Jesse (00:00): RNZ National. It's Tech Tuesday. Time to catch up with Daniel Watson from Vertech IT Services. Find out what's new and what's on his mind. Hi there, Daniel.
Daniel Watson (00:08): Hey, how you doing, Jesse? No, everything hunky dory. It's great. Good weather.
Jesse (00:12): You got internships on the mind today, Dan?
Daniel Watson (00:15): Yeah. One of the things that I've done over the years is getting in young people. Because I'm a small growing business and sometimes you don't necessarily want to take the risk of hiring somebody straight out and finding out they're a bit of a dud. But here's the thing, when I'm looking at putting out job ads and then I can check out other computers, what's going on? I'm amazed with how many people just asking for somebody with absolutely all the knowledge and experience and the certifications and I'm going, "How do young people get into the industry?" Because when I came in the late 90s, there weren't courses designed for IT support and stuff.
Jesse (00:59): Totally. Yeah.
Daniel Watson (01:00): It didn't exist. They were taking anybody who had the right aptitude and attitude. And that's kind of where my hiring practice goes. Now, I'm thinking why to them, and I've got a young guy with us who's doing his masters. Because we got approached by the Auckland University, because I knew that person from another place where I was heading them up for interns.
(01:22): And it is a really great way of bringing people into your organization and having it. Because going for a job, it's not a one way street. They've got to figure out if you are the right boss or the right environment for them to grow and get that bit of experience. I'm right all for it, because the tech industry got so many different jobs and niches available that cater for all types of people and skill sets and neuro diversities that it's worth giving young people a bit of a crack to have a go at it. Because it might be that just by taking a risk on that person, you might find that golden nugget, that person that if they stay with you for two years, it will really make a big boost to your business. And it'll make a giant leap in their career. And frankly, I think these days with house prices as they are nationwide, it certainly doesn't hurt the future of our economy to give those people a bit of a hand up and get them ahead.
Jesse (02:26): Certainly, sometimes I talk to people in trades who say they're reluctant to take on people and skill them up, because they're worried that as soon as they get some skills, they'll be poached by someone else. That's obviously not something that concerns you.
Daniel Watson (02:37): And the correlation for that is what if you take on somebody and they don't up skill themselves and they don't leave?
Jesse (02:41): Yeah. Okay.
Daniel Watson (02:48): Okay. One of the things I've always said about being a business at, I'm not worried about bad employees. Because they will advertise themselves through their work and you'll get them out the door pretty swiftly. Great employees, fantastic. Nobody complains about them. It's the mediocre ones that they're kind of just drifting along. Those are the ones you want to avoid, because they'll never wow your customers nor really piss anybody off too much that it's hard to grow a business when you're firing on three out of the four cylinders. You know what I mean? Especially, in small businesses, everybody needs to be able to do what they can to move things forward.
Jesse (03:30): Consider the idea of internship, particularly if you're in the tech industry. The benefits outweigh the risks as far as you are concerned, Dan.
Daniel Watson (03:38): Totally.
Jesse (03:40): You've got another little tip for us, and that's the people who find themselves in the house market at the moment.
Daniel Watson (03:45): Well, obviously in some of that, there is the time to go house hunting. And with the fine weather, everybody's pretty keen to show off what they've got. And it can be an enjoyable activity I've heard for wives. But one of the annoying things about is when you start getting into the whole negotiation bit, the emailing back and forth, the papers, and this usually comes at you as a PDF, which you then usually print out signs, initial, initial, initial, initial, send back. It's worse than the old days when it used to get faxed, but that kind of deterioration of analog. Well, these days I still find I come across people who don't know that you don't actually have to print them off anymore. You can in the common like Foxit PDF reader, which is a piece of free PDF.
Jesse (03:45): Yeah. How's it spelled?
Daniel Watson (04:39): F-O-X-I-T. You can use your mouse to create your signature in the application, and then in a PDF that gets sent to you, you can use that as essentially a stamp. You can stamp your signature on there, and then you can use the text editor to overlay your name and date and then use the little initials thing to stamp the initials and all of that. Slap that out, save it, email it straight back without even having to hit the print button.
Jesse (05:14): I love that.
Daniel Watson (05:14): It saves you time. The document doesn't end up getting worse and worse and worse over long negotiations. And the turnaround time is faster, because sometimes these deals will hinge on whether you are the first person to get back with the right number. Lord knows, sometimes your partners get really emotionally attached to a particular place, and you just don't need that extra sadness.
Jesse (05:43): I feel like we're getting a bit of an insight into the Watson households in today's tech session. And I will just say on behalf of the wives and other partners out there who drag their partners along to open homes, things might never ever get done. But nobody might ever move house, Dan, if it's not for one member of the couple saying, "Come on. Get off your bottom on a Saturday, and let's go check out some open homes."
Daniel Watson (06:05): I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people here of scotch descent here who really don't like the idea of digging a hole of several hundred thousand dollars.
Jesse (06:13): By the way that, so that was Foxit F-O-X-I-T, and I see it's an app as well if people want to get it on their phone. A quick chance to mention something a bit more fun you've come across in your travels.
Daniel Watson (06:24): Yeah. Image Candy, I-M-G-C-A-N-D-Y imagecandy.com. It's a free online image editor. You may have seen various memes, which commonly is a picture with some texts thrown over the top to be amusing being sent around. Often, you'll get them from the younger people that you might know. It doesn't hurt to use this tool, which is quite easy to do to create some to fire back at them. The cringe level fun of it is awesome. If you like dad jokes, I think it's just worth returning some fire back at the-
Jesse (07:08): You are saying if you are sick of the young people in your life sending you memes, and you're feeling a bit like left out and you want to get them back. This is the name of a meme creator where you can go along and maybe take them by surprise by doing your own meme.
Daniel Watson (07:23): That's right.
Jesse (07:23): And sending it back.
Daniel Watson (07:24): Yeah. Preferably something, an embarrassing photo of them that you can send out with a little bit of text overlay on the top. If you've first heard that phrase, "Okay, boomer," one too many times it's time to take your revenge.
Jesse (07:43): I love it. IMGcandy imgcandy.com. Dan, great to chat to you. I know you've had a busy week, even though it's early in January.
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