In this episode, Leon and Josh discuss failures big and small, and how our religious/moral/ethical traditions inform the "opportunities" for failure that life in IT presents us with almost daily.

Transcript:

Leon: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate it. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious.

Josh: 00:21 Hey Leon, did I ever tell you about the time I was wrong?

Josh: 00:24 No

Josh: 00:26 It's okay. I was only mistaken.

Leon: 00:29 Oh, seriously?!?

Josh: 00:32 You know, dad jokes are a fantastic thing, Leon. And uh, sometimes my delivery is great and sometimes it's an epic fail, which is good. It's okay. Because I think today I want to talk about failures in it.

Leon: 00:47 Like when the SAN fails?

Josh: 00:50 No. How about when we fail the SAN, Not when the SAN fails us.

Leon: 00:54 Oh, you mean like the time I took the entire backup path down, but I forgot about it. And later on I did a fail over and the entire storage array went down because there was nothing to backup to.

Josh: 01:03 Uh, yeah, exactly that.

Leon: 01:05 Oh God. Okay. All right. Once again, our religious, moral, ethical outlook I think helps us with those failures. First of all, I should say that the opportunity to fail presents itself almost every nanosecond in IT. I think there's lots of things to fail at. Um, but uh, as, as some people say, failure isn't an option, it's actually built into the primary features of the product a lot of times. So I think our religious outlook helps us to either adapt to failure or fail better. What do you think?

Josh: 01:40 Well, um, so I, you know, I don't have a great answer for that yet. I'm going to flip back to my ideas of, of religion based on scripture. Okay. So, in the scripture, in the New Testament says, "be ye therefore perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect." And to me that's always been a very weighty thing because I view God as perfect. You know, he's all knowing, all loving. He's, he's the perfect father and holy cow, how do I ever live up to that? And I, I've spent a lot of time in my religious life and even my post-Mormon life thinking about this mandate we've been given of being perfect. And you know in IT I'm, I'm nowhere near perfect. I am so far from it, but man, uh, I spent a lot of time in my religious upbringing trying to look, sound, act, be perfect. And I didn't do a very good job to be frank.

Leon: 02:50 So it's interesting because, uh, at least in in Judaism, yes, God is perfect, omnipotent, you know, uh, infinite, all of those things. But, but the mandate to be perfect is... That's, that's a hard pill to swallow. Um, the, the language that I've always heard is that you should, you should try to perfect yourself. So it's more a message of constant self improvement. Knowing that, that there's always something about yourself that you can improve upon rather than say that you're trying to attain this goal of perfection. I think that that's, to be very honest, you know, impossible. But I also think that that idea pairs nicely with IT life because in IT, I think that we, the, the people who are most successful in IT typically are committed to being lifelong learners and to knowing that they're going to spend their whole life perfecting a set of skills - whether it's networking skills or their knowledge of IOS commands or, their ability to create good, useful powershell scripts or whatever it is - that nobody sits back on their laurels and says that "I'm the everything about active directory. I've got it all down." I mean, they may be comfortable with it, but there's always a recognition that you could do more with it. Um, so yeah, I think that's an easier thing to, to get to then