I think your answer basically proves his point that we are becoming a highly entitled group of people. We struggle to empathize with other workers and, I would say, companies and managers. We tell ourselves this very simplistic stories like "all managers are bad", "all office work is a waste of time", "I should just get tasks on my async proj manager tool". I am telling you, with this level of entitlement, just hope the tech industry keeps growing so the job market remains an employees' market.
You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions. Money is definitely being “stolen”, it’s just a more sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based models.
Yes Italians cheat on taxes, but on the total Italy is the 6th country in the world in terms of GDP/tax ratio. To give you an idea, Italy is just a bit below Nordic countries. In fact, the Italian government is quite effective in collecting taxes.
Since I have been running my company 2.5 years now, a quick reminder: employees expect yearly salary increases, tech employees have very high salary growth expectations. You can explain to me how to make employees happy without "infinite growth", as you are there, please also help me understand how a company is to secure their sustainability without growth with expected positive inflation.
No, it's a joke that you tell me it's ok to pay for something with no clear ROI. Feel free to live in fantasy land, but when you run a business cost counts, this is exactly what I dislike about tech, a lot of talk, but 0 accountability when it comes to how they actually impact the bottom line.
Look, I am going to wait and see on this, maybe new facts will make me reconsider. In the meanwhile, github Copilot is just cost to my company, haven't seen much additional productivity. I guess my concern, given how hard is to hire developers and technologists, is replacing simpler job roles, like a customer service representative, with complicated new ones, like "MLOps Engineer".
AI hype is really problematic in Enterprise. Big companies are now spending C executive time figuring out a company "AI strategy". This is going to be another cycle of money-wasted/biz-upset, very similar to what I have seen with Big data. The thing in Enterprise is that everyone serious about biz operations knows AI test scores and AI quality is not there, but very few are able to communicate these concerns in a constructive way, rather everyone is embracing the hype because, maybe they get a promotion? Tech, as usual, is very happy to feed the hype and never, as usual, telling businesses honestly that, at best, this is an incremental productivity improvement, nothing life changing. I think the issue is overall lack of honesty, professionalism, and accountability across the board, with tech leading this terrible way of pushing product and "adding value".
They mainly use Excel spreadsheets, but Excel supports add-ons in Typescript now (haven't tried building one though). This is data like invoices, bank transactions, accounting postings, cost center data, cost center mappings, income statement, balance sheet.
This is a great use of ML! I run a data engineering company, but in the past I worked as a controller and I think Finance controllers need better tools. Your idea of embedding ML into the spreadsheet is really a good one. I can see accounting teams and controllers using a tool like yours to control expenses, reconcile bank transactions, manage cost categories for management reporting.
I mean, let's be serious for a second, MS PowerApps, an Enterprise tool every CIO knows by now is potentially cheaper than Retool's unknown Enterprise price: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
There is not much to talk about, I don't see it, maybe Retool is targeting a different ICP. I don't see how a CIO would go for Retool when they can reach for PowerApps which is also potentially cheaper. PowerApps also integrates with the rest of the MS stack.
I am not saying I like it, I prefer Slack over MS Teams too, but Retool is a very hard pitch right now for Enterprise, and I don't see AI driving any points in that discussion.
Let me give you some bullets on DataFactory (DF) because it is a question I get a lot.
- DF is quite hard to operationalize, the logging is not so good, Python stack traces are easier to debug and logging can get as detailed as needed
- DF lacks connectors for data ingestion, this is easy in Python as on average a custom connector takes a week or two to develop
- DF is not data pipelines as code and it is becoming really hard to manage governance and change management on UI based ETL tools
- It is hard to enforce best practices on DF. We are finding it is easy to enforce standard ways of writing and managing SQL models and metadata with a combo of dbt and a dbt-ready data catalog
Connectivity was the hardest part, we had to write Python connectors for a variety of ERP systems. We have a 1 server setup where we run duckdb and Python scripts, we monitor and orchestrate with Prefect but you can use one of the many Python orchestration tools. We load the finished data marts to a MS SQL server and users connect to it via PowerBI or Excel.
Agreed, not completely on duckdb but we used it for consolidating billing data from 10+ ERP systems and it works, so I see his point. Just to add to his points:
- Integrations are still one of the hardest things in Enterprise IT. Snowflake/Databricks/etc in fact add to the number of systems to integrate, they make this problem worst most of the times
- Governance in a self-service data ecosystem gets complicated fast, especially if you need to stay compliant with data privacy, gdpr, etc.. And amazingly again neither Snowflake nor Databricks solve this. In fact, they make it worst by sucking up budget away from governance initiatives
Coming from Enterprise and having used Retool ~3 years, I am also buffled… low code biz apps is one of those product categories that seems good initally, especially if you never worked for a Corporation, but it is really not. These tools normally don’t do governance, testing, security, users management, that well, which puts them in direct competition with MS Access. If you think MS Access is old and not web based, just use it’s evolution: MS Power Apps. Can you compete in this area? Sure, but at 100$ per seat prices, about 3-5 times less these low code tools demand. By the way, I have been quite pleased with Flask Appbuilder, which has a clean approach to crud apps, has good governance, and it is truly open source.
The biggest issue for me is people using kafka for mqtt, mqtt is a pub/sub broker already. The other issue is thinking of Kafka as some kind of “innovative” data ingestion tool, so now instead of 50 extract jobs per day, you got to reconcile millions of events in realtime. I think message brokers make sense, but they are message brokers, nothing else, no?
We will see what statistics say and what the trend will be in a few years, but if labor goes up for the same output then mathematically productivity has to go down, which has a variety of consequences, but I can think of 1) less capital market yields; 2) less tax income from governments. Both 1 and 2 have nasty impacts on pensions. I am not saying one way of thinking is better, I am just pointing out the obvious fact that there is no free lunch. Workers might get a better deal now, to be handed a bad one when they retire. Unless technology comes to the rescue and helps us keep increasing productivity, but it’s not realistic to rely only on tech.
Please, look into your use cases and keep asking "why", why do I need Kafka? Kafka is a beast of a tool. Example, I have seen people using Kafka after an MQTT broker, because... Kafka has an MQTT connector. Well, MQTT is a pub/sub architecture, so you are putting a pub/sub (Kafka) after another pub/sub MQTT, you need to be aware of that and need to think it thru if it makes sense for your use cases.
Maybe short term, but long term I am really not that convinced any longer. Forcing the UI approach everywhere has a cost, these tools are terrible for operations. You can automate code testing, deployment and ops and have really good operations as a consequence. You will never be able to do that with spreadsheets or more horrible stuff like Power Apps. Just see how many millions of people are hired to manage all these UI clicky things offshore and how much mess it creates for business ops.
Anyone understands why the Australian senators are attacking Deloitte's executive compensations instead of the government leadership that signed the pricey contracts with consulting suppliers in the first place?
The issue is externalities. It's not a 100% free market because actors are not paying for Co2 emissions and pollution. If we had a carbon tax and that cost was part of the price of smartphones, I would be close to agreeing with you.
You will not like the answer, but it's the face to face trust and relationship you build with them over time. I know, I know, it's not a perfect logical answer, but it's been working like this well enough for longer than 100% remote options were so common. I am not saying I am right and I am not saying remote is bad, I am just saying this isn't a black and white topic yet, maybe one it will be, right now we should be OK to say "ok it might be good in some cases, but not all cases".
Have you got experience on this? Because I have seen it first hand and reliability goes down with remote, people can leave anytime which happens less if you have developed a face to face rapport. No I don't have numbers, but neither you do? This is my point, there is no black and white here and it should be normal to discuss the topic. I fear too many people are jumping into this "remote is better" without putting enough thought into it.
I think this WFH articles are generilizing too much. Remote work is challenging for companies that, and I need to say this, in the end must deliver predictable realiable value to their customers at reasonable prices. There are safety, security and trust problems to mention 3 very important things in 2023 with remote work. Just imagine what can happen if you need to fire an employee and they must give you back the work laptop with sensitive data… but they are working from a remote beach in Thailand. Best case they collaborate. Worst case they sell the laptop to hackers. This doesn’t mean remote work is doomed or bad, it just means we are dealing with a complex issue, it’s not going to be a black/white solution.
I consult in Enterprise and these tools are technologically great, but their company strategies make them impossible to scale. Their pricing model usually makes them too expensive since they normally are a small part of a bigger solution which has a lot of components to it (including labor…). They also have a very small ecosystem compared to open source frameworks in python, javascript and so on, this means talent will be harder to hire and consulting and outsourcing will be more expensive. Finally, they have a tendency to play with pricing, so you never know what you will pay in 1-2-3 years.