Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
Welcome to Rarified Air, stories of inspired service. In today's episode, John Paladino explores his own transformative journey. It's the story of a curious mind turned tech innovator. He'll guide us through the twists and turns of a career shaped by personal tragedy, a relentless quest for knowledge, and a deep seated desire to make a positive impact. Here's John.
John Paladino:So as a kid, I was always the kid asking why why why. I was very curious. I took apart my father's lawnmower while he was at work completely. You know, I took the piston out, I was about 11 and I almost put it back together before he got home. So when he came home, of course, there are a few parts that weren't back together yet, and he said, what did you why did you do this?
John Paladino:And I said, I want to see how it worked, and he helped me put it back together. He's a mechanic, and I think he he loved the fact that I was digging into hands on stuff. So that's kind of how I was as a kid and, you know, I always liked math, like physics, like sciences in general. And when I was growing up, I went to be a fighter pilot. That was my dream.
John Paladino:So I had applied and my junior year applied to the Air Force Academy. I went for an eye test here at Mass Eye and Air and royally flunked. So I have a lazy muscle in my I've had that my whole life, and the doctor was kind. He just said, you know, kid, you're never gonna fly. So I just pivot and said, okay, what am I gonna do?
John Paladino:And I looked in the newspaper and there were lots of jobs for electrical engineers. This is back when computer chips were there was fierce competition from lots of companies for different types of chips, different types of computers. So I thought maybe I'll go to school for electrical engineering and apply, yeah, my interest in math and physics and had a great time, went to WPI for that. But my sister had died, my younger sister died at 13 years old accidentally when I was in my junior year of college, and it really wrecked the family. So, my parents, they never really got over it.
John Paladino:And I took control of setting up the funeral, taking care of all the arrangements. When there's trouble, I run to it. I don't run away from it. And I knew after she had passed away that I want to do something with my life to help people. That's really where it stems from.
John Paladino:So, it was my way of trying to figure out how do I manage this tragic event and turn it into a positive, because if they let it get to me, I'm too young to have my life revolve around a tragedy. This first job, which was an internship turned into a real job, was with the company of one person. It was a reference lab. So what they do is they take specimens from hospitals and do lab tests, and they do lab tests that hospitals aren't set up to do. There was the lab director, there was a lab tech, and me.
John Paladino:So what did I do? I set up water filtration systems, I set up QC plans, QC doing statistics on the lab equipment to make sure the lab results were accurate. We needed a computer system, all we had was a connection to somebody else's computer system. So we had a construction team build out a computer room, but everything in the computer room I built. I did everything except for the physical room, cooling, electricity, everything else I did myself.
John Paladino:There wasn't computer science degree in those days, but I knew computers and operating systems. So I brought that in. We hired more lab techs. We went to 24 hour operations. So we went from having 3 people to 200 people in about a year and a half to 2 years.
John Paladino:So when I started at the lab and we brought in a computer system, it happened to be using a database from a company called Digital Equipment Corporation, so some of the listeners may remember DEC back from the 70s 80s, and they were acquired by Compaq, and then Compaq was acquired by HP. But when I had a failure in the database, I called DEC, and this happened many times. So I know the person I really wanted to talk to is an engineer called Fred. It's a real person. I'm not gonna share his last name on the podcast, but to get to Fred took 4 hours to get through Dex support processes, where you had to identify yourself as an authorized person to call for support in the 1st place.
John Paladino:You had to share information about your support contract to basically prove that you're a customer. You had to describe the problem, typically a few times, to different people, and then they would categorize it and put it into a bucket. Now my system's down, I think it's a crisis, but I have to go through and explain this to people who don't really understand my system, they don't understand my business. They were polite, which was nice, but it was the whole process was really ineffective. When I got to Fred, Fred always helped me out.
John Paladino:We solved the problem working together, and I was very happy and thankful that Fred was there to help. So that was interesting. I thought that's the way the world works. We moved to an inter systems database, which was fully compatible with a digital database. So, the, you know, moving from one to the other was actually very easy and something went wrong and I called InterSystems, they didn't ask for anything, they asked for my first name, and that was about it.
John Paladino:I described the problem, the person on the phone said, wait a minute, let me look something up. And he said, about 5 minutes later, he said, okay, try this, make a change in this location of memory and put this value in then reboot the system. So I do that and the reboot would take we take it for granted. Our phones boot up in like 3 seconds. Right?
John Paladino:For these systems, it would take about 3, 4 minutes, you know, not terribly long, but enough time to go get a cup of coffee and come back. And then once it was up, but I have to double check and see that the problem was really fixed, so I'd have to run some tests before I let users back onto the system. This whole time, this person I called it InterSystems stayed on the phone with me, and he was very patient and he just waited, he wanted to make sure that what he recommended really worked. I didn't feel like he was rushed to close the ticket. He didn't double check that we're a customer and we're paying for support.
John Paladino:He didn't check on any of that, which was seemed quite odd to me because I wasn't used to it. And lo and behold, the problem was solved. And so I had 3 or 4 other events like that where I called and I get the same person every time. And I thought, gee, this must be the support person who picks up the phone, and I wrote down his name, his name was Terry Reagan, I don't know who he is, and then later as I was applying for a job at InterSystems, I came into the office to meet with InterSystems and go through a couple of interviews, which I did, and the floor wasn't very big and only had maybe 15 people on the floor at full capacity. And I walk into Terry Reagan's office and realize I had been talking to the CEO of InterSystems all along.
John Paladino:Yeah. And that really threw me off. And as I went into his office, I was stepping over paint buckets. I'm not kidding. Because Terry was painting his office.
John Paladino:And we had a nice discussion. It didn't seem like an interview, it seemed like a discussion, but I realized after I thought about everything he said and everything he asked, he was really digging deep and getting a lot of interesting information out of me. I thought it was going to be tell me what your skills are, and then test my skills and what experience did I have. He didn't ask anything like that. He asked about how do I learn?
John Paladino:And I said learn sometimes by making mistakes. After the interview I thought, oh, that's the wrong thing to say. But for Terry, it was the right thing to say because I wasn't afraid to make a mistake and learn from it. He asked about my passions, and I told him about my passion for helping people, where that came from. He asked me about my aspirations.
John Paladino:I said, I wanna own my own company. You know, I wanna work here for 5 years, and then I'm gonna go off and start my own business. And later I thought, I was young, I thought that was a really bad thing to say. And the things I thought were really bad answers as I'm reflecting on this saying, there's no way he's gonna hire me. Within a few hours after the meeting, I got a call and they wanted to hire me and I was amazed.
John Paladino:And when I joined, we had some great mentors and a lot of developers. There were 2 other people in support, so I was the 3rd support person. The company only had 17 people. So again, everybody's doing everything. We didn't have a QA department.
John Paladino:We didn't have a training department. First day in the job, I remember I printed out all of our source code and took it home to read it. There's a stack of paper about this thick. Yeah. There was coffee and beer on the paper and, you know, on Sunday mornings, I'd spend the whole morning just reading through source code to try to understand how the product really works.
John Paladino:So it was an opportunity to learn a lot and I did and then as we hired more people I realized I'm turning into a teacher too. So I can learn and help other people and mentoring other people coming into the company, helping our customers all of a sudden it was feeling that fulfillment that I was looking for to balance out that tragedy a few years prior. And it was really, really felt good.
Female VO:Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or wanna hear from a specific guest, email us anytime at inspired service at inner systems dot com. And when you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience the transformative power of support done differently, go to inner systems.com.