Charity Majors Profile picture
Aug 21, 2019 5 tweets 1 min read Read on X
The help people offer:

* intros
* meeting for coffee
* the answer I got from "I'm feeling lucky"

What I actually need:

* someone who already knows why that answer doesn't work for me, without five hours explaining
* uninterrupted time to think about it or work on it
I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I genuinely appreciate all of the many heartfelt offers of help, and the well wishes behind them.

...except for one very, very common type. Usually but not exclusively found in Homo Venture Capitalis, this "help" consists almost entirely
of offering to connect you with some other poor rando who ALSO does not know the answer to your question, thereby wasting both of your time.

These offers are generated by dumb pattern matching on key terms, without any underlying knowledge of the landscape,
and they come in waves. Fending them off can become a time consuming endeavor in itself. They are designed to:

a) demonstrate how cool and well connected the VC is,
b) make you feel like you owe the person

... and/or are simply heedless of the costs they impose on recipients.
If only problems could be solved just by racking up enough introductions.

💙 if only 💙

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More from @mipsytipsy

Mar 22
Ooooohhh boy, this is a terrific question. I have written two closely related pieces,

* for engineers interviewing at a new company, on how to sniff out bad management culture:

* how to tell if the co is rotten on the inside: charity.wtf/2021/02/19/que…
charity.wtf/2022/01/29/how…
But both of those were written from the perspective of the engineer/interviewee, not the interviewer. The dynamic is different, for sure. 🤔

I would probably start by asking them why they became a manager, why they enjoy the job (if they do). (Softballs)
* what was the most demoralizing week of your management career to date, and why? What would it take for you to give up management entirely?

* I would probe their familiarity with our tech stack, and ask what they do to stay sharp and up to date technically.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 14
Pro tip: any time you see someone confidently opining on what all good CTOs know or do, it is ✨bullshit✨

There is no stock template for CTO, or default set of expectations or responsibilities. It stands alone among the C-levels in that good ones are all over the freaking map.
This may not hold true for publicly traded companies. But in my experience, a good CTO can be:

* over all of R&D
* over engineering, like a VP eng
* like a principal eng or architect
* team lead for special projects
* a great senior programmer

(continued... 👉)
A CTO can also be:

* a great communicator and popularizer
* on the road as a devrel
* a field CTO, whose authority opens doors to big customers
* a product visionary who sweats the details
* more of a cofounder than technical contributor, sharing "company-running" duties w/CEO
Read 12 tweets
Jan 22
Yeah, this is a fair caveat. If you're already a decent senior engineer and manager, it's kind of possible to split your attention between managing a small team and writing code.

But you aren't going to improve at either skill set. Those cycles get devoured by context switching.
Tech lead managers ("TLMs") are a mistake we make over and over in this industry. I've written about this a bit, but the definitive post was written by @Lethain.



Instead of being the best of both worlds, TLMs are poorly equipped to do either.lethain.com/tech-lead-mana…
(I will now brace for complaints. 🙃)

This is one of those topics that people really get worked up about. There are roughly two groups:

1) TLMs, or EMs whose identity is tied up in also being TL

2) Engineers who only respect their EM to the extent that they write great code
Read 7 tweets
Jan 8
My coworker @suchwinston wrote a terrific piece on burnout before the break:

There's a reason why burnout and work/life balance are such evergreen topics, and it's not actually because the world is so terribly harsh and everyone is criminally overworked.honeycomb.io/blog/product-m…
Just to be clear: some places *are* awful, and some people *are* criminally overworked. But burnout and work/life balance are an issue for everyone, not just those people.

I think this is bc there is no real "solution". Each of us has to find and maintain our own equilibrium.
It takes a lot of hard work to become good at technology, and a lot more hard work to maintain your edge in a fast-changing industry.

I don't know of anyone for whom this is _easy_. None of this is remotely natural, from an evolutionary perspective. 🐒
Read 12 tweets
Dec 29, 2023
This is an astute point. For all the ink that has been spilled about what observability is or is not, or how generation 2.0 differs from 1.0, it's actually quite simple.

"Observability" was coined to denote the emergence of ✨high cardinality✨ support in telemetry and tooling.
Cardinality, for those new to my feed 🤣 refers to the number of unique items in a set. Gender drop-down with three options? Low cardinality. Gender field you can write to? Much, much higher cardinality.

Metrics can't do high cardinality data. A metric can only be a number.
Logs *can* handle high cardinality data, which is why logs have always been so much more powerful than metrics.

The most useful debugging data is always the high cardinality shit. Request IDs, uncommon strings, whatever. It reduces the search space fast.
Read 6 tweets
Dec 22, 2023
About two months ago I wrote this thread about how we lost the battle to define ✨observability✨ -- to give it a real, specific, falsifiable technical definition, distinct from monitoring or telemetry.

I complained, I argued, I grieved...and now I'm over it. SO over it. 🙄
In fact, I've come all the way around: I AGREE.

It is less useful for observability to stand for a specific set of technical capabilities and outcomes (explorability, high cardinality etc).

It is more useful, and less confusing, to define observability as a property of systems.
If observability is a property of sociotechnical systems, if it describes your ability to understand the inner system states just by observing the system outputs, then you can improve your observability by adding metrics.

Or logs.
Or traces.
Or profiling.
Or training people.
Read 32 tweets

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