person. So I guess I started out in I t e got an undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University and then I started working in I t. And I kind of got put off to it because I was working for a lot of smaller companies and when I was working for them and a lot of times I was the only person. So I was also on call eso I kind of got burned out pretty quick, and then I decided I was gonna go back to school. Andi ended up going back to the University of Utah, where I got my master's degree in information systems on. Then I started looking at you know what jobs I wanted Thio Dio and I Basically, I really like networking. That was kind of one of the things that a part was pretty cool from that I started doing when I was in undergrad classes and stuff. So I went applied for a job with one of Cisco partner, and then basically, I started working for them. And then I got hired by one of their customers when they closed down there. Salt Lake office and on that was a Web hosting company. Um, and basically, I went up, like, kind of went up the ranks from there, um, through attrition as well as's his performance. So and, you know, I got some certifications with Cisco and that really, that really helped, you know, to kind of boost my career is well, but I really, really enjoyed networking. And so that's And when I was working for a larger company, we had more people, so I wasn't always the only one on call. And so it became a lot better experience that way, and I just really enjoyed it and, uh, flourished in in the networking environment, so

Yeah, we actually don't travel a ton. Eso That's kind of unique. We used to have to travel a lot more, but because, you know, the technology has enabled us to do a lot of remote hands, uh, on demand, like console server access and things like that. So we don't have to travel is much. Um um my kind of my day to day of what I dio I'm in charge of, ah, group of network engineers. Right now I have five direct reports, and then I have about seven mawr that air, not my direct reports, but I I do a lot of the management of them right now, and they are going to be my direct reports shortly They're going to be assigned to me. So on what I do for that is we do a lot of budgeting, a lot of planning a lot of purchasing, uh, and then basically managed those people is well on. So, um, the leadership is pretty involved as well, with kind of the design of the network and things like that. Um, so our day to day, I mean, we usually three times a week, we have what we call a stand up meeting where we have all of our direct reports in a meeting with us. When we go through, you know what they're working on anything. They run into issues on Ben, you know, I take notes on that and then I try to help them, you know, work through any issues. They're running into any any blockers. There's quite a bit of, like project management and coordinating with other teams. Um, like our company has different cysts, ops and administrative teams, as well as business and advertising and marketing teams. We network operations mainly deals with, uh, the other system administration teams, largely who basically treat them as our customer. We don't actually deal directly with end user customers in, um in regards to like our Web hosting services that's handled through a support group. Um, but we're the back end. We're kind of like a utility company. I guess you could say like a telecom company for the corporation is the whole on DSO. We have multiple locations all over the world way also have about half of our network team is based out of the Asia Pacific region way have a manager that manages that team there on DSO I basically managed to North America team Andi. He manages the Asia Pacific team and then we have a director that we both report Thio, we have at least weekly one on ones with our director. We try to have one on ones with our direct reports as often as we can. You know, at least every couple of weeks that doesn't always pan out. Depends on how busy we are. Like with co vid pandemic thing way. I spend a ton of time getting things ready, Thio have the whole staff work remotely so that was kind of an adventure, but we pulled it off a lot of long hours.Actually, we didn't allow any of our network engineers to work from home eso when this pandemic it was quite the shift. So we went from very few people in the company allowed to work from home to everyone works from home except for the extreme, Like the data center technicians who are changing out hard drives and, you know, fixing servers and stuff like that on the critical facilities who are, like power h d a c in our data centers and things like that. So it was quite shift. Um, our hours a Z. One thing I didn't answer. How much time do I spend working? Um, I'm one of the people that I probably work more than some. I would say I work 50 60 hours a week, but most of our team probably works 50 50 hours or under a week, and part of it's because we have multiple times on. So it's like just to keep the communication across the different time zones in the different, you know, like, I'll get up early or stay up late on. Then we also have to dio change management window. Uh, I'm not involved in all of them. but I like to be involved with quite a few of them, especially critical ones. Eso, if something goes wrong, are then weaken take action quickly so it doesn't disrupt customers or any of our other employees on their services.

I mean, ultimately, I would say the biggest challenges. Um, it is probably the project management and planning just because, Well, you know, we'll lay out our plans for the year and quarters and stuff and then, um, depending on, you know, what things happen in the industry is well, is what things happen. You know, if we have some network breach or something like that, then we have to, like, you know, shift our resource is or if we, if there is a critical bug and some version of code were running, then we have to shift. The resource is also taking care of that immediately on Ben, you know, going back to our planned out projects. I guess you could say eso that that that Z that's one of the most difficult parts of my job. I think in stressful parts of my job is just dealing with that. A swell is just maintaining the expectations with senior leadership of how much work we're going to get done. Well, at the same time helping my team members and direct reports maintain Ah, work, life balance. I mean, because we could easily work 16 plus hours a day and still not get everything done that everybody would like, you know, But it's so it's like it's a balancing act, a zwelling, you know? You know, we asked for additional people and, you know, mhm. We have to justify that. And then it has to be budget for it. So So it's There's a lot of work. Thea other difficult. I'm saying difficult, challenging thing in my job and actually kind of like it is that three company that I worked for Endurance International Group. They started acquiring other companies, so it's essentially a glamorous of a bunch of different companies on. When I came to work here, they had largely acquired companies and then they, you know, kind of stuck him on to the bolted it onto the Endurance Corporation. They basically let them run as they wanted Thio. And so we had all these different network infrastructure design stacks way things were done processes. And so we've been trying thio consolidate them and to try to, you know, better utilize our resource is, um, and expertise in tow. Instead of having these silos with different infrastructure and ways, things were done. We're trying to standardize across, you know, the whole locations so that all of our support people can support any of our locations, which in the past it's been more regionalized. We had basically an East Coast group that could take care of the East Coast team, data centers and acquisitions, and then the West and South Team was a different group. And then we have the impact team. But we're getting to the point where, um, shortly all team members and all locations will be able Thio deal with any situation at any of the locations, and that's because we've standardized across the different locations and the, um, the way we do things.