Sustained Interest: A Formula for Technical Mastery with Tad Reeves (1/3)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

What do you love most about your job? Give that some thought before you answer. Have you forgotten what brought you into this industry in the first place?
Tad Reeves, our guest this week in episode 296, has been consistently reminded of the things he loves about technology throughout his career. Tad originally pursued mechanical engineering but made a change to graphic design. Soon he fell into technology and worked for an internet service provider in the early days of the internet. Tad was driven to learn technological concepts at a deeper level and to nurture his interests, letting these behaviors guide him through different jobs and into large scale environments. In this discussion you’ll hear about how doing phone support made Tad’s troubleshooting and communication skills better and prepared him for later roles, thoughts on the role of the technical lead, and how an impromptu dinner meeting led to a job as a systems administrator.
Original Recording Date: 09-12-2024
Topics – Mechanical Engineering and Graphic Design, Supporting the Early Internet, A Level of Interest Drives Deeper Understanding, The Move to Webtrends, Landing Something Bigger, The Technical Lead, Relocation and a Love for Big Gear
2:09 – Mechanical Engineering and Graphic Design
* Tad Reeves is a principal architect for Arbory Digital. Arbory Digital is a consulting firm which specializes in working with enterprises using content management systems, specifically Adobe Experience Manager.
* Tad is a technologist at heart but has focused on Adobe Experience Manager in the last 15 years or so.
* Why did Tad decide to study graphic arts in school?
* When Tad was in high school, he wanted to design cars and refers to his young self as a “complete car nerd.” Tad still has a ton of car knowledge.
* Tad was on the fence between the art side of design (i.e. visual design) or the engineering side of design. After getting into the mechanical engineering school at Oregon State, Tad started an internship with someone who was a seismic engineer, specializing in doing retrofits for buildings.
* After helping the seismic engineer with some of his work, Tad came to a harsh realization.
* “And I saw what being an engineer is day to day…. And I’m looking at these pages of Calculus and all that kind of stuff…I don’t want to do that. That’s not what I want to spend the rest of my life doing…. I’m going to have to tell everybody I know that I’m not going to be an engineer anymore because I don’t want to do that.” – Tad Reeves, on the realization that mechanical engineering wasn’t so interesting
* Though Tad was initially afraid of his parents being angry with his decision to pursue a different career, they supported his choice to pursue something more interesting.
* Tad’s mother was a nurse and his dad an electrician.
* Tad already had an interest in design and would design newsletters, for example. He selected graphic design.
* “I’ll do graphic design. So I did that for a year in college, but then at the same time, I was spending all my spare time fixing stuff. I was always tinkering with computers and stuff. That wasn’t my original interest, but it was one that drew me.” – Tad Reeves
5:42 – Supporting the Early Internet
* Tad shares the story of getting a job doing technical support for a small, local internet service provider (ISP) with about 1000 subscribers in Tigard, Oregon.
* “The pay…that’s not what I’m here for, but the problems I was solving were genuinely cool. They had my interest… Having the rush come in and seeing that ...