So I make fun of @IBM a lot, but an awful lot of that is based on my perception of them as an *institution*.
They're eternal, for all practical purposes; it feels like making fun of a mountain. What's the mountain care?
But they've done a lot of neat stuff.
I talk about being a terrible employee, but probably the best job I ever had was @TaosTech.
IBM acquired them recently, and the folks I know are happy as clams.
One of our great consulting clients was @InstanaHQ; those folks are *SHARP*.
IBM acquired them. I have heard no wailing or gnashing of teeth.
Now they've acquired @Turbonomic, and with it the profoundly kind @ballen_clt (whom you should follow immediately if you don't already).
My reaction was a sincere "congratulations!" I worry it came across as sarcastic.
IBM has a lot of great things going for it. It has its problems, and my brand is snark, but they are and remain one of the Great Companies.
Even if I don't mouth off and get myself justifiably murdered, they're going to outlive me.
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So I want to talk a bit tonight about college degrees.
Let me begin with the obvious: I don't have one. Today that's a fun story; my 20s were harder as a result.
It's clear that a degree makes you more employable than no degree.
But I've spoken with a few people lately who aren't happy with their current jobs and are toying with going back to school for a(nother) degree.
Slow down a second, Hasty Pudding; let me unpack that one for a minute.
A degree is expensive; I'm not going to do the math for you on that one. But it's also a lot of time that you're spending not making money, in most cases.
I've spoken to several people with two degrees who are convinced that a third will make them more employable.
Will the powerpoint slides feature a new template?
Will analysts remember that Amazon has a Cloud division?
Stay tuned for another episode of "As The Cloud Yearns"
(Periodic reminder that the single stock I own outside of an index fund is six shares of $AMZN that I've held for years. Not for any hope of financial gain, but because one glorious day I will shitpost via shareholder resolution.)
AWS earnings beat estimates at $13.5B for 2021 Q1 because nobody listens to me and turns their EC2 instances off when they're done with them.
If we go back in time three years, @SpotifyEng committed to spending $150 million a year on @GoogleCloud (assuming flatline / no growth. HAH!).
This report doesn't really highlight the stupendous scale of Spotify's cloud environment, so without further context I worry that it's going to be something that Twitter for Pets tries to adopt in its three person engineering team.
So once upon a time I worked in a shop where the ops folks were divided into two teams.
AppOps, which handled the care and feeding of the application the company ran, and SysOps, which handled maintaining the Linux servers.
I was on the SysOps team. We handled filesystems, monitoring via Nagios, datacenter buildouts (this was pre-cloud), filesystem work, etc.
We were sysadmins. Today those jobs are called DevOps or SRE. Same job, better pay.
The AppOps teams started with the care and feeding of Jboss or Tomcat or whatever the hell middleware we used in that era, and went into the app from there.
They communicated constantly with the app developers and knew heaps about Java heaps.