Alex Elliott Profile picture
May 21, 2018 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Inspired by @patio11 @RachelTobac @HydeNS33k @holman @sehurlburt here is a list "Quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" aka "Things I wish someone had told me earlier"
I've often heard that #DevOps is all about #empathy and I agree.

As an operations person, the most helpful empathetic developers I ever saw were the ones that were told: "20% of your bonus depends on a rating of you from the Operations people"
I didn't believe this for a long time but you can 100% start a blog, write interesting posts and get people to pay you money to tell you more about what's in those blog posts.

Put another way: there are videos of people putting together Duplo on YouTube with MILLIONS of views.
There are people who will a. love something about you b. put that something to use in their benefit and then c. grow to hate you because they are now dependent on you for their success.

As a young person that can be very confusing so learn to spot these people early.
At every firm I've worked at, from startups to BigBank to HFT, it's been amazing how much positive impact tools written with basic vanilla frameworks can have. e.g. LAMP or #Flask + #CSS + #JavaScript can save hundreds of hours of work.
Interesting categories I've seen hiring managers fall into:
a. Oh, you have 10 years of perl, we only do python here
VERSUS
b. Oh, you were an elementary school teacher? Great, you will fit in perfectly at our biz that organizes CEO events.
"Your software will look like your organization" is a quote that is 100% true. The number of people who are affected by that quote but understand it fully is much closer to 0% than 100% in my experience.
Many firms have the idea that QA is less (in terms of pay/skills etc) than Development and Operations. They then wonder why the QA people who are good developers become Devs and the QA people who are good Operations people become Ops. Simple answer: treat your QA people better.
If you are in TechOps and you report to the head of Development, you are going to have a bad time. A better situation, have head of Ops be == head of Dev. The best, have Ops be part of the business.
ood software systems cost X. You can spend 90% of X on Dev and 10% on Support and get great software that is easy to support. Or, you can spend 10% on Dev and 90% on Support and get bad software with great support. Spending less than X will get you terrible outcomes all around.
My father got one of the biggest opportunities of his life because an external recruiter offered it first to one of his employees and said employee said: "I think this job is too big for me, you should talk to my boss." Moral: have great relationships with your employees.
Biggest job I ever had was b/c past co-worker recommended me to my boss. Co-worker never finished college & his family owned pizza parlors. Said "you gave me great advice over the years, it was the least I could do". Help people b/c you never know how it may help in the future.
That's it for now. If people find this interesting, I'm happy to expand on the items above or add new ones.
If you liked this thread, here is a meta thread of my other threads:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Alex Elliott

Alex Elliott Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @alexpotato

Jan 25
How they used to trace money flows in criminal investigations in the 1980s

A thread.
A couple years ago, I read this great book about a Jersey City narcotics officer.

He went under cover and was mostly arresting small time drug dealers.

Until one day he was able to catch a mid level cartel operator.
This operator was involved in both the logistical and finance side of things but didn’t have a lot of the finance records.

Over time, they worked together to start “rolling up” the drug network the operator was involved with.
Read 15 tweets
Sep 30, 2023
Convincing people to come work with you and your firm.

(Even if you work at a “meatgrinder” of a firm).

A thread.
Background:

At a past job, I ended up doing “closing calls” to convince ambivalent candidates to join the firm.

This was made harder by the fact that this place was known for high turnover and a very stressful work culture (it did pay pretty well though).
This thread is designed to share tips that I learned and then used to have a 100% close rate on these sales calls.
Read 22 tweets
Jan 18, 2023
A story about putting people in the right roles as told via CFOs using foul language.

A thread.
At my first full time job after college, I worked at a small firm (20 ppl).

During one of the monthly company meetings, the CFO gets up and says:
“I know what everyone says about this place:

That HR here fucking sucks!”
Read 14 tweets
Jul 6, 2022
Social Engineering a small town

OR

“I’m Alex Elliott.”

A thread.
In my younger days, I was the General Manager of a “traveling” professional paintball league.

If you have no idea what that means, think of a traveling circus.
I also wrote a thread all about tournament paintball too:
Read 33 tweets
Mar 24, 2022
Running a #restaurant Italian style vs American style.

OR

“I could run this whole place with 4 people”

A thread.
Think about your most recent experience at a restaurant in America:

Your waiter:
- took your order
- brought your drinks
- brought your food
- maybe even bussed your table
- brought you the check
They probably were doing this for a section of the restaurant aka a bunch of tables.

This means that any given time, the server is managing a 2 dimensional status board in their head with tables on one axis and order, drinks etc on the other.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 15, 2022
This is, as always, an excellent article from @danluu

Never done this before but wanted to share some of my thoughts on the article.

(will write it over time instead of all at once)
@danluu The first thing that came to mind is one of Dan's old posts about "the best part of Hacker News being the comments" (see below for reference):

danluu.com/hn-comments/
Specifically, he links to a comment that describes how change happens in organizations (among other things) with the direct link below:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541517
Read 13 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(