My Farming Roots and Education
My father has said, many times, “Derek was a farmer. Until we got a computer.” There’s absolute truth to that. Growing up on the farm was a dream. Lots of open space. Peace and quiet. Animals. Farm Machinery. Working alongside my dad and grandpa. I loved being on the farm. Every Saturday and many days in the summer, I was over at my grandparents. Their farm was the family homestead, near Columbus, NE and had been established several generations ago. While my parents had their own farm place, my grandparents farm was at the root of the Loseke legacy. When I wasn’t working on playing on the farm, I was playing with my farm toys at home. I also loved all things mechanical, electronic or electrical. One of the draws of the farm was all of the trucks, tractors and general farm machinery.
I also liked to experiment with electronics. I had an alarm clock radio in my room with some random speakers in different corners for the “surround sound” experience. And then somewhere around 1995, when I was around 15 years old, we got our first computer. It was an old IBM Aptiva with an Intel 486DX2 66 MHz. We avoided the original Pentium, I believe 75 MHz because of a math processing error that was common on the early models. It originally had 4MB of RAM, a 540MB Hard Drive and a 2400 baud modem. Eventually it was upgraded to 16MB of RAM, a 4GB HD was added and the modem was upgraded to a 14.4 and eventually 56k. It came with IBM PC DOS 6.3 and Windows 3.1 which we eventually upgraded the Windows 95 Rev A and eventually Rev B.
While I enjoyed the farm, I was absolutely infatuated with the different aspects of computing. When I was around 16, I assisted my high school upgrade our computer lab by installing RAM and configuring several new HP Vectra desktops and replacing the Token Ring network with what was probably 10Mb ethernet. It didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted to make a career out of computing. By my Sophomore year of High School, I was enrolled and accepted in a computer programming course at the nearby Southeast Community College – Milford (Nebraska). During my Junior year, I realized I didn’t want to punch code all the time and changed my major to Electronic Engineering with a focus on Networking. Senior year….I did nothing. I just enjoyed the last year of high school and dreamed of a career where I could perhaps blend technology and agriculture and worked at the local hardware store.
After graduation, I had a very short summer before starting my Electronic Engineering program at Milford. The first quarter focused on DC electronics theory. Easy-peasy. Second quarter was a bit more challenging with AC Electronic theory. I also had a couple of fairly dramatic life changes and I realized that Milford just wasn’t for me. I moved back home and prepared to instead move to Omaha, Nebraska and focus on Microcomputer Technology – Networking at Metropolitan Community College. After I finished my degree, I decided I liked it so much, I enrolled in classes at Metro including the Cisco Networking Academy which lead to my CCNA certification in 2003 and some additional CCNP courses. In all, I like to joke that I attended a 2-year college for 4-years, but I really enjoyed learning and stumbled into completing my second Associates Degree in Electronic Engineering Technology – Networking because of the additional CCNA and CCNP courses.
A IT-adjacent job, then internal IT (until it got boring…)
I also restarted my job at Menards, a midwest-based hardware store chain in the building materials department. Not long after, I also began working with a friend of mine as a cable contractor before going fully on my own. I subcontracted for Cox Communications installing primarily residential digital telephone service, but also cable TV service and cable-modem based high speed internet. I contracted for about a year and a half before our contract expired and I joined the team in the call center supporting high speed internet before moving to the escalation desk for all three products. At the same time, I was attempting to join the Data Network Operations Center or Systems Operations Center which was a natural progression given my CCNA certification and classroom-based networking experience. However, SOC and especially Data NOC were highly sought positions and I didn’t have any luck moving out of the call center.
At the same time, I was beginning my Bachelors Degree program at Bellevue University in Internet Systems and Software Technology. At the same time, I started my first “real” IT job as a Network/Systems Specialist at NP Dodge Company, the oldest family owned real estate company in the country — the year I started they celebrated their 150th anniversary. I spent 7 years at NP Dodge supporting several real estate offices and approximately 500 real estate agents, as well as backing up the team managing the insurance brokerage, commercial real estate and title services division. The first 5 or so years was a massive learning experience, but after a while the tasks began to become repetitive and without much room for advancement and little growth over my last two years, I took an opportunity to follow a friend and former-coworker out of the internal IT world and into managed and cloud service provider vertical. Here is where the learning truly began.
A Real Managed Services and Cloud Computing IT Career
The year is 2012 (give or take), and I have just started a new position as a Windows Systems Engineer as a public cloud hosting provider, First National Technology Solutions, now FNTS. Part of my role as a Systems Engineer means managing thousands of Windows Server virtual machines, but also managing and maintaining the VMware environment running atop several Cisco UCS clusters, as well as some old legacy environments running on IBM System X (and even some E Server) servers. Also eventually party of that role….managing backups. Originally the backups here were backed up via a separate “backup network” where they were processed via a quintet of linux servers running Quest NetVault attached to a storage array whose brand I had never heard of (and can’t remember the name of), and eventually offloaded to a large, reportedly multi-million dollar tape library with several fiber channel LTO drives and a single turnstile. Fortunately, during the first couple years of my tenure, we had a separate team that managed backups, and everything I heard about this software was a nightmare. At the same time, my employer, as an EMC shop (this was before the Dell/EMC merger), was in the process of deploying a few EMC Avamar nodes as well as several DataDomain arrays for storage. I dipped my toes into Avamar, but I didn’t find it very user friendly. Fortunately, this was still managed by the backup team, and they were handling the process of migrating off of NetVault and into Avamar. Out of the frying pan and into the fire in my opinion. That was, until the backup team ceased to exist. Of the two members of the backup team, I recall one moving on to another role within the company, and the separating employment. Suddenly, backups became the problem of the Windows team. Yuck!
Fortunately, one person chose to become the “backup czar”. While the rest of us did have some interaction, this other brave soul fully embraced all that Avamar had to offer. Pretty much all systems had been migrated and while the system worked alright, it was far from user friendly. Making it worse, eventually we had to backup unstructured data on VNX and Isilon storage in a multi-tenancy configuration using the very antiquated NDMP protocol. Double Yuck!
Why would anyone want to be a backup engineer and manage backups every day?
– Derek Loseke, probably, 2015
After a few years of mostly avoiding backups and letting the backup czar handle things, I focused on more fun tasks like maintaining the UCS clusters, regular Windows server setup, troubleshooting, etc, and handling small projects to support our Senior Windows Engineers on the project team. In early 2017, I was unexpectedly let go by my employer. I maintain that the actual reasoning was far different that the reasoning I was given but the fact is that I had already been looking for a different role because life was nothing short of chaotic. It all took a toll: years of 50-60 hour weeks, several management changes, several pay structure changes – sometimes event within a few months, nearly every evening consisting of maintenance for customers, often right after I got home from the office, and several on-call rotations. One of those rotations consisted of Thursday through Wednesday every other week — so really, every week. I was well paid, but burnt out and the pay was no longer justifying the high levels of stress as I had young children. On top of that, I had also just covered several months of a 12AM to 9AM shift as a stopgap measure because another team member advancing within in the company. Due to the severe lack of sleep and overall exhaustion, I simply cannot remember the first few months of my infant son’s life. I often didn’t feel safe because I experienced microsleeps while driving and would often fall asleep mid-conversation with my wife. Suffice it to say, after getting past the shock of being let go, I quickly came to the conclusion that this was actually a blessing. Now I just needed to find the right employer in short time while savings was dwindling as my wife was a stay-at-home mom to our three children and I was the sole source of income. Some pressure for sure, but great things to come.
