From Programmer to CIO with Dennis Moriarity

Episode Information

Show NotesHis father got tired of him playing video games. So he threw a book at him.
Thirty years later, Dennis Moriarity is Chief Information Officer at Link Technologies in Las Vegas, and the book his dad threw “Learn C in 24 Hours” started everything.
Dennis grew up in LA and wanted to be a police officer. He applied to the LA Sheriff’s Department at 18 and didn’t get in. He started a business during the dot-com era, watched it dry up when the bubble burst, then went back to college at 20. He was so far ahead of his classmates that his instructor asked him to teach some of the courses. When he graduated, he landed an internship at Bank of New York, was put on the mainframe team despite being a C and C++ developer, and spent the next 11 years rising from intern to lead developer to production support manager to VP. He was still writing code six years into management.
Then his wife wanted out of upstate New York. They moved to Las Vegas. He took a six-month contract at Credit One, then applied for what he expected to be a programmer job at the City of North Las Vegas, just to step away from management. Once he got there, he saw problems everywhere. He told a director he was interested in the IT Director role. The city opened it. He applied and got it. What came next tested everything he thought he knew about leading.
WHAT DENNIS MORIARITY DOES NOW:Dennis is Chief Information Officer at Link Technologies in Las Vegas. He helps organizations identify technology gaps and execute projects, and serves as internal CIO for Link advising on technologies to grow the business and better serve clients.
KEY INSIGHTS FROM THIS CONVERSATION:Your title doesn’t make you a leaderDennis spent years in management before saying it plainly: “Your position doesn’t make you a leader.” He talks about what leadership actually means — helping people get to a better version of their lives, asking what they want to be when they grow up even if they’re 50, and treating people the way you want to be treated. “I’m not here just to lead the city. I’m here to lead every individual underneath me to a better life.”
Being overqualified is not the same as having nothing to learnAt Bank of New York, Dennis was put on the mainframe team even though his background was in C and C++. He thought it was a poor fit. It turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences of his career — not just for the COBOL and JCL, but for what the structured Wall Street environment taught him about planning, change management, and why institutional knowledge exists.
Imposter syndrome is really about managing yourselfStepping into the director role at North Las Vegas, Dennis didn’t struggle with infrastructure or help desk or reporting lines. He struggled with himself. “That was the biggest challenge for me as the director. It wasn’t learning the infrastructure. It wasn’t learning help desk or managing any other people. It was managing myself. That was the hardest part.”
Build trust by getting the right people in the roomDennis read “Speed of Trust” early in his leadership career and built his whole approach around it. He never asked vendors to come talk to him. He asked them to come talk to his team. “I’m just the pocketbook. That’s all I was. I was the final decision maker on if we were gonna spend the money or not. But my team was gonna tell me if it was gonna help us or not.”
Stay quiet until you actually understand what they wantWhether in a client meeting or a team conversation, Dennis’s rule is the same: stay quiet. “The minute you open your mouth, all of your followers are gonna jump to whatever you just said.” He says when he does speak, it lands because Dennis doesn’t like to talk.
TOPICS COVERED:• “If you wanna play these, then learn how to make them” the book that started a career• Writing his first email program and falling in love with programming• Wanted to be a police officer: applying to the LA Sheriff’s Department at 18• Going back to college and teaching courses at his instructor’s request• Bank of New York: overqualified intern on the mainframe team• Change management on Wall Street: 30 days of planning to change a comma• Career progression: intern to lead developer to VP in 11 years• Leadership through gaming clans, a World of Warcraft guild, and sports team captain• The production outage that cost millions and what ownership looked like• Moving to Vegas and stumbling into public sector leadership• Imposter syndrome as a first-time IT director• Speed of Trust and letting the team run vendor meetings• Personality color testing and how it changed team communication• Intention vs. perception: why you need to listen back, not just deliver• Why everyone should work in public sector at least once• “Be kind, you never know what someone’s going through”
WHO THIS EPISODE IS FOR:• Programmers and developers considering a move into management• Anyone stepping into a leadership role for the first time and feeling out of place• Tech professionals in or considering public sector careers• Leaders who want to build more trust within their teams• People who built leadership skills through non-traditional paths like gaming, sports, or entrepreneurship• Anyone who has made a mistake at work and had to figure out how to own it
CONNECT WITH DENNIS MORIARITY:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-moriarity-527a487a/
ABOUT CAREER DOWNLOADS:Career Downloads explores technology careers through conversations with professionals who share their journeys, lessons learned, and practical advice. Hosted by Manuel Martinez, each episode exposes listeners to different technology roles and helps them manage their own careers more successfully. New episodes release every Tuesday.
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Transcription

Manuel Martinez: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about how they’ve managed their career over time. And today I have with me Dennis Moriarty. I’m excited because he and I have crossed paths back when I used to be a VMware SE. He’s moved up into leadership roles and just the way that he went through and just, like I tell people all the time, there’s no one way to get to a specific role and just the way that you go about getting there, the things that you learn along the way. So Dennis has a very interesting story. So I’m excited to kind of go through and dig in a little bit more into that. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Dennis.

Dennis Moriarity: Hello everybody, Dennis Moriarty, Chief Information Officer with Link Technologies.

Manuel Martinez: So like I mentioned to people before, so you’re CEO with Link Technologies. So if you don’t mind just kind of telling us a little bit about kind of your current role and responsibilities and then we’ll kind of start the story at the beginning and work our way to how you actually got to where you’re at now.

Dennis Moriarity: Yeah, in my current capacity, really what we try to do is we’re gonna come into your place of business or whatever, and we’re gonna try to help you identify any gaps you may have or if you have a specific project in mind, how we can help you execute that project. I also help Link internally, right? With the technologies we’re choosing on how to grow our business, how to service our clients even better.

Manuel Martinez: So now we’ll kind of start the beginning. So if you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and then eventually what got you either interested in technology and if you didn’t start in technology, kind of what you thought you were gonna do and how you thought you were gonna start your career.

Dennis Moriarity: All right. So from California, LA area, how did I get into technology? My father, my father was a mainframe programmer, assembly language, all that. He came home one day, he got tired of me playing video games and threw a book at me and said, “If you wanna play these, then learn how to make them.” And it was… Learn C in 24 hours or something like that. And I did, I read the book, I did everything and I fell in love with it. And I think the first program I wrote was a full blown email program that the book kind of helped you write. And from there, there was no turning back. I just loved, I fell in love with the process of programming and how to look at the world differently from a programmer’s lens and what I could affect through programming.

Manuel Martinez: And if I remember the way that you’re, kind of like that exposure, like you mentioned, like programming and building something, was it the process of seeing something