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Speaker 3: The information economy has a ride. The world is teeming
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Speaker 3: And now here's your host.
Speaker 1: Eric Kavanaugh.
Speaker 5: Well, all right, ladies and gentlemen, Hello and welcome back
Speaker 5: once again to the only coast to coast radio show
Speaker 5: that's all about the information economy.
Speaker 4: It's called Inside Analysis.
Speaker 5: You're true the Eric Kavanaugh is here, and folks I'm
Speaker 5: very pleased to be talking about a very serious subject
Speaker 5: today that is hiring in the federal government. We have
Speaker 5: Chris Coldegato today with us, and he is from fedstack
Speaker 5: and they're focused intently on this very challenge. And Chris,
Speaker 5: there are lots of things that need to get done
Speaker 5: in DC, as we all know, and you folks are
Speaker 5: out there helping to make these connections. Tell us quickly
Speaker 5: about fedstack, what you guys were built for and what
Speaker 5: you're working on today.
Speaker 6: Sure, thanks, Eric, so very quick on. Fedstack is actually
Speaker 6: a new brand very focused on the federal.
Speaker 7: Market.
Speaker 6: In fact, we are basically a unit that was worn
Speaker 6: out of a workforce development organization called smooth Stack. So
Speaker 6: this is actually a brand launch where we're actually expanding
Speaker 6: our offering from what we're pretty well known to have
Speaker 6: been doing.
Speaker 7: In the market space until now.
Speaker 6: So our focus has been how do we basically close
Speaker 6: in on the skills gap specific to technology, right, there's
Speaker 6: a lot of difficulty in hiring also in the federal space.
Speaker 6: There's also a lot of competition in the open market
Speaker 6: for pretty much the same pool of resources. So where
Speaker 6: we differentiate ourselves is we're actually what we were calling
Speaker 6: it creation of net new talent. Right. What that means
Speaker 6: is we actually develop the talent from sources where you
Speaker 6: would not usually find them. Right. So a lot of
Speaker 6: new entrants into the technology market that have the high
Speaker 6: aptitude for grasping new technology, exiting military that would like
Speaker 6: to break into the technology field. Basically, we created an
Speaker 6: accelerated apprenticeship program where we are secret sauce is being
Speaker 6: an immersive environment where we mirror the target environment for
Speaker 6: our clients, be that direct to the government or some
Speaker 6: of our system integrated partners where they're trying to meet
Speaker 6: a particular requirement.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the do training where it is intensive training
Speaker 5: and I'm presuming what you're doing is mimicking the work
Speaker 5: environment where they'll be so they work with the technologies
Speaker 5: that they'll need to be working with in the actual job.
Speaker 4: Is that right.
Speaker 7: That's correct.
Speaker 6: So we actually have a patent pending on this technology
Speaker 6: for called mirror environment immersion.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: So beyond just training them on the content, right, we
Speaker 6: really tailored the curriculum specific to that job. Right, So
Speaker 6: it's not just about training on one dimension, but really
Speaker 6: the full breadth of skill set that's required to deliver
Speaker 6: the job. For day one, So whether that's cloud, whether
Speaker 6: that's actual programming or even consulting skills and knowledge of
Speaker 6: the domain where they're going to be deployed. So we
Speaker 6: really tailored environment specific to the requirement and then basically
Speaker 6: run them through anywhere from a ten to twelve week
Speaker 6: window against a full time, full time absorption of the
Speaker 6: material where we provide all the lab environments set up
Speaker 6: for that the trainers, the product owners mimicking and simulating
Speaker 6: what they would face when they actually work on day one.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, and there's lots of new technology to learn these days. Obviously,
Speaker 5: Artificial intelligence is very much top of mind for people.
Speaker 5: You have models that need to be designed, they need
Speaker 5: to be trained, You've got AI infrastructure to worry about.
Speaker 5: Do you cover that whole spectrum everything from the IT
Speaker 5: infrastructure to the model designed, the training, that kind of
Speaker 5: fun stuff.
Speaker 7: Oh, absolutely right.
Speaker 6: So we will focus on what is in need today
Speaker 6: and we actually continue to continue to scan the market
Speaker 6: of what's emerging. So we want to be able to
Speaker 6: stay ahead of what's coming. So we focus on five
Speaker 6: key areas right, data and AI. Right, So a lot
Speaker 6: of the data engineering, big data analytics and so on,
Speaker 6: a lot of the new AI models are coming out there,
Speaker 6: the traditional applications development regarding regardless of what stack that
Speaker 6: may be UH, and then digital platforms. There's a lot
Speaker 6: of COTS packages, ERP packages for example, low code, no
Speaker 6: code type of technologies UH, including infrastructure solutions, cloud hybrid
Speaker 6: and so on, including the way we do DevOps for
Speaker 6: deployment and packaging all that UH into those target environment.
Speaker 6: And finally, of course, across the board, you need to
Speaker 6: have cybersecurity for secure applications and platforms.
Speaker 5: Yeah, cybersecurity, I mean there's a space that will never
Speaker 5: ever ever go away. It's harder than ever, but you
Speaker 5: do have better tools than ever too. So how do
Speaker 5: you yourselves keep on top of the latest technologies? Do you
Speaker 5: hire consultants and practitioners from these environments? Let's just pick
Speaker 5: cybersecurity as one, because it's its own entity. Do you
Speaker 5: go out and get folks from the big firms to
Speaker 5: come on and be your trainers and your consultants?
Speaker 4: How does that work?
Speaker 6: So we have a pretty large partner network. So we
Speaker 6: partner both from a strategic alliance with the vendor providers
Speaker 6: for example. So we create those partnerships where we are
Speaker 6: basically seen as workforce providers, and then we basically look
Speaker 6: at those trainers or the experts experts from the various
Speaker 6: fields that we're trying to surface.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: So, in fact, actual that's a good segue into the
Speaker 6: expansion of our offerings beyond creating this apprenticeship cohorts, where
Speaker 6: we're now actually extending our services to our partners, where
Speaker 6: some of the folks that they have that may have
Speaker 6: been working on the same maybe legacy applications that now
Speaker 6: have to transition to the modern technology as new platforms
Speaker 6: get rolled out, they need to be able to keep
Speaker 6: pace with that, right, so we bring in the trainers
Speaker 6: that will help the transition from legacy to modern digital platforms.
Speaker 5: And there are lots and lots of new platforms. You
Speaker 5: mentioned low code, no code that's been a very hot
Speaker 5: topic the last few years, where you just have a
Speaker 5: nice graphical user interface and it's typically a drag and
Speaker 5: drop where you pull together different components and under the
Speaker 5: covers they handle all the code development, all the code execution.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, Actually there's some exciting things that actually beyond the
Speaker 6: local no code now with AI, right, AI itself is
Speaker 6: actually needs to work together with the folks that we're training,
Speaker 6: because you're no longer just training them the basics of programming,
Speaker 6: but how to ask the program.
Speaker 7: With AI as an assistant.
Speaker 6: So it's a little bit of a new game, right,
Speaker 6: It's almost a game changer where you know, one person
Speaker 6: needed to learn the very basic coding principles. Now you're
Speaker 6: doing local no code and reuse, dropping and dropping GUI
Speaker 6: on top of the thing, and now AI itself. You
Speaker 6: give them a prompt and it's writing a lot of
Speaker 6: the code for you. So being able to live in
Speaker 6: that environment that the expectation is really accelerated outcomes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and of course jen ai is very hot these days.
Speaker 5: But the problem with jenais you probably know, is that
Speaker 5: it is probabilistic, so it's not deterministic. I think that's
Speaker 5: one reason why you see so much emphasis on the copilots,
Speaker 5: on the helpers, the digital assistance, because the human can
Speaker 5: then still make a judgment about what to do. You're
Speaker 5: not just turning the gen AI and letting it do
Speaker 5: the job. Is that your impression as well?
Speaker 7: That absolutely?
Speaker 6: Oh absolutely, I think a lot of this hallucinations happened
Speaker 6: right with some of the It depends on what you
Speaker 6: use for training the models, So you know, part of
Speaker 6: the decision making would be when do you point Copilot
Speaker 6: or others into like external resources where it can be
Speaker 6: corrupted by a lot of the unvetted information that's being
Speaker 6: formed to form your answers versus trusted sources for training
Speaker 6: in house.
Speaker 7: Potentially that would allow actually more reliable answers.
Speaker 5: And you know, one of the technologies that fascinates me
Speaker 5: the most, and I'm curious to know if you've heard
Speaker 5: about this process mining companies like Salonis Software g there's
Speaker 5: a few of them out there where you track typically
Speaker 5: the digital data footprints through various information systems to see
Speaker 5: what's actually happening. To me, that is an incredibly powerful
Speaker 5: technology for rewriting, reinventing information systems to kind of catapult
Speaker 5: them into the modern age.
Speaker 4: What do you think, Oh?
Speaker 6: Absolutely, I think that that saves a lot of time, right.
Speaker 6: You know, you've done a lot of methods in the past,
Speaker 6: the versus engineer, and this really helps a lot, especially
Speaker 6: when you're doing modernization, right, it takes a lot of
Speaker 6: time to try and trace and ensure that you're able
Speaker 6: to keep the functions that you want to keep and
Speaker 6: how to design for the future, and something like this
Speaker 6: really accelerates that analysis.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and open source is a big deal too. Open Source,
Speaker 5: I think has revolutionized the information technology landscape, certainly on
Speaker 5: the app development side, I mean all the way down
Speaker 5: to Linux and the Linux kernel and the work that's
Speaker 5: being done there, but the entire data stack now has
Speaker 5: been opening up to open source technology. Are there concerns
Speaker 5: in federal use cases for open source because the source
Speaker 5: is open?
Speaker 4: What do you think about all that?
Speaker 6: I think in the early days there's been a lot
Speaker 6: of concern But there's like two thoughts on that.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 6: There's still a lot of folks that kind of want
Speaker 6: to look at closed systems. But what we're finding out
Speaker 6: is a lot of folks say, hey, because it's an
Speaker 6: open system, it's been tested more thoroughly than any closed
Speaker 6: system that's out there, that they may actually renders them
Speaker 6: more secure. You know, I could go both ways on
Speaker 6: that one, but it really depends on how sensitive the
Speaker 6: systems you're developing and how you know whether you are
Speaker 6: exposing vulnerability in an open setting or it's a mature
Speaker 6: enough platform that's been really thoroughly tested that makes it trustable,
Speaker 6: like Linux, you know, was in the same boat at
Speaker 6: some point, and now it's all over the place.
Speaker 5: Right now, and now it's the enterprise standard for sure. Absolutely,
Speaker 5: and we all keep hearing about this it skills shortage,
Speaker 5: and you know, I don't really know what to make
Speaker 5: of it all. There are lots of people, I'm sure,
Speaker 5: who want to learn all those things, and you're filling
Speaker 5: that gap, right, I mean, you are training and retraining
Speaker 5: people to learn how to use all the new technologies.
Speaker 5: And you know, the fun part is that Jenai can
Speaker 5: be a big part of that, right. You can load
Speaker 5: instruction manuals into a Genai solution and then just ask
Speaker 5: it all kinds of questions. In that environment, it seems
Speaker 5: to me they're very very very powerful and very effective.
Speaker 5: They don't hallucinate as much because they're just pointed at
Speaker 5: a particular document. Is that what you found as well,
Speaker 5: that Jenny I can be a very powerful copilot in
Speaker 5: helping to train people to to use new technology.
Speaker 6: Well, absolutely, And I think a lot of the younger
Speaker 6: generation factor growing up with gen Ai access already, right,
Speaker 6: So we have to adopt our training mechanisms and methods
Speaker 6: in order to incorporate that in the learning management systems.
Speaker 6: That we actually have ourselves in house, and so we
Speaker 6: need to constantly look for new ways of actually training.
Speaker 6: As you know, we're trying to train and reskale some
Speaker 6: of the folks that are more used to the older technologies,
Speaker 6: and then you have the folks are new younger generation
Speaker 6: are upcoming that expect that this is the way they
Speaker 6: want to learn in the future.
Speaker 7: So we're trying to have that happy medium.
Speaker 6: But the future really is everything's going to be uh
Speaker 6: gen AI or agentic AI system.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that actually brings up a really good point.
Speaker 5: I'd be curious to get your thoughts as a trainer,
Speaker 5: as someone who is working for a company that trains people.
Speaker 5: We now have arguably five generations in the workforce with
Speaker 5: very different cultural norms, very different tendencies and more rays.
Speaker 4: How do you tackle that.
Speaker 5: Do you actually address that programmatically to treat people of
Speaker 5: a certain age one way and people of a certain
Speaker 5: age a little bit different just because of their cultural diversity,
Speaker 5: or how does that actually work?
Speaker 7: Yeah, we absolutely need to consider that.
Speaker 6: Right, So when we're built out some cowards in the
Speaker 6: screening process as we are customizing the curriculum, that's part
Speaker 6: of the consideration. What is the makeup of that cohort.
Speaker 6: For example, if that's a mix of all five generations,
Speaker 6: you've got to be able to cater to what's the
Speaker 6: most effective technique and I just deliver the content the
Speaker 6: material in a one size fits all manner.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's interesting too, So you know, maybe you could
Speaker 5: share with our audience a bit how you track those
Speaker 5: kinds of things, the techniques that you use, which sessions
Speaker 5: you have people joined to.
Speaker 4: Train, and then the efficacy of that down the road.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know fed stack is new, but from
Speaker 5: your smooth Stack experience, for example, how much are you
Speaker 5: able to track, measure, and then ascertain the efficacy of
Speaker 5: certain programs to certain demographics and then monitor it and
Speaker 5: modify that over time.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So that's actually a really good question because that's the
Speaker 6: reason why we actually came up with our own learning
Speaker 6: management system to be able to track everything.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: So when you look at a ten to twelve week
Speaker 6: process and cohort, every week is basically an evaluation where
Speaker 6: actually the progress of the entire class comes in, right,
Speaker 6: So we're trying to develop a cohort. In fact, it's
Speaker 6: no guarantee that they're actually going to graduate, right, So
Speaker 6: the efficacy of how we teach that is very important,
Speaker 6: but also the evaluation factors because we're very selective on
Speaker 6: the folks that we deploy out there for contracts, so
Speaker 6: we may start up with a very large number, but
Speaker 6: by the time if we're finished and only the stream
Speaker 6: of the crop actually surfaces at the end, so we're
Speaker 6: a heavier aligned on metrics. And even after the courses
Speaker 6: are done, we do checkpoints, right the first thirty days,
Speaker 6: the first sixty days, what's your feedback of what would
Speaker 6: you rather us have done. Now that you actually have
Speaker 6: experience in working this and applying this on your current project,
Speaker 6: then we use that for the training of the next
Speaker 6: gohard in order to improve it.
Speaker 5: That's very impressive. You developed your own learning management system.
Speaker 5: If you sometimes you got to roll your own right.
Speaker 5: You have to figure out what you need done, what
Speaker 5: functionality you need baked into this system, and if you're
Speaker 5: a large enough organization, sometimes it makes sense to just
Speaker 5: build out your own systems.
Speaker 4: That's pretty impressive.
Speaker 5: So I'm guessing you had some experience with learning management
Speaker 5: systems and you're like, you know what, we got to
Speaker 5: really roll up our sleeves and build this out.
Speaker 4: Ourselves. How long did that take? Roughly?
Speaker 8: Do you know?
Speaker 6: Well, it's actually born out of necessity. So when the
Speaker 6: organization started a smooth stack five six years ago, it
Speaker 6: was an in person learning. We actually bring our students here,
Speaker 6: put them in apartments, and we have a whole training
Speaker 6: facility in house. When COVID hit, everything had to go
Speaker 6: to virtual and we had to rapidly come up with
Speaker 6: a way to be able to deliver those same, you know,
Speaker 6: quality programs in a virtual manner. And that's what actually
Speaker 6: prompted us to say, hey, we really need to create
Speaker 6: our own learning management system in order to deliver what
Speaker 6: we're able to deliver in an in person manner.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 5: COVID was quite the forcing function right to use technology term.
Speaker 5: It really forced us all to take a very hard
Speaker 5: look at processes, workflows, access to data, access to information systems,
Speaker 5: and security for goodness sakes. I mean, with everybody working
Speaker 5: from home now, your threat scape is much larger because
Speaker 5: you have all these devices everywhere, computers that are outside
Speaker 5: of your data center, phones that are outside of your
Speaker 5: purview at least in the corporate office, et cetera. So
Speaker 5: that was a real wake up call for you guys
Speaker 5: that you had to go and reevaluate and redesign how
Speaker 5: you do these things.
Speaker 7: Right, Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's pretty impressive. And let's get into in
Speaker 4: the next segment.
Speaker 5: We'll get a bit deeper into the cybersecurity side, just
Speaker 5: because that is so important and I happen to know
Speaker 5: from experience that cybersecurity is a constantly evolving, constantly changing
Speaker 5: environment and to stay on top of things you need
Speaker 5: to do. Of course, all the basics, password management, things
Speaker 5: of this nature. Biometrics of course are really coming into
Speaker 5: play these days. But you need to be monitoring the network,
Speaker 5: you need to be monitoring the apps, you need to
Speaker 5: be monitoring the behaviors of all these people. And there
Speaker 5: are hundreds and hundreds of security solutions you can use,
Speaker 5: some like I suggest, that focus on the network, some
Speaker 5: focus on the apps, some focus on the users and
Speaker 5: kind of watching, and some take a more holistic approach.
Speaker 5: And of course, with machine learning you can track these
Speaker 5: things more and more assiduously over time. So when we
Speaker 5: come back from the break, we'll be talking again to
Speaker 5: Chris Coligado. He is with fed Stack. This is a
Speaker 5: new brand that's coming out of the smooth Stack organization
Speaker 5: that's been around for a while. They do it services, consulting, training,
Speaker 5: helping people learn how to do the jobs of the future,
Speaker 5: which are you know, it's the jobs of today, right
Speaker 5: staying on top of these systems and keeping them safe.
Speaker 5: Because if the government isn't safe, who is safe? Well, folks,
Speaker 5: don't touch that deb Right back, you're listening to Inside Analysis.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanac.
Speaker 5: All right, folks, back here on Inside Analysis talking to
Speaker 5: Chris Coligato of fed Stack. This is a new brand
Speaker 5: that's coming out of smooth Stack and Chris, in the
Speaker 5: last segment, you were talking about how COVID was a
Speaker 5: forcing function. COVID kind of woke all of us up
Speaker 5: in lots of different ways and we had to pay
Speaker 5: close attention to what we're doing. You have to create
Speaker 5: these immersive experiences for people. So I guess one question
Speaker 5: I'll ask you is VR. Are you using virtual reality
Speaker 5: for any of this training.
Speaker 6: We're starting to use VR in certain segments, especially in
Speaker 6: the enterprise side of things, because some of the clients
Speaker 6: are actually in the virtual reality environment. So we're experimenting
Speaker 6: a little bit of that right. But again it goes
Speaker 6: back to learning learning preferences. So you know, if we
Speaker 6: are looking at a cohort where they're really receptive to
Speaker 6: virtual reality, augmented reality type of learning process, you'll surely
Speaker 6: explore that. So far, it hasn't been much demand for
Speaker 6: that type of immersion levels, but something that they were
Speaker 6: definitely open to.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, let's let's take back into the cybersecurity. I mean,
Speaker 5: how how do you stay on top of all the
Speaker 5: latest do you interface with companies like Splunk or.
Speaker 4: Solar Winds.
Speaker 5: Of course, they had their experience with being hacked themselves,
Speaker 5: which I thought was one of the craziest hacks. I mean,
Speaker 5: we've seen some really some bad hacks lately. Snowflake was hacked,
Speaker 5: a lot of customer data was stolen. How do you
Speaker 5: guys stay on top of the security space to make
Speaker 5: sure that you are training people for this new generation
Speaker 5: of technologies?
Speaker 6: So yeah, it goes you know, I actually just brought
Speaker 6: in one of our cybersecurity UH experts is going to
Speaker 6: be leading that us for the our Tier one consulting arena.
Speaker 6: But you know, so far we've been basically working our network,
Speaker 6: whether it's a product based you know, as you mentioned
Speaker 6: all all those things that you mentioned earlier. Some of
Speaker 6: the product vendors but also even some of the training
Speaker 6: vendors that are out there, they're already delivering these types
Speaker 6: of methodologies in the defense and Intel spaces.
Speaker 7: We keep track of.
Speaker 6: That and we create a partnerships on how to actually
Speaker 6: develop the curriculum together. They usually deliver a lot of
Speaker 6: these things either in a just urst of content, more
Speaker 6: of a boot camp style content push, and some of
Speaker 6: them are very focused just on the certification.
Speaker 7: Side of it.
Speaker 6: That's when we're actually enriching a lot of the existing
Speaker 6: programs that are out there through our mirrored environment immersion.
Speaker 6: That's kind of new. So we're partnering with a lot
Speaker 6: of the players out there, both product and trainers themselves,
Speaker 6: in order to deliver a differentiated offering.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 5: And now do you also when you do this training
Speaker 5: and you follow all the way through, so you're helping
Speaker 5: folks get jobs at these organizations and your clients.
Speaker 4: Is it any number of agencies?
Speaker 5: Are there specific agencies that you represent or is there
Speaker 5: a particular focus or one of the agencies that works
Speaker 5: with you the most, or tell me about that for
Speaker 5: a minute.
Speaker 6: So we don't currently have any prime contract vehicles, which
Speaker 6: is one of the key things that I'm looking to explore,
Speaker 6: hence the expansion of our services to full technology consulting.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: So a lot of our delivery is through our partners,
Speaker 6: Like our customers are basically your large systems integrators.
Speaker 7: They're the mid tiers and.
Speaker 6: Then basically they serve they serve the government, and a
Speaker 6: lot of these contracts, right, so you look at some
Speaker 6: of the lart and you.
Speaker 7: Can name you know, you know anyone out there.
Speaker 6: They're serving the federal government, they need to ramp up
Speaker 6: very quickly, right, And a lot of cases they would say, hey,
Speaker 6: I need somebody who knows Java, and they'll go in
Speaker 6: there and test it out, but they don't know the
Speaker 6: other eighty percent of the stack that's going to be
Speaker 6: required for that piece.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: That's where we come in and say, well, instead of
Speaker 6: piece mealing how you bring your talent in, you can
Speaker 6: get a cohort of ten that could function equivalent to
Speaker 6: cohort of twenty when you're trying to piecemeal the talent
Speaker 6: that you're trying to put together. We will put the
Speaker 6: talent together for you in a very fast method in
Speaker 6: a cost effective way. We're actually, i would say we're
Speaker 6: the greening strategy for a lot of the sis because
Speaker 6: we are actually creating this new talent pool for very
Speaker 6: affordable resources because a lot of them are just coming
Speaker 6: out of college, coming out of former military breaking in.
Speaker 6: But what they're finding out is the folks that graduate
Speaker 6: from our programs are equivalent to somebody that they can
Speaker 6: come out of the street with two to three years
Speaker 6: level of experience already that level of equivalency. So it's
Speaker 6: become a very very strong value proposition for us, both
Speaker 6: from the cost perspective and then the upfront cost is
Speaker 6: all the risk is on us. We provide a training
Speaker 6: these are paid apprenticeships right well, they're on our books,
Speaker 6: and then when we deploy them to our partners, that's
Speaker 6: where they actually had their consulting experience and build out.
Speaker 6: So that's kind of like a win win situation between
Speaker 6: us and our partners. At the same time that we're
Speaker 6: going directly to the government. Our strategy now is the
Speaker 6: you know, starting to now that we have our brand
Speaker 6: a little bit of recognitions now and about ten different
Speaker 6: agencies at this point through our partners, is to start
Speaker 6: looking at being a small business going directly to the
Speaker 6: government and actually offering these services directly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: I was speaking with a gentleman named Alvin fu who
Speaker 5: is quite a prominent thought leader on LinkedIn.
Speaker 4: He's got hundreds of thousands of.
Speaker 5: Followers, he's all over the world, and we were talking
Speaker 5: about artificial intelligence, and he made a very interesting point
Speaker 5: the other day on this very show in fact, and
Speaker 5: he said that in the old days of business, if
Speaker 5: you walked in and said I've got twenty years or
Speaker 5: twenty years of experience, that was a real benefits. These days,
Speaker 5: it's not as much because the systems are so different,
Speaker 5: the environment is so different, and you almost have to
Speaker 5: unlearn old ways of doing things to appreciate the new
Speaker 5: ways of doing things.
Speaker 4: Do you do you agree with that?
Speaker 6: Do you feel like, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Actually,
Speaker 6: that was a really interesting conversation between me and our
Speaker 6: CTEO here because I said, hey, you know, I came
Speaker 6: in with thirty years of experience in industry, and it
Speaker 6: was like, oh, you know, yeah, me, it's too I have,
Speaker 6: you know, from something similar. But don't think about it
Speaker 6: as an advantage necessarily, because some cases you do have
Speaker 6: to unlearn some of these things when you start looking
Speaker 6: at some of the technologies available. What we call the
Speaker 6: digital native folks that are coming up a high school college,
Speaker 6: they already immersing these things and they can pick up
Speaker 6: things very quickly, multiple stacks before somebody. It's actually sometimes
Speaker 6: harder to teach somebody who's you know, got the ten
Speaker 6: years experience to adopt and learn the new technology because
Speaker 6: they're so biased and some of the they've been thinking of,
Speaker 6: you know, old system, old methodologies. They have to unlearn
Speaker 6: some of that in order to accelerate the learning on
Speaker 6: the new technologies.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 5: You know, we had a guy in the show a
Speaker 5: while ago, Chris Gladwin. He is the CEO of a
Speaker 5: company called Ocians, and they do hyper scale data warehousing
Speaker 5: where they can literally ingest trillions of records. We're talking
Speaker 5: just gobsmacking amounts of data. And he mused that you
Speaker 5: can't be looking at log files like individual log files anymore.
Speaker 5: You have to be scanning and using machine learning to
Speaker 5: send the patterns.
Speaker 4: In the log files.
Speaker 5: And this is an example of how much things have changed.
Speaker 5: You can't I mean, it's kind of like, I mean,
Speaker 5: this is maybe not the best analogy, but in auto repair,
Speaker 5: it used to really have to know what this was
Speaker 5: and what that was.
Speaker 4: These days, they stick that.
Speaker 5: Little thing in there and they get their reading in
Speaker 5: the computer, and it's a whole different ballgame for how
Speaker 5: you address problems, how you understand the problem space, what you.
Speaker 4: Do to solve it. So all these.
Speaker 5: Things, you know, some of the folks are you kind
Speaker 5: of have to unlearn some of what they've learned in
Speaker 5: order to really embrace this new age.
Speaker 7: Right absolutely.
Speaker 6: I mean you know, so we're teaching how to do
Speaker 6: modern modern development.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: Uh, if you start trying to teach folks that are
Speaker 6: coming from the old school, they're doing manual test development,
Speaker 6: doing all the stuff.
Speaker 7: A lot of that is automated.
Speaker 6: Nowadays, right, And how do you package and deploy to
Speaker 6: the cloud very different when you're trying to deploy an
Speaker 6: on premise situation where most people actually kind of live
Speaker 6: most of their careers in and you have to actually
Speaker 6: really teach them that advancement is. And they actually get
Speaker 6: shocked when you see how easy it is that these
Speaker 6: things are automated. Instead of testing for weeks, these things
Speaker 6: are checked in multiple multiple times a day, tested the
Speaker 6: whole harness multiple times a day and it's ready to
Speaker 6: deploy tomorrow, right yeah.
Speaker 5: And that's the kind of speed that you need these
Speaker 5: days because if you think about all the tools that
Speaker 5: we have at our disposal, well, guess what, the bad
Speaker 5: guys have all those tools at their disposal as well.
Speaker 5: And you know, we've seen some really, really bad hacks.
Speaker 5: I always point to the Colonial pipeline hack, which you know,
Speaker 5: the media said was not state sponsored. I don't really
Speaker 5: believe that. I don't expect you to comment on it.
Speaker 5: But you know, when when an organization brings down the
Speaker 5: distribute distribution of gas for the Eastern seaboard, I mean
Speaker 5: that's a real serious problem, right. That's not like the
Speaker 5: you know, the target breach or something where customer data
Speaker 5: is still and that's bad too, But goodness gracious, when
Speaker 5: something is important as fuel is deprived of huge areas
Speaker 5: of the country, that's what you really have to start focusing.
Speaker 5: And that's I think there's a wake up call to
Speaker 5: a lot of people in the security space to realize
Speaker 5: that these threats are very real. They are persistent what
Speaker 5: do they call them APT advanced persistent threats?
Speaker 6: Right, yep, yeah, and you know. I mean there's a
Speaker 6: lot of things that are continue to merch. I guess
Speaker 6: it's cat and mouse, right. Vendor partners are constantly trying
Speaker 6: to be ahead of it, and all the perpetrators are
Speaker 6: of course trying to one up the next solution. But
Speaker 6: a lot I think the weakest link in all of
Speaker 6: that is still around the people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: So when you talk about inside our threat, unless you
Speaker 6: have a holistic approach to really patch all the different
Speaker 6: layers of security, you're always going to be vulnerable. It
Speaker 6: can't just be totally reliant just on advanced technology, but
Speaker 6: you have to get your people trained and that they're
Speaker 6: not creating the vulnerabilities themselves right.
Speaker 5: Well, and you know, I get really excited about some
Speaker 5: of the newer technologies and you think about the capacity
Speaker 5: we have now to scan entire networks to map them out,
Speaker 5: where are the apps, whereas the data going, who's accessing
Speaker 5: the data? And there are just huge areas that you
Speaker 5: can close off. I mean, we didn't used to have
Speaker 5: the capacity to really understand who's using one and when
Speaker 5: at some sort of significant scale, but now we have that.
Speaker 5: And there's some basic things like users who haven't logged
Speaker 5: in in the past six months shut them down.
Speaker 4: They're probably gone, right this see.
Speaker 7: That should be automated, right, right, right, right, right exactly.
Speaker 7: It actually does that.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, And that's the other side of the equation too, right,
Speaker 5: is that it Historically you could have a policy, there
Speaker 5: was a bunch of words that someone had to manually
Speaker 5: update and enforce.
Speaker 4: You don't have to do that anymore.
Speaker 5: You can have policies that are extant and affect information
Speaker 5: systems dynamically. Now you still have a manual override switch
Speaker 5: at some point say okay, the machine did this, but
Speaker 5: I wanted to do that. But still, when you automate that,
Speaker 5: you solve probably eighty percent of your challenges out of
Speaker 5: the box, right, yeah, And.
Speaker 6: You're starting to get into a lot of the self
Speaker 6: healing platforms now, right, So you don't have to really
Speaker 6: have the intervention getting the right policies and business shows
Speaker 6: out there and pretty much you know, locked and loaded. Right,
Speaker 6: it just does that, and you know, you just have
Speaker 6: to worry about some of the notifications and with a
Speaker 6: lot of the data that comes in, you can control
Speaker 6: how much or how little you know that you can
Speaker 6: actually then prioritize where you can actually have the human
Speaker 6: loop to intervene as necessary.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, well, and just in terms of data usage
Speaker 5: and data storage, for example, to be able to isolate
Speaker 5: cold data, understand nobody's using this data, you know, do
Speaker 5: we really need it? And I mean this is a
Speaker 5: full time job for folks, even with the new technologies,
Speaker 5: to be able to scan these environments. Data governance, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm guessing you've probably seen this too. Data governance.
Speaker 5: We talked about it ten years ago. You couldn't really
Speaker 5: do it. Five years ago we talked about it. We're
Speaker 5: starting to be able to do it now. You can
Speaker 5: really do very fine grained data governance in all kinds
Speaker 5: of environments, right.
Speaker 6: Oh, absolutely, And you know it's taken from the policy
Speaker 6: or the written documents and actually scripting and actually automating that, right,
Speaker 6: so it's actually executable. In the past, it's about, hey,
Speaker 6: here's the policy, somebody has to interpret it. Then you
Speaker 6: have to kind of write the sop to and hope
Speaker 6: that somebody will actually react and perform it, right.
Speaker 5: Right, that's the thing you used actually this hope, you know,
Speaker 5: and pray that someone was actually reading it and then
Speaker 5: adhering to it. These days, it is a completely different environment.
Speaker 5: And you know, I'll just throw another fun concept at you.
Speaker 5: I was at the out Systems conference in Amsterdam last
Speaker 5: November and they just came out their a local platform.
Speaker 5: They just came out with Mentor is their new copilot,
Speaker 5: And you could actually load a requirements document into this
Speaker 5: thing and it will generate the app for you and
Speaker 5: then you just start fine tuning it. That's an example
Speaker 5: of how much things have changed, right that you can
Speaker 5: just because the GENAI can read pars, understand the text
Speaker 5: and you know what they did that blew my mind
Speaker 5: is the agent actually noticed a missing option and filled
Speaker 5: it in automatically. Now that's when you're really getting somewhere
Speaker 5: and using the machines to the greatest of their strengths.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, it's a balance, right, So we always consider that
Speaker 6: in our training, right because before we you know, in
Speaker 6: the traditional sense of how you know, you do applications development,
Speaker 6: you go through the different methodologies and teach them everything.
Speaker 6: Right now they have to really learn how to code
Speaker 6: tests with AI or agents at their disposal, right, and
Speaker 6: you can have multiple agents that they can be working on,
Speaker 6: so almost as a programmer, you're not just an individual now, right,
Speaker 6: you actually have to learn almost to manage these agents.
Speaker 6: And then the sort of like the traffic cop or
Speaker 6: referee as a final arbiter says, Okay, this is a
Speaker 6: fine this is the final code.
Speaker 7: It's what it's supposed to be. But it's not like
Speaker 7: you're doing it from scratch right now.
Speaker 5: This is what Jensen Hang was talking about just the
Speaker 5: other day, saying that I D departments will be more
Speaker 5: like HR departments for AI agents in the future.
Speaker 7: Ye, that's a good and how which.
Speaker 5: Is pretty funny, right You're like, wow, that's interesting. I
Speaker 5: do think there's a good ways to go still in
Speaker 5: being able to effectively harness such agents, shepherd them, manage them,
Speaker 5: catalog what they're doing, be able to really understand what
Speaker 5: they're allowed to do. Because you've turned something fully autonomous.
Speaker 5: You never know what's going to happen out there, but
Speaker 5: it is moving very very quickly. And you were seeing
Speaker 5: this agentic focus from big companies like of course Salesforce
Speaker 5: is doing that. Lots of small companies too. Well, folks,
Speaker 5: don't touch the l be right back where you're listening
Speaker 5: to Inside Analysis expect.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanaugh.
Speaker 6: Show.
Speaker 5: All right, folks back here on Inside Analysis, a fascinating
Speaker 5: show with Chris Coligato. He is with fed Stack. This
Speaker 5: is a new brand spine out of the smooth Stack operation.
Speaker 5: They train folks to work for the big service integrators
Speaker 5: that work for our US government and get things done.
Speaker 5: And I guess one question I'd ask you is, what
Speaker 5: was the impetus to launch fed stack as a separate
Speaker 5: entity or as a separate brand.
Speaker 4: What happened that.
Speaker 5: That led you guys to believe, Hey, we need to
Speaker 5: do something different here, we need to have a new focus.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So when we look at, you know, the origins of
Speaker 6: smooth Stack when it started about five sixty five, six
Speaker 6: years ago, the initial focus was on the enterprise side, right,
Speaker 6: commercial companies and so on.
Speaker 7: And when we started looking at.
Speaker 6: Marketing some of these things into the federal market, it's
Speaker 6: almost like by accident that we found out that there's
Speaker 6: an actual, real need.
Speaker 7: And gap.
Speaker 6: For actual partnering with systems integrators. They become basically became
Speaker 6: our initial targets because they're the ones that are actually
Speaker 6: trying to fulfill a lot of the talent requirements for
Speaker 6: the federal government and it's a very slow process, each
Speaker 6: one competing with each other with the same pool of resources.
Speaker 6: And it became apparent to us because one of our
Speaker 6: founders here actually had a previous company that was also
Speaker 6: doing a lot of consulting and they had to compete
Speaker 6: for the same pool of resources. And when they discovered that, hey,
Speaker 6: if we really want the quality of people that we
Speaker 6: want in order to service our main clients, we actually
Speaker 6: have to come up with our own way of actually
Speaker 6: training them up. And so it was born out of
Speaker 6: that experience as a separate company where they developed this
Speaker 6: that they say, you know what, we can actually offer
Speaker 6: this to other partners now, And that's kind of how
Speaker 6: we was born, right, It's like, all right, we kind
Speaker 6: of figure out what the secret sauce was, we do
Speaker 6: it for ourselves, we prove that we can do it
Speaker 6: better than anybody else, and basically started really adding logos
Speaker 6: of new companies and then it started from there. But
Speaker 6: it became very apparent that what we're doing, it's a
Speaker 6: very different way of doing business, at least from a
Speaker 6: growth perspective on how you go after work in the
Speaker 6: enterprise or commercial sector versus a very highly regulated environment.
Speaker 6: For instance, you know, in order to deploy somebody to
Speaker 6: a commercial environment, it's pretty easy. They don't have a
Speaker 6: lot of background investigations, security clearances, and things like that.
Speaker 6: We have to ensure that when somebody graduates from a class,
Speaker 6: they're actually ready and able to actually work, right. So
Speaker 6: that's part of an additional offering that we have with
Speaker 6: our partners and directly to the government is while people
Speaker 6: are training on our dime, they're already going through the
Speaker 6: secret or top secret interim clearance processes, so that when
Speaker 6: we say they're ready to report after twelve weeks, they
Speaker 6: really can't actually execute, rather than waiting for months and
Speaker 6: months even you know, to be vetted in.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: So we felt that, you know, knowledge of how you
Speaker 6: do business in the federal government is different then the
Speaker 6: way we actually do transactions and the commercial sector. And
Speaker 6: it also became apparent that, hey, we also want to
Speaker 6: be in the prime game at some point.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: So at this point, we're serving a lot of the
Speaker 6: partners that we have on board our tier two and
Speaker 6: training Tier three services, and we wanted to actually be
Speaker 6: in control of our own destiny, and we wanted to
Speaker 6: basically deliver solutions themselves, right, and also continue the career
Speaker 6: path for the folks that we've actually have been training
Speaker 6: up so far. A number of that is being converted
Speaker 6: to our partners as their employees in the future as
Speaker 6: we start to expand our offerings and actually doing a consulting,
Speaker 6: we're actually creating a career path for them to continue
Speaker 6: should they decide not to move forward with existing projects
Speaker 6: they're deployed to. We're creating an opportunity for them to
Speaker 6: actually continue their employment with Fedstack and serving and full
Speaker 6: consulting after they've gotten some of the experience of the
Speaker 6: entry level professional services, they can actually get a career
Speaker 6: path all the way through solutions, architects, senior architects and
Speaker 6: so on.
Speaker 7: As they have they pursue an ax step with the career.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that's great, and I mean I know from experience,
Speaker 5: and I'm sure you've seen this as well, that when
Speaker 5: someone really knows what to do in a situation involving
Speaker 5: industrial enterprise technology, they can save you time money. I
Speaker 5: mean we're talking weeks, months, millions of dollars, even billions
Speaker 5: of dollars if they really know what they're doing, and
Speaker 5: it's difficult for people to ascertain that.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you don't know, it's.
Speaker 5: Like we always joke about in the old days, the
Speaker 5: car repairman was like a doctor who told you was wrong,
Speaker 5: how much it would take to fix and everything. It's like, well,
Speaker 5: if you're on the outside, how can you challenge it?
Speaker 5: I mean, the business leaders and the government leaders need
Speaker 5: to know some of this stuff to be able to
Speaker 5: challenge things and understand. That's why it's so important to
Speaker 5: get a good trusted advisor to help you on the
Speaker 5: these projects, right, because they can make all the difference
Speaker 5: in the world.
Speaker 6: What do you think, Yeah, absolutely so, I think that's
Speaker 6: a very good point because another piece that kind of
Speaker 6: differentiates us is we're not just doing technical training, right.
Speaker 6: So part of actually our curriculum is to do well
Speaker 6: rounded consultants at the end of the process, right, So
Speaker 6: we teach them how to communicate in a target environment
Speaker 6: for let's say, for a particular project within an agency.
Speaker 6: We also teach them how to operate with that agency,
Speaker 6: give them lessons on the mission itself. And that's a
Speaker 6: big different difference between the commercial and the federal side
Speaker 6: is it has to be mission aligned, right, So it's
Speaker 6: not just about the technology that you're doing you need
Speaker 6: to understand what the mission you're supporting. And that combination
Speaker 6: of mission knowledge coming from the experts and the clients themselves,
Speaker 6: immersed with the technology know how, that's a really great
Speaker 6: combination that we're trying to push forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's the next channel.
Speaker 5: I mean, we talk about the ten X developer, for example,
Speaker 5: which refers to someone who really either knows the full
Speaker 5: stack or knows enough that they don't waste time and
Speaker 5: they can really produce quickly. And these days that's going
Speaker 5: to rely heavily on using copilots, on being open minded
Speaker 5: about what these systems can tell us, understanding that a
Speaker 5: copilot will get you almost all the way there. I
Speaker 5: think eighty percent is a good rule of thumb, the
Speaker 5: Preado principles everywhere in life, right, they can get you
Speaker 5: eighty percent of the way there, and then you have
Speaker 5: to do the fine tuning to kind of finish that
Speaker 5: all out. But to not embrace those technologies is really
Speaker 5: a non start of these days.
Speaker 6: What do you think, Oh, yeah, you got to be
Speaker 6: left behind, right, because everybody's doing that in all aspects
Speaker 6: in the federal business, for example, not just from the
Speaker 6: technology folks that we're training but even our business development
Speaker 6: right as we're responding to RFIs and rps, you better
Speaker 6: believe it that you need AI and.
Speaker 7: Just being able to shift true amountains of data.
Speaker 6: Right just to qualify you know what you're going to
Speaker 6: be right and then get a starter, setup a draft
Speaker 6: at least to meet some of the compliance requirements. And
Speaker 6: you know, when you look at using a co pilot,
Speaker 6: let's say pointed to a public training database or LLM,
Speaker 6: you need to make sure that you're augmenting it with
Speaker 6: your private training data set that's unique to your organization.
Speaker 6: Otherwise everybody is pulling from the same data, the same hallucinations,
Speaker 6: And you look at some of the folks that are
Speaker 6: actually on the client side and receiving end, it's like, well,
Speaker 6: you know what, you're just using copilot on this one.
Speaker 6: Everybody else does you submit exactly the same content can
Speaker 6: get really funny. So I think that's how we organizations
Speaker 6: will kind of move this forward. I'd say you're right
Speaker 6: about eighty percent of it is just to be an
Speaker 6: equal footing with your competitors that everybody else is using it.
Speaker 6: Where you have to make the differentiator is what is
Speaker 6: your private training data that allows you then to actually
Speaker 6: put forward what's really unique about your organization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no doubt about it.
Speaker 5: I mean there and there are so many different realms
Speaker 5: to address, I guess legacy systems, and that's that's got
Speaker 5: to be a concern for government agencies and for the
Speaker 5: the sis that you work with is how do we
Speaker 5: migrate away from some of these systems. You know, some
Speaker 5: of these environments are using old operating systems that are
Speaker 5: not even maintained anymore.
Speaker 4: That in and of itself is a huge space to address, right.
Speaker 6: Yes, a lot of these modernizations have been going on
Speaker 6: for decades, right, They've been involved in some of the
Speaker 6: agencies that they started it thirty years ago, right and
Speaker 6: still still ongoing. And some of these systems already you know,
Speaker 6: back to the fifties and sixties, so when they were
Speaker 6: initially built. I think the next challenge, though, I think
Speaker 6: everybody is trying to modernize, moving from the old coldbal
Speaker 6: you know, assembly languages into the even away from the
Speaker 6: main frames into into some of the newer technologies.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: But I think the next challenge would.
Speaker 6: Be how about the workforce program managers, technical managers of
Speaker 6: the old system once it's migrated, right, you then need
Speaker 6: to equip them on how to manage in the new technology, right.
Speaker 6: So it's actually an interesting thing. That's why we actually
Speaker 6: created our Tier three services, our partner training both straight
Speaker 6: to the government is being able to say, how do
Speaker 6: we help you in your transition. You're all in, everybody's involved,
Speaker 6: our partners sis the government. They just move from the
Speaker 6: legacy system and they just upgrade it to the new
Speaker 6: sets of technologies. Well, they know the domain knowledge, right
Speaker 6: and the business policies and the old one, they don't
Speaker 6: know how to translate and operate in the new environment.
Speaker 6: So in fact, helping folks that preserve that old knowledge
Speaker 6: because that's important in order or to operate in a
Speaker 6: new environment. But they need to learn how to operate
Speaker 6: in the new environment. So that's really how our Tier
Speaker 6: three offering really originated, is for that demand that a
Speaker 6: lot of folks are in modernization. Then they're figuring out,
Speaker 6: oh my god, I have a lot of talent here
Speaker 6: I need to preserve, but they're not used to the
Speaker 6: new technology. So there needs to be a transition, right,
Speaker 6: preserving that old knowledge and being able to operate in
Speaker 6: the future.
Speaker 5: Absolutely well, Folks podcast bonus segment coming up next will
Speaker 5: be right back all right, folks, time for the podcast
Speaker 5: bonus segment here on Inside Analysis with Chris Coldegato of
Speaker 5: fed Stack and Chris, lots of people out there are
Speaker 5: looking for jobs. You know, we're in a very strange
Speaker 5: time right now. You're going to see lots of layoffs
Speaker 5: at big companies as companies really try to reorganize and
Speaker 5: understand how to work in this new world because with
Speaker 5: all these copilots, while let's face it, people who have
Speaker 5: jobs are going to have to do slightly different jobs
Speaker 5: or even significantly different jobs and really stay abreast of
Speaker 5: what's happening out there. So what's your advice to folks
Speaker 5: to help them understand maybe which direction they should go
Speaker 5: they want to work with you, which path should they follow?
Speaker 5: How do you know what you're going to enjoy doing?
Speaker 5: What's your advice to people looking for work right now?
Speaker 6: So, you know, I think it's important to know kind
Speaker 6: of what level you're at at this point. Right we
Speaker 6: specialize on a lot of the folks that are actually
Speaker 6: in the entry level folks, right so we're creating that
Speaker 6: launching that career path for folks that are exiting college
Speaker 6: or just trying to break in the same thing with
Speaker 6: the former military. If you're in a situation where you
Speaker 6: are experience and you're experiencing a layoff, right, it could
Speaker 6: be a little bit of a shock when you try
Speaker 6: to enter the market and you're used to working in
Speaker 6: the legacy environment and now you're being asked to operate
Speaker 6: an environment you've never been exposed to. And so I
Speaker 6: think that's critically important that you gain the proper skills
Speaker 6: that's marketable in the current environment. We talk a lot
Speaker 6: about AI and basically augment and thing what you may
Speaker 6: you may be an experienced developer in the past, but
Speaker 6: a lot of expectation is that you have to learn
Speaker 6: how to program together with your assistance or your AI assistance,
Speaker 6: and that's a brand new gain. So in order for
Speaker 6: you to not only differentiate yourself, but just to keep
Speaker 6: up right, because your competition is actually probably not necessarily
Speaker 6: the UH, the tenured resources, but even the upcoming UH
Speaker 6: you know, younger generation who's actually been brought up in
Speaker 6: this type of technology. Right, So it's it's very very
Speaker 6: important to understand the landscape, who your competitors are, and
Speaker 6: then be able to highlight what your value proposition is.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, you know, And one final question I'll throw
Speaker 5: at you, what which part of the market do you
Speaker 5: think is most underserved? Is there an area like AI,
Speaker 5: cybersecurity andalytics, data infrastructure? Are there any areas that seem
Speaker 5: to be bigger than others in terms of opportunities that
Speaker 5: you're seeing right now?
Speaker 7: AI is exploding, so that's very important.
Speaker 6: Data centers are popping up, which basically coming with AI.
Speaker 7: It's chicken our eggscenario there one is kind.
Speaker 6: Of feeding each other, right with the advent of FAI,
Speaker 6: more computing power, more data center is going to be up,
Speaker 6: So technicians on the data center area is actually a
Speaker 6: very strong growth area to focus on, which also can
Speaker 6: gain you exposed to some of the AI applications development.
Speaker 7: Maybe a good entry.
Speaker 6: Way is to start getting exposed to the infrastructure that's
Speaker 6: going to be housing a lot of this AI and
Speaker 6: computing power. So I think those two and of course
Speaker 6: CyberSecure is always a requirement, So regardless of what you're heading,
Speaker 6: you need to make sure that you're well rounded. Any
Speaker 6: kind of solutions you're developing is well grounded in security.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's really good advice and I always suggest to
Speaker 5: folks and I'm guessing your degree, focus on something you
Speaker 5: really enjoy. If you are naturally curious about hardware, go
Speaker 5: down the hardware road. If you're naturally curious about app development,
Speaker 5: focus on app development. I mean that example I gave
Speaker 5: about these new machines, these new systems being able to
Speaker 5: load a requirements document into a gen AI oriented engine
Speaker 5: and have it build an app for you.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's just crazy. That is so much different
Speaker 4: than the way it used to be.
Speaker 5: And whenever you see these huge advances in productivity, you
Speaker 5: got to jump on board quick right, Final thoughts from you.
Speaker 7: Chris, absolutely.
Speaker 6: I mean this is a very fast changing environment and
Speaker 6: so you're going to be left behind very quickly unless
Speaker 6: you keep up. So you may be busy doing kind
Speaker 6: of what your day job is, but you need to
Speaker 6: kind of do your homework and really continue to learn.
Speaker 6: Continuous learning is what's going to give you keep your
Speaker 6: value long term.
Speaker 4: That's great, that's great advice.
Speaker 5: Well, look these folks up online, Chris Coligato co L
Speaker 5: I G A d O.
Speaker 4: It's fed Stack.
Speaker 5: Congratulations on doing some good work keeping our country safe, prosperous.
Speaker 5: That's what we want to see here, folks. Send an
Speaker 5: email I want to be on the show. Info at
Speaker 5: inside analysis dot com. We'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 5: You've been listening to Inside Analysis and.
Speaker 9: Now you can listen to KCAA Radio anytime on your
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Speaker 9: to oh nine nine seven two oh a three five
Speaker 9: three oh nine nine.
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Speaker 11: For over a century, AM Radio has evolved to meet
Speaker 11: the needs of our community. More than eighty million listeners
Speaker 11: depend on AM Radio each month. It's also the backbone
Speaker 11: of the emergency alert system, keeping us safe in dangerous times.
Speaker 11: A new bill in Congress would ensure this free, reliable
Speaker 11: service remains in cars. Text AM to five two eight
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Speaker 7: Act message in data rates man play.
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Speaker 11: Furnished by the National Association of Broadcasters for.
Speaker 12: Over seventy five years, the Marine Toys for Tots program
Speaker 12: has provided toys and emotional support to economically disadvantaged children,
Speaker 12: primarily during the holidays. But needs are not just seasonal,
Speaker 12: and now neither is Toys for Tots. They've expanded their
Speaker 12: outreach to support families in need all year long with
Speaker 12: their new programs, including the Foster Care Initiative, the Native
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Speaker 12: you can help, visit Toysfotots dot org.
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Speaker 13: Summertime and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and
Speaker 13: wait a minute, what the hell is this? A summer
Speaker 13: camp for kids? But with a disturbing corporate twist. Some
Speaker 13: outlets of Chick fil A, the fast food chicken chain,
Speaker 13: for promoting a summer camp for children as young as
Speaker 13: five can learn quote, how to be a Chick fil
Speaker 13: A worker. Isn't this fun? The corporation says that while
Speaker 13: the chickadees won't actually be doing the work of regular employees,
Speaker 13: they will learn how to take orders, deliver orders, make drinks,
Speaker 13: and be a hostess. Of course, the little campers don't
Speaker 13: get paid. Indeed, their families must pay to let the
Speaker 13: company give them an early dose of the good old
Speaker 13: American work ethic and a behind the scenes look inside
Speaker 13: the hierarchical corporate order. You can't start them too young
Speaker 13: on these life lessons. The kiddos do get compensated, sort
Speaker 13: of with their very own Chick fil A name tag
Speaker 13: and a T shirt. Okay, this is not the Dickensien
Speaker 13: dystopia of nineteenth century England, but is that our modern standard.
Speaker 13: There's nothing wrong with young kids working, but five year
Speaker 13: olds and as was the case in the preteen tasks
Speaker 13: I had in my father's small business and on my
Speaker 13: Aunt EULA's farm, the objective ought not be in doctrination
Speaker 13: into the corporate culture of low wage French. Rather, I
Speaker 13: was learning to help the family and how to contribute
Speaker 13: to the larger community. My reward was not merely a
Speaker 13: token stipend, but a recognition that I belonged, that I
Speaker 13: had a role and was valued as part of that community.
Speaker 13: People didn't need a corporate name tag to know who
Speaker 13: I was. This is Jim high Tower saying there's so
Speaker 13: much more that an eleven billion dollar nationwide giant like
Speaker 13: check fil a could do for the communities that provided profits.
Speaker 13: Can't they think of anything less selfish than promoting a
Speaker 13: fast food future for children. The high Tar Radio Lowdown
Speaker 13: is made possible by youth subscribers to Jim Higtar's Lowdown
Speaker 13: on Substack. Find us at Jimhitower dot substack dot com.
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Speaker 10: Del Walmsley Here. The first thing you're going to have
Speaker 10: to learn is that until you stop expecting our politicians
Speaker 10: or anyone else to change your life, your life isn't
Speaker 10: going to change. The only person who can change your
Speaker 10: life is you. But you need to know how. Listen
Speaker 10: to my show, The Del Walmsley Radio Show where the
Speaker 10: hype ends and the help begins right here on CACAA
Speaker 10: now broadcasting on ten fifty AM and one oh six
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Speaker 1: One of the best ways to build a healthier local
Speaker 1: economy is by shopping locally. Teamster Advantage is a shop
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Speaker 8: NVC News Radio. I'm Chris Gragio. President Trump is ordering
Speaker 8: immediate tariffs and travel ban on Columbia after it denied
Speaker 8: entry to a pair of US military deportation flights. The
Speaker 8: flights involved two SEE seventeen aircraft, which were each caring
Speaker 8: about eighty Colombian migrants from California. In response, Trump announced
Speaker 8: on truth Social that he ordered decisive retaliatory measures, including
Speaker 8: a twenty five percent tariff on all Colombian imports. He added,
Speaker 8: these measures are just the beginning. Trump said Colombia's action
Speaker 8: violated its legal obligation to accept the return of criminals
Speaker 8: they forced into the United States. Senator Lindsey Graham says
Speaker 8: he believes it was a mistake for President Trump to
Speaker 8: pardon anybody convicted of violent crimes. During the January sixth
Speaker 8: ride at the Capitol, the South Carolina Republican told CNN
Speaker 8: State of the Union that he's a firm backer of
Speaker 8: the president, but he doesn't think it's acceptable to pardon
Speaker 8: criminals who assaulted police officers. Graham insisted that doing so
Speaker 8: sets a bad president. Graham also criticized former President Biden's
Speaker 8: decision to pardon several family members just before leaving office.
Speaker 8: President and Trump is defending the late night purge of
Speaker 8: seventeen Inspectors General. Scott Carr has more now from Washington.
Speaker 15: The federal Inspectors General are independent government figures charged with
Speaker 15: rooting out fraud, waste, and violations within their own agencies.
Speaker 15: White House officials confirm over a dozen of them were
Speaker 15: fired Friday night because they don't align with the new
Speaker 15: Trump administration, calling the move a very common thing to do.
Speaker 15: Trump defended their removal while speaking with reporters Saturday. Some
Speaker 15: officials claim the firings violate federal law, which requires the
Speaker 15: president to give both Houses of Congress cause for dismissal
Speaker 15: and thirty days advanced notice.
Speaker 8: Southern California is bracing for more heavy rainfall and potential mudslides.
Speaker 8: The floodwatch is in effect through Monday night, and Los
Speaker 8: Angeles County Public Works is preparing for possible mud slides.
Speaker 8: The agency says it's working with local and state agencies
Speaker 8: to protect against potential debris and mudflows and areas scorched
Speaker 8: by the recent wildfires. I'm Chris Garagio, NBC News Radio.
Speaker 2: News on CACAA LOMEL, sponsored by Teamsters Local nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: Protecting the Future of Working Families Teamsters nineteen thirty two.
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