Data Custodian

They're Not Even Hiding It Anymore | DataCust datacust February 2025  ·  Workplace & Industry A job listing from the #4 fastest-growing software company of 2025 — 21 people, $36M ARR, built by ex-Google, Meta, and ByteDance founders — tells you everything you need to know about what happens when hypergrowth stops being a metric and starts being a management philosophy. I've been in tech marketing long enough to read job listings the way a doctor reads an MRI. The optimistic language, the strategic omissions, the buzzwords carefully selected to make brutal conditions sound like a privilege. Most companies are at least subtle about it. This one is not. A listing that's been circulating belongs to a Bay Area startup with a growth story that genuinely belongs in a business school case study — the bad kind that future MBAs will debate. They went from $8M to $36M ARR in eight months, with a team of 21 people. That's $1.71M in revenue p...

I'm joining Pure Storage on March 2nd to be part of the technical marketing team, and I'm genuinely excited about it. During the interview process, I took my own advice from a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago and asked them the question that makes most candidates nervous: "What concerns do you have about me for this role?" They didn't flinch. They gave me real feedback. We had an actual conversation about fit, not just a polished interview performance. That's when I knew this was the right place. What Got Me Excited The conversations with Pure focused on enablement. Not campaigns. Not metrics. Enablement. How do we help the people in front of customers have better conversations? How do we give them what they actually need to succeed? Those questions resonated with me because I've done that work before. I know what it's like when you have the right materials at the right time. When customer stories are authentic and metrics are real. When enablem...

There's a growing crowd on LinkedIn and across tech circles doing something that honestly baffles me... AI shaming. Calling people out for using tools like Claude or ChatGPT to help write blog posts, articles, or social content. The implication being that if AI helped, it's somehow not real or not yours . Real talk: that's a hot take I can't get behind. Here's where the critics have a point Look, I get it. We've all seen the posts that feel like they were written by a robot that's never actually worked a day in tech. No personality. No opinion. No actual experience baked in. Just a perfectly structured wall of text that says absolutely nothing. If you're using AI to replace your thinking, that's a problem. The best content comes from people who've lived the work, seen the customer wins, felt the pressure of a tough deal, watched a product land or flop. AI can't fake that. And when people try to let it, readers can smell it. So yeah, l...

I got an email last week from a recruiter. Senior role at a company building 'AI-first infrastructure.' The job description was full of the usual buzzwords. Scale. Innovation. Future-ready architecture. But buried in the third paragraph was something interesting: 'Experience with water-cooled data center operations preferred.' Not power management. Not cooling systems. Water. Specifically. That's when I knew we'd moved past the hype phase into the 'uh oh, physics still exists' phase. The GPUs You Can't Plug In In my last post, I wrote about how companies are hoarding GPUs they can't use . The utilization numbers are brutal. 85% idle capacity. $120 million sitting unused. Microsoft admitting they have chips in inventory they literally cannot plug in. I thought the story ended there. I was wrong. The problem isn't just that companies bought too many GPUs. It's that even if they'd bought exactly the right number, they still couldn...

I was on Best Buy's website today, finally ready to upgrade my gaming rig. I had the whole build planned out. New CPU, more RAM, and the centerpiece: an RTX 5090. I'd been waiting for this card for months. I found it. In stock. Add to cart button right there. Price: $4,499. Four thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars. For a graphics card. The same card that should have launched around $2,000. I closed the tab. Here's the thing: I'm not mad about the price gouging. I'm mad because I know exactly why it's happening. And it's not crypto miners this time. It's something worse. It's companies buying GPUs they don't need, can't use, and in some cases, literally can't even plug in. Everyone's hoarding silicon. Not because they need it. Because everyone else is hoarding silicon. It's 2020 toilet paper panic, but with chips that cost $30,000 each. And the gamers are the ones left holding an empty cart. The Problem Nobody Wan...

Honestly, I almost didn't post this. You know how it is. You don't want to look salty. You don't want to look difficult. It’s easier to just roll your eyes and move on to the next application. But I can’t be the only one dealing with this nonsense, so I’m saying it. Here’s the situation: I’m interviewing for a senior role. Things are going great. The hiring manager is cool, we’re clicking, the vision matches. Then comes the homework. And not a 30-minute writing sample. They asked for the full package: A 12-month strategic plan for Analyst Relations. How to position them for MQs, Waves, the works. I sat down and did the work. I audited their competitors. I built the roadmap. I gave them a strategy I would usually charge a consulting fee for. I sent it off, ready to talk shop. The result? Ghosted by the human, rejected by the robot. No feedback. No "hey, thanks for the effort." Just a generic, no-reply template email: “We have decided not to move forward.” Since w...

If I’ve been a little quiet on here lately, it’s not because I’m sipping coconuts on a beach. It’s because I’ve been in the trenches. I’ve been doing the rounds—interviewing with a bunch of different companies, shaking hands (or bumping elbows), and sitting in a lot of hot seats. And when you do that many interviews back-to-back, you start to see patterns. You see the same generic questions, the same awkward pauses, and the same moment where the power dynamic shifts. It happens when the interviewer closes their laptop, leans back, and asks: "So, do you have any questions for me?" Most people play it safe here. They ask about work-life balance or what a typical Tuesday looks like. Those are fine, but let’s be real: polite questions don't get you the job. If you really want to stand out—and more importantly, if you want to know if you actually got the gig, you need to stop being a passenger. You need to be bold. You need to ask the questions that make your palms sweat. Her...

Most companies have a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan sitting in a PDF on a SharePoint site that nobody has opened since 2022. That isn't resilience; that’s theater. In a ResOps world, we don't do checklists. We do Stress Tests . This final part of our series provides the operational manual for executing the ResOps mandate, moving you from a reactive stance to a state of rehearsed readiness. 1. Defining the "Black Swan": Beyond Simple Hardware Failure Traditional IT testing focuses on "Likely" scenarios: a server goes down, a database slows. ResOps focuses on "Severe but Plausible" shocks. These are the multi-vector crises that actually bring down modern enterprises. The Scenario: A major cloud provider has a DNS outage at the same time your primary security vendor issues a buggy update that locks your team out of their laptops. The ResOps Exercise: You don't ask "Will this happen?" You ask "What is our Mean Time to Recovery of L...

The hiring market right now feels a bit like trying to start a fire in a rainstorm. It’s slow. It’s damp. And if you’re doing it by yourself, it’s incredibly frustrating. Today, everything changed. I sat down for the very first meeting of my Job Search Council . We come from completely different worlds: Government, Consumer Goods, Tech, and FinOps. On paper, we don't have much in common. In reality? We’re all staring at the same uphill climb. What is "Never Search Alone"? If you haven't heard of it, it’s a movement based on Phyl Terry’s philosophy. The core idea is simple: Job searching is a broken, isolating process, and no one should do it by themselves. Instead of shouting into the void of Easy Apply buttons, you form a small, disciplined council of peers. We support each other, hold each other accountable, and most importantly remind each other that our value isn't defined by a recruiter's silence. The Vibe: Radical Support The atmosphere today was immed...

You’ve hired the best. Your ResOps team is mapping dependencies and simulating chaos like digital doomsayers. But there's a problem: you can’t hire your way out of fragility if the rest of the company is still incentivized for speed alone. If "Move Fast and Break Things" is still the unofficial company motto, your new ResOps squad will feel like a fire brigade constantly putting out fires started by arsonists. Building a truly resilient organization requires a fundamental shift in mindset. It means moving beyond the reactive "blameless post-mortem" to a proactive "resilience-first" culture. The Shift from Uptime to Survivability: Embracing "Breaking Gracefully" For decades, the holy grail of IT was "99.999% uptime." This fostered a culture of denial: nothing ever breaks . The problem? Everything breaks. All the time. The Old Mantra: "Don't let anything break." The ResOps Mantra: "We are experts at breaking grace...

The digital world is currently obsessed with "speed." We’ve spent the last decade perfecting the art of shipping code in minutes. But as our systems have become more interconnected, they’ve also become more brittle. We’ve built Formula 1 cars that shatter the moment they hit a pebble on the track. If DevOps and SRE are about keeping the car fast and on the road, Resilience Operations (ResOps) is the specialized crew that ensures the driver survives the crash and the car keeps moving—even if it’s on three wheels. But who actually sits in the ResOps garage? This isn't just "SRE with a different hat." It’s a strategic pivot from maintaining state to managing shock. The "Hybrid Persona": The Battle-Scarred Diplomat You can’t build a ResOps team out of junior devs. You need people who have smelled the smoke of a data center fire (metaphorically or literally). The ideal ResOps lead possesses a "Hybrid Persona": The Technical Grit: They need the ...