Episode Information
In the second part of the Career Downloads interview with Sirinda Glasgow, she delves deeper into her career journey, sharing pivotal moments and decisions that shaped her path. Sirinda discusses her return to MGM Resorts, the challenges of outsourcing, and how she navigated these transitions. She also touches on her move to Dell, transitioning from a hands-on technical role to a Sales Engineer position, and the new set of challenges and learning experiences that came with it.
– Transitioning back to a familiar environment.
– Outsourcing Dynamics and the impact of outsourcing local operations.
– Moving from a customer role to a sales and advisory position.
– Family and Work-Life Balance: Managing a demanding career while raising three children.
– The evolution of server technology and virtualization.
– Career Advice and Insights: Adapting to new roles and responsibilities.
– The importance of continuous learning and staying current with industry trends.
“I needed to make the decision whether I was going to stay and be part of this opening where a lot of things are changing or make my exit.”
“Whatever career you go into, at a certain point, you become responsible for that business. You’re on call whether you think you’re on call or not.”
Tune in to gain insights from Sirinda’s rich experience and learn how to navigate career changes, embrace new challenges, and find a balance between professional and personal life.
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Manuel: Hi. I’m Manny Martinez. Are you looking to level up your career? Then welcome to Career Downloads. Each episode I’m going to hit the refresh button with different guests and dive deep into the journeys of these inspiring professionals. I’ll unpack their educational paths, explore their job histories, and discover the strategies they use to navigate the ever-evolving job landscape. So whether you’re just starting your journey or you’re really looking to make a more strategic move, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights and actionable advice from the diverse minds in the industry. So plug in, download the knowledge, and join me on Career Downloads.
Sirinda: As they got close to opening, coming out of bankruptcy, the folks that came in were going to make a lot of changes. And it’s about a year out from opening. Either I make a decision and they had me on a contract and the contract came up. So I needed to make the decision whether I was going to stay and be part of this opening where a lot of things are changing. It makes me a little nervous, right? And a whole new team. Or is this the time that I make my exit? Because everything’s changing, they don’t necessarily need me at this point, right? Like I’ve delivered all this way. And now if you’re not going to kind of implement what we’ve already done.
Manuel: If you’re not going to utilize me the way that I was brought out to do.
Sirinda: Do I need to stay? And MGM resorts asked me to come back. So I went back.
Manuel: And when the MGM, was it the same person, a different person?
Sirinda: Some, same. There are a lot of people that were there for a long time. And so I knew a lot of the people when I went back, it was kind of like going home.
Sirinda: And the only bad thing is, is I get back. I’m super happy. System Engineering role. And they started outsourcing. [Laughter] So I got to be a part of like that whole outsource planning. Like what does that look like? What is a RACI? Who’s responsible?
Manuel: So when you say outsourcing, they were looking to outsource all the internal like everything or portions of it? Like what?
Sirinda: It was supposed to, so they had outsourced one portion previously and now they were going to outsource more. More of the like infrastructure pieces, right? So they brought in some different companies, evaluated about five, narrowed it down and then picked one outsource provider. And so once I turned over a lot of my stuff, so I worked a lot with the Linux/Unix guy, he was actually from Ireland. So they’re scattered. They’re a big global company, which the only problem and challenge there is you had all Las Vegas people, if you had to take down the casinos and multiple casinos running on a central system. Now, like over the years, we had come to a point where you want to take advantage of those like players club systems where multiple casinos are all connected to the same back end systems, right? So if you need to take that down, you’re affecting multiple properties. So you’re going to do it on the middle of the week at the slowest possible time for those casinos in the middle of the night. And you have somebody taking down the front end, right? So the Help Desk could coordinate with the users. You’re going to take down those front end of the application, then you’re going to take down that middle tier, then you have your application, your database, and then the storage, the RS/6000. There was an RS/6000 that was part of like what we would be taking down. That was maybe a team of five people that had to coordinate and bring that down and bring it all back up within a very short window. Now, that storage guy might be in California, the AIX person’s in Dallas, the database people are in India, the Linux/UNIX guy is in Ireland, like you’re spread all over. So now, you can just imagine it’s kind of a challenge to take it up and down as fast as we were able to. And that’s the stuff that gets missed when you’re kind of outsourcing that you’re not accounting for, like how well, how efficient some of the people that were here, that were local to Las Vegas, had become very good at being able to do what they did and understand the business. To this day, outsourced companies will sometimes say, well, let’s take that down on the weekend. No, this is Las Vegas. We’re not taking anything down on the weekend, right?
Manuel: And that’s kind of going back to what you said before, right? Most businesses, nine to five, Monday through Friday. So the casinos are very unique in that aspect, right? They’re 24 by seven. You say the slowest time, but they’re still people, right? They’re still people eating or playing the slot machines or their operations are still going. So they don’t just say, hey, we’re going to close the doors for a little bit, come back in the morning.
Sirinda: Which is really cool about if we get there within, if we have enough time to keep going, but to what we do today, to make sure that we’re able to keep things up, that we’re using some new technologies, microservices, that you can just take down a little piece of the application instead of the whole thing. Because you just heard me talk about taking down this whole monolithic architecture, even if you have high availability or disaster recovery built in, if you need to do some kind of maintenance that requires you to take down the application or the
Sirinda: Yeah, it’s painful.
Manuel: All right. So then.
Sirinda: So I went back for the outsourcing. Finished everything I was supposed to do, just like I’ve talked about before, finished my project. And I think they were talking about putting me over the Desktop Engineers, which that was the farthest from anything I had really done. So I guess I could have looked at it as a new challenge. Well, early in my career, I installed terminals and point of sale equipment. But while we were in a few meetings, the Dell Sales Engineer had gotten promoted. And he said, Sindy, I’d like to recommend you for my job. And I was very surprised when he said that. And I said, you know, I don’t think I can do that. I have three kids. I can’t travel. He said, you’re going to cover Nevada and Arizona. Sindy, that’s like a day trip, not even 45 minutes up to Reno.
Sirinda: Quick trip down to Phoenix and back. You’d be home at night every time. He said, you can do it. And I’m like, huh, let me think about it. And I remember calling my brother and saying, if anything were to happen, that a flight’s delayed, that I get stuck, you know, would you guys be there to help back me up? Because I’m going to need somebody for the kids.
Sirinda: And they were a little bit older by then. Not old enough to be home alone, though.
Sirinda: And at the time too, like when they were in middle school is when my kids, I asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. And they almost in unison, it was the scariest moment, looked at me and said, not what you do. I was like, I like what I do. They said, you’re on call all the time, mom. So this is right after the Bellagio Easter, three days out. I was on call a lot for a little while. So Dell gave me the opportunity to dial that back. If I had stayed at MGM, even with outsourcing, ultimately, even those executives there on believe me, that’s the one thing I try to impart on my kids. Whatever career you go into, at a certain point, you become responsible for that business. You’re on call whether you think you’re on call or not. Right.
Manuel: It may not say, hey, on call ours, but you’re part of that.
Sirinda: You’ll be called in. Yeah. Look at doctors, they’re on call. There’s lots of comparisons I could do. But even when my on call went away, there were times and like at Qualcomm, well, no, I did have on call there. There were times when I didn’t have a lot of on call, but you would sti...
