# The importance of being a tinkerer

- **Episode:** [135](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/135.md) (2024-10-10)
- **Type:** panel-interview
- **Tags:** tinkering, curiosity, learning, technical-skills
- **Time:** 7:57–10:51 (start 477s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/135?t=477](https://truthliesandwork.com/135?t=477)

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[7:57] John White: There's lots of software systems that go into running even a small business, but if you start at the larger end of small businesses, you start to get fairly complex technology systems that tend to need either oversight from the company or maybe even a specialist as the company gets larger. In that specific type of system
[8:21] Nick Korte: You might be on the cybersecurity team where you have to secure those systems, secure the network that those have to be connected to, and how does the data flow in and out of that company's environment so that they can do business, and how does it meet the compliance regulations. But there's another type of, I guess, company you could work for, and that's a value-added reseller or Or a consulting firm where you might work with many different companies across many different technologies
[8:56] Leanne Elliott: So, a huge spectrum of different things you can do within tech. Is there anything that unites them, do you think, in terms of a mindset or a skill set or characteristics? Is there anything that you think somebody probably needs to invest in or have innately if they want a career in tech?
[9:15] midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge): Yeah
[9:17] John White: The characteristic that I've seen most consistently is that of tinkerer. And someone who tinkers tends to have maybe lost their fear of breaking things, for better or for worse. So the apocryphal, in a previous generation, person who took apart their radio and put it back together again. Someone who Plays and pokes and wants to know how things work. And in general, all of these technology systems have kind of what we call sandbox environments, which are environments that you can play around in without actually breaking a system that's actually being depended on to do anything. Again, The tinkerer, the person who wants to play around, who understands that if this thing breaks, it doesn't actually cause a hospital to go dark and people's lives to be impacted. That's the characteristic that I've seen in common. I don't know, Nick, am I missing something there? Yeah, no
[10:36] Nick Korte: I think everything you said was on point and that the tinkering comes from maybe at a higher level, this curiosity element. Why did pressing this button or doing this thing work? Why did that break it?
[10:51] Al Elliott: Yes
[10:51] Nick Korte: So I think the tinkering and the curiosity naturally leads you to have to do some sort of troubleshooting and fixing. And a lot of people that we have spoken to on the Nerd Journey podcast, as John said, they started tinkering with something, maybe accidentally, maybe someone asked them to fix something and they just went ahead and did it, and they realized that they had an aptitude for it or a real interest in it, and they kept going with that. How can I learn this at a deeper level, or does this run into some other element in technology. What, you know, what can I actually do with this thing? And I think a lot of it spans from that. Go mess with this thing. What can it do? What are the problems that it can solve? And what does clicking here or changing this do? And finding that really interesting as a way of learning