Lauren Balik on benn.substack

This week I joined a data Slack group. It took all of 3 days for it to devolve into influencers and vendors peddling various ideas. The high water mark was a dbt analytics engineering data influencer who sells SQL books and SQL courses and the vendors put him on their webinars and such, and he is now working on a new product he and his business partner are pitching, which they started drumming up and hyping up in the Slack, as they do on the socials. However, in the #general channel the very same dbt influencer was crowd sourcing answers about how to do a self-join in SQL, and he was fanning out expensive compute in loops. SQL 101, or if not 101, 102. That's why this will all fail and it already is. Everyone is an influencer. Everyone just changed their job title. Low interest rate data teams and gigantic stacks of tables, tables, tables and product and people are over. The YAGNI data stack is in vogue.