Low stress method to meet people at the bar.

A thread. There is a lot of talk lately about getting “off the apps” to meet people if you are single.

One thing I don’t see is good suggestions on how to do that so let me share a great option from back in my single days:

The unwritten rules of yelling at technology people on trading floors circa 2008.

A thread. So I worked in technology and sat on a trading floor supporting equity and derivatives traders in the late 2000s.

It looked a lot like this:

A deep dive into one of the most under appreciated parts of the modern financial system:

FTP’ing files between financial institutions and their clients.

A thread. So your first question might be:

“Why are companies FTP’ing files around??“

This is a good question and we are going to zoom out a little and explain what kind of information firms are sending in the first place.

One of my favorite stories about hiring people from the old days of Western Union.

A thread. It’s the Great Depression and MANY people are looking for work.

GitHub has a talk from 2013 where the Ops guy says:

"We don't have dashboards. If something goes wrong, the alerting system generates a chart showing the error, screenshots it and then drops it in the ops channel"

I think about this quote every time I see a dashboard.

https://twitter.com/skamille/status/1790561926910554492

This is the talk btw which is excellent:

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.

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).

“Shorthand phrases” that my wife and I use to describe common situations in our life.

OR

“I thought it was free tacos but it was actually a newel post”

A post. So first of all, what is a “shorthand phrase”?

Have you ever had a shared story with either a good friend or your spouse that you can recall just by saying a key phrase from it

Eg “oh, yeah, remember the ‘burnt octopus’ story??”

That’s a shorthand phrase.

How I ended up working in hedge funds.

OR

“I will accept EVERY recruiter LinkedIn request!”

A thread. I’ve been working on Finance Tech(FT) for about 15 years with the last 9 being focused on hedge funds and prop trading firms.

This story is how I went from “regular” FT (Eg banks and other small firms) to hedge funds.

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:

A list of facts that I find interesting/surprising.

Will try to add a source link for each.

A thread. 1. In Europe, only around 15% of smokers ever develop lung cancer.

Originally read this in a book by Bill Bryson but confirmed here: canceraustralia.gov.au/resources/posi…

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.

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

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)

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1503512394126938120

@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/

Managing your time in high performant organizations.

OR

"Does your spouse log on to work after the kids go to bed?"

A thread. Unlike some of my other threads, this will be:
- A little more unstructured
- Written over time (usually I write the threads as a draft and release it all at once)

A curated list of some of my favorite quotes.

Sometimes with attribution and sometimes without.

A thread. On growing up: “At 16 I thought my father was the dumbest man alive. At 21 I couldn’t believe how much wisdom he acquired in 5 short years.” -Mark Twain

After almost 15 years of working in technology as an SRE (before it was even called that), here is a list of things that I wish I had at every firm I’ve worked at.

OR

How to be the best tech firm you can be.

A thread. 1. If you have a system that used complicated logic to route/classify/process information, spend the extra day or two at design time to have it output in PLAIN ENGLISH what happened for a given transaction.

https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1220576811190575104

A random assortment of tips and things about parenthood.

A thread. Two toys which have a child has grown tired of can sometimes be combined together into a new fascinating toy.

e.g. Teething ring and a stuffed gorilla. Now it's a gorilla with a teething ring hula hoop.

A tale of of the benefits of aligned incentives

aka

"Teaching people to play paintball by taking away their guns.

A thread. Many years ago, I used to coach college paintball.

If you have no idea what college paintball is, below is a thread I previously put together which you might want to read before you continue.

https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1219998518489878530

How to do a "make vs buy" decision when you have zero data.

aka "What running professional paintball tournaments at Disney World taught me".

A thread. So back in the mid 2000's, I was the General Manager for a professional paintball league called Paintball Sports Promotions (PSP).

To give people a sense of scale, here is a picture of our biggest event in 2006, the World Cup:

A story of corporate bureaucracy hacking, programming, automation and depth first search optimization algorithms.

A thread. At a previous job, everyone was required to track the amount of time they spent on different projects. This is a pretty standard thing but, of course, at this place it was harder than it needed to be.