Thread by @QuinnyPig

I will soon be giving a talk in which I read mean tweets. Please reply to me with mean tweets; you folks haven't been mean enough.

To assist you, in this thread I will be posting incendiary opinions I may or may not hold; at least one will upset most people. #fightme

Conspiracy theorists are for people who want to be intellectuals but without the hard work. #fightme

Kubernetes is for folks who want to make not-Google more like Google, complete with far-future architectures and sneering condescension. #fightme

Slack and Dropbox are competing with one another on who can redefine their product into something nobody wants more rapidly than the other. #fightme

Azure's capacity challenges exist because they never expected people to take "the Microsoft cloud" seriously. #fightme

A lot of great companies are having hard times right now, but so are a bunch of crappy companies that shouldn't exist but for VCs with too much money to burn. #fightme

"We let Jordan go for performance reasons" but you didn't backfill their role is a layoff that you're not calling a layoff.

"Taylor's position was eliminated" but you're still hiring for basically the same thing is a firing that you're not calling a firing. #fightme

IBM Cloud's understanding of computers seems firmly anchored in 2008, which is decades ahead of where their reputation would have them. #fightme

On the one hand, being well known and telling jokes on stage isn't enough to sustain a career in devrel. On the other hand, @mattstratton. #fightme

"90% of what @awscloud builds comes from customer requests" is less a statement on customer obsession than it is victim-blaming. #fightme

The primary argument against Route 53 as a database is that you suck at DNS. #fightme

When you look at the cost of tuition at most four year colleges, the @awscloud free-tier bill surprise is a shockingly affordable learning experience. #fightme

If you don't read the full AWS documentation, watch six straight years of video recordings, and become lifelong friends with the engineers who built the thing, you really have nobody to blame but yourself for your cloud problems. #fightme

Vendor certifications cost money to prove you know that vendor's technology stack. It's such an amazingly great scam that I'm annoyed I didn't think of it first. #fightme

"We're proud to be a VENDOR partner" has never been a true statement. It's always a marketing deal, an offering to a vengeful god, or someone who has no idea how purchasing decisions work.

The fastest way to indicate that you're a dangerous fool is to assert in good faith that giraffes really exist.

Blameless postmortems are incredibly important according to the person who'd be blamed otherwise.

DevRel is marketing.

Slack sure has been running their gums about "how to effectively work remotely" for a company that until this crisis was staunchly anti-remote hiring themselves.

If you talked to people the way marketing talks to people, you'd get punched in the face a whole lot.

"We're not a tool, we're a platform" usually means "we're about to ruin a great tool." The rest of the time the tool wasn't great to begin with.

With maybe three court-tested exceptions, open source licensing's primary purpose is to let engineers LARP as attorneys.

If you hate people and can't code, become a sysadmin.

If you hate people, can't code, and don't understand technology become an industry analyst. #fightme

Venture Capitalists' entire business model distills down to "I won a lottery once, now I get paid bushels of money and respect to tell other people how to win a lottery too." #fightme

If you can't define your job in a sentence, you have a problem.

If you can't define your job in a 2000 word blog post and four different conference talks, your job is probably not long for this world. #fightme

"Sales people only ever want to talk to my boss" scoffs the clueless engineer whose signing authority caps out at $50 and would gladly spend eight weeks building something to avoid a $200 purchase. #fightme

Speaking as management, our job is to ensure that the work gets done. Hiring employees is just our current approach to solving it. #fightme

"My company bills me out at three times what they pay me, I'm going to become an independent contractor and cut out the middleman" is the rallying cry of someone who'll be back on the job market within 90 days. #fightme

People who say billionaires should just cut seven figure checks to solve COVID19 fail to grasp that (unlike the current administration) a virus doesn't take bribes. #fightme

"Sorry, my dog and kid are making a lot of noise" is precisely the wrong thing to say. Everyone else on the video call wants the dog and kid to take over while you shut the fuck up for once. #fightme

"Hanging up while you're speaking" is a great way off of a conference call because nobody hangs up on themselves. With the advent of video you've gotta now also practice your Freeze Face. #fightme

Managers! Everyone enjoys a good teasing of their colleagues, so make sure to pick someone at random on the video call and mock their home decor. #fightme

It can be hard to choose between the $80 microphone and the $120 microphone, so take a step back and recognize first that nobody cares what the hell you have to say and maybe fix that first. #fightme

COVID19 research is being aggressively pursued by doctors, medical researchers, and JavaScript enthusiasts.

One of those three groups will only make things worse, but will eventually attempt to claim full credit. #fightme

Uber went all-in on microservices to solve the problem of "how can we let our 22,000 employees all work on a single application."

Just kidding, the problem was "how can I give a conference keynote?" #fightme

"What will it cost us to do a cloud migration" is a question that lets you make up an answer of your choice. The only meaningful variables are how many pages your report appendices are, and how many zeros are in your consulting fee. #fightme

A lot of today's tech billionaires spent a lot of time being bullied in high school.

I don't condone bullying but I'd also love to invest in Uber for Varsity Football Players in a couple of cases. #fightme

So far there haven't been a lot of mean replies to any of these. Come on, Twitter: reach down deep within you and pretend for a minute that I'm a woman of color expressing an opinion on the internet. I have faith in you. #fightme

If you're rude, view people as malfunctioning robots, fail to grasp how money works, and believe everything can be expressed in 280 characters or less, ask your doctor if cryptocurrencies may be right for you.

With a recession looming, I'd like to point out to Bitcoin folks, armchair epidemiologists, abrasive Bernie Sanders supporters, and a disturbing number of legislators that "shutting all the way up" is and will remain completely free. #fightme

To quote Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Unfortunately social distancing has made it significantly harder to punch people in the mouth. #fightme

"You complete moron, you failed our sneaky test by CLICKING a LINK in an EMAIL!" is the kind of sentiment that explains why nobody takes infosec seriously.

#fightme

When employees of two companies have to do a video chat, you determine which platform gets used via who's paying whom.

In other words: I'll be damned if I pay you, then you force me to use WebEx. #fightme

"So a careful chaining of these six exploits could lead to exposure of customer email addresses!" shrieks the CISSP to the CEO whose password is 'Kitty!'

#fightme

I built a Lambda function that retries passwords for services that lock people out after enough failures. I call it an "infosec tool" because that's the industry standard term for being a dick to people.
#fightme

"This article saying we mistreat our partners is bad reporting, here are some partners who love working with us" is evocative of trotting out hostages to tell the world how well they're being treated. #fightme

"Serverless runs on servers" is this generation's "No, I will not fix your computer" Thinkgeek t-shirt, and is excellent signal that the speaker can be safely ignored. #fightme

Right now's an exciting time for infrastructure engineers; you stand at a crossroads!

Serverless vs. Containers vs. Doing Your Fucking Job
#fightme

If you've built a Rube Goldberg contraption that services your environment, your boss:
a) has no idea how they'll ever replace you, and
b) is positively ITCHING to find out

#fightme

Google cares deeply about privacy, as per their billboards that appear in the DC airports and absolutely nowhere else on the planet.

#fightme

How many generations do you have to live in a country before you're considered "a native" and not "an immigrant?"

Asking for a few "cloud native" companies with 80 datacenters and executives on VMware's board.
#fightme