Technically Religious

In religion (and the religion of IT), we often find ourselves accepting the majority of the dogma while having to choose to reject the minority. In this episode, Josh, Doug, and Leon talk about how to support something that you disagree with because it’s just part of a larger system that is mostly good. Listen or read the transcript below:

Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked," and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks.

Josh: 00:25 Welcome to Technically Religious, 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.

Leon: 00:48 So tell me, what do you think the hardest part of your job is?

Josh: 00:54 You know, when I lived in Las Vegas, a retired LAPD gang squad detective that I knew, I think he said it best, he said, In order to be in leadership, you have to tell people how to go to hell and have a good time getting there."

Doug: 01:08 Wait, what does that even mean?

Josh: 01:10 Well, I think that it means that sometimes to lead, well, you have to tell people things that they don't want to hear, but you have to do it in a way where they don't hate you or hate the process.

Leon: 01:21 Okay. And that takes us into our conversation for today, which is, opposing something even as you are a part of it. Even as you follow it. What we're going to talk about is where the majority of the thing that you're in, your work, your religion, the club you're in, most of it you like, it's good, but there are certain elements that you absolutely can't stand. It is wrong, wrong, wrong. So how do we as good IT people, as good practitioners of our faith as good members of our family - How do we oppose something while still being part of it, rather than just rage quitting. So that's the topic for today.

Josh: 02:09 Well, I'm going to oppose the fact that we've started this podcast without introducing Doug.

Leon: 02:15 Oh, right, sorry, everyone, uh, sound off

Josh: 02:18 Josh Biggley

Doug: 02:20 Doug Johnson

Leon: 02:22 and I'm Leon Adato. Thank you. Okay, good. That... See? So sometimes opposition can be good, and be done respectfully. Right?

Josh: 02:28 Well, you know, I, I if you've been on the Internet lately, I think that they would disagree. I'm just going to say that Reddit and every comment on every article I've ever read says that you have to oppose by burning down the world.

Leon: 02:43 Right? Right. They would oppose the idea that you can oppose something respectfully.

Josh: 02:47 Absolutely.

Doug: 02:47 Yeah. It seems like, but it seems like what they're doing is by burning down the world, they're burning down the very thing that they want to preserve. It drives me crazy that people are just like, "Let's just go and destroy this thing cause I hate this part of it. So I'm going to ruin everything for everybody."

Leon: 03:04 Everybody. Right. And, and Doug, just a little background for the listeners that don't know you really well, you, um, the way you described yourself to me first is best, uh, Steve Martin once said that, "two years of philosophy is enough to screw up anybody." And you've had four.

Doug: 03:18 That is correct.

Leon: 03:18 So I can only imagine that some of the arguments that you see on the Internet are maddening for you.

Doug: 03:26 It can be and I've actually gotten off of all of the long form ones because I was tending to do too

Identity is a complex concept. "Who we are" is comprised of a rich tapestry of experiences and relationships. We try to control which of those aspects we share and which we keep private. But there are times when the world around us - strangers, coworkers, and even friends - define us in ways that don’t match the view we have of ourselves. That experience can be merely surprising or terribly upsetting, and many of us struggle both with the fear of it happening and with how we should deal with it when it does.

Listen to this important episode or read the transcript below:

 

Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called, "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked" and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks!

Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion - or lack thereof. 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.

Leon: 00:49 So back when we were recording episode three, in the middle of our conversation about something completely different, there was an interesting side conversation that happened between Josh and me and Roddie. Um, so I want to play it for you right now"

Josh: 01:02 I will point out though that as diverse as we, uh, as we think that IT is, we're three white males on a podcast, and...

Roddie: 01:13 I'm not white.

Josh: 01:13 So I mean... you look white...?

Roddie: 01:17 I know I do. I do look white. I'm undercover, but then I'm full. I'm full person of color. I'm, I'm half of the... And actually thinking about this podcast for the last few months of where Leon wanted to go with it, I knew kind of that would come up because I can identify as white, right? Most people look at me and say, "Well, he's just another white guy." I'm not, I'm full. I'm half Lebanese, half Palestinian, so I'm full Arab blood. Um, but it's, but it's, it's great that you actually mentioned that

Josh: 01:48 That I broached it, right?

New Speaker: 01:49 (dialogue fades out)

Leon: 01:50 So we ended up cutting that particular exchange out of the episode, but, uh, we here on Technically Religious wanted to circle back to the concept of being identified as somehow different or what we're calling being "othered". And that's what we're going to talk about today. Uh, I'm Leon Adato and with me today. Uh, I've got Josh Biggley.

Josh: 02:12 Hello-Hello.

Leon: 02:14 And also Kate Asaf.

Kate: 02:16 Hello.

Leon: 02:17 So those are the voices that you'll be hearing on this episode.

Josh: 02:20 Well, you know, Leon, I don't think that we can start this episode or really any episode without talking about, uh, what has gone on in New Zealand. If for some reason you have been living under a rock for the last two weeks, week and a half, you know, 50 people were killed at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand by an Australian guy whose name we're not going to mention because he's not important. What is important is that he took 50 lives. It's interesting when, when I heard the news I was, I was a little gob smacked because about 18 years ago my wife and I almost moved to Christchurch. We had the process all started and I thought, "Holy crap, that is a city that we seriously considered living in," and I... The Prime Minister of New Zealand is also a post-Mormon, an ex-Mormon. Uh, she grew up LDS as well. So, you know, one other tie I, I can't say enough about her and her response and I don't even know how, I can't process it in my

Religion and IT share a common ground when it comes to humor. In both cases, if someone doesn’t “get it”, it could take HOURS to explain enough for them to understand. in this episode, Leon, Josh, and special guest Doug Johnson talk about whether that is unique to IT/religious people, our own experiences with tech- and religious-based humor, and whether (as Josh asserts), Mormons just aren't that funny. Listen or read the transcript below.

Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked," and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks!

Doug: 00:24 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 the ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious,

Josh: 00:49 So we just missed a very special holiday.

Leon and Doug: 00:52 Wait, what? I...

Leon: 00:54 International women's Day?

Doug: 00:56 Ash Wednesday?

Leon: 00:57 Mardi gras?

Doug: 00:58 Pi Day!

Leon: 00:59 The opening of Captain Marvel!!

Josh: 01:00 Uh, no, no. It's that special day when we as it pros, we do important work, like changing everyone's password to "butthead" or setting everyone's email quota does zero, or setting off 500 alerts, you know, for no reason.

Leon: 01:15 Oh April Fool's day.

Josh: 01:18 Exactly. And in honor of that blessed day we're going to talk about jokes

Doug: 01:24 Religious jokes?

Leon: 01:25 Well, kind of. I think that religion and IT share a common ground when it comes to humor. In both cases if someone doesn't get it, it could take hours to explain enough for them to understand it. And by that point it's not funny anymore. So today I think we should focus on "jokes I wish I could tell."

Josh: 01:39 So like religious jokes, you can't tell at work, not because they're bad but because it requires too much background knowledge?

Doug: 01:48 Sure. But maybe also tech jokes that you can only tell the other it people.

Josh: 01:53 Or even tech jokes you can only tell other folks who understand YOUR sub specialty? Like enterprise monitoring?

Leon: 02:01 That would be like the story of my life as a monitoring engineer. Exactly. So before we dive into the topic, I do want to do some introductions. With us today is Doug Johnson. Say, Hi Doug.

Doug: 02:11 Hey, hi.. uhey,

Leon: 02:14 You missed it.

Doug: 02:15 I know! All of a sudden I realized.. and oh no. I hate those jokes.

Leon: 02:22 "Good night Gracie" Okay. Well, and today especially, we can talk about the jokes that we don't appreciate. So that's, that's fine. That's fair. I didn't mean to set you up for a joke you didn't want to hear. Um, so like I said, I think the tech and religion have like similarities to them that they're in the, you know, if you're not in the "in" crowd, you don't get it. But the other part of is that I think as IT people and also as people with a religious background, whatever, we keep TRYING to tell these jokes to people like, "No, really, you're going to love it once you understand it." Like, we keep doing that. Um, and, and that expands, I think to nerd or geek culture overall. The number of times I've tried to explain, you know, Harry Potter or Star Wars or whatever to people who just did not want to, did not want to hear it. Right?

Doug: 03:08 Oh, I know. One of the problems that you run into is, you know, here we are, we, we've got all of these jokes that we really think are great and maybe they're jokes in our religi

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

Many religious traditions embrace the idea of being an example, a "light unto the nations". On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Roddie explore this idea for those of us who work in IT, when it's a highly stressful situation such as a system outage - the dreaded "sev1 call"? .

Transcript:

Josh:                                      00:00                     Welcome to technically religious 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.

Leon:                                     00:24                     Look, we all know that working in it isn't all rainbows and ice cream and unicorns. There are frustrations, there are disappointments, and even times when the work is downright stressful

Josh:                                      00:33                     and perhaps no time is more of that then during an outage when there's a lot of unwanted attention and tempers are running high.

Roddie:                                00:41                     Today we want to explore the ways that we navigate those high stress moments as an IT pro with a strong ethical, moral, or religious perspective.

Leon:                                     00:49                     To put it in scriptural terms. How might we use our perspective to be a light unto the nations in those moments? Um, this week we have a couple of new voices. So let's just do some quick introductions. I'm Leon Adato,

Josh:                                      01:01                     I'm Josh Biggley

Roddie:                                01:03                     and I'm Roddie Hasan. So diving right in. Leon, why don't you tell us where the quote comes from and kind of give us some context here. Okay. For those people who aren't familiar with it, um, it actually comes from one of the books of prophets, Isaiah, for those people who are quickly flipping through, it's chapter 42, verse six. Uh, and it, the whole context of the sentence is, "I am the Lord. I called you with righteousness and it will strengthen your hand and I formed you and I made you for a people's covenant for a light to the nations." So that's, that's what we're talking about. Um, but what does that mean, right?

Roddie:                                01:39                     Like, yes, what,

Leon:                                     01:41                     What, what's that supposed to be? Actually, before we dive into that, um, just, you know who, who among us has obviously, you know, prophets or Navi, uh, is a Jewish, you know, is part of the Jewish canon. So it's part of our context, but I do want to clarify that from a Jewish perspective, the prophets is not considered what we might call gospel. You know, thou shalt it's really considered a timeless political commentary. So, uh, you can derive life lessons from it, but it isn't a binding in the way that a commandment might be. So how about for you guys?

Josh:                                      02:19                     It's interesting. So in Mormonism, um, and as we talked about last week, Mormonism being my, uh, my previous religious belief now identifying as post-Mormon and although, you know, having spent 40 years in the religion, I know a fair bit about it. Um, in Mormonism, Isaiah is feared, uh, only because, hey, it's Isaiah and he, you know, he uses some really complex imagery in order to extract his true meetings. Um, however this particular idea is also reflected in the New Testament. Um, so certainly I think Mormons and Mormons identifying as Christians this idea that we should stand up and use our correctness are... And certainly in context of Mormonism, are our absolute belief that they're, um, that that it is the true reli

As our level of religious observance changes, explaining what we do and don't adhere to can present specific challenges within an I.T. context. 

Transcript

Josh:                                      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 mash or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious

Josh:                                      00:22                     Hey Leon, regardless of your level of religious observance. Now there was probably a time when it was was different. Um, it might've been more or less or you may have been part of a different denomination or even an entirely different religious practice while changing levels of observance carries with it a whole set of challenges religiously. What what we and what I want to look at today is a here on technically religious is the other side of the coin. How does it impact your life at work? Uh, in the IC trenches? Did you suddenly have to change your on call schedule? Uh, were you in the life of the Christmas party or, or maybe the perennial, no show. And then suddenly you were able to participate in things that were once verboten, but you found no real idea how to navigate them?

Leon:                                     01:08                     Right. So, yeah, that's what we want to talk about today is, you know, if your religion changed or religious observance change and uh, you know, and then you had to adapt and explain it and all of that. Um, I think the first thing is that for some of us and certainly those of us on the program, um, we do tend to frame our work identity around our religious beliefs. It's not the only thing that we talk about, but it definitely is sort of front and center. Right. Um, I know that, you know, when we were working together, there was, you know, ongoing comments. It wasn't even teasing or anything, but you know, oh, we can always depend on Josh to be the designated driver because, you know, he's Mormon, he doesn't drink, you know, and, and that was it. It wasn't a joke or a jibe. It was just like, oh yeah. Right. That's, that's a thing. Right,

Josh:                                      01:54                     right. I don't, like we discussed on the first episode, you are always the go to guy if there's a Sunday, if it needs to be covered, especially if you can change it so that someone covers your Saturday on call. You know, Leon is the super dependable, you know, hey, as long as it doesn't conflict with, you know, my sabbath observance, I'll help you with your sabbath observance.

Leon:                                     02:15                     Right? And, and I'm sure that other religious perspectives, you know, have the same thing where they get known for something, whether it's a positive or a negative. I think some of it depends on how you, how you spin it or how you present it. And some of it just depends on what that thing is. And that's, I think the meat of what we're going to get into, um, along the way. However, because this is about technically religious, right, not just religious. I think that there are other religions that are worth mentioning also. For example, you know that, that great commercial, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, right? Our technical identity holds the same place. Everyone knows that I am a deep lover of Linux. Of all things, Linux, that is part of my persona. And, um, that also defines me. Right?

Josh:                                      03:02                     Yeah, I agree. In fact, I would say that, um, the Linux worship is really a religion unto it's own, right?

Leon:                                     03:09                     Careful. I think we're on dangerous ground there, but, okay.

A discussion of how the "challenges" presented as people with strong religious points of view working in I.T. can be supplemented by our teammates. 

Transcript:

Leon: [00:00:00] 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 I.T.. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as I.T. professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious.

Josh: [00:00:21] All right. Hey Leon how are you today?

 

Leon: [00:00:23] I'm doing good. It's happy not frozen Sunday. I know that a podcast is sort of timeless but we're talking about this during the winter and the polar vortex is not in my part of town. How about you?

 

Josh: [00:00:34] I feel like in Canada it is always cold during the winter. So my my wife says suck it up princess.

 

Leon: [00:00:46] Right. Exactly. It's like “this is why you moved to Cleveland.” I'm in Cleveland so yeah. Same thing. Yeah.

 

Josh: [00:00:53] If I was going to pick an island to live on I probably should not have picked one with snow, I probably should have picked one with palm trees. You know lessons learned.  You know looking back at the past is always it it allows us to hopefully make better choices. Which is interesting because making choices is where we're headed today on this podcast. At least that's where I want to head if you're willing to follow along.

 

Leon: [00:01:16] I'm always happy to follow you if nothing else to to watch and see what happens.

 

Josh: [00:01:21] That's what I love. I love to hear it. So in fact just this morning Leon I was I was reading the e-mail that I sent you before I interviewed with you and the rest of the team before you hired me.  And then abandoned me but we'll get into that story later.

 

Leon: [00:01:38] He's not bitter.

 

Josh: [00:01:38] I'm not bitter at all. It's all right.  And I realized how flippant my email was to you it was like "Hey Leon you know let me introduce myself here's who I am." And I knew you by reputation and I also knew that you were Jewish. But I have a little story to share with you. Once you hired me and once I finally met you although I knew that you were Jewish I was surprised by how Jewish you were. Does that sound weird or what?

 

Leon: [00:02:09] It it's it's an interesting phrase it's not one that I have not heard before. But yeah you know it's. "Oh you're very Jewish. You're really..." Yeah it's so yeah I'm for those people listening I'm Orthodox Jewish. So that's the most observant. I think that's the the probably clearest way to put it. And if you've never seen a picture of me I have a nice bushy beard and I have this funny little hat on the top of my head called I kippa or yarmulke, and I have little fringy strings hanging out of my pants and all sorts of things. It's all the things.

 

Josh: [00:02:44] Yeah. And I think that that's what struck me. You know my idea of Judaism was probably skewed to the polar ends. And so when I first met you I thought Wow. Leon is really Jewish.

 

Leon: [00:02:59] He's reallly... Wow.

 

Josh: [00:03:00] Yeah like it should have been something that I knew but I didn't know it. And. In the same vein in context I was born and raised a Mormon. And we'll get into that a little later so I'm used to people being a little surprised when they interact with you and they're like oh you're Mormon right.

 

Leon: [00:03:22] Yeah yeah. So I think that that one of the underlying ideas for this entire podcast is that we've all had that experience of "Oh oh you're really... you're REALLY this thing" like whatever this thing is like.  It's not just a word that you use or dance around like you really are into it. And how do we make our career in I.T. and our interactions. So from my side you know you had mentioned that you were Mormon and I had worked with other people who are Mormon so

Introducing Technically Religious, a podcast by IT practitioners with decades of experience, who also have a strong connection to their faith. We talk about how we make our passion for technology mesh with our religious principles, where those two things conflict and where they combine to be greater than the sum of the parts.

 

Transcript:

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 I.T.. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as I.T. professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious.