Michael Gruen - VP of Engineering at Cybrary

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Michael Gruen, the VP of Engineering at Cybrary. And we discussed building an engineering team from the ground up, how communication through Slack can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, and the personal side of the people you work with. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Man, I'm excited. We're just going to hang out and talk if that's cool.

(Michael Gruen at 00:00:36) That is cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Everybody from Cybrary that I've talked to is really great. So I talked to your founder, investors, and so there's a lot of hype for you coming on the show.

(Michael Gruen at 00:00:49) Wow. Well, I hope you're ready for disappointment. So yes, there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) I love it. Oh man. So you actually went into the office for this?

(Michael Gruen at 00:00:58) Not entirely. I wanted to get the microphone because I'm recording a bunch of podcasts, and so I figured if I was going to be home for a while, I'd do that. And then it was one of those, like, well, I don't want to take the risk. I had a bunch of other meetings, so I figured I'd just stay here for the day. But yeah, on the plus side also, at home I have two kids who are on Zoom all the time for school. So hopefully from a bandwidth perspective, this works out much better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Oh, so they're doing their school through Zoom?

(Michael Gruen at 00:01:25) Yeah, yeah. Not all day. Just a few meetings and stuff, just periodically throughout the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) That's interesting. So the teacher is just flipping on the camera and talking to all the students?

(Michael Gruen at 00:01:38) Yeah, I mean, sure. I don't—I could go all day. That's a different podcast of how our public school systems effing suck. Is this being recorded right now? How's this? Yeah, it is. It's fine. Everybody knows my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) But yeah, let's talk about it, man. I was not a fan of public schooling system at all. And so if you would have told me in high school that I'd end up working at an education company, I would laugh at you. I'd be like, no. I'm against education. This is not going to happen.

(Michael Gruen at 00:02:07) See, that's interesting because going through school, I always had these notions of if I was a teacher, this is how I would do it, and if I had the opportunity to make changes. And there was this little part of me that's always been in the back of my head of at some point in my career, if I don't need the money and I still want to work, going into teaching was one of those things I sort of had in the back of my head. Now that I have kids of my own, the idea of dealing with any aged child that's not my own is not appealing. So I think I'm done with that idea unless I was doing college level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:45) That's true. I didn't even think about that. See, I just got all the way through school—I got, "Why aren't you like your brother?" So I have a brother who's two grades ahead of me, and we went through all that—my parents are on the PTA board or whatever. So we went through all the same classes, all the same teachers, and then they started saying, "Why aren't you like Mitch?" And I'm like, well, you know, we're two different people for one. And he went on and became a doctor and did very well. And it's just his route. He really liked the schooling route. I did not like the schooling route. And I mean, I liked learning what I wanted to learn. So I would basically shrug off school all day and then go home and learn computer things or games or whatever it may be. I didn't dislike learning. I just wanted to learn what I wanted to learn, what I was interested in.

(Michael Gruen at 00:03:33) Yeah, exactly. I mean, for me it was the—I had almost the exact experience. I have an older brother and an older sister. My older brother, I think he knew this—he figured out the system. I wish I had done it the way he did it, which was do well enough, but not so well. Stay off the radar, but get good grades. My sister was a total overachiever. And so when I came along and I was a total slacker, it was like, "Why can't you be more like Jen?" Stuff like that. So definitely know how you feel. What I found most frustrating was all the pencil drill stuff. When I thought about if I could do it differently, and it's actually very related to what we're doing at Cybrary, having a pre-assessment. If I had a pre-test for Earth science and I get 100 on the pre-test, why do I need to do any of the other work, like the homework or whatever else? If I know the material, I know the material. And so I always thought the idea of being able to be tested and not having to do those drills—because what homework is, it's supposed to be a way of reinforcing the learning. And if you already have it reinforced, if you already know it, you could be spending that time learning something new rather than just doing homework. That was sort of my feeling back then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) Yeah. There was also a narrative that if you could not do well at what we're telling you you need to understand, then you will not do well in life. We just basically told that to a whole generation of kids. Like, if you cannot get an A or B on this, you're not going to do well in life. And that's not true at all.

(Michael Gruen at 00:05:00) Interesting. Wow. Yeah, I don't know. For me it was more if you don't do the work, you're not going to do the work later in life. You're going to have a bad work ethic and you're going to fail. Actually, I had two different types of teachers. I had the type of teacher that got me and was super positive, really understood what motivated me, and would give me additional outside work and be like, "Yeah, you don't have to do this. Do this other thing," because it's more interesting or more creative or whatever it is. And then I had the teachers that just absolutely hated me and were the ones who were like, "No, you have to do it my way," and more focused on homework and just that type of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:41) I had a math teacher who knew I was into computers and making little technologies and things, and he could tell I wasn't into the class at all. And so he actually—and I think back, this is crazy. So this is probably right when the Nokia phones came out. But he asked me what I was interested in. I told him—at the time I was talking with Jake about this before the podcast—I was doing some hack learning, learning how to hack through some books I had purchased at the computer store. And I had come across this Sub7 thing and you could generate a script kiddie payload type deal. And I told him I was interested in it, and I was trying to get into people's computers. He's like, "Oh, that's really interesting. You could actually get in my computer?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "Here, take this CD. It's got a bunch of pictures on it. Put it in your computer, and then tonight I'm going to get into your computer." And it was hilarious because he let me do that. And obviously at the time nobody had any concept of any of this stuff. But the fact that that guy stuck in my head—I don't remember his name—but he stuck in my head as one of the few people that saw that I was actually really interested in dedicating time to something else and encouraged it, even though it wasn't in his—he wasn't like, "You have to learn this algebra." He was like, "I'm just going to encourage you to pursue whatever you're on fire about."

(Michael Gruen at 00:07:00) That's really interesting. Yeah. I can remember three or four teachers. I still remember their names. I actually stayed in touch with two of my high school teachers for a little while after I graduated college even. Got together with them for beers and stuff like that. My AP English teacher and my senior year math teacher, because they were just good dudes. And I've always felt we sort of got each other. At least they understood me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) So how did you get involved with Cybrary? Well, why don't we do a little background of what Cybrary is?

(Michael Gruen at 00:07:32) Definitely. Yeah. Alright, so Cybrary is a career development and training platform, mostly focused on cybersecurity and IT professionals. The idea is that individuals can come on our platform and upskill or reskill to get a job in cybersecurity or IT. We have—all of our training is really focused and oriented around jobs. So it's not training for the sake of training. It's training for the purpose of getting a job. Nobody goes to the gym just to go to the gym. They go to the gym for health or, you know, muscle, whatever it is. And so we sort of see training in that same light on the individual side. So it's really about getting the skills that you need to continue in your career and get that guidance. We have a very good, strong community and mentors within that community, and so there's a lot of support and guidance there. And then we also have, on the enterprise side, we're able to sell into teams where managers want to provide the same sort of platform for their team so that they can align training to skills that their team needs to do their job at that company, and also give some guidance in career within that company, which helps with retention, helps with onboarding, in any number of ways. And we're doing more and more around skill analysis and skill gap analysis for teams to understand, you know, what's the makeup of your team, where are the holes, and how can you address those holes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:02) That seems to be really popular too lately, the analysis of the team.

(Michael Gruen at 00:09:06) Mhmm. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, that's how I look at my software development team. Whenever I built a team, it's always, you know, who's on my team, what are they kind of good at, and where am I sort of weak? That's what indicates who I need to hire next or potentially who to give training to or whatever it is. So generally speaking, the job descriptions I have for software engineers are usually fairly generic because it's really about who's on the team now and how does this person maybe fit into that. Same thing with data science. We recently hired a senior data scientist. And what I need—the role that I needed filled—was fairly specific, but I knew that there were all these other adjacent capabilities. And so whoever I got was going to have an impact on the next hire I was going to make. Because if I get somebody who's more data engineering oriented, then my next person might be more data scientist. Conversely, more data scientist, more theoretical, then maybe the next person would be more data engineer. So sort of looking at a team more holistically is definitely something I've always done when building teams. And so it makes a lot of sense to me at Cybrary to apply that same technique to any sort of technology team or engineering team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) So how big was the company when you found Ryan and everyone over there starting it up?

(Michael Gruen at 00:10:21) It was around 20-ish. I think I was number 19 or so. So there was less than 20 people when I got introduced.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) And so what do you think about you stood out for you to rise up within the organization as it grew? Like, how did you go farther?

(Michael Gruen at 00:10:38) I was really brought in—I had experience at a former company called Red Owl where I had built an engineering team. And I think I was really brought in with that idea of having had that experience. That was something that was sort of lacking with regard to building out an engineering team and building out a product team. And so for me, it really hasn't been about rising as much as—I sort of was hired to do that, hired to do the position I'm in. It's really been about filling in all those pieces, building out an engineering team that's capable of building, a data science team that's capable of doing what we want to do, and then advising on the type of product managers we want to hire and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) Do you guys have more of an emphasis on security because you are education in security?

(Michael Gruen at 00:11:30) So yeah, it's funny. We don't consider ourselves an education company, and we don't consider ourselves a cybersecurity company. However, much of the rest of the world does, especially on the cybersecurity side. We have courses on SQL injection. We have courses on cross-site scripting. Those courses are big targets for SQL injection and for cross-site scripting attacks. People like to try out what they're learning and do it in real time on our site. So yeah, we take security fairly—you know, very seriously. I think when I think about the data that we actually have, the risk and how we protect it is probably way higher than it needs to be. But that's also because we have this reputational risk. If people are like, "Oh, I was able to hack Cybrary," then that sort of hurts us a little bit because, you know, we're not practicing what we preach. That being said, we're not a cybersecurity company. I have a very small team, but we do take it very seriously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:27) So you come in. You're in the first 20 employees. You're charged with, you know, building out an engineering team. What do you look for when building teams from scratch?

(Michael Gruen at 00:12:38) Yeah. So in this case, this is my first time where I wasn't building a team from scratch. There were five engineers, I think—four engineers, I think—when I got here. So it was a little bit of, again, assessing what their skill set was and then building it out. So but the same thing. I mean, when I look at engineers in general, it's more about character and personality, that type of stuff. The years of experience and technologies that they know—that more plays into how much am I going to pay you once you get the job, or how are you going to fit in? Like, do I need that skill set? But what I really look for is open-mindedness, self-awareness. Those are the two really big, most important things. And then thirdly, critical thinker, obviously. Good problem-solving. So if you're open-minded and self-aware, you know what you know and you know what you don't know. I find that those are the people that will learn anything and adapt very quickly and will be very solid engineers very—and will fit in and learn whatever they need to learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) So today you guys have, you know, probably like 20-plus engineers?

(Michael Gruen at 00:13:53) We have—my team has 13 people, and that includes data science, infrastructure, and software engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) And then so how do you go about coaching those individuals to better their self-awareness and all of those core skills?

(Michael Gruen at 00:14:09) Yeah. So I have one-on-ones. I believe very strongly in scheduled one-on-ones. I used to be one of those fly-by managers who would just, "Hey, how's it going? Pop by." And my last job, there was somebody who was fairly adamant that we don't do it that way. I tried scheduled one-on-ones and found them very successful. So the scheduled one-on-one generally has a structure to it. One of them is tell—having them tell me what's sort of going on, what they think could be going better, how I could be doing better. And then there's an opportunity for me to reciprocate. So usually in those settings is when we find out things. And I also have a very open policy. So more of the junior engineers take me up on the open policy in terms of, "Hey, this is happening right now. Can you give me some help?"

(Michael Gruen at 00:14:58) And I think having given them help, listening to their feedback, and actually incorporating it and following through on some of the things that they say—you know, they would like to see me doing something differently or stop doing this, and I do it—that builds up that trust. Right? We have this nice two-way street, and so I think they feel very comfortable coming to me with whatever's going on. And then I can sort of pull back from my experience and give them some ideas.

(Michael Gruen at 00:15:26) Frequently, it's around communication. I feel like much of my job is marriage counseling. So, you know, it's usually some sort of one-on-one conversation or one-on-two situation where it's like, well, let's peel this back a little bit and see what they heard versus what you thought they—versus what you were trying to say. And then sort of go over the idea of, usually, it's best to start with your intention. Why are you talking to this person is usually a great place to start to make sure the conversation goes in the right direction and they know what's going on.

(Michael Gruen at 00:16:02) The other one that I like to point out, especially now that we're all working remote and there's so much that's asynchronous communication over Slack, is, you know, never ascribe to malice what incompetence can explain, or never ascribe—and also just assume that they're trying to do the right thing. Don't read too much into the words. Usually, it's being terse, not being mean. And so trying to just read things in the most positive light rather than in these very negative lights that will sort of get you more riled up or upset.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:40) Yeah. It's weird how that happens. Right? It's like the default is almost to read it negatively. And then, you know, it's interesting how humans will process their current—project their current state onto what they're reading.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) So, like, you get someone who's really positive and happy, and they read that and, like, okay, I understand that information. Like, transmission received. And you get someone who's in a really bad mood, and then they read it, they'll just project that negativity right onto it. So it's a hard thing to do because you don't have that human's energy projecting it with the tones, and it's just subject to your own impression.

(Michael Gruen at 00:17:21) Yeah. Voice is very hard to read. Sarcasm, it's tough. Stuff like that.

(Michael Gruen at 00:17:26) And, yeah, totally agree that a lot of it is your own mental state. What are you bringing to the table? And I think terseness is one of the biggest causes of people thinking that the other person is saying something somewhat negative, and it's no. They're just trying to be brief, and they're sort of leaving out many of the pleasantries you would normally see in a written communication that if they were talking to them, they wouldn't bother with because, you know, you can sort of hear it in their voice and read into their body language.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) Yeah. It's like I was making my language efficient like I do with Alexa because I know she's interpreting it in the text. And so I just try to use as few words as possible in the right order so that she could process it correctly. But if you do that with a human, you get an adverse reaction.

(Michael Gruen at 00:18:13) If you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:13) If you do it with your wife, it's double bad. I remember, like, it's so tough for me. I've been, like, writing code for, you know, fifteen-plus years and coming off of coding binges and then interacting with a significant other—it's like you're sitting there for multiple hours a day being as short and succinct as possible with the computer, commanding it what to do. And then you disengage from that to go interact with a human.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) And it's like this—it's a physical—like, I did this thing where I stopped programming before talks. Like, I won't program before talks because you can literally feel your brain shift into a different gear when you're problem solving, deep problem solving all day. So for me, at least, and this is completely subjective, right? For me, I just can't do it. Like, if I have to give a talk or if I have to be extra personable, I'm not programming or doing difficult problem solving right before those social interactions because it's just too hard.

(Michael Gruen at 00:19:16) That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting because I almost feel like, in some ways, the opposite for me. I like to sort of unplug from other people and be able to focus on a problem. And I think it depends for me—it really depends on am I solving the problem, or am I just fighting with it?

(Michael Gruen at 00:19:33) Because, definitely, if I'm just fighting with a problem, then it's certainly not gonna put me in the best of moods. But if I get that sort of sense of accomplishment, then I think it puts me in a better space. And so, as opposed to meeting with people and talking to people, which generally just results in more meetings and more—you know, not very many decisions or a feeling of accomplishment. It's very rare that you walk out of a meeting feeling like you accomplished something. So for me, I mean, I see what you're saying.

(Michael Gruen at 00:19:59) I'm trying to think back in my career. It's been a long time since I've done actual development. Most of my time is spent in meetings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:08) Well, I was thinking more about, like, before I have to give a talk—like, a meetup or an event or something. I noticed if I'm programming before that, my mind's in a different state. But, yeah, you know what's really helped me with the meetings? Adopting that Amazon, you have to write it out principle. Have you come across that yet?

(Michael Gruen at 00:20:30) I mean, I've certainly seen it. I tried to do that at my last company. It was not adopted. We haven't really had a need for it here. I actually feel like most of our meetings are fairly efficient, even if they don't always frequently end in that sense of accomplishment.

(Michael Gruen at 00:20:51) But I am familiar with the concept. I'm curious what your experience with it was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) Amazing. It's hard. It's like talking about going to the gym and getting ripped. It's like everybody would like that result.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) But you have to put in the work consistently to get it. It takes effort, but you get a better result because when you can read that out, we use it for hard decisions or when doing new things—like, approaching a new part of the market or how are we adjusting our business because of the crisis. You know, you have to put, like, a background. You just write it out and cite your research and build this whole multi-page narrative, and then you let the other person read it and then the questions that they ask are in-depth questions. And you basically read this whole thing and then what comes out of it is basically task assignment. Like, are we going to move forward with it? Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:43) What are the to-do items? You know? And then task assignment. And then the meeting's basically just like a group of people coming together to execute the project, and they leave, and it's all really clear.

(Michael Gruen at 00:21:55) Yeah. No. It sounds amazing. I think it also would probably help with one of the things that we've noticed since everybody's working from home. We didn't write a lot of things down.

(Michael Gruen at 00:22:05) There were a lot of decisions made in conversations, and so it becomes much harder to track. And now that we're all working from home, you can't easily have those conversations. I think writing more things down and moving more towards that would help. I think we do that for those really large initiatives. There's definitely a sense of doing that work, but we generally do it more collaboratively.

(Michael Gruen at 00:22:33) But I do like the idea of, you know, sit down, write it all out, think through some of the things—because if you do take that time, you're naturally gonna think about some of the things that you need to think about. And I like that idea a lot. We'll have to—I'll have to see how I can try and get that going here a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) So one of the things that we're asking as, like, recurring topics right now on the show to different engineering leaders is for your direct reports, do they have budgets for their own education, like, if they wanna do something? Or is it centralized at the organization? How does that work?

(Michael Gruen at 00:23:16) So we don't have a formal process for that. What we're usually doing, if there's something they want, they can come and talk to me, and I'll—you know, we make the business case for why it's important and then get the money. If it's gonna cost money. Frequently, it doesn't. And there's a lot of—I think my team does a pretty good job of finding some really good resources online, from similar companies to us. So, but yeah, there's not a set budget.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47) So, like, if they wanna take a communication course that was, like, $400 or something, they would come to you and they would say, I wanna take this communication course. Can we get it approved? And you would create a business case around it.

(Michael Gruen at 00:24:00) Yeah. Yeah. And I'd probably also work with our director of people to also—so that we can also—yeah. I work very closely with her on a lot of things because what I'd like to have is more standardized processes. So if we do a thing, like, let's make sure that this is repeatable.

(Michael Gruen at 00:24:15) If we're gonna pay for somebody to take a communications course, for example, then we should probably make sure that we're gonna do this for other people who can make similar business cases. We don't want everything to be a reinvention of the wheel every single time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) You're an engineer that likes building processes and systems? What?

(Michael Gruen at 00:24:33) Crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) Repeatable, scalable things excites you? What? Oh, man. No. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) I was talking with one of the engineering level two managers—not exactly sure what that means. But I was talking with him the other day, and he was discussing about how in his one-on-ones, what he'll do is he'll work with one of his direct reports and say, you know, what are two areas that you wanna work on this quarter? And maybe it's like public speaking, which would be like a communication thing, or, you know, selling your ideas to others. So, like, maybe an influencing thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) You know, persuasive course and persuasion. And so he would take those two things, and then they basically would be in a spreadsheet or something. And then they would revisit them meeting over meeting over the course of that quarter, find some goals, and he would begin to coach him on, like, hey, you should do this meetup over here. And he would basically be like a partner or pair in moving that skill forward. Have you experimented with anything like that?

(Michael Gruen at 00:25:38) So, I mean, in terms of career, I do like to check in in the one-on-ones at least quarterly on what is it that you're trying to do, and then we sort of track it, and we talk about it. And then, but nothing as formal as what you're describing. But, yeah, we definitely talk about more—the one-on-one, we make sure that every two or three, we're definitely talking about more strategic things rather than those sort of tactical what's happening now. It's like, hey.

(Michael Gruen at 00:26:09) Let's take a step back. Do you have interest in becoming more of a senior engineer? These are the skills you're gonna need, and this is how we're gonna find opportunities within Cybrary to get you that experience and so that you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you wanna go that route. And then if there's reading or other things, other resources, you know, we definitely recommend that as well. Podcasts to listen to, stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:32) Yeah. Modern CTO podcast.

(Michael Gruen at 00:26:35) There you go. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) Oh, I just plugged my podcast on my podcast. Yeah. Well, so what I have been noticing now as a trend with talking with different engineering leaders is that things really change when you get to around, like, 70 managers at the company. And that's typically when people start getting really hungry for career development. And then before that, it's—there's not a lot of formal processes to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) It's more relaxed, partly because, I guess, they're just engaging more. Like, you have 13 people on your team. You're definitely engaging with them a lot more than if you had 200 people on your team.

(Michael Gruen at 00:27:11) Exactly. Yeah. And I think there's gotta be more formalized process for that so that there's more consistency. Right? You don't want people to have such different experiences within a company.

(Michael Gruen at 00:27:22) You wanna try and make sure that there's that sort of cultural fit, and that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the structured one-on-ones and where that came from. At my last job at RedOwl, there was myself, a senior engineer, and another engineer hired. He became CTO. I became VP of engineering. We were both responsible for managing engineers.

(Michael Gruen at 00:27:39) He was up in New York, and so he had those developers as direct reports. I was in Baltimore. I had those developers as direct reports.

(Michael Gruen at 00:27:49) But we wanted to make sure that we're managing people consistently. And I think having those formalized processes is important. But, yeah, when you're smaller, when I have 13 people, they all directly report to me for the most part. And so it is a lot easier to be a little less formal. But, yeah, as we grow, as I bring in managers who are really managing people, then there will definitely be a little bit more formalized, just for that consistency reason.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Yeah. I've also been asking if you have any favorite one-on-one softwares or if you just do it through booking a recurring event. Or—

(Michael Gruen at 00:28:25) Yeah. It's booking a recurring event. And then that recurring event has the agenda right in there of, this is our—unless we have something else to talk about, this is what we're gonna talk about, you know, sort of to reinforce it. And, also, one of the other things I think is really important in one-on-ones is to talk about personal stuff. It's not just—you know, I care about my people.

(Michael Gruen at 00:28:46) I care what's going on in their lives. And so it's also just a chance to sort of catch up and connect. Right? Yeah. Connect.

(Michael Gruen at 00:28:55) Yeah. Sorry. All of the words that were coming to mind were not the words I wanted to use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:00) No. I just read your face. It's like, what? It's like, yeah. We do the—it's a podcast, but we also are connected on Zoom. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:10) Yeah. But, I mean, I get it. Honestly, I get it because I'll be walking around my house outside of work hours, and I'll just be like, I wonder if Jake's wife is having a surge in sticker orders from her company, you know, because I saw my kids with stickers, and a holiday's coming up. And so, you know, just weird stuff like that because you just can't—it's like there's—our mind doesn't really know the boundaries. It's like we just have relationships with other people.

(Michael Gruen at 00:29:40) Yeah. Exactly. I mean, for me, very recently, one of my developers, Tim, his wife is a hairdresser. Now with what's going on, like, hey, how are things going? How are you dealing with that?

(Michael Gruen at 00:29:49) Because I know she's definitely impacted. Right? So it just makes—understanding what's going on in people's lives, not just because I care and because—you know, it's also just helpful to give insight into maybe some other things that are going on at work and being able to make sure that they're getting what they need. We'd like to have a very flexible sort of place that's built on mutual respect and understanding of, hey.

(Michael Gruen at 00:30:19) You know, sometimes we need more. Sometimes your personal life needs more, and we want to have that healthy give and take there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) Yeah. My hair is all grown out from this is like COVID. This is being stuck inside beard. Yep. And the hair and everything is just like, my wife calls me a manimal now. She's like, half man, half animal. I was like, thank you very much. Getting back to the roots. You know?

(Michael Gruen at 00:30:44) There you go. Yeah. No. My hair is definitely getting a little long. I texted my barber the other day to see how she was doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) Yeah. I know. All I have a recurring event, and they all got canceled. And I was talking with my stepsister, and she was telling me that there's like in DC or wherever she's at, there's like underground speakeasy style haircutting happening. I'm like—

(Michael Gruen at 00:31:10) I'm sure. I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) I know. Well, you have kids. Yours are, how old are they?

(Michael Gruen at 00:31:17) So, 13 and 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) Okay. I've got younger ones. I've got three and one and a half.

(Michael Gruen at 00:31:22) Yeah. No. I don't envy you. Yeah. My kids are pretty self-sufficient at this point and a lot of fun. So yeah. Although, you know, teenagers, we're getting there. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31) It's a whole other—

(Michael Gruen at 00:31:32) It's a whole other, it's a whole new level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:35) Yeah. You know, what's interesting is for some reason, Jake and I were talking for like 20 minutes before the show today. So we were talking about like being back in the day and computers and things like that. And one of the things that escapes my mind but got brought back into it today is the internet is a public space. Like, we were 13-year-olds screwing around on the internet, you know, pushing all the buttons we wanted to, testing the securities that we wanted to test. That doesn't go away. Now you just have it more. It's just amplified more. It's just I was like the only kid that I knew that would like recreationally spend time on the computer.

(Michael Gruen at 00:32:14) Right. I recreationally spent time on the computer as well, but it was all, you know, I grew up a little bit earlier than you. So there was, so 46.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Okay. Yeah. So you look young, dude. Congratulations.

(Michael Gruen at 00:32:28) Oh, thank you. Yeah. Oh, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Time is—

(Michael Gruen at 00:32:30) Good to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:30) You, my friend.

(Michael Gruen at 00:32:32) You're the only person who's ever said that, so thank you. I think that's how old I am. Yeah. Anyway, 45, 46, somewhere. You start to lose count once you have kids. But yeah. So, I mean, my first job was in 1996 writing web forum software where we could make actual real money selling web forums. This is before cookies, before SSL, you know, the really, really early days of the web. And so I think back to when I was in middle school and high school and the idea of, like, oh, my friend up the street has a modem, and we could potentially figure out some way for his computer to call my computer so that we can play some flight simulator, you know, one-on-one against each other. And even that was like never happened. We could never get it to work. And talking to my parents about like, hey, can we get like Prodigy or something like that? And my mom was like, what is that? No. So I didn't really get exposed to the internet until I got to college in '93.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely about a couple years after you, but my stories are more like when we, before Xbox Live, when we had this thing called Xbox Connect—

(Michael Gruen at 00:33:49) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) Where you could network your Xboxes over the internet. And if you go back even farther, you know, I remember the browser wars. I definitely, because my dad, see, I got lucky because my dad was an engineer. Like, my brother and sister didn't show interest in the computer. He'd bring the, like, we had a computer at the house, and he would bring all the, his old ones because he'd have his new ones at work. And so I got in really early to the computer game, and he'd give me little small programming tasks to keep me busy. So I spent a lot of time there. And for some reason, I just latched onto it. Like, I just felt so good being able to type something and then write a program and having it automate. And that was just beautiful for me. And so it's just that creation aspect. And, you know, when you're eight, 10 years old, like, what else are you going to create with? Like, you're not going to use a saw, you know? Maybe. Maybe when, maybe when you grew up, old man.

(Michael Gruen at 00:34:45) Exactly. In a more rural area. I grew up on a, you know, it was a little more rural. We had saws and stuff. But, yeah, definitely not at eight. But yeah. Yeah, I had similar experience. My dad, it was funny. He's not an engineer by any means, but he was all, he's always, like, our family has always had the latest technology. He sort of would bring it home, and it's just funny because he doesn't really use it, but he still bought it. Like, it was just this weird thing. And so we had a PC really early on. We had, I still remember one of our first computers was the Basis 108, which was interesting because it could actually boot both Apple and DOS. It was like a dual boot machine. So you could run both operating systems. You could play games. It was mostly compatible with both. It was like 99% compatible with both. And so I spent a fair bit of time like writing BASIC and doing things on there. But growing up in a more rural area, you're sort of, and without the internet, you sort of are a little more locked into what you can figure out on your own and maybe coming across one or two scraps of code from, you know, from some friends who know somebody or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:57) Yeah. The quality and availability of educational content is just tremendous now because it used to be you would read a manual and try to figure things out, and that manual would be printed, and it would come out every once in a while, and there'd be a new update. And like, that was it. But there was the emergence of the category, and then you got some great writers. Like, I'm a big fan of the Martin Fowlers of the world. And you get some great engineering writers that not only do they show you the examples of the code, but they'll actually explain it to you like the Feynman technique, like you're a child. And they give you examples that you can remember. Sandi Metz is like using references of her bicycle for the Ruby people out there. And it's just this really, really great. And then now we've gone from great written content to now great video content and interactive consoles like, you know, you guys have. You guys have that, right? You're like an interactive learning. Yeah.

(Michael Gruen at 00:36:57) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) You have great interactive learning where you can try stuff right there. It's just a beautiful way that the world, and then once Elon Musk finishes his neural net interface, brain interface, we'll just be able to download patches, and I'm looking forward to that as well.

(Michael Gruen at 00:37:14) Brave new world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) It's not that far off. If you look at where we've come since 2000 with our educational materials and just say, bounce that out 100 years. Oh, yeah. We've gotten all that stuff.

(Michael Gruen at 00:37:28) Yeah. Probably. Stuff I don't like thinking about too much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) Why not? Download some of Cybrary's content right here? Right into my head. Yeah. Cybrary patch? Yeah.

(Michael Gruen at 00:37:39) Yeah. Maybe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) No. You're thinking about it. I see your gears are turning.

(Michael Gruen at 00:37:42) What do you think about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:43) Oh, no. I definitely, yeah, no. I definitely think about it. But, yeah, I don't know. It's one of those, there's always this unintended consequences is always my big thing. Right? So when I think about, it's funny. I've recently, only recently really gotten behind the idea of fully automated cars, like driverless cars. In the beginning, it was like, well, I love driving. I'm very focused when I'm driving. Like, I enjoy this. This is something. But the more and more I realize that so many other people around me aren't that way, and the sort of, used to be that I had this thought of, like, well, I know how hackable computers are and car, you know, the security and all those fears. But the reality is that we probably will greatly reduce the number of accidents because as technology increases and people are getting more distracted and so on and so forth. So when I think about things about the future, I can't help but think about sort of those unintended negative consequences and grasp onto that of, like, what does it mean if I download some sort of patch and teach it and I learn something? What does that mean? And then what can it possibly do to my memories and who I am?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) We're going to the cloud now.

(Michael Gruen at 00:39:00) Those are the thoughts that I have. What was that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) We're going to the cloud.

(Michael Gruen at 00:39:05) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) Who is that guy over at Google that's all about that? Which is with his dad? I don't know. I can't remember. But, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people that are pro cloud brain initiative, and I think it's interesting. I wouldn't hate it. I actually have learned to enjoy life. Like, I think in the future, being able to be on earth walking around in a human body and being able to go farm, like, manual labor will be considered something like rich people can do, like, use their body, you know?

(Michael Gruen at 00:39:40) Yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain extent that that is right now of, you know, you look at certain areas in cities and places like that where being able to do those types of things is definitely not accessible. And so for me, I grew up, as I said, in a more rural area. Grew up with horses and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) Dude, me too.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:03) And chickens. Oh, did you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:04) So yeah. So I definitely have that, like, I enjoy the outdoors. I enjoy getting away and getting away from a computer and getting away from technology, go fishing, do stuff like that. But, yeah, I definitely agree that at some point in the future, in this very highly tech future, there'll be this idea of fishing will be this thing that's that only rich people can afford to do in some way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:26) Real fishing.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:27) Real fishing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fishing. And a human—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) You could digital fish all day. Yes.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:31) Yes. Yeah. Digital fish all day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:33) I need to digital fish all day. Yeah.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:35) I mean, depending on how you spell fish, you can digital fish right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:40) There we go. Security pun.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:43) I couldn't resist. I'm a dad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) Dude, let's do it.

(Michael Gruen at 00:40:44) Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) We'll do it all day. Oh, yeah. I don't know. The future is definitely bright. Our monkey brain is default programmed to fear what we don't know. Right? Like, that was just our default state. And then one of the things that got me over the fence with the digital driving is I've got a lot of friends that are pilots, and they, I've got two of them that are actually commercial pilots, and one of them flies for Delta, like, international flights, explained to me how the computer systems work and how they're doing most of the flight and how they're set up in this triad with the computers making the decisions and essentially voting on the decision. And it's really interesting how it's all set up. But the fact that most of our, virtually all the commercial flights have been operating like this for over a decade, you know, that's unbelievable.

(Michael Gruen at 00:41:40) Yeah. For me, it's not, I have no fear of a future where it's 98% automated, you know, driverless cars or whatever. It's that in-between state that I wouldn't say I worry about, but I just think I don't think people are really understanding all of the, like, all these, I don't know that people, and they certainly, the decision-makers are, but I always wonder about those, what are the consequences of this decision and what, and it's not so much fear as much as just sort of morbid curiosity of, like, what could go wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) Everything.

(Michael Gruen at 00:42:15) Exactly. Right? Everything. Right? And that's the same thing that we've already learned. Like, a fully automated car is way better. I would feel much better if my car either did everything or nothing. Like, I don't like that sometimes my car can't anticipate or understand, you know, the ones that have some of the more safety features. It's great, but it might not anticipate what I'm trying to do. I've perceived the danger, and I'm handling it this way. And now we're in a different situation because the car and the driver don't necessarily agree on how best to handle the situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) So yeah. There's no new driver school. You can go pick up a Tesla, and it has, like, have you driven the Tesla with the assistive driving?

(Michael Gruen at 00:43:03) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03) Dude, it's crazy because it's kind of like what you're saying. So I did a test drive with the X, the Model X. I went on the interstate, and he's like, hey, you double-click and press down. And you do, he showed me the gesture essentially that you do to get it to go into this mode. And then he explained to me all the different settings. And he's just iterating through numerous settings and features and availability to set this up. And I'm like, and I got it. Like, it was pretty intuitive, and I got it, but I couldn't help but thinking, like, how do I say this? I want to make sure I choose the right words. There is a spectrum of intelligence in the world, and I feel subjectively as if I'm over the 50% mark. Right? Maybe 51. Right? In the top 50%. But that means there's 3 billion people—

(Michael Gruen at 00:43:37) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Who are in the sub 50%, and they too will also be operating these machines. So it's pretty interesting to see how it all plays out.

(Michael Gruen at 00:44:01) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:02) Yeah. Shout out to Ford. Dude, I got to have, oh, man. You know those moments in your career when you're really excited? I got to have the CTO of Ford come on and discuss how they did the, made the shift to do the ventilators and everything—

(Michael Gruen at 00:44:15) For the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) For the COVID. Because that's, talk about a digital transformation. Right? It's like—

(Michael Gruen at 00:44:19) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:20) Cars to that. And, dude, they've got this new Mustang SUV thing that's digital, and it looks like the Tesla. I think I accidentally said that to him too, but I was like, oops.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:41) I think it's almost like we deserve it, because for all those years, all those car companies put out the nerdy looking electric vehicles.

(Michael Gruen at 00:44:50) That was horrible. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:52) Yeah. I didn't know how to ask him that question, though. I wanted to be like, why can't somebody design a good looking e-car that's not Tesla? And then in my research before I asked them that question, I saw their new Mustang thing coming out. I was like, they nailed it. They did absolutely nailed it. I think they did such a good job. You should look it up after the call.

(Michael Gruen at 00:45:13) Definitely gonna look it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:14) Yeah. The guy was, he should buy one. I'm like, okay, alright, fine. I don't know. We got off topic, though. But if you make those cars, somebody's gonna make a Linux version or a Red Hat version where you can actually do the operating system, and that's where I think one of the biggest issues is going to be. Because when they're not closed systems, when you can start making apps for them and things like that.

(Michael Gruen at 00:45:38) They're already not closed systems. No. I mean, cars in general are not a closed system. One of the best Black Hat talks that I went to were from the car hacking guys, and I have a friend who sort of part-time consults to Detroit on some of that, and another friend who's working on similar stuff, but not for cars, but for other parts of the infrastructure. And no, they're not. I mean, they're supposed to be closed systems, but you can definitely get in there and you can do things. And there's lots of people. If you remember the Volkswagens that had the, that were cheating on the EPA test? You can go in and you can get those. You know, you can get one of those cars that's been, and they've been retrofitted with whatever to make them legal again. But you can totally go in and change the firmware and other, whatever you wanna call it. You can put other chips in there, and you can get it to do what you need it to do. And then you can also, I mean, you can still continue to cheat where it knows that it's in EPA mode, whatever, and sends the right information on so that you can continue to drive your really fast car that doesn't meet emission standards. Wonderful. Exactly. And so, right, those are the, when I think about the unintended consequences, it's just a matter of time before some guy figures out how to have car-to-car transmission of information of, like, hey, I'm an emergency vehicle, get out of my way, when they're really not an emergency vehicle, and there's no reason for you to get out of their way other than this guy figured out how to hack that part of the car to send that message to the cars around them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) Oh, wow. I didn't even think about that. And then it just spreads.

(Michael Gruen at 00:47:14) See? Unintended consequences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) Probably will come out of some automobile software research lab in Wuhan. Oh, that was fun. That was fun. No. So, you know, it makes me think, though, could I buy a Tesla and plug into its computer system and write code on it? And do you know what that's based on, by the way? Just off the top of your head as a consumer?

(Michael Gruen at 00:47:45) No. I don't. I mean, it's all, my guess is it's all C. But, I mean, it's a message bus that sends messages. Everything's, there's no direct connections, right? So the wheels are listening to a message bus, and I'm definitely out ahead of my skis. I'm sure there's lots of really talented car people that would correct me. But there's a message bus and there's all these different computers within the car that are sending messages consistently. The wheels are saying, like, I'm driving 90 miles an hour, I'm driving 90 miles an hour, I'm driving 90 miles an hour, I'm facing this direction. And so if you can just get messages on the bus, that's all it takes to get things to go. So that was one of the, one of the original problems with the original car hacks was you could actually dial in because cars had the OnStar type stuff, or whatever it is. In order to do that, they had a car phone. There's a phone inside the car. It doesn't have an, it has a number. You don't know what it is. But if you can figure it out, you could call it. It would answer, and then you could do things to take control of it. And they fixed all that. Everything's much better now. But, yeah, it's just a message bus. So my guess is you could write it in any language. You just have to know how to format the message for the other computers to be able to understand it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:55) Oh, it's true. That's interesting. Yeah. And then at one point, you know, one of these cars is gonna come out with an app store where you could actually write code for it and deploy your app to the car.

(Michael Gruen at 00:49:10) Right. I mean, it would be great if I could explain to my car that, like, yeah, instead of braking, I like to really accelerate around the accident rather than being trapped by the emergency vehicles that are bound to come up on the scene.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:22) I was thinking entertainment stuff. Right? I was thinking entertainment. But, yeah, we could do that too. Or it's a whole new world of people that will modify cars. Right? You have the Fast and the Furious, you know, timeline of those people that are putting the NAS and all those things in their cars. And then you're gonna get computer hackers on the cars. They're gonna be doing crazy things with wheel rotations or whatever it may be.

(Michael Gruen at 00:49:52) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:53) Oh, I could press a button and then it does some specific type of figure eight burnout. Do you do stuff like that? Yeah.

(Michael Gruen at 00:50:01) Yeah. Definitely. Yep. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:03) Yep. Or a bunch of friends get together, and we can do some choreographed dance with our cars.

(Michael Gruen at 00:50:09) That's funny because I had the exact same thought as soon as you said it. Like, have a car do a thing. It's like, oh, no. Why don't we do it as a group? And then it's like some Olympic event.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:19) We should do a Cybrary dance off with all the employees' cars, eight of them, and we'll do a dance off with another company.

(Michael Gruen at 00:50:28) There you go. Yeah. I like it. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:31) I think we're supposed to be talking about technology leadership stuff. Anything else? We wanna plug Cybrary. So if you need cybersecurity certificates, or you can probably plug it better than me.

(Michael Gruen at 00:50:44) It's not just certificates. I mean, you can definitely, if you're looking to train up and prep for a certification, by all means, come on our platform, but we really see ourselves as getting skills and keeping those skills current. And yeah. So if you're looking for that opportunity or you need, you're looking for a platform for your team, maybe your training budget was allocated towards in-person training and you're looking for more on-demand training, we're definitely available for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) Perfect. Amazing. And then if people wanna find out more about you, probably hunt you down on LinkedIn.

(Michael Gruen at 00:51:18) LinkedIn. Yep. Or, there's, ever since I joined Cybrary, I'm now way more public facing than I used to be. So there's podcasts and other things that are linked to from cybrary.it, in addition to, every now and then. I'm really bad at personal self-promotion, so you won't really find too much from me about myself on LinkedIn. But, yeah, there's definitely stuff out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:43) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.