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28 May, 67 tweets, 19 min read
And now, reply to this tweet (or DM me) with your career questions, and I will advise you in the form of a shitpost.
I'd take a look at what salaries in this industry have done over the past 18 months and seriously question whether you've maxed the salary, or merely maxed it at your company.
Never. Your answer to "why am I looking to leave" is "I'm not sure that I am." Make them sell you. If they can't, don't jump.
Have you considered a role as an Enterprise Architect?
By giving perfectly wrong answers when "consulted" on management problems, "have you tried firing the complainers" style.
No, you can easily be useless with k8s as well.
On your own equipment on your own time so they can't claim ownership, but past that? Go for it. Why take risks you don't have to?
A deceptively nuanced question. holloway.com/g/equity-compe… answers it way better than I do.

I suggest studying computer science at Stanford in 1998.
"An expert in Cloud A" is worth more on the market than "a generalist who hath fucked around with clouds A-L." Strive to be a T-shaped engineer.
Any remote job is part time if you're creatively lazy enough.
Sacrifice a goat.
Find roles that combine "things you enjoy doing and are good at." The niches are often very lucrative. "Follow your dreams and the money will follow" is excellent advice to earn a subsistence living.
Have three racially diverse friends periodically replace you on a team Zoom call and see who actually says anything about it.
Clearly you should lobby to get me promoted.
Change your name so it's the same as someone who does have a LinkedIn profile.
Be a white guy in tech and make a complete pig's breakfast out of being a Director of Engineering.
Insist on referring to it as OpenSearch.
You can google the answer to everything, as it turns out. In my industry, it usually doesn't lead to investigations / people dying.
Shore up the portion of your skills that are more portable as you wait for the inevitable collapse into oblivion.
They should be an employee, full stop. People who want to be entrepreneurs are some of the last people who should be.
People generally only know 7-9 of the Leadership Principles by heart. You can make up the rest and not get called out on it. Tell People You're Right, A Lot.
Threaten to switch to T-Mobile if they don't.
If you want to combine it with modern tech skills it would appear that phrenology is all the rage.
That's a whole separate thread.
If you know how to apply things you shouldn't get a PhD.
The one companies in your area will pay you to do.
"Cause a data breach" is the canonical way.
levels.fyi, talking to friends, and getting a few offers in hand.
Everyone is somebody else's fetish.
Establish US residency for tax purposes, or find one of a growing number of companies who support global remote.
Charge more.
Position yourself to exciting startups as a subject matter expert in selling to slow, outdated government agencies.
You should honor the full term of your nonsolicit agreement. Instead reach out to those former excellent colleagues and ask them to recommend people just like them, except who cost way more money.

If they don't pick up the subtext, they're not that talented.
Ask politely for a comp adjustment, without citing specifics of others' comp. If they reject your request, get a job elsewhere. Do not entertain a counteroffer.
Sure, you're already used to AWS treating you like shit so you'll have a better adjustment period than most.
If it's a good project, switch teams and take the project with you to curry favor with your new VP overlord.
Open ended questions that lead to discussions. Look, if they've been in the industry at name-brand companies for a decade, you're not going to be the gumshoe that catches them out by asking FizzBuzz.
If you're happy, you've made no poor decisions.
Continue sysadmining and take care of the computers. If you want to build relationships, consider creating a profile on Tinder.
Ask whichever manager approves your comp increases, and have them prioritize what you should be working on. That's their job, not yours; don't be a hero trying to please everyone and burn yourself out.
It's unlikely you'll be mad; just lonely.
Because a lot of terrible hiring manager think that a date range tells the entire story rather than digging further.

Understand that many hiring managers have this failure mode, so you get to decide what you want to do about that.
I'm partial to turning off production. If customers complain, call it a Chaos Injection.
Twitter, obviously.
How about you find a *more* desirable position with a 40-60% raise instead? Early career, this is incredibly doable.
I... if someone dies and isn't backfilled, who's minding the store?!
Smile, nod, take the check. Make sure your objection is in writing somewhere to avoid it blowing back on you. Clients are going to client.
None of them. Mental health isn't worth the money.
You can always find a sinecure. Consider Facebook's ethics group, or AWS's Director of Quality Service Naming.
This is why talking to your peers in other companies is so critical.
Whether you're really interested in leaving is irrelevant; for purposes of talking to prospective new employers, you're quite happy where you are-but you're reasonable and will of course entertain competitive offers.

"Desperate to leave" smacks of "please underpay me."
First find a company that offers to compensate in cryptocurrencies. Compared to that, tasty snacks are "Google RSU" levels of reasonable.
Take a long hard look around the tech industry and ask yourself what on earth gives you the impression that "being good at managing people" was either good or desirable.
Ask a couple of folks privately what @confluentinc job offers look like these days and apply later tonight.
Kettlebells are a good start.
Have the company advertise the role in @LastWeekinAWS. I talk to the hiring companies and point out that I have an 8th grade education; are they sure they want to drive qualified talent away?
They can usually find those roles by applying to the "Who's Hiring" threads on HackerNews.
I generally talk smack about the CNCF.
About 20K shitpost tweets ago.
I’d start by working on convincing users to change their default passwords.
Slow down, Hasty Pudding.
Either go work at a cloudier company or start calling yourself an Enterprise Architect.
It’s okay if the entire SimpleDB product team quits.
Don’t forget to have helicopter sounds on in the background.
You can stock the lower shelves.
Remember that people are hungry enough for talent that signing bonuses larger than your grant are a thing.

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More from @QuinnyPig

Corey Quinn Profile picture
27 May
I don't think more people have pinged me on something on Twitter since my "how AWS Compensation works" blog post.

I suppose I should read this thing and do a thread.
Before I start, this is my specific industry niche. It's nuanced, incredibly complex, and it's a near certainty that any issues I take with the report aren't criticisms of @martin_casado or @sarahdingwang at all.

Similarly, any VC criticisms I make are broad, not @a16z specific!
We start with this graph. Clearly something momentous happened in 2020 on a global scale: you forgot to turn your EC2 instances off.
Read 24 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
26 May
Oh hey, to install RedHat OpenShift on AWS I have to grant @RedHat administrator access to the entire @awscloud account.
“You mean Administrator access to the ROSA service principals?”

No, I do not.
I should point out that this is significantly broader than AWS's own accesses into your account. You will have no secrets from RedHat if you do this. KMS keys? Theirs. Passwords? Theirs.

These are the only things RedHat can't do with that role:
Read 4 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
25 May
So in tonight's thread I want to change things up a bit, and talk about things I like about @awscloud. Strap in.
First, the folks working in the tech field, including training and certification as well as @awssupport are miracle workers. I mean, think about it—they have to deal with you people!
IAM is complicated and tricksy, with dangers all about. The identity + security folks have what are functionally impossible jobs, but somehow they consistently deliver.
Read 12 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
21 May
Oh I just found tonight’s Twitter thread topic. Let’s do it!
Back up any personal (NOTE: NOT CORPORATE IP!) data on my work laptop whenever I get a context-less "let's talk" message.
Putting all of my corporate expenses on my personal card, then expensing them instead of the other way around to avoid giving them the "well technically this might be embezzlement" stick if they disagree with a decision.
Read 19 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
20 May
This looks *WAY* easier than the alternate "commit newsworthy atrocities" approach to getting @verified...
I think the "Sports" category best fits me, because when it comes to dunking on AWS I'm basically the Michael Jordan of the space.
“What makes you notable?”
“Pass me @twitter’s AWS bill for a minute and I’ll show you.”
Read 4 tweets
Corey Quinn Profile picture
20 May
All right, let's give you a spin, App Runner. Somewhere an @awscloud service team's collective sphincters tighten.
Before I start, a hat-tip of admiration to @AWSIdentity; awscli v2 + SSO make this a streamlined experience in my shitposting account.
I don't know what a container registry is so we'll go with a source code repository. It doesn't even pretend that I"m using CodeCommit, which is nice.
Read 17 tweets

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