Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL
<i>... a highly specialized team of dedicated engineers...If they are not bored, chances are they are pretty mediocre. Mediocre engineers really excel at building enormously over complicated, awful-to-work-with messes they call “solutions”.</i><p>OMG, the author just described the last place I was at. Processed a few Tb of data and suddenly there's this R. Goldbergesque system of MongoDb getting transformed into PostGres...oh, wait, I need Cassandra on my resume, so Mongo sux0r now...displayed with some of the worst bowl of spaghetti Android code I've witnessed. The technical debt hole was dug so deep you could hide an Abrams tank in there. To this day I could not tell you the confused thinking that led them to believe this was necessary rather than just slapping it all into PostGres and calling it a day.<p>All because they were processing data sets sooooo huge, that they would fit on my laptop.<p>I quit reading about the time the article turned into a pitch for Stitch Fix, but leading up to that point it made a good case for what happens when companies think they have "big data" when they really don't. In summary, either a company hires skills they don't really need and the hires end up bored, or you hire mediocre people that make the convoluted mess I worked with.