Interview by Ben Mundy

IET Manager Ira Tarshis shares his thoughts on technology and time spent outdoors. 

Prior to UC Davis, you attended UC Santa Cruz and conducted research for a Biotech company. How did that come about?

I went to Oakmont high school in Sacramento and was accepted at UC Santa Cruz as a literature major. I took a bio-ethics class, and some chemistry, which had bits about genetic engineering and various bio ethics-related questions around molecular biology.  It seemed like a more compelling field to me. I had friends with experience in organic chemistry who were working in genetics labs.  So I changed my major to MCD Biology and found work in a research lab doing genetic assays on fruit flies, examining genome data, associating genes with traits, and what creates disease susceptibility.

I performed computational work there and wound up getting a job at USGS through a friend. I did desktop support on the back of doing some of the technical work I was doing in the lab. After I graduated, I left the USGS job and was contemplating going to graduate school for molecular cell and development biology.  But I needed to pay the rent so I wound up getting a job at Google. It was a heavy workload. We trained teams of 400 to do local business evaluations.  We went to Ireland and deployed an entire office of data entry reps. I set up their system, infrastructure, and trained them to do the work. At the time, it was exciting because we were young and got to travel around the world on the company dime. 

That led to where I am today, mostly through low-level positions, including being offered to work on cloud projects for Plantronics, where I had worked while at UC Santa Cruz.  I found some affection for doing the work, and the problem-solving end of things, and was able to get off the help desk.  I “fell" into this career, basically. 

How did this technical aptitude germinate?  Was it a skill you developed when you were young?

In high school I built some very basic prototype video games with friends. I remember one that imitated a “claw machine,” with objects that would move around in patterns.  At Google I did a ton of data engineering work, writing queries, generating reports, and inserting data for a very primitive database system.  That was the most fun part of my job. I didn’t really gravitate towards public speaking, presenting information and training people. I was more technical than my peers, and liked the build-out and troubleshooting aspects, so I became the point of contact.  Every desktop across the entire organization - thousands upon thousands distributed across the globe - was connected to a Linux box and connected to a domain, which is completely foreign to most folks who are used to a Mac or Windows system.  

Who were your role models?

My dad was an early adopter of computers and had the very first personal computer that came out. He was always buying handheld things that never took off, like the Apple Newton. He had one of the first laptops that got released and had tons of computer equipment around the house.  He got his PhD in Geology, and did that for a while, but ultimately went into a more technical role later in his life because it was more interesting to him. 

If your child became obsessed with gaming, would you be concerned about them becoming anti-social?

I don’t have strong opinions about what’s healthy, and I’m not anti-gaming. I love video games. But we really try to get our kids to play outdoors. I have a bias towards that.  I loved being outside as a kid, playing soccer, hanging out, and walking around with my friends. All my recreation until my teens was outdoors. I miss it so much now.  We’ve had conversations about delaying smart phones until they’re sixteen, which may be extreme, and also limiting screen time.  I don’t think I’ll be draconian about it. Everyone’s situation is different.  I feel that video games can be a very useful thing. But I think getting immersed in them, and spending too much time on them, can be a little bit damaging too, mostly through opportunity costs to a kid not being able to go socialize in person, and do stuff. I think that’s important. Video games can be very immersive, addictive, and time consuming. 

Draw a comparison of your hobby of making ice cream to a hobby you had as a kid.  What is that satisfying in your life?

I have no idea! The making of ice cream is kind of a flippant thing. I like cooking. I used to make a lot of focaccias as a kid and baked a lot of bread and cookies.  My sister does a ton of baking and is probably going to launch a cupcake-making side hustle. She bakes extravagant things for all my kid’s birthdays, and really likes it. My parents have always cooked a lot. I find it relaxing to cook.  The ice cream thing is kind of recent because someone gave us an ice cream maker a few years ago.  Recently I found a Weber barbeque on the side of the road and I turned it into a smoker.  I smoke things in there often.  Those two processes are interesting to me because there is so much nuance to understand about them.  There’s a little bit of chemistry and science, and  important factors, variables, techniques, and timing.  

With regards to technology, if you could change one thing at UC Davis, what would it be? And do we always need the latest tech?

We have a particular problem right now within the technology space at the University, especially within IET.  It's a two-front challenge: on one side we have a lot of systems that have existed for over thirty years, that are running core services, and need to be updated. They are running on old hardware and operating systems that are difficult to maintain. They’re complicated, and their development process was an older style. We need to upgrade those things, and it’s a big process for some of the systems I’m talking about. In addition, campus pushes IT organizations to move fast because research and academia is a lot about experimentation. They want the latest technologies to experiment with.  But universities, data providers, and research partners also impose a heavy burden on compliance, security and privacy.  To get all those things, you need a big IT organization doing that stuff. Ultimately, that responsibility for brokering those kinds of services falls on us. So we’re looking back to try and modernize what’s old, and we’re looking forward to meet the pressures of campus, which is looking for new technologies to experiment with all the time.  

Are we remodeling a house or tearing it down and rebuilding? 

I don’t think we have a choice but to remodel, and then build new wings and rooms.  And that’s part of the challenge where IET sits. We’re asked to do a lot of things, and we should probably say no to more of them. What ultimately happens is that we have a house with a lot of different rooms, that a lot of times nobody occupies, but somebody needs to go in and look at. There’s a lot of technologies and services that we have deployed that are understaffed because we were pressured to deploy them by campus or other groups And we did it. But there was no maintenance process built into it. I would say, structurally we need to figure out how to maintain the services we have built. It’s one thing to build it, it’s another to maintain it for the life of the service. And that’s one thing we often don’t have a good method of doing. 

To help us do that would be more automation, more purchases of services that handle all that maintenance, and more offloading of maintenance work to vendors.  What’s not offloaded needs to be automated, and we need to automate all the normal maintenance overhead of these systems, from the beginning. 

As far as AI is concerned, I think providing an easy onboarding path for people to engage with AI needs to be secure, and have data guarantees with our partners. We have this opportunity to do one of two things: we can purchase a fully baked AI service through one of the major vendors, or we can build access to Open AI ourselves. At the moment we’re kind of doing both, and I feel like the best way to do things is to form a relationship with an AI service provider and have them provide us the entry points to AI to vend out to our customer base. These are not technical solutions, but an approach to our strategy: more automation of basic technical tasks; a culture that prioritizes automation from the get go, and thinks about maintenance of services we are deploying way ahead of time; better engagement with full service vendors when we go to think about how we are going to broker a new service to campus. Those are my two things I think we can do differently, and make a difference.