Hire the Right People

  • I think you're splitting hairs here Steve. The point of that particular item was to say, "Hey, maybe you should of actually hired someone who works in development/engineering/whatever instead of a person who is the number cruncher."

    Just using me for reference here. I have a team of data engineers. They are data engineers on paper. We work with data scientist. We do the ETL, they aggregate the data and extract the insights. We use entirely different tools sometimes. The one tool that connects us is SQL Server.

    To get hung up on data engineer versus data scientist versus business analyst versus business intelligence developer versus DBA is a really silly argument because there is no real standard. Because there is no standard, doesn't make those of us with data engineers irrelevant to those who are DBA's or the other way around.

    I can tell you off the bat though, just for argument sake, I focus most of my efforts on building infrastructures, data flows and data applications. I'm not a DBA. I don't want to worry about the security model, backups, performance of the services and HA. This is what it means to me to be a DBA, not a data engineer.

    However, that does not mean somewhere that DBA's are doing ETL, SQL development and even programming in Python, C# or whatever too. DBA's are mostly extremely smart IT professionals who just about do anything. It just means times are changing and titles are starting to evolve using the same stuff we've always used, but trying to have some separation without slapping DBA on everyone who works with data.

  • I hear what you're saying, but I'm not hung up on titles. I was trying (perhaps poorly) to make the point that we want to try and hire people that have skills that we need, or train those that can have them, but not just assume anyone can do any job.

    Perhaps I'm splitting hairs, or just communicating poorly. I think what I would hope is that we would exercise some judgment and try to make a good decision on when to re-train someone or just hire another that has more skills in an area.

Viewing 2 posts - 16 through 16 (of 16 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply