These jobs become too config heavy, too nuanced around details of the config, and become further and further distanced from actual business value and outcomes up until the point these jobs and products and infrastructure get dropped altogether.
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Well, I think they can manage in most cases. They’ll just take data dumps out of a system, use VLOOKUPs in Excel instead of joins in SQL on the cloud, and they’ll save lots of money and still produce many directionally correct insights. It’s happening everywhere. It’s the hip, new thing. (View Highlight)
More and more very cheap money means smaller and smaller problems get solved with more and more cash. (View Highlight)
New specialists appear with new job titles (View Highlight)
For a two year period or so, some people took up the full-time job of collecting scooters, throwing them into vans, and corralling them back to docking stations, like cowboys herding cattle. (View Highlight)
There is RevOps, analytics engineering, a solid chunk of DevOps, and all kinds of jobs that have come into existence the past few years, all focused around moving data around a certain way, verticalizing data, creating more data, and storing the data in various places.
It’s all middleware. (View Highlight)
It’s also become very obvious to many how prevalent strategic social graph selling has become in some cases. Probably the most obvious example of this around the general data/analytics/ML world is Hex. (View Highlight)
In 2015, Segment co-founder Peter Reinhart posted a widely-circulated piece in which he argued that jobs were becoming ‘Above the API’ or ‘Below the API’ and that APIs would potentially replace middle management (View Highlight)
However, I’d argue that seven years later, most of these ‘Above’ jobs are not actually above the application at all. In fact, many of these software and data jobs are within the APIs or among the APIs or around the APIs because the software layer has gotten so thick with so many moving parts. (View Highlight)
all kinds of applications are produced that are rushed to market with bugs, and the vendors of these softwares have to rely on outside developers to fix and address them (View Highlight)
Note: This is literally explained like that in Bullshit Jobs.
The database drivers article is the perfect example of how config heavy certain jobs have become. When a data engineer has to spend a disproportionate amount of time configuring connectivity among an increasing number of SaaS applications and infrastructure, that person becomes increasingly distant from a P&L outcome at her organization. Instead, she either has to start patching workarounds or she has to open tickets or issues with these vendors or open source projects, and then spend extra time in config land. (View Highlight)
Note: OMG, being a Data Eng. Manager is several layers of bullshit.
The part of being far from P&L also matches many comments from people I’ve managed over the years.
The developers are the ones who have backed up project delivery times at their employers because of these bugs. They risk losing face and credibility. They risk losing their jobs when times get bad because they spend too much time gluing and patching up fast-to-market, hyped-up products (View Highlight)
In fact, bottoms-up connectivity data companies like Airbyte and Meltano rely on this paradigm. As ‘community-driven’ integrations collections they take the valuation, they get the VC money, they get the most benefits, but who does a solid chunk of the work and who bears the most risk for bugs and issues? Developers in the market, off their balance sheet. (View Highlight)
The only reason this has been so tolerated the past few years is because the organizations that employ these developers have had so much free money that they haven’t been scrutinizing their human middleware. (View Highlight)
the risk borne by the DevOps Analytics Operations Engineer is that she identifies more with the job title than as an employee of the company. Does she know her company’s general strategy? Does she know even the top line revenue that her company did last month or quarter, or if at a larger organization, her region’s revenue or other metrics or financials? It’s unlikely in many cases. (View Highlight)
Why were you hired? Is it because you possess a necessary skill or is it because of bandwidth reasons? Are you the only person who can do something or are you the sixth hire for a specific type of job? (View Highlight)
The best thing you can do is learn basic corporate finance. Low interest rates likely created your job, or at the very least they created the premium on your compensation. Many people who have only ever worked as human middleware on the cloud in their careers have been spoiled by the longest bull market in modern history, and now that times are tight you may want to start understanding how businesses actually operate. It will pay dividends far greater than learning a new language or reading another sea of database documentation. (View Highlight)
Get to meaningful business value creation ASAP. Do not make excuses about how your boss does this or how you don’t care. This is your career. If you can’t have meaningful conversations about business value with your boss or department leaders or perhaps even with the executive team, then you are in the wrong place or you need to learn how to manage communications better. (View Highlight)
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