Harper Talks Episode 44 – Steven Mastandrea: Harper College

Harper Talks Episode 44 – Steven Mastandrea

Transcript

Harper Talks: The Harper Alumni Podcast
Show 44: – Harper Talks — Steven Mastandrea

I'm Brian Shelton, and you're listening to Harper Talks, a co-production of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Today on Harper Talks, I'm excited to speak with Steven Mastandrea. He attended Harper from 1992 to 1993 and then transferred to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, where he earned a degree in computer engineering. Steven and join me in the WHCM studios in Building A. Thanks for being here. How are you?

Yeah, it's good to see you today. I keep wanting to do the Italian pronunciation your name, so I apologize for that.

Yeah, been Americanized. You were at Harper College in the 1990s, and you're studying something that I... I don't know. I guess I was in high school in college in the 1990s, and I look at computers during that time as still being primitive, so to speak. I don't know if that's a fair word to use, but what inspired you to study that in the 1990s?

Going through high school, I was very interested in math and science and computers, computer programming. I took some computer programming classes in high school, really liked it as I was looking then into college, knew I liked math and science, again, and computer programming, and found the computer engineering curriculum, which was a combination of electrical engineering, so constructing computers, building them, and then also programming them. That was something that appealed me at the time. Then as I went through my college career, I learned and I much more gravitated towards the programming side of computers. When you get into my electives and things like that, it really took that programming focus. And then that's where the rest of my career went was on the programming side.

It was very fortunate for my career timing-wise. So a bit of a history lesson But the first web browsers that had in-line images that would show the images actually in-line came out of the University of Illinois right at that time. So NCSA Mosaic, which then turned into Netscape, Eric Bina, Marc Andreessen, they were actually working on that while I was at University of Illinois. So I was one of the 15,000, 20,000, 40,000 beta testers that was in there when it was coming out of NCSA. So, as I graduated, that early sense of the internet, I had a lot of experience and a lot of skills with that that wasn't out there in the industry a whole lot.

As a junior programmer, as somebody that's just coming out of college relatively young. It was something that was relatively new, and I built a lot of my success and career on that is just being in the web early and having some of that experience.

Yeah, what a unique time to be involved in that because I think back, I think I got my first email address in 1993. Then my daughter, who's 14, she got one the day she was born. We signed her up right away. So I think about that. I talk to students about that when we're talking about the early days of the Internet and the introduction of mass communication courses at college. They have been born with cell phones, and so they don't grasp this concept at all. There was a time before the Internet.

Before the Internet or how prevalent it is. When I was at University of Illinois, if you wanted to check your email, if you wanted to log into the servers or anything, it was all dial up. So our dorm was one of the first dorms that had actually hardwired ISDN, which is so archaically slow now with everything. But it was one of the first dorms in 1993, 1994. It was a very different shift. But then, again, as the Internet as we knew it grew with all the images and the inline images and things like that, then that's where the bandwidth needs continued to come about and then continued to grow in the expansion and the investment from all the corporate infrastructure.

It just shows you how advanced that school was because of its focus on what you're studying. Because in 1993, I had to go to a special hallway in the building that housed the IT Department at the college in order to access the Internet. So And that was the only place where you could do it. It's interesting based on where you were and what they were studying, what they were trying to advance there, that that technology existed in your dorm room. Exactly. They had the computer labs that you could go to, but then they were also really...

They continued to push the envelope. But at the time, my last year, when we were in an apartment and another roommate of mine and I, we actually got a dedicated line, a T1 line, a fractal T1 line. We split between three different apartments in that building with friends of ours, which was, again, at the day, it was blazingly fast. Everybody would come over if they needed to work on things because they didn't have to go to the computer lab. But now you'd be like, A) what is that? Nobody has much context unless you're in the telecommunications space. And B) it's the equivalent of Morse code now today with all the speed and everything and the wireless that we have today.

Yeah, I remember installing some fiber optic stuff at a facility, and I'm like, that same material now is completely useless. Anyway, sorry about that. That's okay. I want to go back, though. You came to Harper College first out of high school. How did you choose Harper? Why did you come here?

A couple of different reasons. I was active at Buffalo Grove Fire Department had an Explorer program, and so I was active there. As I was looking at what I wanted to do to college, one of the things I applied for, and I got a scholarship I was an engineering two plus one scholarship, so it was two years of community college and then money for a third year at University of Illinois. I applied for that and was awarded that. That was part of the reason I I looked at some of the things that I wanted to continue on, not just with my engineering career, but with some of my fire service and EMT training. I was able to come here and go through EMT school at Harper College, which was offered. It gave me the ability to continue a couple of different paths that I was exploring and make the transition from high school to community college and then right on to university and go from there. That was a big appeal for it. For me was just still being local and being able to continue those sorts of things.

Keep doing the things that I was interested in and then figuring out exactly what I really wanted to do and then solidified that computers is really the career that I wanted to do. I continued to do firefighting in EMS as a part-time career, but my full-time thing was computers.

There's a constant lesson in all these conversations. I think you're the 46th alumni that I've interviewed for this show. There's a constant lesson. Come to community college, figure out what the heck it is that whatever you want to do with your life and then transfer off to wherever it is that you want to go because you're going to blow a lot of money at that other school trying to figure out what it is that you want to do.

Yeah, exactly. Or take advantage of what's out there. I think community college is an option for a lot of people. You can go through if you're not sure what you want to do or if you want to try multiple things, then you can certainly do that. Absolutely.

Very different. I think if.... We just did a tour with the alumni group not too long ago. I think if you walk around today, if you find any really, really old building that hasn't been renovated, those are the things that look familiar. I was like, oh, that looks familiar. Everything else was like, This is new, this is new, this is different. It was smaller for sure. I think from an actual programming perspective, it was interesting. AP credits and everything was still relatively new, too, to where it was a little bit more conversations with counselors and conversations on what it is and what applies and what your paths are than today. I think there's so much more information. Certainly, the computer, everything is online and electronic from all the classrooms and everything else, which is, for me, would be phenomenal because it's what I'm in. But the rest of it was, like I said, relatively smaller, but there's still pieces that look, it's like, yeah, this is pretty familiar and pretty much the same, but bigger and much It's much more expansion.

Alumni always recognize the student center because it hasn't changed in 50 years.

I know this building. I know where the bathroom is. That's right. Yeah, exactly.

Tell me about this work that you did. You were involved as an EMT while you were here at the college, and then you continued that. You've continued that throughout your career. In the last few years, you've stopped that. But why the desire to work as an EMT? You also did underwater rescue as well?

Yeah. From that side of it, I had started… My family is in the fire service, so my dad, my uncle, so my cousin.

Family business. Now a couple of my cousins' sons are in it. It's a family business. I've always been exposed to that and interested in it. I started with… The Buffalo Grove Fire Department had an Explorer program, which was a division of the Boy Scouts. Basically, try it out, and I tried it out and I loved it. It was something that I was always interested in. As I went through it, I wanted to go through EMT school. I wanted to do fire service in some way. I went down to the University of Illinois, and there they had... There's a student organization called Illini Emergency Medical Service that I volunteered my entire time there, which did EMT, EMS services at all, football games, concerts, volleyball games, sporting events, everything except assembly hall, which is basketball. But I came to every football game, multiple concerts. All that was free if you're working. Really enjoyed that. When I graduated from University of Illinois, came back, started working. I worked at Northwest Community Hospital for a little while in the emergency rooms and in the treatment centers before I went to the village of Mundelein, and I became a part-time firefighter, paid on call firefighter for Mundelein, which I did for 13 years.

So it was part of that, That's where I was doing the fire service, EMS. Then I was CPR instruction. I was on the Lake County dive team for several years, so underwater and recovery diving. It's always one of those things that was there as an also thing I was interested in. Fortunately, I was able to continue that and be able to do that as a part-time career. I always call it still a career because it's a lot of investment and a lot of a lot of work, but also a lot of enjoyment. But I liked the work. I liked the- You find that public service rewarding? I did, yeah. It's really rewarding. I love teaching. I like helping people. It was really good. Ironically, a lot of times I would call it my stress relief.

Which sounds surprising, but from the day-to-day job, but just to be able to do that. I think as I've gone through and I've reflected back, there's a lot more overlap between the two careers than one would think. One of them has helped the other side of my career and back and forth and fed ideas from one point, whether it's leadership or whether it's operational management. We do a lot in the computer side If we have production issues and things like that because we're 24 by 7 service. It's like, what do we do if there's incidents and we have to respond to things? It's like, well, boy, that's fire service.

All of a sudden you're doing this, and here's how we do that. So shifting between those two. It's really helped me in each of my careers, helping the other is fed to it.

Great. You are in your current position, you're Vice President of Engineering for a company called Vibes.

What do I do? What is Vibes, yes. I'm the head of software engineering. We have two different product lines at Vibes. I head up one of the two product lines, which is called our Connect business. Vibes is a mobile marketing and messaging company. The division that I do deals with pretty much delivery of all the messages and text messages that go through our system and by our platforms and our customers. Everything from, if you think of companies that send fraud alerts, transaction alerts, order shipment, notifications. It's two-factor authentication, which is really huge. A lot of times it's our software underneath it that's running that. While you think you're interacting with... Harper College is an example, although they're not actually a customer. It's actually a lot of times, Harper is using us to actually do the sending and delivery of messages. It's, as you can imagine, a real-time 24 by 7 messaging system where we're doing tens of thousands of messages a second in billions of messages a month, which is fun from my perspective. It's the area of software that I really like is that transactional messaging, transactional processing, real-time, low latency type things. It gives us a lot of challenges.

That's what we do, and I oversee the engineers. We write all the software and then oversee production operations, so making sure that our systems are up and running and delivering 24 by 7.

That's interesting what you do there. I think about that, how multifactor authentication has really blown up in the last couple of years. I mean, it's been around for a long time, but it's become very pervasive in our lives to the fact where me personally, just going in to teach in a classroom, I have to sign in four times before I can actually teach my class, if I'm using the computer in any way. And maybe you can't talk about this, but what's the future with that? What's the evolution? How does that get easier for the end user? How does that become invisible, maybe? I don't know.

I don't know that it'll ever get invisible. And so now you're getting outside. There are security and crypto guys that are-They do that. They do that. They're the trailblazers, so I usually watch what they're doing. I'm like, Okay, five, six years from now, it'll be built in mainstream to everything else. I think the challenge that they're trying to solve is just passwords The whole concept of passwords are really easy for computers to crack and really hard for humans to remember. Having a password that is... Something that's good enough. There's been a couple of different theories and changes in that aspect of the software industry. The two-factor authentication is really to try and get around the fact that passwords are notoriously easy for computers to crack. I think at some point there starts to be these key fobs, there starts to be fingerprints, there starts to be other things. The whole concept of two-factor is not only is it something you know, which is a password, but either something that you have, which is like a key or something that you are, identity-wise, which is like a fingerprint, retina scan, things like that. I think eventually those things will get built in a little bit more to where it's a little bit less intrusive.

It's usually with those other factors, it's usually about how you make it really easy to use. Again, the security guys that we have that control a master passwords and things, there's two and sometimes three different levels of security that they have for those sorts of things. But it's not two or three seconds. It's a crypto key that you have to put in. It's dependent on the computer. Eventually, those things become to the point where it becomes a little bit... Even looking back, we've been doing two-factor authentication. With my company, I can think of companies that have been doing it for eight, nine years. But again, it was very high secure transactional type areas and high risk type areas. They first introduced it and it was cumbersome. Now, it's good at a point where everybody, it's into the mainstream where pretty much the entire I was like, Oh, yeah, it's a two-factor code. Okay, I get this. Okay, I get that. That's generally the flow that you get. I think some concept of those biometrics or third-party keys that you carry around or that you'll scan to continue to try and bring those alternate methods, the duels.

But I would say if you're really, I'm probably could be 80% wrong, too. There's all kinds of blogs and crypto magazines and things that are really trying to do, moving away from the concept of password itself and just getting into basically identity metrics and things like that.

I think we all like it when we just look at our phone and it knows who we are, but nobody wants to have to do the multi-culture authentication. But it also creeps you out a little It's like, if you've ever been, you go on the web and you look for something and then you go into another part and it's showing you an ad for what you're doing, and you're like, okay.

There's always the, I only thought about that. I never actually typed it anywhere.

That's interesting that that's what the company does and that that's on the back end because just as a consumer, I would have thought that that was a product of the company that I was directly interacting with, but you're telling me it's going through another system, and I think that's really interesting.

Yeah. And again, you get into different experiences. So companies are really... If you're a bank, for example, you're really working on banking and you're investing in the financial aspects and products of that, sending emails, sending text messages or things like that, you generally let the experts that do that because we're connected to every single carrier. I know if you've ever tried just changing your phone line or looking with it, and imagine all the differences that are there. Imagine when you're actually trying to connect into the back-end. There's a lot of this one does it this way, this one does it that way, a lot of that complexity that we handle so that that way upstream, our customers is like, Oh, we're just sending this message of this phone number, and it's that easy. Well, it's not that easy, but our job is to make it that easy for you.

The invisibility of the system. I don't think many of us think about it. We're not supposed to think about it. It is supposed to be invisible.

For the same reason that you just plug something into a wall and you put the switch and the electricity comes on. They think of all their electrical engineering, brother-in that are here, will tell you just all the complexities that go into delivering power and balancing all that. But not for us. It's just plugging in a light switch.

It's supposed to just work. If you do that well in any company, in any industry, if you do that well, then you know you've hit it.

Yeah. You've been coming back to campus to talk to our students here about careers and engineering and that thing. How did come about? How did you get into doing that?

Interestingly enough, several years ago, I think we just did the math, I think it was seven years ago. One of my neighbors teaches here at Harper College in the engineering program. We were sitting around a barbecue outside one day just talking. And I had happened to mention that I've done a couple of engineering talks at other schools, at University of Illinois, and at Illinois State, there at the ACM, just It was a freshman, and he said, Oh, we have an engineering program. We talked through that. Would you be interested? It started there. I said, sure, I will come in. I do the talk to the engineering freshman and just give basically a layout of, here's the different areas of computer software and computer programming. There's a lot more areas to it and aspects to it than it's not just always ones and zeros, but there's designers and analysts and QA and user experience people and all the other facets and ancillary, not ancillary from a supporting, but just the different non-traditional or non-mainstream, what people think of as a programmer, as just somebody that's... I did that, and I guess it was received well. He said, because I keep inviting me back.

I've been doing that every year for, like I said, I think it's been the last seven years in person when I can and through COVID, remotely when I can't. But I enjoy doing it. In fact, I've gotten to a where there's a couple of students or former students from a couple of early classes because there's usually two or three that will keep in touch with me after that. A couple of them actually said, Hey, it influenced my career or I'm out doing this now. That usually is rewarding in and of itself.

I find that a lot when you ask somebody to come in and give a talk, if they get something out of it, it makes them want to come back and do it again. It makes a big difference. I was at a talk once I was the CEO of a very large corporation. I won't say the name, but he put his personal cell phone up on a PowerPoint slide in front of 400 college students. I asked him after, I said, Why would you do that? He says, None of them will call me. The ones who do, I give them jobs. I was like, Oh, wow. I think about that with my students a lot. You have to be willing to reach out and talk to people. I'm glad that students are reaching out to you after the talks. That's good. That's good stuff. You're a 2024 Distinguished Alumni here at Harper College. What is that about? What does that mean to you?

It was actually a huge honor. It was, again, Chris, who I was working with. He was the one that first suggested it and said, hey, would you be interested in this? I'd love to recommend you. When I first heard it, I was like, Yeah. Normally, when you hear those, you think, I haven't done anything. I didn't cure cancer or anything like that. But after thinking through it a little bit more, and he said, I think you'd be a great candidate and recommended me. And so I was fortunate enough to receive the award this year. And I think it just helped, as I thought about it more, just reflect on what you need to do, not what you need to do, but what you've done and what I've done. One of the themes that as I was talking through is it doesn't have to be one big thing, but it could just be a culmination of little things. Just an interaction here, a feedback there. That helped put it into perspective a little bit more, not only for what I've done, but what I continue to do. Just have small interactions, small impacts, one conversation at a time.

And I think it all adds up in life, in your career, in your personal career. It's always one interaction at a time, and it can add up. But like I said, it was a huge honor. I feel very fortunate. Sometimes still feel a little like, really?

He can do it right here. Was it Groucho Marks that said, I wouldn't be in any club that would have me as a member?

Have me as a member? Yeah. No, no, no, no. We're proud to have you as a member of that group. You're talking about a little bit there, but I always ask everybody who comes in to do the podcast, what advice do you have for either someone who's thinking about coming to Harper College or someone who's here? What's the advice that you would give them? What's the follow-through?

Boy, I think the biggest thing, just in general, because a lot of advice is contextual or specific to an individual. I think the biggest There's two biggest things that I think are pretty universal. One is never stop learning, and not just learning in whatever you're doing, but the ancillary. As I look back, I wish I took more psychology in college now because being in the computer science realm, it's very analytical, it's very mathematical. But I think there's the whole user experience aspect of software and interactions and human behavior... There's a lot of things that are just not rational. In fact, humans are never rational. And anybody that designs a system, assuming a rational human is usually very wrong. Just how you interact. So a lot of the designs, a lot of the applications that make it intuitive. So I wish it took a little bit more of that. But the economics, I took economics and things like that. That has really helped. So I think never stop learning and never don't underappreciate the core curriculum or some of the other classes because those loose information, loose aspects, bring a lot to creativity, bring a lot to innovation.

I think the other aspect is make connections, figure out work with people, work with other students. I continue to work with people that I've either worked previously or maintained connections with. I still have friends from high school that we're very close. We've worked together before. We may work together again at some point as we go through. But if you find people that you like to work with, then they will continue to come up. If not directly, then even indirectly. If I'm looking to hire somebody or if I'm looking for a role, I reach out. Even if I've never worked with a referral, but if somebody says somebody, if I've worked with this, Hey, this person, and they'll do it, then that carries a lot of weight. It makes a huge difference. It makes a huge difference. The known quantity is always. So I think make those connections. You don't have to like everybody, and you don't have to work with them, but find that there's a few that will resonate and go your way.

And go through those ancillary aspects. I think even when you find people that you work with, find people, figure out your strengths and play to your strengths and hire people or work with people that aren't in your strengths or your weaknesses. When you find friends or other, somebody that's strong where you're weak or you're strong where they're weak, that good yin and yang, that balance each other. If you find those as you're working through.

You don't have the group. It's just like, Oh, right? It's like, I'm always blind to this or I'm never good at that. Those are the general, I think, universal for everywhere is just always be learning and those ancillary information that feeds in because that really helps with your innovation.

We talk about this in the communication courses all the time, that the person sitting next to you doing video production with you is likely going to be a person that you're going to work with in your first job. Let's become friends right now. You don't have to be best buddies or anything like that, but let's get to know each other. Let's stay in contact with each other and figure out how to move to the next thing. Because if Steve knows Jill, then Jill says Steve is okay, and then it moves on the network.

Plus, that's how a lot of positions, I don't know specifically in the communications, but a lot of positions are not posted publicly. You're starting to look, so it's like the first place people go is networks. That's right. The more that you have those connections, then yeah.

The longer and the deeper the connection is, the better. We have a guy on our advisory board here at the College for the Communication program who was a student of mine 20 years ago. He's gone on to do wonderful things. I'm like, Now you come here and teach me. Be on my advisory board. And talked about this. It makes such a difference. Cool. Great talking to you today. This is so much fun. Very interesting. I was a little worried. I'm like, I don't know, engineering. But no, this has been absolutely fantastic. What an interesting time that you have been involved in this industry. I mean, the evolution from the '90s to now is just really just amazing. I think that people who were born into the world with the internet literally in the palm of their hands don't really appreciate everything that's gone into making it possible. It's very interesting to talk about it. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate Steven being here. Steven is a Harper College Distinguished Alumni and Vice President for Vibes. If you're enjoying Harper Talks, please subscribe. And while you're at it, rate and review us so that others might find us.

Harper Talks is a coproduction of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Our show is produced by Shannon Hynes. This episode was edited by Coby Pozo. Our online content producer is Vicky D. Our theme music was created by Aiden Cashman. I'm Brian Shelton. Thanks for listening..