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CJ & The Duke talk about ServiceNow experiences that haunt their conscience. With over a decade of experience each, they've had some doozies! Great opportunity to learn from their mistakes, and learn how to learn from your own!
Authentic, Authoritative, Unapologetic ServiceNow commentary by Cory "CJ" Wesley and Robert "The Duke" Fedoruk
[00:00:00] Duke: All right, Corey, what are we talking about today?
[00:00:04] CJ: Hey, duke, we're gonna do something special today. Today. We're gonna talk about our guilty conscience. We're gonna talk about all those things that we've done over the course of our career that we probably shouldn't have done. We kind of knew at the time that we shouldn't have done, but we did it anyway.
[00:00:20] Duke: Yeah, man, I I golf with a huge handicap. like, I don't have a perfect track record and I think maybe. If you read between the lines a bit, sometimes, the things I rant about most are maybe the things that I had the greatest sins in
[00:00:37] CJ: Yeah. I mean, that's a good point, right? Because you, you don't learn nearly as much from your successes as you do from your mistakes.
[00:00:44] Duke: So, if you take anything from this episode, it's to, take stock of your mistakes and see what kind of value you can extract out of them. Hey, we're all about the value here on CJ and the duke. So,
[00:00:55] CJ: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, and the thing about it, right? Why make the mistakes if you're not gonna learn from them.
[00:00:59] Duke: yeah. True.
[00:01:01] CJ: it's all, all about, getting that value all about learning from mistakes.
[00:01:05] Duke: Hey, listen, you're gonna make em like
[00:01:08] CJ: It's perfect.
[00:01:09] Duke: I've been at this for 14 years. And it's just, you can't be right that often or rather it's very rare to be right that often.
[00:01:17] CJ: Dude, one of these mistakes I made just this year so, so it's not that these are all like early career mistakes, right? Like one of these things is something that I did just this year and I knew I shouldn't have done it while I was doing it. And,
[00:01:33] Duke: Yep.
[00:01:34] CJ: you know, sometimes, you know, the things conspiring against you and you're put in that position and you either don't fight hard.
Or you just let it go. or , sometimes you're just kind of back into a corner and you have to make that mistake. Right. Whatever the reason. my point here is I made this mistake this year. And I've been doing this for a long time.
[00:01:51] Duke: All right. You wanna roll off with the first one?
[00:01:54] CJ: Yeah, no doubt. . So, one of the first things I did was I took on a project where I had an imperfect, uh, match between my skillset and what the client needed. And, this was way, way, way back. This is one of the earlier mistakes that I made, And, , it actually ended up turning out. Okay. But it was one of those situations that it really put me in a bad spot. so way way early in my career, I was working with this huge organization, and everybody in it probably knows this organization, but the organization is not in it. And, they wanted me to come in and do discovery job for them. they wanted to roll out, ServiceNow discovery across their entire organization, which was a kind of national thing. like thousands, millions of nodes, whatever. A ton of mid service, the whole nine yards.
Right. And so they brought me in here to do this thing. And what happened is that somebody else had already started it and then that person had taken the job. And so they were rolling off. And so they needed me now, early in my career, I'd done discovery before I was, fairly, you know, confident in my discovery skills, but I'd done discovery in my own infrastructure.
Right. As a, as the person who owned the instance as an employee of that company. So I. Access to every single thing, because I was in it. Right. I had God level permissions across the entire environment or most of it. Right. And the folks. And when I didn't have those permissions, I knew everybody who had those permissions and it was a walk across the corridor.
It wasn't
[00:03:17] Duke: friend. Yeah. To
[00:03:18] CJ: Yeah. To a friend who also knew me for 15 years. Right. so, to say I had internal trust, right? Like as an understatement. And so, rolling out discovery, there went great. What perfectly. I'd never done it before then. and it went amazingly. right.
And I felt like, oh yeah, I got some discovery experience. Absolutely. I can take this job for this, you know, huge billion dollar company and roll it out for them. And I get in there. And the first thing I realize is that I'm in way over my head.
[00:03:47] Duke: Oh,
[00:03:49] CJ: know, they they're, they need custom probes, custom sensors.
They need all kinds of scripting. They've got all kinds of devices that have never seen the light of day in a service now discovery implementation. But they need all of this stuff in their service now instance, and I'm the guy that's gotta build it. you keep, man, let me tell you. I was, I, I was floundering there, I don't know how I'm gonna get to the end of this thing. But, you know, you double down, What do you do in those situations? ? Do you quit? And that's situation I found myself in. It's like, do you quit now? And just say, well, you know, I'm sorry, I'm not the guy for this, or do you double down on it?
And you, and you crack open the book , you know, and, and at that time it was the Wiki still you crack open the Wiki and then you get on. Right. I chose the latter. I cracked open the Wiki I got on with it. Right. And, I built them a reasonably good implementation. Um, I didn't get to the end of it though, because the original guy didn't like the place that he went to.
So he quit and he came back and there and, and yeah, so he was like, Hey, um, and we were all, Backfilling his team. Right? So this is an internal conversation with him at this point, cuz he's back on the team. He's like, Hey man, I can take that thing back over for you if you want. I know it's tough.
I was like, thank you.
[00:05:02] Duke: yeah, it will problem all.
[00:05:05] CJ: here you go. So I got bailed out a bit on that one, but I, I mean I was holding my own until then, but man, it was tough. It was tough duke
[00:05:12] Duke: Well, I got a question for you on that. Because I think more than a couple times we've said on the podcast, get in over your head.
[00:05:19] CJ: Mm-hmm
[00:05:20] Duke: And, go slay a dragon looks hopeless
[00:05:23] CJ: Yeah,
[00:05:24] Duke: but dragons, layers get all the glory. Right. so how would you tell the difference between this is over my head and I should take it or nah, dude.
Nah. Don't like, nah, let this one go. Yeah.
[00:05:38] CJ: scale. Yeah. that's for me, like where I drawn a line on whether or not this is something I should do or something that I shouldn't do or can't do with somebody else's money. Right.
[00:05:48] Duke: Uh, would you say let me ask it this way, too.
[00:05:50] CJ: okay.
[00:05:51] Duke: How much stronger are you? In what ways? After having that experience?
[00:05:57] CJ: Yeah, that's a good question. I ended up way stronger in discovery because of that, it made me really tighten. all of my, um, upfront processes, you know, a lot, because a lot of discovery is working with other folks, as I kind of alluded to in order to ensure that you have the right credentials to access devices, to ensure that you order devices live, to ensure that you know, what types of devices, right.
There's a lot of upfront kind of planning, , with a discovery project before you get into it. This made me really tighten those things. And get into 'em because I had to think about this from the, perspective of a person who doesn't have internal access to their network.
as a untrusted kind of agent. So that made me really reframe the way that I start discovery projects. it also made me, uh, a bit stronger in doing things a bit out of the box or a bit, oh, actually let me say, not out of the box, a bit outside of the box, right? That's a little bit more custom.
So, yeah, I ended up a, a much better discovery, um, engineer because of it. , but man, I don't know for me, I learn when I get that kind of, that, that adrenaline rush going, right like that, oh my God, you're going to die. And it's like, okay, I don't wanna die. so, so what's next?
Like what can we do next to avoid dying? And, and so a lot of that is okay. All right. Well we know, you know, you know, discovery, so calm down, you've done discovery. So when you can say that to yourself, like when you put yourself in a situation and you can say, all right, calm down, you've actually done ITBM before.
Maybe you didn't do it in this way, or you didn't do it for a client like this, but it's okay. You've done this before. Let's figure it out. Right. So that's, to me like the, difference between when you should go in and slay that dragon versus when you shouldn't. if you, you can't take on a project that's outside of your, outside of your capabilities in too many different dimensions, right?
It can't be outside of your capabilities in scale, can't be out your capabilities and in raw knowledge, it can't be outside of your capabilities in raw experience. All at the same.
[00:07:53] Duke: Yeah, I'm, I'm really struggling with this one. Because you can't tell the future. Right. And you can, you can look at it front and say, look, I I'm like the wrong person for this job. Which I have literally explicitly told people and they just said, no, no, you're wrong. We want you
[00:08:12] CJ: you don't know yourself.
[00:08:14] Duke: So like, how do you, so I guess what I'm saying is you could get a guilty conscience from, I didn't deliver what I hoped to deliver. Because I wasn't ready, but no matter how you got into that position, you can still come out of it way stronger.
Like this isn't the jungle, this isn't, a battlefield mistakes. Aren't gonna cost you your life. So anything, even if you are in the deepest, deepest, Shit. there's, only benefits afterwards, unless you're doing something like illegal or, Non-compliant or whatever that, , but anything else, no matter how bad it is only future muscle.
[00:08:54] CJ: Do I mean, and that's absolutely right. So I mean, absolutely feel guilty about it, but at the same day, at the same, um, at the same time, take advantage of the fact that you're here now. Right? I said, man, you know, it's like, oh, I sh I probably shouldn't be here, but I'm here now. What do I do? Right. And you know, like you said, it's all, it's all future muscle.
Right? So build.
[00:09:14] Duke: mm-hmm so I'll just jump into my first guilty conscience. One is, It's kind of a similar situation. Like I had this company called Wolf pack. There was a , catastrophic, failure to that company. and I let it go and I mustered up with a partner. I'm not gonna name names here.
They were awesome. You know, they took me on. but I kind of subtly warned them that like CMDB and asset management, aren't my forte. Right. And. And they sent me on one of those jobs, a week later, right. It was like, go, go do a cm, B workshop. and, and it's like,
[00:09:49] CJ: listening.
[00:09:50] Duke: it's outta my control.
So I'm not sure, like maybe I shouldn't feel guilty, but I do. And I think I feel guilty because. I just, I let despair take over, you know what I mean? Like I had a huge network which came to my rescue right. And taught me everything I needed to do like a CMDB or an asset management workshop. Um,
[00:10:10] CJ: Hold on, man. No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say, say that part again because that, I, I, I think there's a whole lot of value in that. Say that part again?
[00:10:18] Duke: what about having a network that, that came to help me out?
[00:10:21] CJ: Yeah.
[00:10:21] Duke: Yeah, no, I mean, it was, it was a huge blessing. I, handed in a lot of chips that day
[00:10:27] CJ: but you had the chips,
[00:10:29] Duke: I did. Yeah. I had the chips
[00:10:31] CJ: paying it for it, man. That's the thing, right? That's why we do this. Right,
[00:10:34] Duke: it's true. Don't kid yourself. There is a currency that is not money in our ecosystem
[00:10:39] CJ: absolutely.
[00:10:40] Duke: somebody will stop their own billable hours to like jump on a call with you. And. Help you with your thing. not everybody can just do that. but everybody can do it.
[00:10:52] CJ: Right.
[00:10:52] Duke: you know what I mean?
[00:10:53] CJ: I do.
[00:10:54] Duke: you can't just walk in and do it. You can pay a toll and do it anyways. Like you see what I mean though? Like, I didn't realize that I had the chips to make that happen. And I was like, all I could think of was how bad this thing is gonna blow up in my face.
[00:11:11] CJ: Right.
[00:11:12] Duke: And I think there is guilt there. So if there's anything I could have done better. Oh my. So they're all coming in my head now. I should have. Cause I had, a couple business days before I had to go there. and it was just like everybody was new to it or rather I was new to their company.
Right. But they were also a new company. So I should have sat down with their delivery managers and say, listen, how do you guys do CNDB workshops?
[00:11:35] CJ: Right,
[00:11:36] Duke: I could have, I could have had all kinds of prep, but instead I was like, how do I do a workshop and just squirrel away in my own cave, trying to figure out CMD B all by myself.
Right.
[00:11:47] CJ: Yeah. And, and so why would you say you did it that.
[00:11:50] Duke: Um, it's how I'm wired, Like, For big things. If I look at it, I'm like, oh my God, how do I do this? And it's just, I'm automatically in a bubble without thinking about it. I have to get like really close to danger zone before I say, I gotta call somebody, you know, and to that, to that extent, it's kind of like the episode we did. Like, how do I get help?
[00:12:10] CJ: Yeah.
[00:12:10] Duke: It's just, I got, I have to be convinced that I've exhausted my options before I ask somebody else for theirs.
[00:12:16] CJ: Man, I am the same way and I just don't know. That is good for me.
[00:12:22] Duke: Yeah. I mean, I, it, it's clearly not a black and white thing. You gotta have a gray area and say, cuz you definitely don't want to just do the opposite. Right. And just say, oh my God, I got a big thing to do. Let me call somebody,
[00:12:33] CJ: right.
[00:12:34] Duke: sit and ponder that stuff, sweat over it a bit.
[00:12:38] CJ: Yeah, right. I mean, look, there's a, there's a lot of information out here in, in the ServiceNow ecosystem. We put some of it out there. . And you get into the, into that space where it's like, oh man, I don't, I don't know what do I do here? Right. So you wanna, you gotta bang your head against it for a little while, at least to try to figure it out.
Like, you know, maybe I don't need some help. But sometimes you do get you're back up against the wall. Like you're in that position, you were right.
[00:12:59] Duke: Yeah,
[00:13:00] CJ: And then you made the call.
[00:13:02] Duke: I got a totally different one.
[00:13:03] CJ: Yeah, go for
[00:13:04] Duke: Uh, for guilty conscience. And this is like anybody who's thinking about going Indy or anybody who's been Indy for a short amount of time ponder this well, taking on too many customers,
[00:13:16] CJ: Oh
[00:13:17] Duke: you know what I mean? Sometimes you can't help it, right? It's not like these things come in in nice, even slots, 40 hours here, 40 hours here, 40 hours here to make a full year of work.
We know it doesn't happen that. Um, but there are people out there who they'll take everything on, they could be working 80 hour weeks. And they'll just say, yeah, I'll take, I'll take the contract. And a lot of it has to do with this idea that, I'm fully capable of working 40 to 80 hours a week.
Right. I can make that decision and I can just do it, but your customers don't make the same decision.
[00:13:46] CJ: Ooh, good point.
[00:13:47] Duke: they might not be content with the Monday to Friday 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM band
[00:13:58] CJ: that's. I mean, yeah. That's that's, I mean, that's pretty fair, right? they might not be re be okay. Being relegated to doing like, everything outta hours. Good
[00:14:05] Duke: You and, and you can't slot them anywhere. And it's, it's worse than that. It's, it's worse than just, you can't squeeze everybody into seven to 9:00 PM. Everybody, everybody wants nine to 11:00 AM, Monday to Friday. That's what they want.
[00:14:20] CJ: Seriously.
[00:14:21] Duke: wants anything else. So basically you can have 10 customers and each of their preferred bands is that.
Band of hours. So anyways, I'm, I have a guilty conscience because for a couple of years, I just treated everything as an hour is an hour is an hour.
[00:14:36] CJ: Yeah.
[00:14:37] Duke: And I took too many customers on, I think the second part of this is that, we are not machines and I have utmost respect for people who like labor with their bodies through the.
[00:14:48] CJ: Yeah,
[00:14:48] Duke: And spend, you know, eight hours swinging a hammer. That's a hard life, right? Eight hours climb on a roof. That's hard life. but eight hours of cognitive output. Isn't a walk in the park either.
[00:14:59] CJ: No, it is not.
[00:15:02] Duke: and you can't be at prime thinking condition and prime, cognitive output for 80 hours a week. Like you just can't 60 hours a week, even. Like somebody's gonna get the ass end of your hours.
[00:15:17] CJ: Right. I mean, it is, it is difficult. Absolutely. Right? Like I've been in that position where I've, been juggling, you know, four or five clients. Right. And it is tough. it's absolutely tough. And I've also been in a position where I had to come in and bail out a buddy.
Because they were in over their head with too many clients. and in this case, the buddy actually was working for a partner. So this person wasn't actually, , in control of their hours,
[00:15:43] Duke: That's terrible.
[00:15:44] CJ: Right. Like the partner was just giving them too much work.
now this person was a rockstar, right. Really, really good service in, in, in the service ecosystem. But there's only so much you can do in the amount of time that you have to do it. And this project got to the, to the, to the end of the rope. Um, there was a client demo that was due. the client demo couldn't happen because the work wasn't.
And that's when I got the phone call and I came in and, and then I, I knocked it out the park, but I knocked it out the park because I didn't have five projects on my, on my plate at the time. Like, you know, it wasn't a, it wasn't a situation where, where this, uh, where this pu this person couldn't do the work.
Right. It was a situation where this person literally didn't have enough hours to do the work and, you know, so.
[00:16:32] Duke: Yeah. I mean, just, I think again, because there's guilt there means there's fault. There's something I did wrong. And in this case it was I just had too many yeses going on and. I feel like I had one customer, I built a custom app for which it was, the app was awesome, but it was also like excruciatingly important.
[00:16:50] CJ: right.
[00:16:50] Duke: You know what I mean? It wasn't the most complex app out there, but it, it was kinda like one of those you can't fail. Can't fail once
[00:16:57] CJ: Okay, that makes it, yeah, that makes it super complex actually.
[00:17:01] Duke: yeah.
[00:17:02] CJ: we don't, we, we don't do a whole lot of stuff in service now that can't fail once.
[00:17:06] Duke: Yeah. It like, it was, it was in the compliance. Area. And it was like compliance to like government entities. And so like somebody was gonna audit them and it was gonna have like serious executive repercussions. Right? If so, anyways, it was like really close to go live. We did something to test and it, it like didn't work in test and it was like on, on their clock.
It was just what the heck? What if it, you know, it just undermines all the confidence. And I feel, if they weren't number four on my day, my to-do list today. I would've caught what went wrong. it took us like five seconds to figure out what went wrong and fix it. But that 5 cent cost me all kinds of credibility, all kinds of credibility.
[00:17:46] CJ: Yeah. Yeah, no, I get it right. Because it's like that extra five seconds that you could have devoted to them, before they saw it would have prevented you from losing like their trust.
[00:17:57] Duke: Yeah, that's right. Like, and going back to the whole, like, you can't squeeze that much. Everybody who's been to the gym knows you can't just max rep the entire day. your arms will literally fail. They'll just stop working.
[00:18:12] CJ: Dude.
[00:18:12] Duke: And your brain's the same way. It's like you, you won't be able to focus.
You won't get the attention. You won't have the cognitive processing ability. Sorry. I'm totally ranting.
[00:18:20] CJ: No, man, this is a good one. I I'm, I'm gonna build on it a little bit. Right. Because I'm seeing a lot on Twitter with folks, super new to the ecosystem, taking on , multiple gigs. I applaud that. Right. I'm all about get your money. So, you know, I, I get it, but I also wanna point out that. Working two, three gigs, four gigs when you're new to the ecosystem probably is gonna seem easy in that first three months. Right? Because everybody understands that you're new and everybody understands that you're ramping up. Right. But at a certain point, there's a, a gonna be a switch that flips right, where folks are gonna start to expect a certain level of quality expertise, et cetera, from.
Right. And put it this way. Right. It's a lot easier to carry three projects when they're in easy mode. It's a whole lot harder to do that, to carry three projects when they've switched to hard mode. Right. And you're new.
[00:19:17] Duke: Yeah. Cause this one app that we were just talking about, it was winding down. It's like, we're almost a GoLive and then it's just gonna be like hypercare support or whatever. Right. So I should have. Like I might be getting two, three hours a week outta them, so I need to have something in place.
So I stay at my max hours
[00:19:34] CJ: Right.
[00:19:35] Duke: and I had that. So the last thing I needed was for this thing to fall apart at the finish line.
[00:19:40] CJ: Oh,
[00:19:42] Duke: cause it's like, you're leading back. You're like P I'm tired. Then they get the phone call what the fuck's wrong with this thing?
[00:19:50] CJ: So, right. And what do you do then? Cause you're ready to crack open a cold one, you're good. it was like, I, I pushed it out. I'm done. I feel good. And then you realize I'm not done and not only am I not done, this is where the work begins.
because this broken. So this isn't simply, I'm doing this in a vacuum, right. Where I can do it at nine o'clock at night or three o'clock in the morning, or, noon on a Saturday. Right. This is like, it's broken now and they know it's broken, so they want it fixed as soon as possible.
[00:20:18] Duke: Yeah.
[00:20:18] CJ: That's a, that's a different level of balance, right,
[00:20:22] Duke: why don't we tell, tell them how to mitigate this as well, because sometimes it's just going to happen to you if you're an indie, right? Like as careful as you might be. So honesty is the best policy and. I am looking for fractional work, like I'm not looking for a 40 hour week, I'm looking for a 10 hour week or a 20 hour week.
Right. I'm super upfront with my clients about it. I tell them like I have this many other contracts and these are the bands that I put them in. Like I don't lie to them and say, just the, the work is gonna get done. I tell them the work is gonna get done in this band. And if you're okay with that, and it's okay if you're not, that's where the worst gonna get.
[00:20:59] CJ: Absolutely transparency and honesty. Right? that goes a long way to mitigating this stuff, and look, if you're an indie, your clients know that you don't work for them. Right. so they have to understand that this is a business arrangement.
And they will understand it as a business arrangement. If you tell. that's the key, if they need butts and seats for 40 hours a week from nine to five, maybe you're not the right person. And that's okay. The key to all of that though, is making sure upfront that they understand how you work and you understand how they work.
And then both of you understand whether or not it's a match. There's a lot of service now work out here, right? Like there's gonna be a client who won't care that you're coding at three o'clock in the morning. There's gonna be a client that won't care that you're doing most of the delivery during over the weekend, but there will be some clients that care.
Right. And they, you should, you should find a better alignment and allow them to go elsewhere and find different resources that fit with the time scale that they're looking for.
[00:21:54] Duke: So we have time for one or two more.
[00:21:57] CJ: I'll kick on this one a little bit. I let the client drive the implementation. . And this is fairly recent. . And so this isn't Corey with. two years of experience consulting or anything like that, this is a CJ, right?
this is CJ coming in and, having done this for almost 10 years and, prepping for the CTA course, I've gotta like a little bit of, of something under my belt and I still made this mistake. Because when you get in a situation, sometimes it makes it hard not to make this mistake.
So we were running a, implementation for a, client and they've actually tried to implement. I TSM three different times. This is the third time that I'm helping them with and they fired their first two implementation partners. They haven't been able to get successful with ServiceNow, , over like three implementation partners.
I'm in there and I'm like, yeah, no, I'll get you to the finish line. We got this, this is easy, this, you know, but then you don't realize that there's a culture thing, right? This is a government client and they want to do things their way, promise, doing things their way.
Often leads to a failed implementation, which is why they fired their previous two implementation partners, right? Like they've been causing their own calamities. and so, you know, I come in and I, and I tell 'em that it's like, Hey, lo, this you're doing it wrong, this is not the way that we do things.
Best practice, leading practice, whatever practice you wanna adjective, you wanna put in front and practice, right. This is not how we. It's like, let me help you. Right. And so, you know, I did the workshops I had, I talked to the people, this was great. We we're getting somewhere getting, we're getting processes outlined.
We're starting to understand resource management, all of those kind of good stuff. Right. We're getting there. And then I'm like, okay, great. So let's populate the da, the foundational data into the instance crickets. Well, that's not our team. Oh, okay. Well, let me know who you talk to, right?
Like who, who do we talk to? Let's get 'em in here, right? That team's backed up like nine months of. Like what, like, look, we can't, we can't build a service now instance without data. Right? Like we can't like, there's no way, like, we, we need data in here and it's like, can we just save that for the end of the, of the process?
I was like, how do we, like, how do you do that? How do you build out processes with no groups, right? Like how do you, how do you define VIPs when you don't have users? Right. Like it's like, it is like, there's so much, you know, uh, locations, right? Like how do you do location specific, um, uh, um, um, catalog requests, right?
When you don't have locations, like on and on and on and on. Right. And so yeah, man being who I am, right. I'm like, this is a little bit of a ego guide. It's like, all we can do this, right. Yeah. All right. No problem. I been here before, like will cowboy up. Right. All right. So we'll, we'll create like all of these kind of temporary things, right.
That we can code against like temporary entities, I guess, is what we'll call 'em. and yeah, so the processes work because we coded everything to be happy. we got four users in, in the table. It's fine. Right. Two of them are VIPs. One of 'em is this. And we can, you know, and, and it all works fine.
We got three departments. None of 'em are real, but they're and on and on and on. Right. And so we get to the end of it and. We were like, okay, alright. So we need foundational data. Now we need to go be able to go in here and, and tack it in. They're like, well, we're in the middle of a, implementation with our new single source of truth for data.
And so this thing still months out, we don't know how it's gonna look. We don't have a schema. We don't have our, so SICE is to say like, we're at the end of the service now implementation, but we still don't have data. And we don't know when we're gonna get data. at this point, you can't, go live, There's no going live because there's nothing here in the instance to code against. it doesn't work. And had I pushed harder in the beginning and said, no, we need data. I don't care how you figure it out. I don't care if you figure out, you know, masters, Excel spreadsheets that ultimately get ingested into the, to the instance, right?
Like we need foundation of data before we build, I didn't do that. Screwed it up and, oh, I they're still digging out.
[00:25:51] Duke: what's the thing that you could have done better?
[00:25:53] CJ: I know better, man. That's that's what I could have did better. Right? Like I know better. we shouldn't have gotten through that process without having foundational data. and I know that we, could have started a little bit without foundational data, but we don't bill for months without having foundational data, and we definitely don't get to the point where we're ready to go live and we still don't have it.
I know better. I've actually experienced that problem before. Yeah, I didn't learn from my own mistake. It was one of those things, because Like I know you need users, groups, locations, departments, so on and so forth, in order to kind of get this thing done in order to go live.
And I didn't listen to myself, I didn't listen to the mistakes that I made. I allowed the, client to dictate the direction of the project. and they're not the expert I am. And even if they have all of these astounding business cases about why they shouldn't do it this way, or we shouldn't do it this way, I, I should have told them no, it's a line in the sand.
[00:26:48] Duke: Right. Okay. Just my last one in here too. you hear me rant all the time about document, document, document, document, like, why do you think that is? Because I burnt myself by not documenting stuff. My first service now gig, I was a customer, right. So I probably didn't think I needed to document cause I'd just be there forever building and
and so I didn't really document what I did and, except for one thing. And within a year, all of us kind of moved on to different places and the people who had to step in for us. it was pie on their face. I made somebody else eat a shit sandwich cuz they couldn't figure out how we did this kind of stuff.
Right.
[00:27:25] CJ: Right
[00:27:27] Duke: And so, I projected harm on somebody else because they had to do the hard work and look bad by not being able to administer this system. Except for that one thing that I did document, which he did just great on. I've been that person, but I've also caused that person, right. So that's a huge guilty conscience for me, is not documenting and From a purely selfish perspective too. guilty conscious for not documenting cuz you ever have those like great little code things that you build, even if it's not for delivery, it's just something that you did for practice or in my case for a video or something.
And it's just in my mind, I don't think I should have, have a giant code repository where I just keep that.
[00:28:07] CJ: Yep.
[00:28:08] Duke: Like a real dev. Right. But, you know, in my defense, I'm not a real, like, I, I haven't been a real dev. but Tim Woodrow was like, oh yeah, I just, I built a script for that eight years ago.
And just up in his, app that stores all this kind of stuff. And he just like pulls this thing out of thin air. And I'm just like, whoa, that is such a great idea. And I'm still not doing it.
[00:28:31] CJ: So, so what did we learn here today?
[00:28:38] Duke: Somes persist
[00:28:43] CJ: So, right. Like it's like still not doing it.
man, that, but that's so true. That's so true. Duke one thing I won't call out though. Why don't you think you're real deaf?
[00:28:57] Duke: Well, you know, I say that kind of tongue in cheek. I think if ServiceNow imploded tomorrow, I wouldn't become a DAF. You understand what I mean? Mm
[00:29:05] CJ: bet you would.
[00:29:06] Duke: I be, I, if I did, it would be on another low code platform.
[00:29:09] CJ: There you go. That's where I was going. Right. I was gonna say, so I bet maybe you won't be like a react, dev or like a vanilla JavaScript dev or whatever, but I bet you'd find another, service now, esque platform, That marries process with code and you go there and kill it.
[00:29:28] Duke: I think speed is a part of it too. Like I made a wallet, once outta leather, uh, cause I love leather working, right. It took me like two evenings you know, to get it done and it's not complicated at all. And it's like, I leather worker, no, I'm not, because somebody who's doing it as a living, if they couldn't crank that thing out in two hours, Right.
It's not worth their time. So to me, it's like I can develop, but I'm not what I would call a professional developer. When I say I'm not a real D I'm not a professional D that makes don't down that rabbit hole. Cause we're at.
[00:30:04] CJ: Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. I'll let you slide out of that one. well, folks it's always has been a pleasure talking with you all.
[00:30:15] Duke: Yeah, this is being and conscious saying, see you on the next one.