Arjan Timmerman

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 Grundeman. And this is the Arjan Timmerman episode. Arjan is a seasoned IT professional coming from the trenches of enterprise IT. And he's written a lot of content, run a podcast has made many appearances at major IT industry events, including the acclaimed and live streamed tech field day event series.

[00:00:37] Chris: Hi, Arjan. Would you like to introduce yourself a bit further to the imposter syndrome network? 

[00:00:41] Arjan: Yeah, sure. My name is Arjan Timmerman. Um, I've, uh, been in the industry for. 25 years now, I would say I've been a IT architect for, for many years of it. So the last 10 years, I've been mainly an IT architect doing a lot of, um, architecting work for the bigger companies here, especially in the Netherlands, but in Europe as well, uh, writing global designs, as we call them in a year or high level designs, as well as low level designs.

[00:01:14] Arjan: And doing a lot of analyst work, uh, the last couple of years as well. So, um, yeah, fun times. 

[00:01:20] Chris: Awesome. Yeah. We'll dive into a bunch of that. And I know kind of just looking back at your career history, you've done a ton of stuff, just a bunch of projects and things over the years. But I want to kind of maybe start all the way at the beginning.

[00:01:31] Chris: And maybe even before technology, I don't know, what was your first ever job? What was the first thing someone paid you to do? 

[00:01:37] Arjan: So if I would go back to when I was still at school and doing some, uh, holiday work, it would be, um, I'm not even sure how you call it in, in, in English. So we call it, uh, bollenplukken.

[00:01:51] Arjan: So the, the tulips in, in the Netherlands, they are balls that you put in the ground and, and, and the tulip comes out of it. And there's a shell around it. And, um, to make sure that the, the growing process goes well, you need to get those, those shells off of it before they go into the ground. So that was my, that was literally my first job.

[00:02:13] Arjan: So that was the first one I did. But if you're going back to when I started my working career, I actually started in AutoCAD. Drawings on a, on a, on a, on a drawing. I I'm not sure how you call it, but that's where I started. And that's actually where I rolled into the IT as well, because back then the drawings were all printed out or plotted out as you, uh, As you know, because they're really big and they were archived in a way, um, that they were put in a box and the box was put in a closet.

[00:02:47] Arjan: And that was the way we did it. And then we were kind of like, okay, why are we creating the drawers on a computer? And then doing it physically, the archiving physically. And, um, we started with creating a kind of drawing backup, uh, solution. And, uh, that's the way how I rolled into IT as well. 

[00:03:09] Chris: That's really cool.

[00:03:10] Chris: I like, I mean, both of those things. One, I don't think you could have had a more Dutch, uh, first, uh, working experience than taking the shells off of tulips. I think that if anybody who knows anything about the Netherlands, right. Knows about tulips and, and, and, uh, the, the connection there. So that's, that's pretty fun.

[00:03:27] Chris: But then, um, yeah, I, I love that, you know, and I think most people, I guess, of, of our age ish kind of fell into technology and, and so that, that's a really interesting kind of origin story, right. Of, of, of seeing this computer drawings, right. Being, being then printed out and boxed up and stored in a, in a warehouse or, you know, you know, a cellar somewhere or whatever, and, and thinking about that and saying, Hey, wait a minute.

[00:03:48] Chris: What if we stored these on the computers, which at the time was a leap, right? I mean, that was probably pretty fairly revolutionary at the moment. 

[00:03:54] Arjan: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, like I said, most of the drawings back then were, were, uh, were printed out and then, uh, were stored in, in, in that kind of way. And, and so we started thinking about why are we doing that?

[00:04:07] Arjan: You have to remember back then. So we're talking about late nineties, a big hard drive was probably around what was it, a hundred MBs or something like that. That's totally different from, from what we have these days. So, um, um, yeah, storing. Everything on the computer was, was not done because it was just not doable.

[00:04:29] Arjan: But in the end, what we started doing was, uh, creating floppies, uh, creating a backup program to get it on floppies. And then the floppies were. Not as big as the, as the, uh, a zero, uh, drawings that we had. So you didn't have to use that much space, but yeah, in the end you can, you can go from there. Right. So, um, it will probably be completely different program now, but, but back then it, it, it started with, uh, going to floppies, 

[00:04:58] Chris: that's really interesting.

[00:04:59] Chris: Yeah. And I don't know if it's shifted or not, but I know at least for a very, very long time, the bandwidth of a station wagon full of drives. Could be faster than internet connections, uh, up until very recently. I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's even switched over quite yet. Cause, cause the drives keep getting bigger as well.

[00:05:16] Chris: Right? So if you load a station wagon up with SSDs and, and haul butt across the country, uh, you might be able to transfer more data than the internet can still. I don't know. 

[00:05:24] Arjan: Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm not sure if that still works. If I look at what we have here at home, uh, I've got, um, fiber and I've got four gigs up and four gigs down.

[00:05:36] Arjan: So. You know, probably, probably won't work that way anymore, but, um, yeah, it's, it, it, it used to be, uh, sometimes it was funny, uh, how things worked. And, um, I do remember the times that a lot of, um, the admins drove with the tapes from, uh, A to B to make sure that it was just faster, the lines weren't there.

[00:05:58] Arjan: And, um, if you, um, in the Netherlands, you had ISDN lines, and if you have two of them, uh, you would probably take, uh, three or four days to get your data over. So it was much easier to put it on tape and drive from one side to another and do that way. 

[00:06:14] Chris: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So fast forwarding all the way to today, You're now the co owner and also an industry analyst at that tech unplugged.

[00:06:23] Chris: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what tech unplugged is and even more to the point of this show, kind of what your day to day looks like. What does that role even entail? What do you do as a, as an industry analyst and an owner of this business? 

[00:06:35] Arjan: So, so let's start at the beginning of, of Tech Unplugged.

[00:06:38] Arjan: Tech Unplugged was started, uh, by, uh, Enrico Signoretti, a well known guy of the, of the storage, uh, industry. And he asked me after one or two, uh, Events that he did back then. It was purely event driven. I think that was back in 2015. Uh, if I could join him and help him with setting it up, uh, even further and Rico left for, uh, a vendor open IO.

[00:07:05] Arjan: It was back then. And, um, so he left the company to me. That was the, the agreement we had. And I asked, uh, Max Mordelaro, uh, to join me instead of, uh, Enrico. And we were kind of like, okay, so what are we going to do with the, with the company, the event industry, it's, it's nice. And you probably know that, but it's a lot of work and we both had our day to day jobs and we were like, is this what really what we want to do?

[00:07:32] Arjan: That's the first thing. And the second thing is, is there not something else that we can do that we Like even better than that. So, uh, we started more in white paper, blog posts, uh, video costs and all that kind of stuff. On the other hand, Enrico, uh, left OpenIO and went to GigaOM and after, I think he was there a year or a year and a half or something like that, he asked us if we could join him, help him create the content needed for GigaOM.

[00:08:04] Arjan: So. The last two and a half years, we worked really, uh, a lot with Enrico on the GigaOM side, creating the content, the radars, the key criteria, and the sonars. You, you know, them very well as well. And we decided last year, end of last year that, um, it would be better to do that for ourselves. So we are going.

[00:08:28] Arjan: We always continued with Tech Unplugged. We've got a couple of bigger companies that always supported us. So we, we did a video content for them and written content, all, all kinds of stuff. Um, and we decided that we would do that for the foreseeables future, um, for, for Tech Unplugged as well. So reached out again to our audience again and told them that we would leave And that we would start creating, uh, new content and the big differentiator for us for, for tech unplugged is that we have the ability with Max and myself, first of all, to do really.

[00:09:12] Arjan: EU driven, uh, content. And I think that's a big differentiator from, uh, everything that's going on in the, in the, in the U S and in the rest of the world, because of all the regulations that we have over a year. And the other one is that with the both of us, we talk six to seven different European languages.

[00:09:33] Arjan: And we can write in them as well. And that's a big differentiator as well. So we. Uh, one of the things that we did for one of our customers was a white paper in Italian. And another thing, when, um, one of our customers, uh, Commvault Metallic got G8 in, in Europe, we did, I think we did six different languages in, uh, in videos, uh, with, uh, the different.

[00:10:01] Arjan: Management teams of the countries here in Europe. So that's a big differentiator that we have. And that's what we told. We tell our customers as well now that we can do that. And we really have a focus on the European market. 

[00:10:13] Chris: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I like that. And that's really cool because I think that helps both sides, right?

[00:10:17] Chris: I mean, obviously. Any companies that want to generate content, they want to have it go to the audience more directly, but also engineers who are looking for content, you know, don't always know every other language that the content might be produced in. Right. So having it in your native language makes it much easier to understand and kind of consume.

[00:10:33] Chris: Yeah. 

[00:10:34] Arjan: Yeah. And, and, and one of the other things is that there are a couple of European companies or European countries, let's put it that way, that if the content isn't in their. Mother tongue, they will not really consume it. So there's a couple of, uh, uh, countries here that really want it in their own language.

[00:10:55] Arjan: And, and, uh, big thing is that we, that we have the ability to do that. So that's, that's really cool as well. 

[00:11:01] Chris: Yeah. That's awesome. We know only a little bit about that North America, right? The, the French Canadians. And there are some Canadian rules around stuff having to be in English and French, but definitely not anywhere near what you're dealing with, uh, in the EU with so many countries packed together there and so many different languages kind of bustling together, but a very different environment.

[00:11:16] Arjan: I think you, you even in, in, in the Netherlands, if you, if you went back probably not even 10 years, most of the, of the government. Um, designs and all that kind of stuff should be in Dutch. Now it's now it's totally different these days. It can all be in English, uh, probably will be in English, but if I think you don't have to go back that long that a couple or most of the companies would like it in, in, in Dutch and not in English.

[00:11:48] Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think, you know, like again, especially when you're talking about really technical topics, I think it's easier to consume that in your native language when you're not trying to translate the technology and the language at the same time in your head. I mean, yeah, for sure. So looking back and I think I looked at LinkedIn and I think it showed like 43.

[00:12:04] Chris: Previous positions. That's a lot of different projects and companies you've worked with. I wonder if you have a, if you can think back on, you know, what, what the favorite job, favorite role you had over the, over the course of your career so far has been. 

[00:12:16] Arjan: Yeah. So there's a couple of them that I really liked.

[00:12:20] Arjan: I always like to be more of an advisor to companies than really, um, be An admin or a consultant or whatever. Um, I really like the advisory stuff of it. I would say probably ASML, um, a well known company these days in the, in the world was a, a very interesting project to be sure. Um, there was a lot going on back then.

[00:12:51] Arjan: It's already, uh, um, about five years ago, I guess. For them, there was a lot going on because they were growing like crazy. The world stage was different from what it is now, but there was already a lot going on. They've got a lot of. Competition, not real competition, but they've got a lot of intellectual property that they want to protect.

[00:13:16] Arjan: They actually, uh, back then had, and I think they had one, uh, last year as well, they had a breach from, um, and, and, and nine out of 10 times that will come out of China, but they've got their own offices in China as well. So, uh, there's, A lot of the time you see that that's, uh, one of the things that's really important for, for companies like ASML.

[00:13:40] Arjan: So the intellectual property that needs to be protected is, is one of the, the biggest thing within those companies. But also, uh, like what we already talked about data and, and, and how, where does my data reside? How do I keep it protected? How do I make sure that if something happens that I'd be up and running very fast as well?

[00:14:06] Arjan: So a lot of that went into what I was doing at ASML, and that was a really interesting project. 

[00:14:13] Chris: Awesome. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. On the flip side of the favorite job, have you ever worked on a dysfunctional team? A team that just didn't, didn't click, didn't, couldn't get it together? 

[00:14:23] Arjan: Yeah, a couple of times.

[00:14:25] Arjan: So a big bank here in the Netherlands, uh, I won't call them by name, but, um, I worked with them as well. And, and, um, uh, I worked there for, I think about a month. And then I said, I'm, you know what? This doesn't work. I'm, I'm, I'm stepping out of this and I'll, I'll figure something. Most of my jobs are. Right.

[00:14:48] Arjan: So I come in for one month to a couple of years and, and, and I'll be gone again. But with this one, I really said, you know, um, this doesn't work. Uh, it's just too much. The internal people were. Kind of always putting everything to the external people and never, there was never a good back and forth on how we could make things better.

[00:15:14] Arjan: It was always like, okay, you're going to do this and that's it. And if you would want to tell them something about, okay, but if we do it this way, it might go better. If we work together on this, it will go faster. That was, that was not done. It was always. A one way kind of, um, uh, discussion. And there was after a month I said, you know, that's not going to work for me.

[00:15:40] Arjan: I'm going away. Yeah. 

[00:15:41] Chris: Yeah. That resonates with me. I mean, I think that's a good. Kind of description of most of the kind of dysfunctional teams I've seen is that that lack of collaboration, kind of not being open to new ideas or suggestions and then kind of the my way or the highway kind of attitude, which I think rightly so yeah, choosing the highway is sometimes the best option.

[00:15:59] Arjan: Yeah. Sometimes people, um, are offended by it or are kind of like, but you cannot do that and I'm like, you know, why not? It's my life. And, um, I think you have to learn that. I wouldn't have done that in the, in, in, in the first couple of years of my, uh, of my career, I would say. But after, uh, 20 years in, in IT, you're kind of like, okay, you know what?

[00:16:23] Arjan: There's multiple other opportunities, um, at the end of the month. And, um, I'll, I'll go and do something else. 

[00:16:31] Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It always is a little scary, right. To, to kind of turn down good work or, or we're paying work at least, but yeah, there, there's a lot of it to go around, I think, uh, in our industry.

[00:16:41] Arjan: Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. 

[00:16:43] Chris: What about like, like good leadership? I think again, kind of having worked at multiple companies on all these projects that, you know, I want to kind of pick your brain a little bit about some of the things you've seen and, and, and good leaders is, is one of those pieces. I mean, could you maybe think about and describe the, the best kind of boss, manager, coach that you've ever worked for?

[00:17:01] Chris: Or maybe, you know, the collected traits of all the best, I don't know. 

[00:17:05] Arjan: I would say the best that I worked with was, and actually the, the project or the program that we worked on wasn't completed by us because we were, again, by the internal team, uh, after I think it was 10 or 11 months or something like that, we were kind of, um, put aside by the internal team.

[00:17:25] Arjan: But that was a program manager that was, he always, what he always did is that he built a team around him that could teach the, the internal team to be at their best, and that works if you've got a functional team already, that is still kind of looking. To learn from such a team. Um, so there was a lot going on.

[00:17:55] Arjan: It was a large, um, normal hospital in the Netherlands. And they were fused with two smaller hospitals, uh, within the same city. And that actually one of those. Two hospitals was the hospital that where all the princesses of the Netherlands were born. Um, so it was in the Hague and with that, because the Hague is, is a place that most of the people, um, from the outside of the Netherlands know also because, um, there's a lot going on there.

[00:18:34] Arjan: It was a hospital that thought that they, because they've got a status, right? So they have it all and the others need to be, they need to fall in line with them. And it actually, it went the other way around. So the other hospitals work cooperating together and, and, and making the decisions and, and the other hospital needed to go with them.

[00:18:57] Arjan: In the end, that broke the program as well, because there were still some people within the organization that had a lot to tell and they eventually got the CIO to back them and so they got in another team. That was really one of the things that he, what he learned me is that you need to first listen to the people.

[00:19:26] Arjan: Um, so you need to let them talk, what is going on? What happened? Uh, where are you working on and what can we do to help you, um, get into a flow where. You can do what you need to do and we can do the program on the side. So in the end, we all come together and we create something for the organization. And that is something that he, that I really learned from him.

[00:19:54] Arjan: Um, he created a team. He built a team around him, uh, really talking to the people and listening to them. But if something went on, he knew about it. And there's one thing that I, I will remember forever is when the CIO reached out to me, uh, bypassing the program manager, trying to get things out of me to make a case against the program manager.

[00:20:22] Arjan: And I told him, I'm not going to do that. You know, uh, I worked for the program manager. He got me in. That's not going to happen. So I gave him a call, uh, directly. And the next day he called me in to his office. And while we were talking, the CIO came in and he was mad as hell. And he, the program manager literally went in between us and said, you know, you can do whatever you want.

[00:20:51] Arjan: You can do with me, whatever you want, but you stay away from Mario. He's in my team. He's my responsibility. If you want something of him, you can ask me. But you're not going to go to him directly. So that's really one of the things that I, um, I really, um, admired that. And I really, uh, had a good time there, even though the program never, uh, I think it eventually, uh, Happened, but it, uh, it, it didn't happen under, uh, under us.

[00:21:20] Chris: Yeah. I think that also rings true to me, especially that last part, right? The idea of kind of protecting your team from whatever it might be is a really big piece of being a great manager, especially in bigger companies. I know I've always worked for small companies. I think the biggest company I ever worked for was like 2, 500 people.

[00:21:36] Chris: And, and that, that was a company that I've heard had lots of politics and stuff going on while I worked there. I never got to see any of it luckily, uh, cause we had a really good manager who was just kind of our umbrella. And so we did our work. We did our job inside of that. We kept the layer three network running and kept all the devices upgraded and all the security taken care of.

[00:21:53] Chris: And, uh, just did our job and, and, uh, he dealt with all the other stuff outside of that and the rest of the organization for us, which was amazing. Yeah. 

[00:22:00] Arjan: Yeah. And that's, that's a good one. Let's put it that way. 

[00:22:03] Chris: Yeah. On the flip side of some of this, maybe I wonder, you know, doing so much kind of consulting work and coming in on these projects, right.

[00:22:11] Chris: You know, you're a little bit, always the outsider in some ways, right. And kind of maybe always having to prove yourself over and over again to every new, you know, company or, or, or team you can kind of get involved in. In that, like, do you ever feel like you're not smart enough? Is it ever really hard to, to kind of deal with, with kind of being the new guy over and over again like that?

[00:22:29] Chris: Or, or is that something that just comes very naturally to you? 

[00:22:31] Arjan: Uh, always. It's always a, a, a struggle, let's put it that way. . It's always like, uh, am I good enough to do this? Am I, um, um, is this really, uh, something, uh, that I can do for them? But again, uh, what is really important to me is that I think everybody and, and that's what I tell the people around me as well is, I think everybody has a, a voice and should have a voice because you know, something that an, an, another doesn't know, or At least you can, if, if you tell both stories, you can, you can come to a conclusion and say, okay, if we do it like this and work together, we can make strides and we can make it better.

[00:23:21] Arjan: But it's always, and I think a lot of people have that. I know people, there are people that, that don't have it. But I definitely have that feeling like, uh, am I going to be the right person, uh, for this job? It's every time. 

[00:23:35] Chris: Yep. Yep. Me too. Uh, and, and you just have to, you know, it's something that I think, um, in a lot of ways never goes away.

[00:23:42] Chris: Right. But you just, uh, you get maybe used to feeling that way a little bit, kind of learn the tricks of pushing past it and learning to ignore it maybe a little bit. I think at least from in my case. 

[00:23:51] Arjan: Yeah, absolutely. I think what you do is that you say, okay, you know, what I also do now nowadays is when a recruiter or someone like that calls me, I will ask, okay, but what is really going on at the customer and what do they, what's their real ask?

[00:24:11] Arjan: And if I don't feel that it would be a fit, I will just say, you know, I don't think that's really what I should do. You should really look for someone very specific for that. I had a call this afternoon with a guy and he said, you know, they want really someone that has set up a cloud competent, competent center with a customer.

[00:24:35] Arjan: And I've. I've definitely done some of that stuff, but they were looking for someone that had five year experience with that. And I'm like, yeah, that's not, that's not me. You know, I cannot do that. So I think you get easier on that part as well. And making it easier, makes it easier to have a conversation on, okay, you know, I think I am the right person for this, especially with, um, everything that's being asked by companies these days, which is kind of crazy.

[00:25:05] Arjan: Uh, and sometimes, uh, on Slack channels and that all that kind of stuff, you've got those kind of gifts or whatever saying, um, you know, uh, we are looking for someone with 25 years of experience in, in Kubernetes or something like that. You know, There's no one that, that has that, but still it's being asked.

[00:25:27] Arjan: And, and on one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, in some cases, a lot of the ask of companies is just crazy. If you ask me, they are looking for the sheep with, uh, 20 feet. I would, I would say, 

[00:25:41] Chris: yeah, I saw one. Similar to what your example, right? That's a 25 years of Kubernetes experience is a good one that I think I forget the guy or the tool, but it was, it was something similar where the company was asking for like five years of experience with this particular tool.

[00:25:53] Chris: And, and the guy who was making the post that I saw said, well, I guess I'm not qualified because I created that tool only three years ago. Um, well, speaking of time, we're just about out of time for today. There's, there's a ton more we could talk about. But, uh, for now, is there any, any projects or causes or, or things you'd like to point the listeners towards, uh, that we've either something we've talked about or something we haven't talked about that folks should go take a look at, or 

[00:26:17] Arjan: yeah, stay tuned for what we're going to do with, uh, with tech unplugged, we're definitely going to create a lot of, uh, content, uh, again, Oh, uh, What we did, uh, before we rejoined GigaOM was a lot of video calls.

[00:26:31] Arjan: I think we did one every week or something like that, that we, that will return as well. So we will be much more on the social network. Let's put it that way. 

[00:26:40] Chris: Good deal. Well, Arjan, thank you so much for sharing your story with the Impostor Syndrome Network. And thank you to all of our listeners for your time, your attention, and your support.

[00:26:50] Chris: If you found this episode insightful or interesting, And as always, Or even just entertaining. Please consider paying it forward by letting others know about this show and the great guests we have on before we totally close out. Um, I am curious, was there anything you would change or what is there that you would change about your career?

[00:27:07] Chris: If you could go back and change something or change things, is there a different approach you would take or a different perspective or. Or maybe not. 

[00:27:13] Arjan: I would definitely start self employment much earlier. That's the only, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would definitely have done that. I would probably be, um, uh, I've got my own company now for seven or eight years.

[00:27:29] Arjan: And I would say that there would be at least five more years with that if I really started at the time that I should have done it. Looking back at how it's all going now, saying that I, I did a ton of work with companies that really helped me out as well. So you can always work for a company, but I really enjoy the self employment.

[00:27:56] Arjan: That's something that I should have done it earlier. I'm proud. Maybe that doesn't fit some of the, of the listeners, but for the others, yeah, maybe they should do it. 

[00:28:06] Chris: Yeah. It's definitely not for everybody, but I think it may be for more people than who think it is. There's definitely more involved, right?

[00:28:12] Chris: I mean, you've definitely, you've got to do the job and run the company, which, which, which is a lot. Um, but most jobs, uh, I don't know. I was never completely fulfilled in any job I had. I don't know about you. I was always doing stuff on the side anyway. 

[00:28:24] Arjan: That's it. Yeah. That's it. And, and, and companies know that.

[00:28:29] Arjan: So they make use of that. 

[00:28:31] Chris: Sure. That's fair. 

[00:28:33] Arjan: And that's okay. 

[00:28:34] Chris: Yeah. I mean, everybody's, everybody's got to, got to make a living, right. Um, the companies as well. That's it. That's it. Cool. Well, thanks again. This has been fantastic. A lot of fun. And we will be back next week.