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[00:00:00] Duncan Roe: Math is like the programming for the world around us. I’m learning. While I was in college, I was teaching myself all of this programming. I was also in these physics classes that were using math. It felt like math was this underlying framework for how the world worked, basically.

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[00:00:23] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am so excited to have this second of our many Career Connections conversations today with my son, Duncan Roe. Yes, I have voluntold two of my kids to do this, and later this summer, I’ll bring in a third one. Duncan is child number five of six in Clan Roe, and I’m really excited to talk to him today about his job as a network systems engineer. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you?

[00:00:55] Duncan: Hey, everybody. My name is Duncan Roe. I am a systems engineer for a multi-service provider in Brevard, North Carolina. I basically work to manage and maintain the servers for small businesses, as well as their network and IT needs. I basically am the come-to-guy for all of their issues when it comes to their network and managing their computers and that kind of stuff.

[00:01:21] Gretchen: It’s handy to have a network systems engineer living with you, although I have to say, most of the time when things go sideways for me technologically, Duncan’s not here, so I have to figure it out for myself. It really is helpful to give birth to your own geek. I’m delighted to have you here today, Duncan, and we’re going to talk about how you got started on this adventure. How about let’s begin with, what drew you to wanting to be interested in doing something more intentional with computers?

[00:01:57] Duncan: Well, I always had a knack for it. I remember the first time that I ever used a computer on my own, my brother showed me how to open up Paint, and I spent a really long time playing around in Paint. I think that being around it as the technology was starting to evolve, it was something that was introduced to me, so I was very aware of it. Growing up alongside of the advent of technology as the Internet grew and as home computers grew, and that kind of stuff, it always was around me, but it wasn’t like my entire life revolved around it.

That gave me this warm welcome and then when I got into middle school, I very much got into computer video games and specifically Minecraft. That got me– Now I was faced with problems that I was needing to solve, being that I wanted to create a Minecraft server, and I needed to figure out how to do it. I spent a really long time learning about how to fix and make this Minecraft server.

That got me very interested in servers in general and using a computer as a host to run a function. That idea, I’m not sure why, but it just latched onto my brain, and I loved that concept. Specifically, a computer that would run all the time. It’s weird, but the idea of servers itself is what really, really interested me. Then, as I grew up, in high school, I was just very, very bored after the swim season ended, and I wanted to learn.

I just started putting my resume out there. I didn’t have anything on my resume related to computers, but I just started giving my resume to people, telling them that I’d work for them for free. I ended up walking into an internship at a local IT shop, and I worked with them every day after school from 3:00 to 5:00. I did that for about two years. Then I created this sort of basis of knowledge that I have been pooling from my entire career of just an understanding of how computers work and how they’re put together, and all that kind of thing. It’s grown from there. Yes, that’s how I started out being interested in this field, and that’s the direction that it took me.

[00:04:28] Gretchen: How old were you when you built your own computer?

[00:04:32] Duncan: I wasn’t that old, or I wasn’t that young. I think I built my first computer when I was 18.

[00:04:38] Gretchen: Okay. All right. It started with a Raspberry? Do I remember this correct? Do I have the right fruit?

[00:04:45] Duncan: No. That was a different thing. That was a project that I started when I was in high school, where I was just fidgeting around with smaller computers, basically. A Raspberry Pi is like a computer about the size of a credit card that has very, very minimal specifications, but it can run certain tasks. I was just fidgeting around with the Raspberry Pi to run different things, but I built that computer because I needed a powerful workstation to help me with my code, or at least as a place for me to code. Then I needed something to play video games with, and that’s what that ended up being.

[00:05:22] Gretchen: Didn’t you end up running a family Minecraft server that you guys were playing on together?

[00:05:29] Duncan: I put one together at some point. I’ve had all sorts of things going, but I don’t think I ever got one running for the family. I never was able to get it so that the server would go outside of our network. I only ever had it so that it was just a local server. Yes, I never actually got to that point where other people were able to connect to it. That’s mainly just because I didn’t have the hardware to run that kind of thing.

[00:05:53] Gretchen: Right. Okay. First, talking about your senior year in high school and doing that internship, you were mainly working in the repair end of computers at that point, right? You were learning the language, the verbiage, the elements, and components?

[00:06:13] Duncan: Yes, what I was doing was very much personal IT as opposed to what I do now, which is more of a corporate IT. Yes, I was helping just end users, just everyday people who were having issues with their computers, just things like their drive, the hard drive died, so they needed it to be repaired, or maybe their screen died, so they needed that fixed, or this program was running slow, that kind of stuff.

Very low-level problems that it was the perfect introduction for me because I knew very little about computers. This was like a safe place for me to play around with very simple problems and not have corporations’ data on the line. That was a helpful way to get started.

[00:06:50] Gretchen: Sure, that seems to make sense. You have always been the family mathematician. You have always loved math. Can you talk a little bit about your high school math journey? Because I know that that made a difference for you in your college major. You told me you don’t necessarily use math on the daily now in what you do, but can you talk a little bit about your experiences mathematically?

[00:07:17] Duncan: Yes. I honestly would say that math has never been something I’ve been interested in, or I wouldn’t say I’m the family mathematician. I’m just capable of doing math. I would say that I struggled with math heavily all throughout my high school career. It was something that I could visualize and conceptualize in my head, but I never put in the time to actually practice to do well in the courses.

That really was the piece that I was missing was just the practice. I would say that I didn’t use it, but I was around it a lot throughout high school because of the schooling. It was kind of a reminder of something that I was capable of doing, but I just wasn’t very good at and it just needed more practice. The skill needed more practice. I wasn’t going anywhere with my abilities in math in high school.

Then in college, I realized that math was the gateway to all of these things that I was interested in, and that I was fascinated with programming. Programming, I realized math is like the programming for the world around us. I’m learning. While I was in college, I was teaching myself all of this programming. I was understanding that, while I was learning those programming classes, I was also in these physics classes that were using math.

I was seeing the parallels of it. It felt like math was this underlying framework for how the world worked, basically, especially in terms of physics. That’s when I started putting the pedal on the gas and started focusing on math and learning it a lot more diligently because I realized that it’s this framework for the universe, frankly.

[00:09:22] Gretchen: Well, I should say for our audience as an aside, I have vivid memories of Duncan coming to a homeschool conference and standing with a colleague in the booth, and they were working out calculus problems on a whiteboard. I have no idea what they were doing. I would hope never to have to be pressed to do a calculus problem. You and Lisa were having a lot of fun doing that. You said it was like a puzzle. I remember you saying that.

[00:09:47] Duncan: Yes, it is. I think that really the big game changer for me between my high school and college math careers was, in high school, I was following the framework of what I had been taught, like, “This is how you learn math. This is how you should practice math. This is how you should view math.” Then college gave me the ability to step back and create my own way of viewing math and understanding math.

I realized that the most powerful tool I had was my ability to visualize what I was working with in my mind. If I could visualize it, then I could create this understanding of what I was doing in my mind so that it wasn’t just these numbers on papers, basically. I think that with calculus, I started to just teach myself how to learn math, or not teach myself, but I learned how I learn math, and then I could start learning math. Yes, that was very helpful to figure out how I needed to learn the curriculum, and then I could start learning the resources.

[00:11:01] Gretchen: I think the hard part there is, many times, those of us who are a little math-hesitant or math-phobic give up before we’ve pushed through to that point where we start to learn for the nature of learning. I know it became fun for you. I remember the things that you were saying. I remember laughing, thinking you look just like me, but we don’t have the same point of view as far as math is concerned.

I also remember you saying to Steve that you wished he had written a college calculus book because you found his explanations more thorough than what you experienced in college. Were you able to use the foundation that you got in high school to carry you through in college, or was it a little bit of reverse engineering?

[00:11:50] Duncan: I think it was definitely reverse engineering. Before college, I was just getting by with math. I was not fully understanding. I was not fully embracing the topics. I was just getting by. College is when I started to understand and again visualize and know what I was doing, basically. Once I started to, I almost think of it as this divide where it’s like before, I had no idea what I was doing at all.

Then, after college, once I learned how I learned, then I could start actually understanding material. I think that Demme was very helpful in that, because as someone who likes to visualize things in my mind, Demme’s way of breaking things down with their visualizations of what’s happening with the numbers, that was what I needed, and that’s what really spoke to me the most. That was the difference, I think, the most between public education and Demme Learning, was the visualization.

They in public school were just like, “Well, we do this just because of this. You just need to get this result. That’s why we’re doing this.” Demme was like, “Well, here’s what’s happening with the numbers, and here’s like why the denominator grows,” or “Here’s why.” They have the blocks, and they break it all out with the blocks and that kind of thing. That was like once I started seeing that visualization, that’s where this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where I could start creating this into a puzzle. It was like a puzzle in my brain, and I could figure out what pieces were missing, and then I could fit it together.

[00:13:30] Gretchen: Cool. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you explain it that way. That’s pretty interesting. Once you got off to college, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this question either. Were you intent on computer science before you began, or did you sort of parse that out as you started taking college classes?

[00:13:53] Duncan: I was intent on computer science before I began. I knew what I wanted to do from about the age of 12 or 13, I would say. I knew that that was the path I was always going to go down. It’s like I could just feel it in my blood that that’s what I was going to do, just because it was what interested me the most. It was a pathway that is growing and always growing. It’s it feels like the front line of innovation. This is where I want to be.

[00:14:25] Gretchen: Now, with what you’re doing, what is the most rewarding thing about what you do?

[00:14:30] Duncan: Probably the most rewarding part would be the least interesting part for me, which is the troubleshooting part. I love the satisfaction of having a problem and then reworking the problem until you figure out what caused it, and then fixing that cause and making sure that that problem doesn’t re-emerge. That’s my favorite thing. I love that troubleshooting process.

I love that you have to be almost an investigator, of you take what things you do know, and then you test to see if anything changes with what you do know. If you change some factors and then you take the results of that and then apply that to the problem, and see what changes, and then the problem grows from there, and it feels like you’re some sort of investigator working back what caused the problem.

That’s like my favorite thing. I say it’s my least favorite part because I don’t really like the IT portion of my job. I’m not passionate about fixing printers very much. That’s why it’s the most rewarding, but at the same time, it’s not my favorite.

[00:15:41] Gretchen: Well, I know that you have told me on more than one occasion, if you could take printers out of the equation, that would make a perfect employment because they’re the worst and always the hardest to figure out why they’re misbehaving. I think probably anybody would say that because we always have printers that are possessed. I know mine here in the office, I have asked you on more than one occasion, “Why is this doing this?” Your usual response is, “Mom, it’s a printer.”

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[00:16:10] Duncan: That is generally what it always seems to be. It’s just that they’re just possessed, basically.

[00:16:17] Gretchen: What would be a piece of advice you would provide to someone who’s interested in pursuing a career like yours?

[00:16:25] Duncan: I would recommend that they don’t go to college, which is a startling thing to recommend someone in a technology field. Here’s what I say that if you’re going to become a programmer or maybe a computer engineer or someone who’s working on the innovation aspect of this field, then I definitely think college is a good step. For someone who’s working within what I’m doing, I think that I did everything perfectly.

I didn’t do it perfectly, frankly. It just happened to me. The pathway that I went down seems to be the best, where I spent my high school career focusing on school but also trickling in some experience, working in the field as an intern. Then my college career was mainly pointed towards get done as much education as I possibly can, related towards my field, but more of to just check the box to get the associate’s rather than getting the full degree, and that kind of stuff.

I got everything I needed to learn there. Of course, there’s way more for me to learn as far as computer technology and computer science and all that kind of stuff goes, but I don’t use that in my job. What I use is the experience that I’ve learned over the past six years working for this company. Truthfully, when I got here, most of the stuff, and I’ve trained many people since who have gotten degrees in this field and are now coming to work in this field.

Most of the time, I basically have to tell them like, “Listen, you learned all this amazing stuff, but I’m going to show you how we do things, and then we’re going to go from there.” I think that the best step is to get on-the-job experience as fast as humanly possible. For me, that just meant working for free, which is not really an option for a lot of people, but it’s what I ended up doing. It took me down the path that I am on now, and I’m very grateful to be here.

That was just my willingness to be an intern. “I don’t know anything, so just teach me what I can.” That’s why I think it was important that I did that in high school, because I didn’t have any bills. I didn’t have anything to– The fact that I wasn’t making money wasn’t that big of a pressure. You guys dropped me off at the internship and picked me up so I don’t have to pay for gas or anything like that.

That was the perfect time for me to start learning for free, basically. I think that was the biggest thing is that on-the-job experience. If I would have gone off and done a four-year degree and caught my bachelor’s, as far as education goes, I would be far ahead of where I am now. As far as on-the-job experience goes, I would be so far behind. That is what matters the most. I’ve had the experience to train many people since I’ve come onto this company.

I could tell you that there’s definitely the people who they have a degree and they’ve spent a long time studying this material and then there’s the people who don’t have as much education, but they have that intuitive, investigative kind of mindset and then on top of that, they’re very driven. I can tell you that the people who have that intuitive mindset and they’re very driven are the ones who succeed the most.

It is about that on-the-job experience, specifically for my field. Any other field of computer science, you probably need a degree. Do not take my word for it. Definitely, degrees are important, and I’m not saying that that’s not important. For what I’m doing right now, it wouldn’t have served me very well.

[00:20:04] Gretchen: What I think I hear you saying is there’s a difference between learning a foreign language in a classroom and having a conversation in a foreign language. They’re two wildly different experiences. For what you’re doing, you needed that conversational experience more thoroughly.

[00:20:23] Duncan: Yes, exactly. That’s very true. I think that conversational experience, it’s like, in my field, a lot of what we’re dealing with is, “Well, I’ve seen this before, or I’ve seen something similar to this, so let me try what I’ve done in the past.” That’s not something that you could teach in a textbook or in a class, or in a test. That’s not something that you could have someone take a quiz about. You need to just see it to know it and to understand it, and to figure out how to fix it.

[00:20:57] Gretchen: Then, as your experience has grown, the depth of your understanding has expanded as well. Now you’re in the position of training people to do what you do, particularly since you’re going to be leaving the position for several months over this summer. Tell us a little bit about that. What is it like to bring someone in and try to download your basis of knowledge into their head so that they can step into your shoes?

[00:21:31] Duncan: I always tell them that I’m going to give them a trial by fire. I basically just hose them with as much information as I possibly can on the first day. The idea with that is I can teach you how to fix problems. I can teach you how to approach a situation and how to find the best outcome for that situation. I could teach IT skills, but I can’t teach executive function. I can’t teach people’s ability to show up every day at the same time for work and all that kind of stuff.

I can teach the skills part. What I do is I just hose them with information on the first day. I show them how we do things, why we do things this way, where we make the decisions to do those things, I show them everything from our setup, and then I say, “Okay, where do you have questions? Where does our logic not make sense to you? Where do you see that we could do something better? Tell me where, in this setup, do you think that changes can be made?”

That way, I expose them to a bunch of information right off the bat. At least, they have a little bit of an idea of what’s going on. Then they can come back to me with their questions, and then I can answer their questions, and that solidifies this understanding that they have of what they’re doing.

[00:23:03] Gretchen: A little bit of what you’ve said, though, is they have to experience a problem and figure out how to solve it to really understand how to solve it the next time, if I’m understanding you correctly.

[00:23:15] Duncan: Exactly, exactly. For instance, I’m training a new employee now, actually. Today, we had someone call, and they were having issues with their calculator app, just not working on their computer. I told him, I said, “You’re not going to know what we’re doing right now, but I want you to go connect it and watch what I do.” I showed him how I took the problem. I observed the factors that were going into the issue.

Then I created a set of “This is what it could be. This is probably what it isn’t.” Then we went through each step of that list and tested until we found what the problem was, and then we resolved the issue. That was not something that I could have told him how to do. That’s not something that I could have– He wouldn’t have learned that in a book. If he watches me do it the first time, now he knows the next time that he does it, “Okay, this is where I should start.” That’s what’s the idea that trial by fire is the exposure.

[00:24:16] Gretchen: Going back to what you said about being an investigator, it also creates the premise that you have to know the right questions to ask. I would assume that now, having done this for six years, you know the questions to ask to sort what it is not from what it could be.

[00:24:37] Duncan: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s like that scene from iRobot where they’re trying to get the correct questions to figure out, because AI can only give them answers, but you have to know what questions to ask. Yes, that’s exactly like the situation that we deal with, where I know what could be going wrong because I’ve seen it in the past. I know where to potentially look. If that doesn’t work, then I know where that might lead me to continue to investigate the problem. Definitely, it takes the ability just to see, “Well, what would happen if I try this?” and then going from there.

[00:25:20] Gretchen: What advice would you give to a student who’s interested in pursuing this, but school is tough for them? I know that you had to work harder than some of your siblings in school. What advice would you give to a student as far as stick-to-itiveness?

[00:25:41] Duncan: There is a lot of discussion these days about the difference between motivation and discipline. Motivation is an amazing thing that comes every once in a while, and it can move mountains, but discipline is truly what makes it work. Discipline is what gets you up out of bed every day to work, to study, to do whatever you need to do; motivation is what did it that one time. I think a lot about motivation and discipline when I think about this.

For me, it’s balancing both motivation and discipline. I have a lot of motivation to learn about computers, a lot. One of my favorite things about the field of computer science is that it is such a broad topic. There are so many things to learn that I probably could spend my entire life just researching and learning, and I won’t even get to the end of it. I think that’s awesome. That’s so cool.

The opportunities there, just opportunities to learn, just knowledge for knowledge’s sake, there is so much there. I could just spend my life just researching and fiddling around with tools and playing around with stuff. I think that that’s pretty exciting. That’s the motivation part. The discipline is the part that makes me get up every day and go sit down and log out of my computer, and start working.

The stick-to-itiveness, especially when it comes to your education, is really hard because I think it’s very easy to lose sight of the forest from the trees when you are deep within your day-to-day schooling. It’s hard to know why you were doing this. If you’re just spending every day studying for it but you’re not actually doing any of it, why are you there? I think it requires you to touch base with what has motivated you to start learning and also touch base with the discipline that has brought you to where you’re at now, because it has taken discipline to get to the point you’re at.

You already have discipline, and it’s taken motivation to get you there, too. It’s about recognizing both of those aspects, and when one falters, the other one steps in to take over, so when you’re lacking the motivation, that’s when the discipline comes in, and it starts to work, and when you’re lacking the discipline, that’s when the motivation comes in and starts making you work. For me, at least, I try to balance those two things, and that’s what keeps the world turning around for me.

[00:28:07] Gretchen: That’s really interesting, Duncan. I love the way that you’ve said that because I think that gives us a different way to look at the necessity of learning for ourselves, being a lifelong learner. I love how you said that when the motivation wanes, it’s the discipline that keeps you going forward. Where do yourself in 10 years?

[00:28:30] Duncan: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I try not to plan very far out because I think that I have done that many times in my life, and every single time, life has tossed it back on my face, laughing at me. I try not to plan very far out. Truthfully, I’ve only planned the next six months of my life, and that just means the CDT. As far as my career goes, I want to push to the next level.

I have been working in IT for a really long time, and this is a lot of fun, and I’m good at this. I want to start managing people. I want to start managing more networks. I want to start being in charge of bigger projects, and I want to grow what I’m doing, basically. I want to be where I’m at now, but on a more advanced level. I am hoping that once I finish with this long trek, I can find a new position that will help me advance my career a little bit down the pathway and get me more experience with managing people and with bigger projects, and then I will go from there.

My eventual goal is I have this, I don’t want to say light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s more of this just exciting thing that keeps me going, which is that I would like to one day manage servers for a company or an organization related to space. Something that’s related to radio telescopes would be ideal for me. That’s what I would love to do is manage radio telescope servers, basically. That’s my big mountain in the horizon. That’s what I’m trekking towards, is that I have like an idea of what I would like to do. I hope that I can get there one day.

[00:30:22] Gretchen: Well, Duncan, I think you’ve inspired us a little bit never to stop learning and to keep pushing forward. In this last couple of minutes, what closing words would you have for our audience today?

[00:30:35] Duncan: Well, I’m glad that I can be inspirational with the lifelong learning thing. I really think that learning is one of the most exciting things about life. I think that it’s really easy for school to make learning feel mundane and routine. It is the coolest thing that humans can do is to learn. I really think that it’s just so exciting. There’s just so much for us to learn. There’s so much for us to understand.

There are so many problems for us to look at in a different way. We just have to keep looking for those things, and using the motivation and discipline to balance that is a beautiful way of keeping that on track. Yes, definitely, I wish to everyone who is listening that they have their own adventurous, beautiful journeys with their lifelong learning.

[00:31:29] Gretchen: Awesome. On that note, I’m going to say thank you to everyone who trusted Duncan and I to come into your living room today. I learn something every time I sit down to talk to him, and he is my son. I wish the same for you. I wish you all a wonderful journey. Duncan, thanks for taking time out of a wildly busy week to have this conversation with me today.

I really do appreciate it. We’ll look forward to coming into your living rooms again soon to have another conversation that I hope you will find as edifying and fascinating as this one has been. Thanks, everybody. Take care, and we’ll see you again soon. Bye-bye.

[00:32:08] Host: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

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