So who is @aselipsky? He left @awscloud for @tableau shortly before I entered the space (presumably because he was so disgusted with QuickSight that he wanted to ground them into the pavement as a core focus), so I'm as puzzled as you.
A thread!
We know he was one of AWS's first VP hires--he came aboard in 2005 from RealNetworks where he was the VP of Buffering.
Apparently he's serious, businesslike, and inside of @awscloud he's almost universally liked.
In other words "so much my opposite that if we ever shook hands the resulting explosion would destroy everything within six miles."
Apparently @aselipsky went to Harvard which is covered by the exact opposite of an NDA. According to legend he was the captain of the water polo team and turned it around; the ponies drowned over 40% less frequently during his tenure.
I *really* didn't foresee this one; a boomerang is a weird hire. On the other hand, it does provide a novel way out of this conundrum:
The consensus opinion is one of cautious optimism about @aselipsky, as well as speculation as to what he'll do first.
Prospective answers range from "pointing out that when he left as head of Marketing he was supposed to be backfilled" to "blocking me on Twitter."
In any case, good luck and best wishes to @aselipsky as he transitions back to a company far larger than it was when he left.
He starts in May, at which time he'll have to update his Twitter bio to read "opinions my own," then he's off to the races.
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How do we interview? Well okay. We're still learning. This is how we approach hiring for Cloud Economists (other roles vary and are available at duckbillgroup.com/careers/). There are six steps.
Step 1: So you apply by filling out the form. Next, @mike_julian goes through and screens out poor fits.
(He has no job more important than hiring.)
What do I mean by "poor fits?" No AWS cost optimization experience, inarticulate answers to the questions in the application, etc. We never "shame" folks for it, we just move on.
Nobody should ever be made to feel like an asshole for applying for a job, full stop.
In tonight's thread, incoming @awscloud CEO @aselipsky gets to learn who I am, along with anyone else new to my nonsense. This might take a few tweets.
Around the time @aselipsky was leaving @awscloud I was starting the consultancy that eventually became The Duckbill Group. We fix AWS bills for large customers, and also have a "media" division. Our mascot is Billie the Platypus, who is dangerously unstable and frankly scares us.
Those scare quotes around "media" account for the @LastWeekinAWS newsletter, blog, and podcast, meanwhileinsecurity.com, and the non-snarky interview podcast "Screaming in the Cloud" to which @aselipsky has an open invitation. I also tweet actively and aggressively. Oh dear.
Having reviewed the counteroffer that @vPilotSchenck's dev friend sent, it's very much a "bullet dodged." There was nothing egregious about it, and the company comes off incredibly poorly as a result.
The response was reasonable. The edge case I’d have understood would have been an emailed counteroffer that made the employer question the candidate’s professionalism or judgement.
I’m talking “8x market rate” or opening with “Dear Shitpoodles.”
The company now has spent more than the salary difference just getting to the offer stage, so it’s dumb financially. And they’re in a small sector so it’s reputationally moronic.
“Telemedicine” is a $100 billion market that will be worth every penny when you need a quick excuse for your roommate when they walk in on you showing your butthole to your webcam.
Site Reliability Engineering is just DevOps with better gatekeeping, which is just sysadmining with a better paycheck.
The first donation is in. Yay, the system works. That's because @charitywater clearly doesn't use a service mesh, which is the first victim of the snark.
Service meesh are fundamentally thin layers of abstraction on top of DNS, which is a database. The reason for this is purely to shut up the "it's always DNS" brigade. Now it's the service mesh which nobody understands either, but at least this time they're honest about it.
“The Duckbill Group” is next. Sweep away the fancy language and the marketing; what you’re left with is “Dramatic Readings of Excel Spreadsheets.”