Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeltz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that is an issue a friend of mine has right now with his team. He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background (or really much programming background either). And one of his main frustrations is that the analysts do not understand the data model or the business. Before he became their manager his team just took report requests and then wrote some SQL and delivered some numbers. Without understanding what those numbers were supposed to mean or the quirks of the underlying data.

View on HN

Clearly, the correct move here is to replace the entire team with Looker and let every department head create their own dashboards to track arbitrary kpis with no understanding of the product or underlying data model. /s

The correct move seems to be to replace the team with a set of oracle bones. From the very limited information we have it seems to me like the team was used to justify whatever conclusions were already made before consulting them.

The whole practice is kind of a proof-of-work scheme for credibility and liability laundering: even if you intend the team/company to follow your conclusions regardless of what anyone else thinks or says, getting some analysts or outside consultants to burn non-trivial amount of time and money evaluating the situation before rubber-stamping your proposal, is what may be necessary for you to sell your ideas to the rest of the team/company. Such exercise may be especially important if you want to protect yourself from having your head served on the platter after your hare-brained idea fails spectacularly.

Who needs a data model when you can just dump a bunch of excel sheets and database dumps in a shared folder, call it a data lake, and encourage anyone who has a report to just throw it together in the free version of power bi?

> He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background

I assure you, it wasn't random. It was punitive. ;)

Honest question: how rampant is this kind of bullshit politicking in tech companies, and how does this differ with industry, size, company age, etc.? My friends who have worked at big names like F and T have described the cultures there as following: "it's as if everyone who studied too much in high school and college missed all the parties and bullshit, so they're making up for it 'on campus' here". And the stories from folks at G are not really better, though allegedly they tend to exercise politics more in the quiet-sabotage style. I feel like I'm describing races from Star Trek, company cultures are weird.

I'm pretty sure the GP was a joke.

Whoever made the decision very likely wasn't intending to punish the person. It was only the consequence.

And it is not really punishing, yet at least. He likes his new job despite the mess he was put in. He loves it because he learns so many new things (analytics, how the be a better manager, etc) and how he has managed to make his team actually deliver a lot of value to the company in spite of these problems. It is possibly that the challenge will be too big for him and it will burn him out but so far he likes it.

And, no, it is very unlikely to be intended as a punishment. More likely he got it because he was too interested in getting good reports. The usual accidental volunteering where if you are too interested in something you end up doing all the hard work.

Definitely a joke. It only FEELS punitive!

the larger the company the worse this becomes. When you hit mega level like government the IT side barely knows what the business does and has no idea what anything means. If you're lucky they may know how to support your application from completely failing. If you need any major development you need to compete against everyone else in the government for IT resources.

This is a key learning I had to learn as a manager: people learn what they need to turn their inputs to outputs well enough not to be fired. It's management's job to internalize the business and its needs and make sure that the individual contributors have an accurate mental model of the world.

I wonder what it would look like if we had people across the business working on the same problem together rather than a game of telephone, which is how these data requests end up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com