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13 Jan, 73 tweets, 20 min read
In this thread (which you may want to mute), give me a company and I'll tell you why they fired me.

I'll start with @F5: because I used the word "refreshing" in their marketing copy.
I felt sorry for the princess our customers had to kidnap for ransom to pay for our product, so I bought her a taser.

I violated their ethics policy by having some.

It turns out "you can just claim you have a degree; they might not check and you can save $120K" is terrible career advice to give to students.

I walked out of a conference room and didn't kill the lights.

My memoirs violated their trademark guidelines because I called them "The Sun Also Crashes."

I didn't charge their family a license fee after snatching food away from them.
If you work at the wrong one, you don't suggest that you "go dutch" with a colleague for the lunch bill.
Too easy.

"Shitposting all day" is what users should be doing, not employees.

Violating brand guidelines by putting quotes around "Cloud" all the time.

I called myself an employee.

It was evenly split between "everything I said" and "everything I did."

I kept records.
My constant listening to "Space Jam" by the Quad City DJs was messing up their stats.
I pointed out that Facebook did it better.
I misread their former head's name as a very strange DevOps Day.

I didn't realize I was supposed to lie to the auditor.

The emperor didn't like it when I pointed out that he had no clothes and was also a jackass.

I suggested a monolith instead of composable microservices.

I wasn't a culture fit because people took me seriously.

I misunderstood the name and thought I worked at Pivotal.
I replaced the backup tapes with CD-Rs.

I pointed out that people only like creepy robots if they clean the floor.

I pointed out that the VCs were going to want them to draw a hell of a lot more blood than that.

Even if it's super nice, apparently gifting a rubber ducky is super insulting.
They didn't appreciate the "Rust Evangelism Taken Too Far" tagline.

While they're aware that "new relic" is an oxymoron, they apparently didn't want to discuss it anymore past hour 4 of the morning standup.

I successfully explained what their product suite did in a single 45 minute meeting.

I asked what I could help work on instead of chanting "5G 5G 5G" all day long.

I suggested they use @awscloud and it turns out they *hate* it when that billing model gets turned around on them.

I snuck into the Product Management group and replaced the 2005 wall calendar with one from the current decade.

I suggested that a couple of Post-It notes and a todo list would be fine for a project.
I explained the concept of a "screw off" price tag so they tried it and oops it's all my fault.
Someone reported my twitter activity to @mike_julian and he wasn't amused.

Every company has a "you do not EVER ask leadership this question," I just didn't realize that at Yahoo it was "so what do you folks do here?"
I suggested that perhaps as a change of pace they could hire people who were formerly incarcerated instead of the prison guards for their proctor roles.

I suggested that "move fast and break things" was all well and good for a tech startup but maybe some things should be designed via Waterfall.

I suggested that maybe making the customers order in Italian but not being able to speak Italian ourselves was less "trendy" than it was "pretentious asshole."

I suggested that "a business model" or "a good story for VCs" was a binary choice, and "neither" was the wrong answer.
I had a crush on the boss's daughter, which was a problem because so did he.

I told someone I worked at Apple.

I spelled "multi-cloud" properly.

Right about now someone in @F5's social media group is wondering what the *HELL* is going on in their mentions.
I accidentally said something with enthusiasm while on-air.

I ordered coffee at a conference without working a Netflix anecdote into the process.

As a reminder, this thread (which you really should mute) is me explaining why I got fired from companies that people are submitting.
I was extremely misunderstood when I said "We should buy Slack because chattr is awful."

I declined a chance to review a newspaper article before it went to print.

I beat the devil at his own game and demonstrated I was overqualified.

"Learning," "Surfing," and "Building" are all better gerunds than "Drowning" when it comes to marketing copy.

I suggested my team collaborate with another business unit.

I did a product comparison with RedShift and was terminated for punching down too hard.

It turns out you can't call your customers "whiny entitled children" where they can hear you.
I grabbed a drink in a NYC cocktail bar and didn't tell the server I worked at Goldman Sachs.

I found this really fun game where two dinosaurs box each other, but it was too on-the-nose when I named the other one "Cisco."

They caught me printing my résumé in the office because the printer jammed. They can't even get those right anymore.
I asked the product people what made us better than a Google search.

I suggested "we're not as shitty as Google" was insufficient market differentiation, and I could not possibly have been more wrong.

I tried to give the elevator pitch describing the company but forgot to sabotage the elevator to buy time first.

I named a product line and discovered that even with an accented letter like 'é', people can still spot the word "douche" from a mile away.
I dropped one of our cell phones while testing it and it accidentally killed the dinosaurs.

I forgot that the name has three syllables unless we're referring to our customers behind their backs.

I forgot to put a blog post in between the posts complaining about @awscloud eating our business and the one declaring a record quarter.
I accidentally started a civil war and forgot to properly invoice the MyPillow guy.

I demonstrated an ability to go two consecutive quarters without tripping over my own corporate pud.

I admitted in public that @jpaulreed was our very last customer.
I forgot to rebase my commits before pushing and every single one became a movie.

I failed the Iron Test by signing for a delivery instead of making the UPS schmoo Docusign me.

I misunderstood the procurement process and didn't realize I needed a hunting license to do what I did.

I had the temerity to suggest that if we were going to basically wipe our collective ass with the American flag we should at least try to turn a profit in the process.

I mistakenly thought we were trying to go to space, not win political procurement games.

And I'm spent. If you enjoy playing games like this, you'll like my free email newsletter: LastWeekinAWS.com

It's like this, only more so.

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More from @QuinnyPig

Corey Quinn Profile picture
14 Jan
And now a livetweet thread of a legal conference in the case of C21-31-BJR, Parler LLC v. @awscloud.
Parler suggests "AWS just has to flip a switch and Parler gets turned back on. Parler has been their customer for 2.5 years."
"They've met and conferred over some user content that violates not only Parler's user requirements, but also Amazon's." Yes, they'll do that, whether you want them to or not.
Read 29 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
14 Jan
This one grabbed my attention. I spent two years at @TaosTech. They’re the reason I moved to SF, started my own consulting firm, and met some wonderful people. It’s probably the best job I ever had.

Very savvy move by @IBMcloud.
I have a request to say more. Well okay!

The @TaosTech technical interview is a thing of genius. It's standardized, modeled after SAGE levels, and reshaped how I think about hiring engineers.
At the time my biggest gripe with Taos was that they didn't have a role into which I "fit." With the benefit of hindsight that's not their fault; I don't fit in anywhere, which is why I'm here.
Read 7 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
14 Jan
Let me point out some cloud magic tonight / say some nice things.

Normally I dunk on @awscloud in these threads, but today that puts me Nazi-adjacent. Plus AWS marketing's nerves are a little... frayed, so I fear for my safety. Image
The easy starting point is @AWSSupport. People are just rude as hell to them and they take it on the chin like the professionals they are. "Amazon is owned by a billionaire!" but he doesn't have to field the support tweets.

They also have to figure out when I'm trolling.
No matter how much you complain, they'll help you out. They're marvels, and good people too.
Read 16 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
13 Jan
I read this tweet aloud to my wife.

@bequinning: “Oh, Ambika?! We went to law school together!”
I always wondered how an attorney would frame "cool story, bro" and now I know. Image
I'm starting to think that maybe the Parler folks might not fully grasp how complicated web properties work. Image
Read 5 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
12 Jan
There's been a lot of noise lately about follower counts, so I'm pleased to leap into that and take a remarkably petty victory lap:

I now have more followers than the hardest working account in cloud, @AWSSupport.
Their milquetoast advice will work, but my terrible advice is way better!
@AWSSupport: "Use RDS as your database!"
Me: "Use Route 53 as your database!"
AWS: "Lock down your S3 buckets to avoid data leaks."
Me: "Save money by storing data in other people's insecure S3 buckets."
Read 5 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
12 Jan
I’d like to point out that *every* multi-cloud scenario I’ve ever encountered in the wild has been based upon “what if we choose to leave @awscloud.

Never once has it been “what if they throw us off their platform?”
That conversation would be surreal.
“Why on earth would they do that?”
“Y’know. Because of all the insurrection and Nazi shit we do.”
“…riiiight. Hey, where’s your restroom? I really gotta go suddenly.”
Yes, there are other reasons people ask about multi-cloud as well (regulatory requirements, misunderstanding availability, etc.). My point is that I've never heard "the provider may boot us out into the snow" before.
Twitter, 280, nuance...
Read 4 tweets

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