"I'm a new consultant. What should I know?" A thread inspired by the Twitter Space @mike_julian and I did last night.
It never ends. "Done" never is. You're unlikely to have meaningful ARR, so plan for a treadmill.
You can't make a customer do anything.
Don't bill by the hour.
You're first and foremost a customer facing person. Act like it.
Never lie to the customer.
Never surprise the customer. If you're going to miss a deadline, tell them early.
People will never forget how you made them feel. That cuts both ways.
Not every client is a good client.
Corollary: If all of your clients are crap it's probably not them.
"Being clever" isn't nearly as valuable as "being simple" when it comes to the solution you implement. People who aren't you will have to operate it.
Remember who your client is. It's usually the consulting company you work for.
"What moron built this" is a question you'll invariably ask to said moron. Consider the constraints that shaped what you're working with.
Don’t bluff; your credibility is everything. “I don’t know” is the right answer and it ends with “but I’ll find out.”
Very often you’re being paid not only for your expertise, but also to be the calmest voice in the room.
Figure out where your “nope, I will not cross that line” limit is now; otherwise you’ll be making that call when you’re in the thick of it.

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More from @QuinnyPig

28 Jul
Not a shitpost: As a birthday present to me, @awscloud is retiring EC2

aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-…
Classic. Huh, that once again would have fit in a single tweet.
You only have until October to buy a 3-year Reserved Instance on a resource that will be sunset next year.
Read 4 tweets
28 Jul
So you might think that I'd turn this into a database joke, but it gets at something more interesting: the philosophy of failing over. A thread informed by Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom!
Back in the Olden Days of Datacenters, when sysadmins knew C, "serverless" meant that Dell hadn't shipped an order on time, and "Kubernetes" held as little meaning as it still does today, the question of how to keep sites up and running in highly available configurations arose.
It turns out that in single data center environments, you'd have all kinds of equipment; "phantom" routers (a fancy word for "standby") that checked constantly to see if the primary was offline; if so it would self promote.
Read 12 tweets
24 Jul
It’s high time @PolyworkHQ added some features. A thread…
Let me endorse people for things. When they're late to a meeting with me, I can endorse them for "time management." Rude to me on Twitter? You're now a Sharepoint expert.
Offer more clarity in badges. What category does unpaid emotional labor fall under?
Read 13 tweets
21 Jul
An observation on legacy: I have never once heard a story about Jeff Bezos that made me say "he seems like a nice person."

@aselipsky? Too many times to count.
@ajassy? Seen it myself firsthand.

But never Jeff.
You can never get a complete picture from the outside. I get that.

But you can absolutely get glimpses of the real person behind the public persona by talking to the people who've worked with them. Given enough data points, you can tie them together into a reasonable story.
The question is "how do you want to be remembered after you're gone?"

For me, I really hope the answer to that question isn't tied to my job, but instead the people I've encountered along the way.
Read 4 tweets
20 Jul
I've been hoping someone would build something like this to show relative @awscloud service costs. A thread!
"Why not you?"

I can't very well do it myself. At The @DuckbillGroup, our clients these days start at ~$1 million a month in spend or so. I'm very hesitant to give guidance to small accounts based upon what large ones are doing. It's a very slanted view of the industry!
That said, the data I'm seeing in here tracks with what I'm seeing in our client environments. As the post says, "this aligns with other cloud consulting organizations @getvantage has spoken to." We're one of them. They're spot on for the big items.
Read 8 tweets
20 Jul
I have permission to go on a bit of a rant about this tweet-question, so let's get right to it.

I've heard of worse ideas but not recently. A thread.
The big problem that enterprises have is that the @awscloud bill is a game of Corporate Telephone between the person who receives the bill but has no context, and the person who can impact the bill who's five nodes away.

"Let's make sure that last person can never see the bill!"
Enterprise cloud deployments have their own fair share of problems, don't get me wrong. I just have a very hard time believing that "too many of our employees are looking at the bill" is in that list.
Read 9 tweets

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