Mike Julian @mike_julian Twitter profile

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Consulting 101: My top 10 lessons in getting paid to give advice. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

A friend asked me recently what I think the big things are that make GCP, Azure, and AWS different from each other. I think the biggest thing is how they view customers.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

I was holding this back, but you know what, let's kick this hornet's nest. Many engineers are unprepared for the autonomy and freedom they demand. Most problems in business will not fit in your well-scoped JIRA ticket. That doesn't mean you get to ignore them until they do.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

8 months

It blows my mind that Jira and Confluence are still the go-to options for issue tracking and team documentation for anything at non-trivial scale

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

hello darkness my old friend

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

4 years

All airport restaurants that serve breakfast should serve it 24x7. Ending breakfast at 10a is just silly. Time has no meaning in an airport.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

I think it's an incredible ad. I bet it attracts _exactly_ the customer profile they want. The strong language pushes away customers who don't share their worldview while calling out to those who do. An A+++ ad, IMO

Luc van Donkersgoed

@donkersgood

1 year

What the actual fuck is this ad 😮

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Bold opinion about AWS costs I have: Many folks believe dev environments are the primary source of wasted spend. I don't think that's true at all. The primary source of wasted spend is poorly-architectured production environments.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

If you're going to cite NIST as an authority on industry-standard practices, you can't also say that regularly rotating passwords is industry-standard practice

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

One of the most misunderstand aspects of managing an AWS bill is that people often think it's a finance problem. It's not. It's an engineering problem. A thread. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

GCP, organizationally, seems to have disdain for customers. Almost as if the whole org is thinking, "We would have the best cloud if it weren't for all these pesky customers bothering us" I don't know how true that is personally, but it's my perception.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Most problems worth solving are vague. They are ill-defined. They contain more questions than answers. Often, it's not even clear there _are_ good answers, much less where to even find them to begin with.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Hot take: The mere existence of products like HankerRank should be all the proof we need that engineering interviews are a clusterfuck.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 1: You can only help people who want to be helped. No amount of "but they need my advice!" results in you getting paid for your advice. People must want the help.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I've heard many stories of GCP product managers disagreeing with customer feedback because GCP's data says differently. That's dumb as hell. Raw data is so good at misleading you. Customers add context and color to your data.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

4 years

. @awscloud regularly publishes solutions on their blog to relatively common problems. They invariably involve half a dozen unique services, one of which is always Lambda, strung together in wildly complex ways. I call these solutions the "Go Fuck Yourself" option.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

Seriously, everyone thinks Google shuttering GCP is the hilariously-and-awful scenario. I think it’s actually Workspaces/GSuite. GCP fits with their obsession to be a legit cloud player, while Workspaces doesn’t. Workspaces is used by nearly every company, unlike GCP.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Like, lemme get this straight: you expect a six figure salary, full autonomy to solve problems as you see fit, and _also_ bite-sized, well-scoped bug reports/features. riiiight

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

People get paid the big bucks because they handle that uncertainty well and bring those vague, ill-defined problems to a good resolution. "I'm pretty good with React" doesn't quite cut it.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Steve Yegge wrote a great piece about GCP's product management a while back. It's sort of a scathing indictment on this topic of how GCP views customers.

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting…

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

5 years

If I could choose one AWS service to nuke from motherfucking orbit, it'd be Cloudfront. Make a change, wait half an hour, learn you missed something, make another change, wait another half hour. Meanwhile, literal *seconds* with CloudFlare.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

8 months

Hot take: Kubernetes isn't cloud native. Kube enables you to do cloud native things in non-cloud native environments (eg, datacenters). I think there's a real argument for running Kube in a cloud provider being an antipattern.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Bonus lesson! Lesson 11: Get comfortable with your advice not being used. You can lead a client to water but you can't make them drink. Sometimes your job isn't what you think it is (more on that here: )

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

11 months

My SRE days ended when Terraform was just becoming a serious thing (~2016). I was neck deep in Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack then. Now I have the occasion to pick up Terraform for a project and _holy hell_ the learning curve is insane.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

In my opinion, if GCP had the same level of customer obsession as AWS, we'd likely be looking at two major cloud providers neck-and-neck for market share, instead of the one dominant and two also-rans we have now.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

10 months

It’s pretty well accepted that Cisco buys companies and ruins them roughly two years later It’s going to be real fun to see how Cisco manages to ruin a company with a money-printing machine in its basement

Max Clark

@maxclark

10 months

Cisco acquiring cybersecurity company Splunk in cash deal worth $28 billion That wasn't on my bingo card for today! Some thoughts:

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 5: You want short, concise engagements, not long, "whatever you got for me" engagements. Getting through engagements quickly allows you to become an expert in your area faster. It requires you get good at a marketing+sales machine, though.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 9: Fuck you, pay me. But generally don't give private, situation-specific advice for free.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Paying a SaaS vendor thousands a year only for an account manager to ask me to submit feature requests to a community forum definitely rubs me the wrong way.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 8: Teach everything you know. A body of work to point to is an incredibly compelling sales pitch. Don't worry about giving away too much. Clients hire consultants to apply those things to their unique situation.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 2: Consulting is a relationship business. You will spend more time than you expect building relationships. Those may turn into a deal the following week, the following year, or never.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I also think this customer obsession is what's going to lead AWS to continue to become more and more the dominant player and everyone else will be fighting for niche services, assuming no major shift in that inside of AWS.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 4: You want a dozen clients, not three. If you have one client, you just have a job by another name. A dozen clients is a business. Your risk is spread around and one client leaving impacts you not-at-all.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

AWS has the most interesting--and rare!--approach to customer feedback of all. In fact, it's almost like a shibboleth at this point: "$customer has a pain. Can you help?" has a tendency to cause execs and engineers alike to trip over themselves in a hurry to hear from a customer

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Someone asked @QuinnyPig and I this week what business we'd start next. An accounting firm. We'd start an accounting firm. The bar for a great accounting firm is so ridiculously low and none of stuff needed to stand out involves the accounting bits.

📙 Alex Hillman

@alexhillman

3 years

Unsolicited reminder that when I was looking for a home for @indyhall I interacted with more than 250 real estate "professionals" and there are only 2 - TWO - that I would ever talk to again. Not work with, talk to. For any reason. The bar is lower than you could ever imagine.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 3: Consulting is about providing advice, not doing-a-thing. If you're hands-on-keyboard, the most valuable asset you have (what you know) is going to waste.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

7 months

I remember the moment I realized I was bored with being just an engineer. It was when my team was hours into debating the merits of t-shirt sizing vs Fibonacci for estimating tasks.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Honestly, I wish GCP would get its act together and actually be competitive, but alas.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 10: The vast majority of those reading this shouldn't be consultants. It's not always easy, and if you're a capable engineer, taking an FTE job is way easier. Becoming a consultant is not a quick path to riches, particularly for software engineers.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

I've been conducting a lot of candidate interviews over Slack and email lately and it's been great. A thread about my experience so far.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

4 years

My business partner and friend, @QuinnyPig , wrote this today. It's not AWS related. It's something more important.

Paternity Leave

This week marks the first of my eight weeks of parental leave so I can attend to the birth of my second child. Men (and really by extension non-mothers)

www.lastweekinaws.com

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

One of the things that's always bugged me about the way @DuckbillGroup does consulting is that we inevitably move further and further upmarket as we go. Today we've made a move to help our smaller, more startup-y brethren. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

I made a comment to an advisor a while back about "a VP on a PIP" and they laughed. "Mike, a VP is always on a PIP. That's the role. You hit your KPIs or you're out."

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 6: You are your best sales person. You are the product. If you can't sell engagements well, no one else will be able to either. You can't outsource sales the way you're probably hoping. Selling yourself must be a core competency.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

It's been a while since I totaled up our impact with clients at @DuckbillGroup and _holy shit_. Our clients spend ~$1.8 billion a year on AWS. We've negotiated $2.4 billion worth of AWS contracts. We've saved our clients at least $266 million on their AWS bills. 🤩

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

In case you needed an example of yak shaving for today: I'm debugging some HTTP request issues, so I need to install httpie. Homebrew needs an update, but is blocked on Xcode. Xcode needs an update but there's not enough space on disk. Now I'm cleaning up disk space. 🤦‍♂️

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I was once on a call with an AWS product manager, who was confused at their data: "The data says X but I'm not sure that makes sense." Having seen the issue before, I added the customer perspective to it--context!--and suddenly their data made way more sense.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

I've been noodling on creating a few videos about everything I know on building and running a small tech consulting firm. Who's interested? (obligatory "smash that like button!")

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Okay, let's talk about why this totally isn't a joke. A thread about why accounting firms are atrocious and it'd be so. fucking. easy. to be better. This is mainly aimed at small business owners.

Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Someone asked @QuinnyPig and I this week what business we'd start next. An accounting firm. We'd start an accounting firm. The bar for a great accounting firm is so ridiculously low and none of stuff needed to stand out involves the accounting bits.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Experience (and thus, seniority) can't be rushed. Otherwise you get to be one of those people with one year of experience repeated twenty times.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Lesson 7: Consulting sales is relationship-building, not ads. The vast majority of your work will come by referrals, especially in the early days. Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/whatever ads are not how solo consultancies consistently get clients.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

. @QuinnyPig and I are kickin around an idea: hosting regular-occurring office hours, hosted by Corey or one of our Cloud Economists. We'd answer questions on cost management and AWS architecture in general. Who's interested?

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

10 months

Not-so-hot take about AWS costs and resiliency: All these repatriation stories are going back to a single datacenter location and do resiliency on a rack basis at best. They're leaving multi-AZ setups. An AZ is 60+ miles from another AZ. Of course single deployment is cheaper.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

5 years

I left a negative Glassdoor review once. It resulted in a cease-and-desist, a subpoena, and a five hour deposition in front of four lawyers. Oh, and also dozens of glowing reviews from current employees being "persuaded" to post.

Corey Quinn

@QuinnyPig

5 years

I left a negative @Glassdoor review once. Within the week there were fifty glowing reviews, all from current employees.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Why is the role of President in a company so uncommon but Vice Presidents (VPs) almost universal? What does "President & CEO" mean? Join me while I geek out on corporate governance. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

"I'm a Principal / Senior / Staff / L6 / I4 / whatever the hell Engineer!" At one org, that's a huge achievement and incredibly meaningful. Well done! At another, it's what they pass out in lieu of another $10K of salary. Womp womp.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Azure is interesting. I think the most notable thing is that I rarely *anything* about Azure's response to customer feedback at all. What little I've seen from Azure toward customers can best be characterized as "inaction" (any Azure customers want to add thoughts here?)

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Power move for when you're well-connected inside a company and their standard support asks you to file the ticket on the community forum so engineering sees it: Add the CTO to email and respond: "Looping in Engineering."

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

Back in 2019 when @QuinnyPig and I started Duckbill, we met with a cost management company who wanted to partner with us. We declined. So the person told us that he'd "crush us" if we didn't partner. It was a weird call. Just discovered the company is now defunct. 😆

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

We're transparent about company finances with the team at Duckbill. One amusing thing I learned came about when I realized our financial reports were making the team nervous. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I've been neck-deep in AWS billing data all day and all the technical debt AWS has here is somewhat amusing. And, also, I feel for them so hard. Some things that stand out 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

1000% agreed. Either consult on a single *very specific* problem (and do lots of engagements on it) or go be an FTE. A consultant who is a generalist is the worst of all worlds.

RumDood 🍹

@rumdood

3 years

@mike_julian Having switched to being a consultant engineer for the last 18 mos, I've concluded it would have been smarter to either switch to FTE engineer or SME consultant.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

🎯 It'd take *monumental* shifts at GCP and Azure to match AWS's perspective on customers. It's not something that just be accomplished by directive--it's ingrained in the culture at AWS.

Brandon Watson

@BrandonWatson

2 years

@mike_julian This is the missing piece right here. Customer obsession, and the rest of the leadership principles, are so interleaved into the ethos of Amazon that it really is difficult to replicate unless you live it. 1st Q of many product docs: what customer problem are we solving?

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Picking on @Swizec (with approval!). there's a thing that's bugged me for years re: the senior title. You can't _possibly_ be a senior engineer a few years in. Mindset is definitely a thing. so is experience. Some of that mindset *comes from experience*

Swizec Teller

@Swizec

3 years

*cough* *cough*

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Occupational hazard of working on large AWS bills: you start saying things like "a million a month in Cloudfront" as a relatable thing My sense of scale is warped all to hell now

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

We're hiring for a PrincipalCloud Economist at @DuckbillGroup ! If you have an encyclopedic-like knowledge of AWS, love talking about architecture, and are tired of running production infrastructure, this is the role for you. A thread on why you should apply!

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

AWS comp strategy: "You're lucky we're paying you! You should be paying us!" Splunk comp strategy: "Let me introduce you to the money-printing machine in the basement. Feel free to grab a duffel bag or two on the way out."

Corey Quinn

@QuinnyPig

3 years

I had Shawn on Screaming in the Cloud a while back. AWS is starting to have a steady drumbeat of departures. I’m sure its relatively milquetoast compensation isn’t a factor though.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Remember way back in the day when the standard for writing Chef recipes was basically "fuck the DSL, we'll write raw Ruby!" ? Before everyone realized maybe that wasn't the best idea? I just saw AWS CDK code for the first time, and boy, things sure do seem familiar

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

In my time consulting, I've realized a potential client has three hurdles they have to get over before they even _think_ about hiring a consultant. All three are out of your control but can save you tons of time during early conversations.🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I've had a front-row seat to organizations building cloud finance teams. Here's the top three mistakes I see most of them making. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

10 months

When @QuinnyPig and I started @DuckbillGroup in 2019, I sat down with Corey and asked him to braindump everything he looks at when assessing a client's AWS spend in the first pass. I then came up with a simple framework that's easy to memorize and still serves us today. 🧵

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Well that explains the "thud" I heard earlier...

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

Atlassian: "Can you file this request in our public JIRA?" me: "Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?" There are *21,000* open tickets *older than five years* on the JIRA public support site.

Corey Quinn

@QuinnyPig

2 years

When I’m a paying customer and I get this response, my reaction is to observe that community forums are where bugs languish for years, but me shitposting about them on Twitter gets RESULTS.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

The challenge comes down to this: Cost and architecture are the same problem. To optimize cost, you're optimizing architecture. That's engineering, not finance.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

There's this certain vendor we rely on. About 90% of my support requests to them are returned with some form of "submit a feature request on the forums", "works as intended", or "we're not going to fix that" Absolutely infuriating.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

I wrote a thing!

Why Cloud Finance Is Broken and Ineffective

Cloud finance is more “cloud” than “finance.” This fundamental misunderstanding leads to very ineffective cloud finance efforts. Here's how to fix them.

www.duckbillgroup.com

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

I’ve seen inside some of the largest companies out there and they’re running either Office 365 or Google Workspaces. Based on my sampling, it’s like 15/85. That would be a catastrophic scenario. That’s the one that keeps me up, not GCP.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

5 years

Another tip I was taught on this point: when you name your price verbally and then: 1) have an uptick in your voice and/or 2) smile or grin immediately after you diminish perceived value. Name your price with a straight face, like it's totally normal, and it will BECOME normal

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

AWS is clearly #1 for cloud infra, and I think Azure is #2 . But they don’t compete that directly due to different sales channels. AWS competes with GCP directly. GCP customers will go to AWS, not Azure. That’s bad for the market long-term.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

An arms race, but with titles! It's only a matter of time until we have Senior Fellow Principal Staff Engineer with nine years of experience under their belt.

Pat (@[email protected]/@pcable.net)

@patcable

3 years

@mike_julian isnt there like, staff x/distinguished x/principal/fellow/etc. for this reason?

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Yes, because of the implication: you want ownership? Great. Here's your KPIs. You didn't meet those KPIs? Here's your severance, best of luck at your next job.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

4 months

Just crossed $5 *billion* in AWS contracts negotiated. 🎉🎉🎉

Mike Julian

@mike_julian

9 months

As of October 2023, we've added another half a billion in contract value negotiated since June of this year, bringing the number to $4.5 billion. Hot damn. 🎉

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Thankfully, I remembered what I was told and found the head of network engineering. I walked into his office right around the time he realized everything had ground to a halt. He looks up at me. "You did the VLAN mistake, didn't you? Alright, let's go fix it."

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Decided I wanted to prototype out an app idea tonight. An hour later and I haven't even started writing because jfc why is dev so fucking complicated now

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

5 years

. @QuinnyPig and I had the pleasure of working with @honeycombio to optimize their AWS bill Watching Honeycomb use Honeycomb is incredible, to say the least. @lizthegrey wrote up an article about an aspect of the optimization and it's a great read:

Treading in Haunted Graveyards

Part 1: CI/CD for Infrastructure as Code At Honeycomb, we’ve often discussed the value of making software deployments early and often, and being able to understand your code as it runs in production....

www.honeycomb.io

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

. @QuinnyPig and I mused a while back about how nuts it would be if Gmail were automatically scanning AWS invoices and using that data as intelligence for GCP. Everyone said we were nuts. Welp.

DHH

@dhh

3 years

You knew it wasn't going to be great when Google stalled for weeks on releasing their data disclosure for the iOS Gmail app. But still seeing it printed still shocks: Your EMAIL client linking data to you on purchases, location, search history?!

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 months

. @QuinnyPig gets a lot of shit from Amazonians for calling out bad product decisions. "There's human beings behind those product decisions!" Yes, there are, and sometimes they ship things that aren't great.

Dare Obasanjo🐀

@Carnage4Life

3 months

It’s a characteristic of big tech workers who have been raised on performative activities for promotions to focus on output (I did a lot of hard work) but not the outcomes (the resulting product was terrible).

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

OH: “Kubernetes is the web3 of the infra world: there’s tons of money floating around but none of it is going to you.”

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

Hot take: FinOps *in theory* is about fostering collaboration between Finance and Engineering. FinOps *in practice* often devolves into Finance gaining back control over Engineering (that they lost as a result of datacenter->cloud).

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

So, lessons learned: 1) Be mindful about what a KPI says about your business. 2) Be careful what you borrow from the venture world. Not all advice translates well. Hopefully you avoid the same silly mistake I stumbled into.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

What happens when you've got the senior title at five years in? Where do you go? Super-duper-senior at seven years?

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

Something they don’t really teach you in founder school is how to handle the constant feeling that it’s all crumbling down around you but also congrats on that sales record

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

"Culture war" has always struck me as an odd description for describing the things people use it for: - Having empathy for others - LGBTQ+ rights - Women's rights - and so many more

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

"Why isn't Duckbill an AWS Partner?" because Corey keeps doing stuff like this and I'm pretty sure it breaks the partner agreement 😂

Corey Quinn

@QuinnyPig

3 years

“Stonks go up” is not a compensation strategy, it’s a happy bonus. If you work at @awscloud , humor me a second: reach out to your peers at other large tech companies and compare annual compensation. The results might knock your socks off. Thrilled to help facilitate.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

10 months

I once read somewhere that a company gets bored of its product design well before its customers do, resulting in completely unnecessary changes. That about sums up @SlackHQ .

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

2 years

It begins.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

8 months

I worked with a guy who was so damn good at uncommon things, like shell scripting. Finally asked him how he got so good at that: "I read the bash manpages front to back every three months." Inspired me to go deep on the SNMP RFCs (I ran a NOC at the time), which paid dividends

Aaron Francis

@aarondfrancis

8 months

This is my semi-regular encouragement to read the docs straight through. No one does it and it'll give you a massive advantage. You don't even have to remember everything! Having a broad understanding will help you dive deep on specifics as needed.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

8 months

I talk about this with folks a lot. At big companies, it's crucial to _not be wrong_. Being right isn't the goal. It's why companies hire Gartner and McKinsey: because it's the safe choice, not because it's the optimal choice.

staysaasy

@staysaasy

8 months

95% of why big company people and startup people can't get along is that the optimal move at a startup is to play to win and the optimal move at a big company is to play not to lose. This is a much more important factor than speed, bureaucracy, size, politics, stability, etc

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

1 year

It's hilarious how true this is. Nothing gets AWS' contracts team going like a serious GCP threat.

@[email protected]

@randomfrequency

1 year

@mike_julian GCP exists as a negotiating tactic for AWS customers. Azure exists because some people compete with AWS.

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Mike Julian

@mike_julian

3 years

I know all you folks love k8s. There are even halfway decent reasons to! k8s is an extraordinarily expensive architectural choice that only gets worse with scale. And if you're one who puts stateful stuff on k8s? god help you.

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