welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans is a showcase of servicenow personalities that have punched above their weight and elevated the servicenow community titans of now is brought to you by me robert the duke fedoric if you want to see what i'm up to check out my website theduke.digital here you'll find all my cj and the duke episodes links to my youtube content and my upcoming course hired the definitive guide to profiles that win servicenow jobs hey everybody welcome back to another episodes of titans of now in this episode i am very pleased to announce an absolute baller in the security space and servicenow he is a security and id management guru he is a three-time dev mvp he is a four-time knowledge speaker and he's a moderator on our favorite slack channel sn devs ladies and gentlemen jared mont jared so good to have you here man it's good to be here finally uh thank you for the invite and you've been dodging me but i got you so everybody knows the game we start the start how did you get your start in a servicenow world so i was a team lead at a large agricultural customer and we did not have servicenow we had about four different fulfillment systems you know one to track software one to track hardware one to check mobile devices wanted and of course remedy to track incidents and change so when we implemented servicenow i was an instant power user on the platform fell in love with it from day one and uh you know grew out of the power user into the administrator into the developer and yeah so that was around 2014 in the the calgary era of the platform okay and what was your background before you entered were you like were you a tech person or yes i had been in uh infrastructure management desktop architecture you know managing 10 000 workstations with group policies and scripting a lot of powershell prior to that and then also um back going way back into the early 2000s when i was still in the us air force uh i'd been a webmaster and database admin and some other things so when it came to servicenow with the cmdb discovery it kind of put all those skills together of knowing uh the network layer the desktop layer um and yeah yeah uh yeah i've been never been professionally trained in computer science or programming but have just just put in the hours um of of tinkering over the years which is really surprising because i still get a lot of people questioning me about like hey should i get a should i get a master's in computer science or you know i mean should i take this dev boot camp before i start learning service now and you know i keep telling people when it first came out it's not like these companies said get me a masters of computer science you know to put in front of this application they were just like install this ticketing tool fast who's the most accessible the most available right and you just you know a generation of us just had to learn it it is yeah yeah it's true copying and pasting javascript from stack overflow or community and see if it works in a pdi and then you know hopefully understand what it's actually doing before you move it into a customer instance but that's that's how i got my start because there wasn't excess there you know there was no now learning there was no uh there was no boot camp it was just you know put the scraps together and and make it work so besides the accolades that i introduced you with how might people know you in the space so the service now space uh they would might know me from conferences and just you know the general channel mostly out on sn devs uh hopping into any threads that uh have to do with oauth uh integrations security platform internals troubleshooting that kind of stuff but but locally here in colorado people may know me from uh the local lock picking and hacker scene um we do some uh local you know defcon and hacker related uh local meetups so i guess in general i'm kind of drawn to building communities you know regardless of what the topic is so you're into lock picking i am that's one of the that's one of the local things when we when we meet up at the starbucks you know spread out some some sample locks and uh and teach teach people you know it's just like a rubik's cube it's just a little bit uh a little bit more eye-catching uh to see somebody doing that i'm not saying this is a thing but you are now the third titan on titans of now who is into lockpicking as a hobby take from that what you will folks but uh there it is it is i i think it's just it indicates that the hacker mindset and not hackers and like breaking stuff but hacker as making it work by any means necessary right just trying and trying and trying and trying and hitting it from different angles uh and you know it works i don't know why it works but okay now let's figure out why it works um yeah yeah just that that mindset um so i'm actually not too surprised that there's there's more than a couple of us out there true enough right um and is that that hacker mindset how does that relate to your servicenow work like what parts of the platform do you most resonate with is it that security and vulnerability and platform side so yeah early on um going back a couple years to the the geneva helsinki era when when psycops was brand new uh i i jumped in with both feet on there luckily i was at a partner at the time that we were getting some good business with those those early products uh and and i chose it was not because of the product itself but just because i was getting to work with the security team at you know some pretty cool large organizations and i thought that was kind of the that was the gem not the you know not the product itself um but within the servicenow space yeah uh the the part i like most isn't any one particular application right like like csm is great hr is great security incident response is great behind the scenes they're all very similar and so i would maybe i should update my job title and say like reverse engineering specialist because really that's where you know when something's broken or another dev has a really hard problem and they can't get it and they come to me you know we just open it up we start following the app you know from what we can see until it you know goes off into java rhino land and we can't see it anymore but uh you know take a a couple years ago i was on a live coding happy hour and um we were doing uh exporting of update sets and and integrating that into a flow designer so we could use integration hub and send it up to github uh yeah that was just reverse engineering what happens when i click on this export xml button okay well it's a ui action what does that do it calls a processor okay what does that do it calls this other thing which calls this other thing and so on so just learning how to how the you know the 50 layers of the platform work um by reverse engineering common everyday buttons that we use all the time and that's just i think that's given me a leg up on um you know the reputation for being able to troubleshoot hard problems uh and just kind of uh that has translated into getting a lot of points um plus plus points out there on s and devs which is translated into the dev mvp program which is translated you know it's kind of a cycle of cycle of knowledge um i think people sleep on the ability to troubleshoot and good troubleshooting versus great troubleshooting and i i mean i've been in this kind of industry at least for 20 22 years and um it just kind of dawned on me like this past quarter just how difficult it really is right because what we make is effectively invisible it's not invisible it's just like the next best thing to invisible right like if you were a a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer you could like look at the parts of the things that you're gonna make and then you can see the thing right i designed a car i designed a carriage i designed a bridge like there it is there's all the materials right there but the best we get is looking at thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of text one page at a time ever right it's it's such a weird thing to to manifest that's kind of part of why i you know i nerd rage all the time about solutions that have no documentation sorry it's your show bud what do you think no i agree and and you know if you like me we're doing this stuff back on call it istanbul you know and long ago and then actually you and i in 2020 uh co-presented a script debugger session at creatorcon and tools like that just kind of speed up the process right you still have to have that mindset you still have to kind of know how things are connected together but the the tooling is getting better um along the way no the log points and break points and just being able to like drop that into prod without you know what i mean like you could just finally we can troubleshoot from pride from the instance where it's actually happening by the way do you have the link for that i cannot find that video we did together anymore i may i may have it downloaded somewhere um i i i'll have to check yeah so we're going to check on that folks and if you want to see our co-presentation on log points um just check in the description below if we found it it will be down there one thing i get a lot of positive feedback on is uh the war stories the times where people you know in the in the titan position uh have felt like their backs were against the wall and they weren't gonna make it do you have any of those probably a couple every year um over the past yeah yeah that's that's actually one of the the blessings of of of taking on a higher position of being you know an architect level or senior senior developer or you know even like a you know putting on behalf of an engagement manager you you know you get away from the stories and the the qa side of a project and you get to see a little bit behind the curtains of the what's going on with the sow negotiation or you see uh you see the customer who's you know visibly angry with the partner or whatever you know because of either a misunderstanding or uh you know a delay or whatever so yeah yeah those those are kind of cool to to to see the raw you know how the industry works um behind the curtain but uh yeah technical wise as well um when actually there was there was a large msp so they were in a big domain separated instance uh they were moving a variety of other systems into the cmdb and our project was uh putting a scripted rest api in front of it so um you know they made the decision early on to not use the table api and um but then they jumped ahead a couple of steps and they started to have a team in india building part of it and two different partners uh domestically in the u.s building a part of it and so everyone was using different naming conventions everyone was using different blogging styles everyone was doing different you know versions of glide aggregate and everything so uh pretty quickly it was just chaos right and the and the qa team was having to learn how to test these three different styles and then yeah and then the security team jumped in and said hey you can't use basic authentication you have to restrict it to oauth 2 only and yeah actually the more i think about it a lot of the projects didn't go off the rails because of technical reasons they went off the rails just because of either a lack of architecture or a lack of transparency early on in the project and then understandably you don't burn a couple hundred hours of developer time and then the customer realizes that they're not anywhere close to what they had in their head along the way so maybe a shout out to to all the good engagement managers and project managers and uh making sure that the sows and the transparency is you know if you're on a successful project and you never have these issues uh it's it might not be because of the devs it might be because of all the people you know hidden early on in the process and how did you how did you find your way out of that one that one luckily um they somebody saw a spark that i knew what i was talking about and they reached out one on you know they kind of bypassed you know four layers of contract management and reached out direct to me and said you know what do you actually think we should do here and i just bluntly said you know hit pause let's take a week and define some standards and we did um and [Music] it it pretty quickly got back on track because a lot of that stuff was reusable uh the way we were logging uh the way we were for example checking the uh headers coming in um to see what type of uh authentication was being used and gracefully exiting if if it was a basic off header instead of a uh you know an olaf authorization editor so um by doing that once early on it let all maybe 12 different scripted rest api devs across the world just kind of piggyback on that and done got back on on track so yeah so i guess even on you know community like like sn devs and the other and the other servicenow communities is global right we there's people posting all and helping each other out on all time today but within a particular engagement there's also you know a community you know it's a much smaller community of like six or seven people but it's it's the same sort of things apply just um transparency being helpful uh probably listening is probably you know you can be the smartest person in the world but if you don't take two minutes to to listen to what they actually want uh they're not going to be happy at the end of the day man there's so many teachable moments in there um i think a couple of things you said that have resonated with the questions that are coming to me from the newcomers is um there's there's kind of there's two mindsets in consulting and contracting right there's the i have been told what to do i had better do a good job of doing that right but then there's more of like a well it's just back no matter what i'm asked let's just let's just zoom out a bit and see what that is in context and i encourage people all the time say your piece say your piece most of the time in the business world people are always just there to do the right thing right everybody basically wants to do the right thing and if if at least you say i don't think this is the right thing or i think there's a better way we can do this like 99 times out of 100 that is not going to insult anybody you're not going to get slammed down because of that it only makes you look like a that you care and b that you have insights that nobody else had yeah that brings up another war story from call it 2016 or 2017 uh so so being one of the few servicenow certified people that also had a cissp certification uh that helped me get into the secops space but also the the platform encryption space you know whether it's column level encryption advising on uh full disk and database encryption but specifically edge encryption you know the big nasty sledgehammer of encryption options uh so i was doing a uh edge encryption implementation and they wanted to just lock it down within an inch of its life right lockdown short description lock down description lock down work notes walk down every single field on this uh and and so uh going back to your object to the customer um and actually uh actually one of the the community members presented a virtual session at creatorcon this year uh that talks about gracefully saying no to the customer it talks about all the different ways to politically um uh dave yeah anyway we'll come back to that but but check that out for creatorcon 22 uh a session all about saying no but but but when i did push back to the customer um i did it you know in writing right coming back from that military background and defense contracting background you always want to have a paper trail whenever you're you know doing the right thing so so i did i did push back and said you know if we do this it's going to reduce the future opportunity to do integrations with your sim or do integrations with your you know other tools and you know they just very quickly said don't care lock it down move forward as as planned so uh fast forward about six weeks the account exec from servicenow gets wind that everything's locked down and and they are of course concerned about the long-term account value they want to sell additional integrations they want to sell additional projects and and and rightfully so so uh they reach out to me and say why are you locking this down you're going to hurt our our opportunity to integrate the customer's not going to be happy in the long term and i dug back through my email and i i said here's you know here's names here's dates you know i totally agree with you but here are the specific people that overrode my recommendation and so yeah so definitely say your piece but also take a quick screenshot of that dm or take you know save that email into a separate folder that's not going to get [Music] not going to get purged in 30 days yeah i mean it just it just goes to show how important documenting stuff is right and i just don't get the aversion to it you know having that trail of you know the the important decisions on any feature set yeah sure it's a pain in the butt to look at that for five minutes every day but when it matters you will wish you had paid five times that price changing course a little bit opposite direction what would you say was your pinnacle of your servicenow experience the last couple years have been really good to me so like as as you well know they're they have kicked off a developer mvp program so i've been selected for that uh and then they've nicely sent out some shiny hardware you may have seen on linkedin there's a few uh a few people who've really shared a lot about that so just i guess being recognized for the community that's that's been great uh and even more specifically this year in person uh at knowledge in new york city at the creatorcon stage uh the backdrop instead of using stock actors and models they they pulled people from the community and put their faces up there so when i was doing my in-person presentation on json schema validation uh behind me on the stage was a a three foot version of my face kind of looking back uh so that's that was just pretty cool to be you know recognized but also to have real people from the community featured and not just the the stock uh stock models uh as in past years if you change one thing either about the product or the ecosystem itself what would that be um the top thing i think would be a little bit more transparency into licensing at most organizations there's two or three people that know exactly what their contract says and and what the real impact of adding columns adding tables adding skilled apps is to that particular organization so um if that was a little bit more more structured and and uh transparent that would help devs uh architects business analysts make good decisions for you know uh and not accidentally make decisions that are gonna cost the customer to step outside of their of their agreement that's that would be the [Music] probably the biggest single quality of life thing that i would edit i couldn't agree more actually i've never been a harsh critic of the license model just because i i always believe that if the solution's worth doing it's worth paying for um but it's just that sense of it's just not clear right it's just you know when i go to pick up my car i generally know what's going to affect the price right but i feel like there's just there's a lot of people who who are now instinctually going back to a place of fear like i don't know what my license agreement actually says i do know that there's something about tables and fields so let's just whatever we build let's just not add tables or fields and it stymies the building of solutions on the platform agreed yeah yeah i think most organizations probably have a very positive roi on their on their license it's not about the dollars it's just about the you know we spend way too much time talking about it and thinking about it um then we probably need to okay we have a few minutes left uh i usually open this up if you have a message or advice to the people who are new to the servicenow ecosystem and coming up yeah if you're if you're new to the platform if you're new to the ecosystem whether you're you know transferring in from a different skill set or brand new to technology um this you didn't miss the boat so like like the good times are uh still now and so just just remember that any decision that you make is not set in stone for the next 40 years um it's a question i get all the time and i know you do as well is what should i special in what should my niche be which you know should i do x or y um just just pick one and and learn right uh the same applies outside of service now should i learn python or powershell well just jump into one a lot of those skills are transferable so just don't try and be an expert on every part of the platform you know in your first three months you know know that things exist but just specialize in something and something that you enjoy in right like michael jordan when he talks about teaching kids basketball like should i you know what skills should i teach my kid you know my sixth grader well make it fun for them and then they will pick up all the skills that they that they want over time so same thing don't don't jump into itom you know because it's hot and that's where the jobs are right now jump into something fun if you if you love the ux stuff spend your hours in the ux stuff um make it fun and you know the the experience the skills everything else will come wise words man wise words ladies and gentlemen this has been jared mont newest inductee two titans of now jared thanks so much for taking the time for me this is great i'm finally glad that i got around to sitting down all right man we'll talk to you soon if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or linkedin profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via linkedin or the email pictured here as i offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1500 subscriber youtube channel and mailing list and thousands of linkedin followers let's make sure your open positions get first go with the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the emailed picture here