The Failed Commodification of Technical Work

Consider the Business Intelligence/Analyst roles. The industry is trying to replace people who write SQL with people who can use Tableau or similar. "Just connect to whatever datastore you have and non technical people can drag and drop."

Its got some problems:

1. They forget you need to hire many more (lower paid) people, because your output now linearly scales. Human hands have to turn the crank because its all UI-based work.

2. You still end up with very complex and disorganized business logic transform code, and now its buried in the UI. The PMs or business teams are the only ones who know what that logic is. The engineering org delivers high quality, tested datasets that are pretty raw for the purpose of answering business team questions.

The hard part was always solving the weird way business outputs are obtained from raw upstream data. Now that solution gets stored in a tableau workbook and cant be used as input for something else. It has to be copy pasted from the UI into a new tableau workbook. Well, now we bought the Tableau cloud service and our BI team can build and maintain SQL extracts in a more rigorous way. Tableau now looks like its trying to take a chunk of Databricks business here, but now its a non-engineering team doing it.

Not sure its going to work out.

“craftsman” is fine, don’t worry about it

You can't abstract away risk, you can't abstract away complexity. You can either reduce, increase or shuffle them. Shuffling with layers of abstraction is the manager class preferred approach. Which leads to tech stacks of the type - "only me and god knew in the beginning what was going on, now only god knows"

eventually it will create and publish it for you, they say... not only the package definition, but the implementation also.

I don't know exactly why, but I doubt it will.

This is a real issue I've seen at my past jobs in Support -- in theory, the better the support team got at closing issues without needing RND, the better the case load should have gotten and the better overall time for everyone involved (support, rnd, C-levels, customers). We had many huge enterprise customers using the product (usual big names across the globe), and everything was working pretty damn well and people were happy.

Then the acquisition came, hordes of new C-Levels and directors added, and suddenly, the system everyone wanted was no longer enough; we needed more out of the Support/RND team for some reason, more sales, more renewals, more special contracts with ENT clients with exhausting demands from the company. And the expectation was just "be more efficient". All of this came over slow time with small changes (back porting features for ENT clients who refused to upgrade, forbidden solutions for the Support team because "it upset the major clients", allowing sales/renewals to force RND engagement if they demanded it, new CRM because it was too hard to do marketing campaigns in the old one, even though people were calling _us_ and asking to just send them a quote they liked the product so much)

I honestly think trying to commodify and extract even more from what was a very successful system financially and just overall ended up ruining pretty much everything. Sales are slumping as are renewals, we're churning RND and Support folk, and because of slump in sales, there's belt-tightening everywhere.

We've implemented so many new systems needlessly with huge implementation/consultant fees that absolutely no one knows how to use -- workday is a prime example of this as out of the box it doesn't do _anything_ we needed, but we had to use it anyways, and absolutely no way to pay for the features we really needed. Same with ServiceNow implementation, it was supposed to be a near 0-code experience we were sold, but naturally that was not the case. Why did we get it? No idea except that it came down from on-high from persons that don't use the CRM and now we're stuck with it.

For me what it comes down to is too many people having to be like the CEO and Bill from the article -- for some reason such Clevels need to show they're doing "something", but I didn't think that something should include implementing wild changes to workflows in the company the C's know nothing about, or even worse, responding to customer complaints and demanding we "fix the issue" without knowing what the issue is.

The conference experience from the article resonates with me heavily, cause we have all these systems that do "everything but nothing", all these workflow changes without listening to the people having to use the work, it's really awful.