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Understand data engineering before Buy-In IT

Gaurav Gurjar
5 min readOct 29, 2022

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IT is a support function. Understand the business problem and return on investment of your time before writing a data pipeline.
(Comment on Hacker News)

People on your team are going to ask you what data will be in your data model. That is sensible because coveting is hard. How you presuppose what you model will be is good (here are some examples), but at what level do you chat about modelling question?

Answers

“If we’re not doing that much, we don’t need a data model.”

This is one of the worst response that an engineer can ever give to a modelling question. Data is about understanding and improving a business’s processes.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

“Models get in the way of development.”

Developers may feel like it gets in the way. However, if models are completed early in development, they are waiting for business input. So development continues to go and models complete later. Additionally, if needs change, the models are good for both development and operations. And if you have documentation, you can switch a model as needs change.

“Models are hard.”

If models take time to create and maintain, then so be it. Modelling is hard, but it hurts more productive code being spread across…

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Gaurav Gurjar
Gaurav Gurjar

Written by Gaurav Gurjar

I share compassion with people, data and business intelligence. Contributed to data products worth of $2M-$20M, Wrangled data size of 10KB-20PB

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