I recently made the difficult (albeit highly privileged) choice to leave my most recent job as a data analyst to start a new role as a technical instructor instead. This week, I offer up a retro of my last job as I look ahead to starting this new one. Full disclosure though—specific and especially private negative details aren’t gonna get shared here. I don’t know if you know this, dear reader, but the internet is not and should not be a repository of every single one of life’s details. I reserve the right to wear as rosy colored of glasses as I damn well please.

Year 1

Winter

I haven’t been a classroom teacher since 2018, but I still think of jobs in terms of a somewhat offset school year. Winter is when annual planning kicks off anyways, so it ends up being a time of year where you finish up yearlong projects and think ahead to the next year. I like that pace, and winter/late fall has usually been right around when I’ve taken stock of my life and my work.

It also helps that financial budgets apparently reset in September, so right around then can be a convenient time to look for work. I found the listing for my analyst job just before September hit and ended up being the first applicant. I don’t think being first in the door got me the job, but it definitely got me noticed.

Ramping up to a new job in the winter wasn’t a bad time to start. It felt like easing into a new position. There were projects for me to do and help finish up, but I mostly got to participate in vision-casting for the year ahead. It was also a good time of year to really get acquainted with what the business actually did, and personally, I needed the ramp-up time to understand how the hell to speak corporate-ese.

Spring

By the spring of year 1, we had also hired and ramped a data engineer. He and I were hired, in part, to build our company’s data stack from the ground up. I knew from the get-go this would be a big part of what I was hired for, and I was totally raring to go. Irritating vendor calls be damned1, I was gonna get to build something that would have a tangible impact on this company long after I left.

Boy did we build. And, looking back on the whole process, I think we made mostly durable decisions. There’s definitely been a handful of things we had to rework and re-think through as the data needs of the org grew and matured, but overall, we made pretty durable choices. Seeing the architectural calls we made as a dynamic duo more or less stand the test of time was incredibly satisfying work.

Plus, that kind of close collaboration in service of a big, data construction-y project like that? It’s hard to come by, and I’m grateful as hell for the experience. I remember giving my boss an update on the progress of the data stack construction project and had mentioned that our data engineer and I had spent a chunky amount of time debugging something, and he goes “Yeah I know, you guys are besties.”

I hope all the analysts in my life get a chance to have their own data engineer bestie to learn from. It’s a totally different way of thinking about data, and it really hardened my technical skills in a huge way.

Summer

Our stack was set up, and it was finally time to use it! It wasn’t until this point that I started to understand the pain that my data fam around the world had already been experiencing in terms of project setup and management.

Before having our own data stack, any analytics project was generally on the longer side of things. Most of the time, “quick number pulls” weren’t an option. But with the holy trinity of Databricks, dbt, and Looker? I could pull numbers SO FAST. And I did. I gave out those fast numbers like they were candy, baby.

Should I have? No. Would it have saved me tons of time to simply slow down and think about process around analytics requests instead of bounding around the organization like a 10 month old golden retriever, entirely too eager to please? Yes. Yes, that would have been MUCH BETTER. Unfortunately, with less than a year under my belt and my most recent project being a build-y instead of process-y one, this just didn’t occur to me2.

Fall

However, what I lack in foresight, I quickly make up for in pattern recognition. By the fall and the closing of my first year as an analyst, patterns had emerged. I was quickly starting to tire of getting the same requests over and over again, the same themes popping up constantly, with seemingly no way out.

This fall was also the first year I attended Coalesce. I listened to talk after talk with other analysts experiencing the exact same pain points as me, and many of them sharing strategies they had come up with to try to remedy these issues. This was absolutely fucking inspiring. When was the last time you had someone tell you they were experiencing the exact same bullshit as you and that they were willing to tell you how they fixed it?! Shit is intoxicating, man. I went home full of ideas and fervor. Some of them actually stuck.

My favorite idea that stuck in the fall was my implementation of PR templates on the data team. There’s a few ways to skin this cat, but overall I can’t recommend PR templates enough if you don’t already use them. They’ve been amazing for my work quality overall. It also does a lot for team identity when you firmly and respectfully hold each other to high standards.

Year 2

Winter

It’s kind of amazing how startup time is like dog years. After a full year under my belt, I felt like I had pretty excellent clarity on our goals for the following year, what I needed to improve on professionally, and our vision as a team. I came back from Coalesce with fire in my eyes. I spearheaded a data catalog project at work to start reigning in our data quality and improve our data literacy, and it earned me a promotion.

The data catalog project was fun to implement and put together3. I got a crash course in writing for an executive audience, negotiating with vendors, and being convincing on the business value of a product that was going to cost our organization (not insignificant) money over the course of the contract year. I was in charge of the project, but I was well-supported by the data team.

And furthermore, I had a boss who was looking out for when his team members were performing above and beyond their current title. He was proactive about it, and it was incredibly validating and exciting to know that my boss was watching and appreciating my work in that way. I didn’t have to beg for a promotion. I performed at a high level, and was awarded one. I know that’s not the case at every org—so I’m grateful it was the case at mine.

Spring

Spring brought tough times, both professionally and personally. While writing this, I literally googled “quotes about Spring being hard” and everything that godforsaken search engine turned up was hopeful quotes about Spring.

Well, I’m glad Spring is all about blooming and new beginnings and shit for some people. For me, Spring was a harsh exposure of sun and heat and icy runoff all at once, when what I needed was the insulation, hibernation, and steadiness of winter. Spring in Colorado comes in fits and starts. You’re equally likely to have a city-stopping bomb cyclone as you are to have a gorgeous, 70-degree, park-worthy day. It’s chaos.

Similarly, Spring brought thorny technical and business problems that were just no easy task to solve. Our team banged our heads against the same problem for months, struggling to find a decent solution to it. The macroeconomic climate brought anxiety and increased tensions, and we struggled.

Sometimes it’s like that. No need to make bones about it or try to find a silver lining—sometimes it rains and there isn’t much you can do but wait for the clouds to clear up.

Summer

We found some steadier footing in the summer, especially as the weather stabilized. The seemingly unsolvable problem we had been banging our heads about in the Spring had a new leader (who was not me). I learned the tough lesson that just because I love to take charge of projects does not mean I’m always the right person to take charge.

Turned out that handing the reins off to someone more experienced meant the problem simplified a significant amount. It’s funny how more years of experience seems to guide you towards simpler solutions, and how those simple solutions are incredibly hard to find sometimes. My ego was certainly bruised having to cry uncle on this problem. But honestly, it wasn’t that bad. My analyst counterpart is a good person through and through who has no interest in ego games or in jockeying for position. I told him I was out of my depth. He agreed to take over, but still involved me heavily in solutioning so I could understand where I fell out of my depth and try to avoid that next time around.

Another big transition in the summer was us starting to find a regular, external audience for our analytics products. I had shown customers data stuff before this, but it was generally on a one-off, consultant type basis. Having customers get data from my Looker dashboards (aka, my babies) was a whole new level of vulnerability and a massive level up in my attention to detail.

Data products are all fun and games until your external customer is the one asking you why the numbers don’t match. Don’t go there, kids. It’s a dark pathway!!!

Fall

Ah, fall. Most of what we intended to accomplish in the year was done. We’d had a difficult year—the economy has not been kind to pretty much any players in the tech space. The data team was still dogged about making time for each other in the form of our biweekly team lunches, and our spectacularly unhinged team chat. There has been more than one time where the data team chat was so deep fried and smooth-brained that I was literally in hysterics over the chat and tried completely fruitlessly to explain to my bewildered partner why butter lettuce and disciplinary action over $400k of imaginary data products purchased was so fucking funny to me.

This fall, we did a lot of process hardening, best-practice forming and vision casting for the year ahead. A time of year I truly enjoy enjoy, as a certified Corporate Girlie.

So when I was offered a Sr Technical Instructor position, I truly found myself in a (beyond privileged) pickle. 2 years as a data analyst has completely turned my technical acumen into valuable, marketable skills. I’ve got some business sense, and it ain’t bad. I’ve spearheaded cool projects and learned a ton from the ones I failed on. The work I was doing at my last job was in service of an incredibly worthy goal. The team I was on had supported me through what have legitimately been the most difficult days I’ve experienced in my life so far—and I’ve seen some shit, dude.

And? I missed doing more regular teaching. Analysts are educators in many ways, but teaching isn’t really a staple of the job. An opportunity for me to teach folks technical best practices in a tool I love, and to have it all be in my favorite language (SQL)? And to have it all be at a company I’ve also admired for quite some time? That is impossible to pass up, so I didn’t.

I promised myself I’d keep it together when I told my boss the news, but I absolutely didn’t. I’m too much of an emotional bitch for that, much to the dismay of my Capricorn heritage. Lucky for me, it’s not the first time I’ve gotten emotional in a meeting, and my boss wasn’t phased4.

And, shockingly, I’m not the first person in the world to quit a job. Turns out if you make a good transition plan, respect the order in which your boss wants you to tell people that you’re leaving, you can leave on good terms.

So, last job retro? Man, it was a good one. I’m going to miss it a ton. Data team homies, you’re actually unforgettable. Thanks for making my life better and supporting me while I launch to the next thing.

See you next week for some thoughts on Coalesce 2023. In the meantime, subscribe, tell your friends, pet your cat. You know the drill.

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1

My unsolicited advice to vendors is to ballpark your pricing on the first damn call. Like I swear to god if you are going to make me book a 2nd fucking call before I even know if I can afford your product at all? I’m gonna scream. It’s such a shitty tactic and I’ve run into it so many times throughout the MDS. Most small-to-midsize startups know that if a data SaaS tool is above like X dollar amount per year, they’re not getting approval. Just give them a damn ballpark so they know if you’re even an option like good lord.

2

honestly every time i’ve run into something at work or in life that seemed like a Big Problem, the person causing the Big Problem just wasn’t thinking things through all the way. good to know we’re all prone to smoothbrain moments, i guess?

3

Honestly? Shoutout to Select Star. Minimally painful sales process, reasonably priced product for our midsized startup use case, and a kickass CS team that were helpful and personable and prompt. Can’t ask for better than that.

4

For all you boomers out there, I wasn’t a sobbing mess. Just the whole crying-while-talking thing. It happens, and emotions exist in the workplace. Shocking, I know.