[Music] welcome back to another episode of the six figure tech talks my name is javon connor if you're not familiar i am your host and your ceo and i have a very special guest here today he's actually our first virtual guest so i wanted to introduce you all to divian who is based out of toronto vivian what's going on man nothing much man just chilling here i'm glad to be here and join the podcast with you guys yes sir yes sir i'm really excited to have you you have definitely been somebody who i've been talking to and was really excited just to bring on the show based on your background and the things that i see that you're doing you're really killing it um when it comes to helping other people uh you know learn more about technology learn more about this space uh and so i just wanted you know you to tell your your career journey the things that you've been experiencing both as um as an engineer and as somebody who is trying to um pursue his entrepreneurial career so i want you to start man just let us know more about you and your career journey yeah yeah sure um i mean it's not too long i mean it's it's been a it's been a fun ride but essentially what happened was like in high school i wasn't i wasn't like i wasn't too good in school man i'll be honest you know it's it doesn't require a lot of people say you need to be a very good stem student uh you know per se um i wasn't good in school but i was always just getting certain grades for you know my parents you know i actually didn't know what to do i wasn't sure my father is a systems engineer like he as a kid i always wondered what he did because he was always doing the technical stuff and then i really i later realized down the road like he's like oh i work at microsoft or ibm and stuff like that didn't really want to tell me he didn't explain me properly um he brought it up a couple times but i just let it pass by i actually didn't even pay attention to it i believe it or not was doing like you know you know just messing around during high school and you know sometimes even doing like bad stuff but essentially what happened was i got into you know forensic sciences and that's because i just it's not that i wanted to do it i was just kind of told that you know you got to get your degree and that's what you got to do yeah i took the first year off actually uh sorry is it fifth year yes i think you can take like after high school you can take like a gap year if you don't want to go into school i'm i'm do that in the stage too i'm pretty sure they they have that everything the gap years yeah if not mistaken some places doing some places don't yeah so essentially that's what i did and then yeah i went to university and i left i dropped out it just wasn't the vibe man um not not for me i i saw what was happening and i'm i'm asking people around me like the first year it was just everybody is so stressed there everybody yeah you know there's obviously some universities it's all they're doing is partying so it's like what am i getting out of this experience yeah partying is fun but you know in my head i'm always looking at certain things like i i love i love nice cars i was always thinking that like it runs through my head and i always get jealous and sometimes i'll be like this guy's driving a 300 000 car like what is he doing what is he up to but essentially yeah i used to ask people in our school because it was literally just memorization people are just you're going through in and out of school and i'm asking students like what are you doing here and they're like yo i don't know i thought i had to get a degree and then we get paid right so i'm noticing i'm like yo they don't even know what they're here for i'm looking at the professor he doesn't give a either i find like essentially like he doesn't care that they're getting a decent amount of salary to just kind of give you some lectures so you know i did and i did computer science courses there too don't get me wrong it's of course i'll teach you something i'm not against going to university and you know if you're doing it you know i'm i'm happy that's great but it wasn't for me i dropped out and i said you know what i gotta i gotta figure out my stuff so you know i i started learning i think i got i think the first course i started learning was an introduction to like networking and i got my ccna um so ccna is like a couple years ago at the time it's considered like a it's a certification by a company called cisco where they kind of help you learn the introduction to like enterprise networking so you know how to how does computer networks work like you're if you're a company how do you send traffic to the internet what is the internet you know people think the internet is just i press a website and boom something pops up right on the back end there's a lot of hops happening there's a lot of you know dns requests going on so much so many different factors happening quickly too in seconds because you see how fast your youtube faster than seconds faster than seconds five milliseconds bro yeah insane how they have it set up so i i was really interested in that so i told my i told my pops like i said this is something that's really cool he goes we'll try it do the ccna so i did it kind of wrong i'll be honest i i made a video on a tick talk about it too you know and it went like semi-viral not too many not not too many views but people definitely ask a lot of questions it's because what i did was i didn't think it was the best way i got my cca and i jumped to another one called the ccnp and i believe you know without too much work that's the associates and then the professional right the professionals what what is for first of all for those that don't know what does the ccna and ccnp stand for uh sure sure yeah the ccna stands for cisco certified network associate and then like you mentioned the ccnp stands for cisco certified network professional the first one is just the training with one exam and the third second one is actually you gotta take three exams so you take i believe it's ccnp route ccnp switch troubleshoot and the latest one now they made a new one they changed the name where it's now called ccnp enterprise which includes more uh software defined networking you have automation yin yang some some um automated frameworks and tools like ansible puppets and stuff like that because that's where the network is going now right so they include that so you don't um kind of get left behind which is i i i think it's amazing now older engineers will tell you oh they're making everything automated no they're not they're not replacing your job they're just saying hey you have help now you can do more important stuff than the mundane like going into a switch and changing vlans constantly you can focus on automating that task and do cool stuff like build a security framework it's not you know they're not pushing you away they're saying hey use the help of a machine to kind of you know do the day-to-day work let the operation get handled by these tools and we can focus on how to build a faster better network a faster better security framework but i essentially did those two and i started you know building my resume i started focusing on linkedin and applying to like thousands of roles man yeah like people people don't uh like understand that and because in the beginning remember i don't have a degree so it's very possible but you have to prove yourself more um of course now it's more it's becoming more and more lenient but people don't understand this the others hate degree but it's a degree or equivalent if you look at every like job description carefully they'll say we want a degree or equivalent experience or and they missed that they missed that exit so like if you know how to communicate man if you if you but what you're doing is you're a brand to them right people realize you brand yourself as a corporate brand well and linkedin does a great job at that you're putting yourself out there and making yourself um noticeable you're marketing yourself as a as your own brand but that essentially doing all those things kind of helped me get my first role i fabricated i believe one or two um roles on my resume and not in sense that i what i didn't do them i i i spiced it up you know i think that's yeah and i'm very honest with that because i tell people like listen it's kind of annoying where how they want you to have experience and then they don't and if you have zero experience they don't believe in you so you got to kind of spice it up but at the same time i was applying my skills with like there's applications you can use that literally help you build enterprise networks one being gns3 um you know cisco has a free one it's more introductory it's called packet tracer but you can use these things and kind of get your first role that's what i did i landed my first role as a network analyst which is kind of like you could say it's a help desk but it's focused more on on networking and security so it's a little bit more senior but you know i got lucky and that i'll say it's a little bit of block but it's definitely the way communication branding linkedin and resume definitely help with that and then ever since then what i did was every year i keep learning and i made myself realize that you don't stop until you know there's so much things happening right now where it's you know at the time i was coming i'm still new so there's like cloud emerging automation is emerging so you feel kind of like are you gonna get left behind or like how do you manage to get these high paying rolls but it just takes time and after a couple of years you're pretty much solid from there you're good only if you focus on like if you know how to properly build your brand you're filling out your resume correctly and there's a whole guide on that too man like there's a way to set up a resume but that's essentially the tools i used i branded myself and i kept learning and you know you don't take you don't stop learning like it shouldn't be a problem for you you should always try to say okay if there's something to learn like try to adapt to it and it's never going to be too hard man if you just focus a couple weeks on it you'll get it that's how i just kept jumping from roller roll and that's what i'm doing right now especially i'm still learning i i don't consider myself to be um you know in some crazy position i'm an infrastructure security engineer at the moment so i started off by network analyst and i jump to that right now nice that's amazing it's great advice too um some of the same things that we tell our clients as far as you know what what your resume is and how it represents you how you can use it as an entryway into technology how you can use your linkedin as another entryway um in the technology so all the things that he's saying y'all like you you really should take it as stellar advice um and it's just another testimony of somebody who's been able to find their way into their career um makes making sure that they're always a student first always taking the time to learn something new um and never getting comfortable with um you know the end result of finding a job or you know finding uh a a new responsibility and settling there you know it's always about advancing and moving forward and and finding new opportunities so kudos to you vivian i love hearing that um i also want to talk to you about entrepreneurship and you know kind of where you are there um some of the things that you're doing to maybe help others also get into technology um or you know anything else that you might have going on that you'd like to talk about what i did was i recently just i started working on my tic toc social media to help the entrepreneur side come out because in the background my whole plan from the beginning before tech i said i don't you know at the end of the day i love tech but it's still not my company right i'm still somebody i'm still helping um and we're doing a lot of cool like people understand like tech runs operations i can remove the it team and i promise you your business is going to stop making money yeah oh yeah oh you don't respect that right like if we if i just drop your you know your network your files off well guess what no data can transfer back and forth no data there's no business you're not compliant you're going to get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars you know so the what we do is a great thing you know i still think we're not over i still think we can we should be paid more but now it's getting better and higher the high-end companies but yeah my goal was always to use i was into like i like investing so what i did was all this tech money i got one of the one of the one of my roles like in the middle i was a you know network engineer network security engineer you could say you know we're working on network security systems we got laid off on the pandemic because they they got i guess their business operations got to get hit and they had to cut pay and then just after they cut the pay they laid off and i was like it's cool with me man it's fine i'd rather not work anyway so if you guys are cutting the pace it's like what's the point you know thanks i took all my money and i i was already i was already playing stock but i said you know what screw it i'm gonna do like a nice one so i put like i think i put like what was it like 25 30k in like stocks and it's not a lot you know even but for me it was a lot because like i had this like most this month saved up i remember putting in a few tech stocks so i know one of them being pinterest the time the pandemic it dumped in 19. and right now it's at 19. but at the peak it was like at 80 bucks so i flipped that 30 to like over 100 100k and i was like yo i'm taking this and um you know i bought some real estate with it and where i'm from it's also very expensive but that helped me you know get from 30k to like you know 100k then i bought you know these properties which are now almost in value they're worth over a million but that's that's only if i were to let's say sell the property you know yeah yeah it's an asset it's a hard asset that you have that's like i said i don't like to tell people oh i'm sitting on that cash it's not cash but you know if it ever came down to it yeah i could probably refinance you know but that's kind of what helped me there so when it comes to investing i make that i made a tick tock and i made this guy that i told you about this linkedin guide that helps people kind of get into um you know making a proper corporate brand for themselves through a proper resume a template and then linkedin and people kept reaching out to me and saying i want to learn a bigger picture and i just wasn't focusing on it for so long and now recently i started building this course where it's like how to break into the tech industry and i'm going to make it proper and that's what i've been working on right now and it should be coming out very soon um you know i just want to make sure it's uh proper but other than that i do e-commerce if people are interested in that because i i kind of on on the way of doing tech i figured out you know you got to turn your earned income into passive income and one of the things i i was watching was e-commerce is going crazy i'm still learning you know myself but i found automated services so like people that i were talking to were saying you know you just pay people and you get your you know your amazon done or you know you get your walmart uh etsy whatever the case may be so i started doing that and i kind of started an etsy and marketing agency where i'll get clients and i have i have some people with me and will kind of get their you know get will sell products on their etsy store now amazon would do the same thing but i don't do it myself i actually offered that service to somebody else and i paid them a certain amount of money and they run the amazon store for me and amazon's killing it man it takes time it'll take a couple months in the beginning because because of the amazon algorithm if you just open a news like store they don't want you you know you're not going to get as much sales but if as you you know as you stay there as you put your journey in you can do the product research and or maybe you're offloading it to someone else it's definitely going to work out you just got to give it time people say a lot of people are impatient about that you know so then yeah they get kind of frustrated i told them i said this is not like it's not it's you know it's a business man you're selling a product you know like you want to sell a good product am i not wrong like do you want to sell something garbage you can share your reviews people report you like no right so what you have to do is you have to think product first customer comes first how can we provide you service with this product so that's kind of what i'm doing right now like e-commerce and then helping people get into tech not too much yet because i you know the guy's there but the course is not fully made yet but that's pretty much the plan with that and other than that i'll make the videos to tell people like hey though tag is amazing and i'll try to drop facts i said always keep in the back of your mind that earned income should turn into passive income but you don't have to but it's a good it's a good way because then you don't have to work tech forever right you'll have you'll be getting paid so much and if you're of course have fun with your life you need to do that's the whole point where we work it gets really stressful at times right but if you do that more than more than enough times or like what you know what you're doing starts some some kind of business it definitely will make a difference so i'll kind of try to teach that as well some enlightenment awareness for people because it definitely helps man so i love seeing people reach out to me and say i was watching your videos it was really cool and i'm like okay that makes you want to do it more you know yeah no for sure hey one of the um one of the things i i definitely want to also touch on um the you mentioned tik tok as well uh i want to talk less maybe about tick tock and its features i'm sure many people across the freaking planet know how tik-tok works and why it's so um why it's so popular but more so i wanted to talk about maybe some controversy that surrounded it um in its last couple years since its inception and i think you're the right person that i like to talk to about this so do you remember um back when uh tick tock was being flagged as a potential national security threat uh because it was a challenge yeah it was the donald trump was he wanted to remove it i believe yeah he wanted to remove it um because it was a chinese-built application chinese-based company and uh they were flagging it for um as like as kind of like a spyware related you know if they have the ability to get all of this information off of these people then they can get a lot of details about who we are as people as citizens of the united states and that would be you know potentially uh national security risk so i wanted to kind of talk with you as somebody who does work in security cyber security uh network engineering and things like that and get your perspective on why that was so important can you educate people on tick tocks controversy at the time as much as you know it and why that was so controversial yeah i know that's actually been a while but i do remember it i remember like i was going on where what happened was i guess microsoft put out a bid out to buy it they said you know what because donald trump said the only way he'll keep it or we'll prevent it from being banned is if an american company steps in and against the majority shareholder of the corporate of the corporations but i think the parent company is called bite dance so it it depends right so like even right now i can go with you with uh that depends because in the time or conflict with china so even right now recently with russia what's going on that's happening right now where a lot of places i was working in customers and clients be calling me and saying you want to make sure x device from x vendor is blocking russian hypo russian yeah yeah i got this in my job too man like i work in network infrastructures some of the same stuff but awesome bro yeah right so they'll tell you like hey is everything okay like are you guys taking care of that so when it comes to tick tock listen yeah they're listening to information i think the only reason is because i mean i don't know if it's you know i think it's because they were a international company but for being honest chairman um apple facebook google they know everything about us too right how do you track ads man you need to you they look at when you're scrolling through instagram it is watching okay how long did you stop your hand press like or did you scroll back did you replay the video like they're looking at so many factors to see to see if you're a good candidate of content so they're doing the same thing the only thing is they're like oh but you're not from our country so that's not cool we're allowed to do it right you're not you know what i mean yeah like i think it's equally as bad but you know what i'm already at the point where they they're already watching everything like i know how these phones are designed these software algorithm like apple is yeah they're up with privacy but there's so many data points they're watching and nowadays a lot of us are on social media so we're already on the internet it's not too hard yeah we don't track our location all the time but you know it's so fast to get like you know every time you upload it'll upload your look like you know your location gets sent with your post or when you take a picture an iphone likes to keep track of like where it was for the memories so you're still building a digital footprint there's you know what you're gonna do about it you can't if you own a phone you already opted into it i'm sorry to say that's right if you own a laptop you opted into it once you pressed once you've any time that whether it was your apple account when you first made it um like your icloud account or whatever when you press that little box that says do you agree to the terms and conditions or our privacy policy you open that up you're gonna find all kinds of crazy stuff if you actually took the time to read it you're gonna find all types of crazy stuff at what they do with your data um what they have the ability to do but one of the things that blew my freaking mind was when i started working in product and i was working with the ux research team and i started learning about uh different tools i'm trying to think if i can remember the name of one of them um i can't remember the name but basically these tools that they use track and record everything like when i say record i mean screen record everything that you're doing on your screen and these teams have the ability to go back and watch every single thing you did from the time you entered the website until the time you left curious man yeah there there's actually um i gotta remember uh uh adobe has one and i can't remember the name of it um but there's actually a few others i i just um recently downloaded an application in my uh and uh figures where we're able to do the same thing we're able to go back and review uh sessions that our clients have had or visitors have had on our website so just yeah just knowing that you even have the ability to get that level of access is one thing so even though they have like certain um you know uh policies that they have to follow like they have to gray out or or black out any any personal information indicators like as you're typing in your email for instance i can't see whose email is being typed in but the point is the raw um screen recording is somewhere it exists before that thing is blacked out there's some type of software that's blacking it out after the reverse tattoo though if you want it exactly and that's my point you know that that data that level of data access is out there i think that's something worth mentioning you know because people don't even know these things exist as they're doing it i mean i feel like you're going to need it though like just how you mention it these things are people like the companies are doing them because that's how they become better they learn oh yeah it's data it's helpful yeah it's helpful so i can't blame them because i'm thinking if i'm thinking of it in a like entrepreneurial way instead of ethical way yeah it's really helpful but yeah when it comes to ethics it's like ethics is where it's different though yeah like somebody if somebody can access that data um they could they could do a lot you know just just just like you can do some very a lot of good things with it there's some somebody else out there that can do a lot of bad things with that exactly exactly because you can sell this data to informat you know malicious intent is where it gets bad but that's a whole different ballgame too like i talked about this in my videos and said you know like why do you think people are hacking so much is because first of all they're asking for too much for entry level like cyber skill like you know you don't need to well now it's now it's actually the demand is good so i like that but even then for like actual ethical hacking they should be hiring kids anywhere they're demanding too much like no you know why they turn like people people say the dark side you know why they get there and they get malicious because one they're bored or the one they want to show off like you know why don't you show them you're gonna give them half a million dollar check i promise you they'll come work for you right away you know by the time they do that it's too late they've been building a team of people that have they don't like society and there's certain reasons but if you show them that hey you don't have to use those skills maliciously like you can come in and get a a nice bag for it like a nice one you know whatever you want money whatever help us prevent help us prevent those bad guys right so just recently i was actually i was just made a video today about i started laughing apple pays like if you can find a bug in apple their backbone is like 50 000 to 100 000. if it's a serious one like a very serious one it's a million dollars so if you can find an operating system bug like they'll give you up to 1m and that's people do that for a living they're bug bounties they'll go on like amazon google try to hack like these companies and they'll report it and they'll get a nice payout but yeah man like it's it's crazy but there just needs to be more awareness on that and then more people that are telling people like you don't have to you know you can they're very intelligent people but if you structure it in a corporate way not everyone's going to want to join and they're going to end up doing it for the wrong reasons but it is what it is man like what can i do right i can i'm just sounding all right i'm on the corporate side so yeah nah i definitely feel that man i got one last question for you um what do you think of elon musk buying twitter i mean man i like it i like the guy he's he he's a you know he does what he wants so i'll give him that much like because obviously even if you i don't know if we saw jack dorsey's response who originally found it i didn't see his response he's like he's like one of the biggest mistakes i because he found it square after which started doing amazing but he's like i kind of messed up with twitter but he goes i believe elon musk would be the one to fix it and the first step to taking it private was a great step it's because at the end of the day social media shouldn't like you know it is free speech so if he like why are we being muted right like if you can't talk about certain things like about politics and stuff i understand certain things you need to control like you know if it's about terrorism and that stuff that's fair but everything else you should let us say whatever you want so if he can make that happen man the guy's a as a g so i gotta give him that yeah he's a little you know controversial sometimes but that's his way of that's where's he but that's his way of he's using what the kids do he's trying to go viral he knows what's gonna kind of you know what's gonna get people to repost and you know put that everywhere like the bill gates meme that he made that was jokes man he made a you got a picture of like the drake the pregnant the pregnant guy and it's like if you want to like lose your boner look at this right here and that was funny you know people are gonna comment because it's like yo you have a billionaire you know running multiple companies and you know you always have to make that professional but he's a human right and i i feel like i feel like no he's smart he's a genius man like even him even him saying or making those tweets is like the whole point you know i should be able to say what the heck i want it's why not he's like if i can't i can buy the company yep so sex you know and i know it's it's kind of like a ballsy him to do that but he's like okay if they're going to censor me guess what i have the resources to go ahead and take over the company and i have a feeling he will make it better and you know if he doesn't we'll see but the first step was to take and it's always going to be another one just like there was a myspace there was a facebook there was a twitter linkedin came and all his other other social platforms you could possibly imagine so either he gets it right and it goes well or he gets the wrong and somebody else ends up ends up pulling the pulling away and then p and then people like us who now are like on these platforms i think that when the new next platform comes up like you know we could always be ready ready to jump on that and take advantage to monetize it and you know go from there that's that's one of the other things i like you know sometimes i was late in the past but these days it's like that's what i'm waiting for but i like like for example like how tic tac is right now you know so many people it's so organic it's that organic reach it's really cool um yeah man that's pretty much it dang well i definitely appreciate that man you got any uh take away messages you'd like to leave with the audience yeah sure man i mean like if you're if so like if your audience is trying to get in tech and if you guys are looking like i'm gonna be honest i just you can't stop man like a degree or not you have to when you get through hurdles but what i tell people is um do it for the money too it's great to do it for the money but sometimes try to do it for some stuff you like you know i always had a fascination for this thing it's really cool to me how human beings were able to create the internet and then build software like this and connect people i to this day i'm like yo this is cool we did this like we lit we don't just like you know little blobs of consciousness went out and made made all this stuff happen but you don't have to do that because also people want it for money but when it gets hard just don't quit other than that like that's the best way that's the best way you'll get there to the goal of whatever you're trying to do is just when it gets hard just try to figure it out like don't stop like you know don't stop and leave it just try to figure it out and get past it and i think that can apply to anywhere in life that's essentially one of the reasons why i made that guide and why i'm building this course to help you guys honestly big facts man and big props to you as well on this course that you're making um everything that you've been doing i keep up with you on social media where can people no no no of course man um where can people find you on social media i'll make sure to include it in the description and in the video but i wanted you to go ahead pretty much tick tock instagram everything divvy.n that's where you guys can find me where i talk about all the tech stuff i make my guide my guide because because i like to you know anyone is accessible they're like literally 10 20 bucks pizza slice pizza i call them pizza guys because that's not at the price of you know the course i'm working on it to make it a lot bigger and it's going to be a little bit a little bit beefier but i'm not sure what to call it yet but uh david is where i talk about um pretty much what i do is a tech commerce and investing so just to help people out and i'm always like i'm always responding to people whenever i can i'll try to comment uh respond um pretty active on that whenever i get a chance though love it man well definitely appreciate you um for joining vivian and i look look really forward to seeing where you take your future where this course is going to land and how it's going to help people so we'll definitely be in tune and um i just can't wait to see you do more great things man definitely appreciate your advice as well yeah man i feel like i should come down and um i'm probably going to come down to texas soon so i would love yes sir if you ever if you ever into that like i'll collaborate you know hey you guys might be seeing diving again on a live episode you never know so yeah let's make it happen man i think i think i saw you brought another person uh uh tech tavion yes sir he used to watch his stuff too so when that talks y'all started following him because i'm like oh i'm in tech too and it was like a lot of relatable content you know yes sir love it man well cool best of luck to you man we'll get up with you all right man take care [Music] you
2022-05-12