[HN Gopher] Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
___________________________________________________________________
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
Author : squarecog
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-07-08 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erikbern.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erikbern.com)
| gumby wrote:
| Great article. The confusion about what team does what is
| priceless...yet so common!
|
| To provide some sympathy for the folks already working there: you
| always replace systems well _after_ you 've overrun them.
|
| When the ad hoc system works (consider that google spreadsheet at
| a time when there were three support people and perhaps a dozen
| customers) you're not going to decide to replace it with
| something more complicated. Then you're busy growing so you just
| keep the system going through sheer force of will. You only
| replace it when the effort is unbearable; at that point you say,
| frustratedly, "I wish we'd done this sooner."
| simonw wrote:
| "This is basically a (somewhat cynical) depiction of things that
| may happen at a lot of companies early in the data maturity
| stage"
|
| I don't think this is very cynical at all! Feels pretty accurate
| to me.
| IMTDb wrote:
| What would be the name of the position/profile of someone in
| charge of building the data warehousing architecture/ETL
| pipelines?
|
| I my view, they need make sure the warehouse model is a correct
| representation of the business and that it can be leveraged to
| answer basic or not-so-basic questions using SQL. They also need
| to promote it's usage internally by ensuring it is accessible and
| easy to use and guide other team to a more data oriented mindset.
|
| I feel that this is a specialised position not exactly similar to
| a developer, but every time I look for "data scientist" I get
| guys that want to do machine learning prediction models, which is
| not exactly the same stuff either.
| sischoel wrote:
| What about "data engineer"? There seem to be a lot of jobs for
| that title nowadays.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The bigger issue is adaptability.. can you migrate schemas
| preserving older clients, typically that's by providing a
| decent middleware.... SQL views are one way, APIs are another
| etc...
|
| All of that while improving performance.
| ttz wrote:
| > MBA types
|
| I chuckled. Then cried, because at least his MBA types can use
| SQL. My MBA types use Excel.
|
| OT: Good article. Like and agree with the push for centralizing
| data first, then building outwards so external teams can move
| towards self-service.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| I'm an MBA type that studied math and computer science, and for
| a living programs distributed database solutions.
|
| I chuckled too.
| munk-a wrote:
| Building a good process into your company to receive a query,
| execute it against a read-only database, and shovel the results
| back to the user as a CSV file will pay dividends and is,
| honestly, pretty trivial in most cases.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| For the last 15 years I've been building (what I consider to be)
| accessible database solutions, for a bunch of different
| industries.
|
| This sentence from the article resonated with me:
|
| > You're starting to lay the most basic foundation of what is
| most critically needed: all the important data, in the same
| place, easily queryable.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| TLDR, refine your thoughts.
| div3rs3 wrote:
| Done well (like here), The Goal like storytelling, is both
| educational and interesting.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is an incredibly valuable writeup. Great job.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-08 23:00 UTC)