Camille Fournier @skamille Twitter profile

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Camille Fournier

27 days

Slowly announcing various life changes: I've written a new book on Platform Engineering with @inowland that will be coming out soon ()!

Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders

www.amazon.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Chicken wings

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

One of my managerial beliefs that has served me well is that when people are doing the wrong thing, the systems are generally making it too hard to do the right thing

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Rust, Python, JavaScript, Java

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Sigh, no, you're not the unicorn who is both an amazing manager of a large team and also an amazing hands-on engineer writing code many hours a week. Instead you're the person holding two leadership positions and crowding out others while also neglecting your own skill growth.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Instead of a tweetstorm, I decided to write a listicle of various non-coding traits that are important for senior engineers. Inspired by conversations with @polotek and others

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.

skamille.medium.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Things I've learned in my years as an engineer: All programming languages are bad New programming languages are bad in ways you just don't see yet That which is dead may never die

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

At this point in my career, I'm a firm believer that a. If it isn't related to your core business b. No one else has an offering or one that is any good for you to use c. You shouldn't build a better solution, you should ask yourself why no one else needs to solve this problem

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

A friend just described a particular tech company as "a place with a lot of lead guitarists" and I'm still in awe of that analogy

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

If you're hitting the wall, you aren't alone. So many people in my world (incl me) are hitting the wall right now, due to pandemic, WFH, extreme sadness/despair about racism, all of the above, and more. Seriously, if you can, take a day (or a week!) off. This is a marathon.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Tech debt is almost always a management problem. If you're a manager who is complaining about tech debt on your teams, take a long look in the mirror and then give them time to prioritize fixing it.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Lol ht @buritica

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Never underestimate the value of reliably showing up

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Rewrite it in rust you cowards

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@pwnsdx

2 years

@blakeswineford @spaceriker @igb @elonmusk Saved it for the lulz

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

On this #InternationalWomensDay you should buy my book if you haven't because it's good and if you really want to support women you'll pay them for their work! 🙏🏻🙏🏻

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

www.amazon.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

If you ever want to lose your damn mind talk to a public school teacher about the things they have to do to get basic classroom supplies

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

One of the most freeing evolutions of my career has been getting comfortable not making other people's problems my problem

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

So wework stopped letting employees expense meat for environmental reasons but the CEO kept a private jet? GTFO

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Why didn't anyone ever tell me this

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

I'm glad someone wrote this so I don't have to. It's right on.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

I'm old enough to have repeatedly experienced the process of learning and getting good at hard things, but also to see that it takes years of regular work to get there. There's no shortcuts. You can be a natural but you're still nowhere near where you'll be with 5yrs of practice.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

One of the super powers and super risks of leadership is that you can normalize behaviors just by participating in them. This goes beyond simple stuff like communication style. Dress up? You normalize it. Dress down? You normalize it. And on and on.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

In case you're wondering, everyone I know is burned out right now it's not just you it's ok you're ok be well take care of yourself I love you we'll get through this I hope

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

I am trying to formulate a blog post on this but something I think is not said enough: people promoted to more senior levels than you at a company are not inherently *better* than you. They have just had more chances to show impact. It is as often luck/right place as talent.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

The truest tweet

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

@alicegoldfuss Apparently Google once had a hiring committee review a set of candidates that it turns out were anonymized versions of their own packets. They rejected themselves.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Yesterday someone said to me with regards to people leaving a job: "money is rarely the first straw, but it's often the last" and I've been chewing on it ever since

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

We’d have fewer execs giving word salad interviews about tech strategy if we all did leaders the favor of telling them when what they’re saying makes no sense. At some point people become so surrounded by yes-sayers they completely lose perspective.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

This is a great strategy to burnout and feeling overwhelmed and underappreciated. You're not the CEO (and haha if you think the CEO does this). You are in fact allowed to and encouraged to pick your battles and not die on every hill just because you see the problem.

Thiago Ghisi

@thiagoghisi

2 years

“That’s not my job” The more senior you become, the more your job will involve filling gaps and stepping up to handle situations that aren’t anyone’s job. Your job is to make your organization successful. (whatever that means) There is no “that’s not my job” anymore.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

If I have one main point to make on this whole discussion it is this. Way too many people aren't being honestly told by their managers that their overwork is kinda meh, because telling someone that their efforts are wasted is incredibly hard. But your overwork is probably meh.

Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

@stevesi @nicolefv It's really hard to actively "punish" someone who is killing themselves at work if their work is at least OK, because none of us want to send the message that your effort is completely irrelevant. But everyone killing themselves thinks their work is great and it usually isn't.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

If the only way you know to tell if someone at the executive level is technical is by giving them a coding interview well, I'm sorry, but you don't have the experience or judgement to understand what it means to be technical

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Screw "choose boring technology," today's mantra is "make boring plans." AKA, if you can break a problem down well enough that the plans look to an outsider like they are mostly boring and rote, you are probably a damn fine platform engineer.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Currently working a theory that every company that thinks they have a "technical career path/individual contributor career path" problem really in fact has an unaddressed management problem

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Been too long since I got to see this guy give a talk

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

I really hope everyone in the US is prepared for like, their whole company to be on vacation starting ~June through the end of the year.....

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

A small thing I'm trying to do to improve the diversity of my hiring pool is removing all job listing "requirements" that aren't

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Has anyone researched whether the benefit derived from mandatory code review are actually bigger than the cost of the slowdown in productivity waiting for approvals?

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

If part of your job isn't literally "giving talks" you are probably not getting your day job effectively done if you're giving a lot of talks and your colleagues will notice and resent you for it

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Today is my son's birthday, so to celebrate we decided to do family Nailed It! Here was the goal, and the result. Nailed It!

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

11 months

Management is not therapy. You are managing adults. Empathy is fine but I have no idea why you would expect your manager to help you work through a personal crisis in all but the most extreme cases. This should not be your constant state as a manager.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Making senior managers write code is a great way to strip them of time to have opinions about things and to reduce their overall influence and power in a company. It's as much a power play on the part of Management against engineering as anything else.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Lol director of engineering with 5 years of experience because people in their late 20s regularly are extremely mature and ready to manage large teams

My Black job is to get Kamala elected! 🖤

@Lanooba

2 years

Great article from Pragmatic Engineer but this career/experience ladder seems off to me. Not looking to gatekeep but I’m surprised one can be called a senior engineer in 3 years. Thoughts? or maybe shade, since this feels like I’m walking into it 😬

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Finally got around to finishing this post, which has been bubbling for months now. In short, vision and innovation are not strategy and they are definitely not planning! Make Boring Plans

Make Boring Plans

You’re probably familiar with the concept of Choose Boring Technology. If you’re not, I’ll wait for you to read the excellent blog post by…

link.medium.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Manager "readmes" or "user guides" are a bad trend. Managers: get the fuck over yourselves with this nonsense.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Not gonna lie this shit is pretty cool

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

This week has me thinking about how so often the incredible leadership of my Black friends and colleagues is reframed as troublemaking and rabble rousing just for daring to question the status quo

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Have a vague theory that every company seems to be completely stressing out about moderately trivial things right now because every manager is trying to exert control in the one place they can while the pandemic takes control over the rest of life

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

A lot of managers out there high on their own farts actively marginalizing employees with kids at home and encouraging everyone else to pretend like life is all happy and good right now. It's a bad look folks. Don't be that manager.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Funny to see everyone finally tweeting about Platform Engineer. Well, welcome friends. Here's my advice: if you don't have a product mindset when building your platform, you will probably fail. Talk to your users, and have fun!

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

The best way to ensure that people don't complete migrations is to make them not only migrate but do orthogonal improvements along the way, with the idea that you can piggy back on the migration since they're doing work anyway

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Questioning the value of mandatory code review is definitely the most popular underground belief held by senior engineers I know

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Today someone asked me how you coach the "alpha geek/brilliant jerk" out of being that person. The answer ultimately boils down to two simple things: Have you really, truly, looked them in the eye and told them the problem? Do they want to change?

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Today was my last day with my beloved Larry. I'll never forget him. Rest in peace buddy 💔💔💔

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

I really wish every week was a 4 day workweek

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Someone who works for me just sent this to me and now I'm a ghost

shelby wolstein

@ShelbyWolstein

4 years

Your boss answering a simple yes or no question:

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Current status

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

8 years

Did you know the Kindle version of my new book has been released? If you we waiting for Kindle, your wait has ended!

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

www.amazon.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

One of my favorite parts of my job is when I watch someone solve a hard problem in a very different way than I would solve it but a way that is both authentic to their personality and ultimately effective. They get a win and I learn a new approach I never would've considered.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

It's easier to get mad at people and blame them for being lazy/stupid/whatever but usually they are just following incentives and affordances or lack thereof to their natural conclusion

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 months

Deep thought of the day is that the same people who like to build dashboards like to look at them and most of the rest of us are completely uninterested in ever looking at dashboards at all

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

How many sins of engineering teams stem from the fact that most engineers just really really hate doing any project management

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Random thought for the morning: servant leadership is a useful skill to know when to deploy. Leadership in general is being the leader your team needs at the moment: sometimes the servant, sometimes the director, sometimes the visionary

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

I failed a Google phone screen once a long long time ago. The question was some dumb thing that I would never know without studying. The worst was the recruiter who emailed me to suggest that I work elsewhere for a while to get good enough to be a googler someday

David Zhou

@dz

5 years

people don't talk about failing at job interviews often enough so here's one of mine: the year was 2009, and i was looking to move away from front end work to more backend/fullstack work, and i was on the phone with a guy from mozilla

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

I just published “Engineering Productivity”

Engineering Productivity

I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that…

skamille.medium.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

The fact that the vast majority of both technical and organizional blog posts by startups are "aspirational" rather than reflecting reality is part of the reason our industry is so full of bad ideas and bullshit

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals

“The Spotify model” got a bunch of companies talking like Taylor Swift about startup culture, but four former Spotify employees reveal the truth: its eponymous way of working failed before it scaled.

www.jeremiahlee.com

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Been thinking about this "bartender chases away Nazi punk before he does anything" thread and how HR in most companies basically prevents you from doing that

Michael B. Tager is leaving cause X is the worst

@IamRageSparkle

4 years

@birdpoems I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

If the #1 thing you look for in your manager is hands-on technical depth, you are probably not ready to be a manager yourself

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

I see this behavior a lot. Very senior person thinks that they, personally, need to spend time with engineers to talk through every technical detail in order to get a solution moving. I've been tempted myself. It's a bad idea.

cron mom

@sophaskins

2 years

its a _very small_ thing in terms of mattering, but among the elon musk texts there was a bit where he was like "no I want some 'real engineers' to sit down with me and the code to twitter, so I can formulate more helpful suggestions" and like fuckin a man

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Thought lead of the day: Leadership skill is really about comfort with handling ambiguity. Handling it for yourself alone is enough in many contexts. To be a great manager/leader you must handle it well yourself and also help the team handle it by providing confidence and clarity

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Exciting arrival!

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

8 years

I never knew that I could combine two nightmares into one but apparently CBP has figured out a way

Uncle Celestine

@cyberomin

8 years

I was just asked to balance a Binary Search Tree by JFK's airport immigration. Welcome to America.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

A great GitHub story would be dropping ICE!

Nat Friedman

@natfriedman

4 years

GitHub Stories 🤔

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Legacy code

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

My son is playing with some programming toy my husband got him for Christmas, and I just heard him say "I don't know how that worked, but it's good." Now wondering if he's learning git over there.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

7 years

OH: "I literally used a fake GitHub account to submit a patch to systemd because I didn't want to be associated with it"

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Thinking today that the reason that Agile/Scrum are so persistent despite their shortcomings is that there is very little else that teaches engineering managers how to actually run their teams from an operational perspective

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

One of the things I get most pedantic about is OKRs. I cannot believe how many KPIs I see labeled "OKR." If the objective is nothing but increase/decrease measure and the kr is that measure it's not a freaking OKR

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

8 years

Apparently my book is up for pre-sale on Amazon, pretty exciting!

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

What is it with functional programmers and the belief that if we just had the right computing paradigm everything would be orders of magnitude easier

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Some days I think all engineering leadership is is being willing to tilt at windmills everyone else has given up on

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Can you imagine being at a whole conference about yaml

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

For the first 10 or so months of this pandemic I was like, turn on your cameras everyone! We have to see each other! Now I yearn for voice-only calls. I'm sooooo tired of video chat. I keep taking days off work just so I don't have to be in video meetings.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

What is it with adulthood and having this just neverending stream of tasks that have to be done

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

This Twitter situation is grim. I don't say such platitudes lightly, my heart really goes out to you all working there through this. I have loved this product and it's a shame to see it so quickly run into the ground.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

I think I should write a book titled "how to get what you want, and then deal with what you get" all about navigating your career

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

At this point I'm actually curious who has a good reason for multi-cloud beyond "completely separate parts of the org went to different clouds and it's ok because they barely need to interact"

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

I see this happen constantly to both women and men who don't fit various stereotypes. It regularly amazes me how under appreciated some great people I know are and I'm positive this bs "potential" stereotyping is a big part of it

Women Aren’t Promoted Because Managers Underestimate Their Potential

Why are fewer women promoted to senior positions than men? In a study of a retail chain, Prof. Kelly Shue and her co-authors found that women got higher performance ratings than men but were incorr...

insights.som.yale.edu

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

I just welcomed my three college hires to my team this week, and asked them about the best class they took their senior year. Every single one of these computer science majors named a humanities class that expanded their way of thinking about the world.

Ale Checka

@plainy

4 years

We have denigrated the humanities for decades, and we're paying a cost as a society.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

The biggest thing I wish the rest of the business world had learned from Google is the approach to employee productivity and treating enterprise tools and processes like a product with employees as customers

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

4 years

Maybe we don't have enough Black people in leadership positions in tech because we look at their leadership and see it as a threat I mean just a thought..............

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

Can't believe "women should be involved in interviewing to detect sexist candidates" is a novel or interesting take in this day and age

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

1 year

A good way to have a frustrating career in platform/infrastructure engineering is to expect other engineers to do the right thing and get mad when they fail to do so

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

I don't understand why spreadsheet cells don't text wrap by default

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Y'all come on. I spend almost all day doing people shit, and I would not be able to do it without the 20+ years of code that came before it. Just because it's not all of the work doesn't mean much of anything. You're not doing sw dev if you can't code.

Brian P. Hogan

@bphogan

6 years

Software dev is 20% code and 80% people. Yet this industry pushes coding. We create code “bootcamps” , create “everyone should code” startups, crap on “soft skills” or anything that isn’t typing code, divide on “tech” and “non-tech”. Code is 20%. And I’m being generous.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

2 years

I just don't understand where all you nerds think you're going to go, TikTok? You're on Twitter because you're not good at visuals. The comment section of your favorite newspaper? Reddit? Gonna go back to making weird tumblrs?

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

A thing that continues to surprise me is how many people think the main purpose and value of code reviews in the modern era is "catching bugs"

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

6 years

Increasingly I believe that "career goals" are for people in their 20s and early 30s. These days every time I get asked that question it just makes me tired.

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Sooooo many expensive bespoke internal tools that never should've been built. It's not 2000, find the SaaS or figure out a workaround, don't build that future albatross!

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

3 years

Rip mesos, you had a good run

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

7 years

It's hard to overstate how terrible it feels when you realize that some people you work with don't believe you belong due to being female

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Camille Fournier

@skamille

5 years

Some days all management is is trying to get people to see a problem clearly so they can solve it

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