E71 - Ioannis Theodoridis at The Bank of Greece

On this episode, Ioannis Theodoridis joined our Director James Dean. Ioannis is an experience Telecommunications Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the banking industry. He is currently working as the Deputy Head of Networks at the Bank of Greece. In this episode, they discuss Automation and how it can be used to simplify mundane and simple tasks for many businesses.

Ioannis has been in the industry for 20 years now. When he was younger, his father was in the IT industry but his advice to him was to not go down the traditional route, which led him to go into mechanical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. There were IT classes that he took as part of the course and naturally was drawn to that side because of his family history in IT. He knew at that point he wasn’t interested in the mechanical side and slowly edged towards the IT side.

After he finished his studies, he moved back to Greece to work as an Integrator. From that point, he moved into a few roles, starting in Pre-Sales, and then got specialised in a variety of technologies plus Network Management. After a year and a half at that job, the whole engineering department was split into 2. They would either go on to the sales team or go into a different division that would pursue different projects for the public domain and the military. He ended up working on the management team before realising he was losing his trade as a Network Engineer because it wasn’t as hands-on. He moved to The Bank of Greece and has been there ever since.

Making that transition from management back into a Network Engineering role was a daring move for him because he went back to being hands-on and technical when he had little experience there. The transition he explains is none other than “violent”. There was a signification pay cut. He was thrown into the deep end where they said, ‘This is the documentation for these routers, you’re now 2nd Level Support, off you go’. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but he got to build the whole Network Management field from the ground up and was able to grow their open-source project.

Deputy Head of Networks at the Bank of Greece…

There have been a few projects along the way that has demanded a lot of effort and organising in his position. He did the Project Management for a few of them like interconnecting their data centres with VM links as well as changing the architecture of their data centre.

He’s responsible for the NOC team to make sure everything works correctly and is also part of a NOC team as a NOC Engineer. Not only that but he is a NetDevOps Engineer which he decided to go into because of his backlog of DevOps certifications.

Some would say a man of many trades…

The biggest challenges he’s facing at the Bank of Greece currently is as a whole, they’re forced to bring a lot of changes due to the industry being so fast-paced. The resistance to change has proven to be a challenge. As a culture all around the business, it’s natural because they learn a lot in their career and put a lot of effort into that. At this stage in his career, he feels safe now because he’s adaptive to change and continuously learning.

Another challenge they faced was especially during the pandemic and the balance. They found themselves working double hours and found the work-life balance was non-existent.

Eventually coming out the other side of that, comes with lessons. Ioannis shares some advice for anyone who is overworking themselves and struggling to find a healthy work-life balance. Tune in now to hear what he says!