surprise myself. I. Because I was very worried. I was like, ah, I'm old. I forgot all this.
[00:12:36] Chris: I'm not gonna be able to do it. Everything's changed. Now we're using NetBox instead of spreadsheets, uh, instead of spreadsheets and stuff. Um, and I, you know, I, I, at least, you know, luckily for me, I, I surprised myself we was able to do some, some new technical work. Uh, I felt really good. One thing I, I noticed in this, not to go too far afield here, but you know, it triggered a memory in me.
[00:12:55] Chris: One of the things I've noticed, and I was talking to my wife about this. Is, you know, the deep satisfaction I got from going back and doing more of that technical work again, that hands-on technical work and we were talking about why that was, and I, I think a big part of it may be this was the insight of my wife, that it's kind of not dependent on other people, right?
[00:13:13] Chris: Like if, if I get a piece of code to work or configuration to work, if the route happens and the packets move, that's real. And it's validating in itself. Like I can see, oh look, the packets are moving. You know, the script uploaded the VLANs to the API or whatever the heck it might be. I know that that thing happened and I don't have to worry about anybody else liking it or not liking it, or not believing it or whatever, which so much of my other work around marketing and sales and, and technology strategy and, and managing the people, it's all dependent on other people's reaction to what you do.
[00:13:43] Chris: Whereas the technical work, it's kind of more binary. So I don't know, have you noticed that? 'cause you're, you're kind of going the opposite direction right now where I'm kind of diving back into deep technical stuff. You're kind of, I guess, you know, maybe not that early, but earlier on your, your technical evangelism kind of role.
[00:13:56] Chris: Do you, do you see any of that dynamic shaping out? I mean, is it more or less satisfying to work more directly with people than with the network?
[00:14:03] Jordan: Ah, that's a real interesting question. I still find it as satisfying doing this sort of work today. One of the reasons behind that is because still am very technical.
[00:14:17] Jordan: Like I love technology. My, I had my first computer when I think it was five. It was, I had a Commodore 64 and some other I B M micro compatible that ran MS-DOS 3 1 1. Like I've been in tech for as long as I can remember. So within this role, I, I have a unique ability to where it's not just talking about the product and saying, okay, here are the features.
[00:14:43] Jordan: So NetBox is really plugged into a lot of automation that's happening today. More so on the network side. It can go in some other places, but real heavy in the network automation space and something that I was always so, so at, was programming. I was never a good programmer, but, Now with automation being as prevalent as it is and NetBox being such a large part of, uh, a lot of organizations, automation, in order for me to understand that, I have to understand the programmatic side.
[00:15:18] Jordan: I have to understand how networking is evolving, like when we start looking at new fabric technologies or SD-WAN or, or really, you know, whatever's coming. Quantum networking is around the corner. I saw a presentation on quantum networking the other day. I have to understand that still, and I don't have to be a practitioner of all of it, but I still have a lab at my house with hardware and virtual.
[00:15:42] Jordan: I got way too many dev boxes. You shouldn't have that many dev boxes. Uh, but I still have to stay technically plugged in. So the other day I was working on a problem with a Jinja2 template, and I've not played a lot with Jinja2. And it took me a couple hours and then when it snapped, I still got that aha.
[00:16:04] Jordan: That satisfaction that, yes. So it wasn't moving a packet, it was just. Giving an input and getting the right output. But that satisfaction still exists for me in a role like this, because I'm still being challenged technically. But then I take that back and the person that I am telling this, at this point, it was, uh, it was somebody on Reddit.
[00:16:27] Jordan: It was somebody on Reddit who had asked the question, they wanted to know how something worked, and I took it back. I said, here it is. And they're like, oh, that's great, thanks. And I still got to like show it to someone. They said thanks, and I felt good about, um, solving something with tech.
[00:16:42] Zoe: That's brilliant.
[00:16:42] Zoe: I love, I love being able to give the answer. It just makes me feel so special.
[00:16:47] Jordan: And kind of just a slight, uh, follow on was after I gave them, after I gave them the answer, I said, oh, that's wonderful. Where's this in the documentation? Like, oh, okay, I'll take that back to the team and we'll figure out the documentation.
[00:17:01] Zoe: One thing I was curious about, I mean, uh, your current role, we've talked quite a bit about it, but I imagine you've had other roles and, and other experiences and one thing that I was curious about, you actually had mentioned was, uh, the whole dealing with burnout and dealing with being overwhelmed. So throughout your career, I imagine there's probably been a time where you've been overwhelmed and.
[00:17:24] Zoe: How did you one identify that that might be the reason, and then how did you get past it?
[00:17:29] Jordan: Yeah, so the burnout, I'm very passionate about tech as I've, I've droned on about here quite a bit. For about 10 years out of my career, I worked in healthcare, uh, and that was well, frontline healthcare. I, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't a nurse, I was a network engineer at a hospital group, and there was a lot of high pressure involved in there just in terms of, okay, well you're gonna make a change while there are patients in the hospital or you're implementing a new system with surgery. Well, don't forget what surgery does. And that drove a lot of my tension. Just, just very high to where, you know, you need to be perfect.
[00:18:14] Jordan: You need to be exact. And doing that for multiple years, just sort of, and I, I was young at the time, this was in my mid twenties. There was something in me that, it took a couple years to realize that, you know, working 60 hours a week was becoming detrimental. I was not treating my body properly, I wasn't treating those around me properly.
[00:18:43] Jordan: And I wish at that point in time, somebody had said something to me about it. Like, um, a peer, a mentor, anything like that, that said, Hey, you know, you're, you're pushing a bit too hard right now. Maybe you need to take your foot off. And I had to learn it the hard way, I guess. So it wasn't a, a realization, it was, no, you've been doing this for too long, you've been hurting yourself for too long.
[00:19:09] Jordan: And I eventually left that job. I actually came back to the hospital group a few years later as a more healthier version of myself and didn't have those issues. But when, when I look back and see how hard that was, what I put myself through, what I put those around me through, it's something that I became very passionate about and try to spot it where I see it in other places and try and just say, Hey, you know, Look, I, I, I've been where you're at or, or somewhere close to where you've been.
[00:19:44] Jordan: And just try to give friends, colleagues, other ways to get out around it because, oh, I, I don't know where I'd be if I had that time back or if I treated myself better, but I can definitely say that I'm, I'm glad that I, I stopped, I started establishing more healthy balance, uh, work-life balance. I'm definitely much happier today.
[00:20:12] Jordan: So it was a hard road to go through. Definitely. Definitely happy to be on the other side of it though.
[00:20:17] Chris: That resonates for sure. I mean, maybe there, there might be, and I don't know if this, maybe this is not true or not, but you know, I, I definitely went through a very similar, like overworking, pushing way too hard, especially in my twenties, and then kind of, you know, burned out more than once before I even realized what burnout was.
[00:20:33] Chris: I came back. And then I think some of that is like a natural cycle, almost. Like you almost have to go through it once. I mean, I'm not recommending that people burn themselves out on purpose, uh, by any measure, but it does seem something you have to learn. So I'm, I'm curious right. In, in, in, now in your, in your kind of advocacy for, you know, burnout awareness, let's call it, right.
[00:20:50] Chris: Do you think it's easier to spot burnout happening in others than it is in yourself? And, you know, are there clear signs, like, I guess maybe there's two questions here. How do you see burnout happening in other people? How do you identify that and, and know, like it's time to step in and say something, and then how do you identify it in yourself?
[00:21:08] Chris: And I don't know, maybe those are, maybe that's the same, maybe it's different. I don't know.
[00:21:11] Jordan: No, I think, I think they're kind of similar, but it, it's, for me, it's always been easier to spot something like that in somebody else. And maybe that is because I went through a good bit of that. But when I see a friend of mine who I, I know is in tech or a, a field prone for burnout that they become, Less communicative.
[00:21:32] Jordan: That's, uh, when we get into weekends, they're not available. And, and, and it's, it's usually they're, they're, you know, communicating, oh, it's, it's work, it's this is that. But what I, I rarely see is any sort of acknowledgement that they are working too much. It's just because they're just completely blind to it.
[00:21:55] Jordan: They feel that they. Owe it to the company that they owe it to the industry, that they owe it to the, uh, to the consumers, which in healthcare, the consumers are, are patients like they're, they're human beings. And when I see the communication breakdown, they stop talking about their job. You, you don't hear, and this is if somebody was passionate for their job.
[00:22:18] Jordan: Not everybody has passion for their job. Some people are. Just there for the check, and that's, that's totally fine. But I guess what I'm, I'm circling around here are personality changes that are linked to the job and the job is the reason why. That's usually the first indicator for me that, okay, maybe they're working a little too hard right now.
[00:22:38] Jordan: Maybe they're pushing themselves a little more than they need to be. And now on the other side of that, for me, it's almost like I have an a built in reaction that stops me. From feeling that again, like I know what the, the trigger was. I know what it feels like to be on the other side. So I've got this built in.
[00:23:00] Jordan: I, I'll just say this trigger again, that sort of snaps shut and goes, no, you're, you're doing too much right now. I know you want to answer that question, but you've already put in 45 hours, you're getting close to 50. Stop, and it's hard. It, even today, it's still hard to do, but I know what it feels like on the other side.
[00:23:20] Jordan: And that for me is the, the anchor that keeps me outta it.
[00:23:23] Zoe: I'm hoping, I'm hoping I'll get to the point where I am more proactive in recognizing it, but weirdly enough, my daughter has helped me a lot because I simply can't work as many hours. I used to be a massive workaholic. Then I got pregnant and now I just don't.
[00:23:42] Zoe: I can't, as, as you saw earlier, she likes to sit on my lap and bother me. It'll Yes. You know, and she's like, oh, okay, now it's time to play with me. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. So she's great.
[00:23:54] Jordan: But then at that point, that is your job. That's like, you know, no, I'm, I'm, I'm here to be, to be mom or mommy, or, or what you prefer.
[00:24:02] Jordan: And that you can never put too many hours into that.
[00:24:05] Zoe: You, you, yeah. It's just you. Yeah. It's four times.
[00:24:10] Jordan: You can put them in at weird hour, at weird times of the day, and that might be stressful, but you can never put too many hours into that. That's for sure.
[00:24:16] Zoe: That's a really good point. How did you, um, how did you get past burnout?
[00:24:20] Zoe: Like when you recognized, finally you recognized it, was it, it was an issue? How did you, I guess, recover?
[00:24:27] Jordan: Well, I changed jobs. I, I had an opportunity present itself at a really opportune time and, uh, I really didn't take much of a pay raise. It was at a smaller organization. I didn't take a, a cut on paper, but it was further away.
[00:24:46] Jordan: There was more transportation involved, so it. It, it got to about a, a bit of a wash there. I'm not saying that's, that's how you handle it. Um, at that point in time, I would say mental healthcare was probably carried more of a stigma than it does today. So I di I didn't seek out professional help or anything I should have, but it was, I, I, I, I don't have a really good answer because it wasn't a, a specific event.
[00:25:14] Jordan: Like I, I have spoken with people that, That have put themselves in the hospital because they allowed themselves to be so consumed. They thought that that job was so important that what they were doing with, like, it was other people's livelihoods, um, but without realizing that they're there to do a job.
[00:25:35] Zoe: Yeah. I was one of those people, I I, same, I had the same issue. It, it took me years after that to realize that's what the cause was.
[00:25:43] Jordan: Yeah. And that's, I couldn't tell you in the moment. Like again, it wasn't a hard snap. It was a very slow snap. And I said at some point said, I've gotta do something different.
[00:25:53] Jordan: And I still stayed, um, within, I was still a, a network engineer afterwards, but I was out of direct line of care. Uh, I was more of an office environments, uh, and I was able to establish a healthier boundary within that job. And then, like, like I mentioned, I actually came back to that same hospital group about three and a half, four years later.
[00:26:13] Jordan: In a slightly elevated position and did that for a few years and had a much, since I had that, that those boundaries put in place, uh, it was a lot easier for me to step in and like, when you're on call, you're on call, but that doesn't mean that you have to also work 60 hours and be on call and sometimes projects get delayed out a bit and that's fine.
[00:26:37] Chris: Yeah. You know, I re a lot of that resonates with me as well. Especially the slow burn of it. You know, I think when people talked about burnout, I always like, yeah, like I imagined, you know, just, I don't know, passing out or something. Right? I mean, just like, like literally just falling down and being done and I was like, oh, that hasn't happened yet, so obviously I'm fine.
[00:26:55] Chris: Right. Um, and not realizing that, yeah, I was definitely grinding myself down, both health wise, relationship-wise, productivity-wise as well. Right. You just, you get to this point of frazzled stress where you feel activated, but you're not actually doing anything. You're just kind of sitting there vibrating.
[00:27:08] Chris: At least that's been my experience with it.
[00:27:10] Jordan: Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree with that. There, there are times that I described it as like a a, a woodpecker on a brick. On a brick wall. Yeah, exactly. He's exactly, he's working hard, but he's not making a lot of progress.
[00:27:22] Chris: Interestingly, you know, stopping, relaxing, chilling out is actually the answer to more productivity.
[00:27:28] Jordan: Yes, it is. Yeah. And that's where I feel like stepping away into a completely different industry. Uh, it was a licensure based, uh, place. So, uh, it was still actually, uh, a little bit related to healthcare, but it wasn't that, okay, here's the, there are patients, we're open 24 7, there's surgery going on. It was, it was more of a nine to five.
[00:27:52] Jordan: And I think there's people who can probably jump into those high stress roles and either they have that ability to self-regulate already. It's just something that they, you know, learned through their upbringing or they naturally have, and that just wasn't me. So stepping out of that industry and reestablishing myself helped me step back into that industry.
[00:28:14] Jordan: 'cause after I went into healthcare, I went into manufacturing after I left the hospital group for, um, Panduit. Well, we're, you know, multinational manufacturing company and there's. Manufacturing in China, uh, there's manufacturing in, I get Brazil's, uh, or Costa Rica, like there's, you are globally dispersed.
[00:28:36] Jordan: But because I had those healthier boundaries established, I was able to be fine in healthcare. I was able to be fine in manufacturing. The middle of the night pages still got to me, but I. You know, I, I, I wasn't, I wasn't beating myself up over it, and, and I do say pager a lot because up until when I left the hospital group in 2016, I still carried a physical pager.
[00:29:01] Jordan: So I still like to call ita pager.
[00:29:03] Chris: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Even if it's an email or a Slack or whatever the heck it is nowadays. Yeah,
[00:29:07] Jordan: that makes sense. Yeah. The PagerDuty a Slack alert, whatever it is. Well, PagerDuty, uh, I still call it pager,
[00:29:12] Zoe: to be clear. To be fair, I've never owned or used a pager and I also call it pager, so.
[00:29:19] Chris: Right, right. It's like dial cone, right? Like that's something that's gonna stay around for while. Um, speaking of boundaries, though, we are at the boundary of this episode. This has been awesome conversation. We are about outta time, Jordan. Do you have any, any kind of projects or, or, or things you wanna highlight for the imposter syndrome network?
[00:29:38] Chris: Before we, uh, before we close out here,
[00:29:41] Jordan: the only thing that I would, uh, that I love to highlight is NetBox. I was an avid user of it, and that's kind of how I ended up, uh, representing it. So if you run a network, go check out NetBox. If you're looking for a place to store your routers and your switches and your racks and your internet circuits and all that.
[00:29:58] Jordan: More on my just personal side. You follow me on Twitter. Sometimes I say funny things.
[00:30:04] Chris: Awesome. Well, Jordan, thank you mucho for sharing your story with the Imposter Syndrome Network. Obviously thank you to all of our listeners for your time, your attention, and your support. If you found this episode insightful or interesting, or maybe even both, please consider paying it forward by letting others know about this show and the great guests we have on.
[00:30:23] Chris: We are all outta time, so no final question today. I'm just gonna jump right to the end and, uh, we'll be back next week.