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Reply All for Friday fun!

Based on a true story! There is nothing like one of these “Reply All” emails to light up a boring Friday afternoon at work! People who do “Reply All” to “Reply All” emails, fall into these categories:

  1. Politely asks to be taken off the list.
  2. Angry people.
  3. Those who want to help others by showing them how to ignore/delete emails.
  4. Those who do it just to keep it alive for more fun.
  5. Those who don’t understand how “Reply All” works.

and people can be in more than one of these groups at the same time. 🙂

Do you know who a data scientist is?

Recently I have been pondering if there are people who consider themselves pure data scientists without a hint of data engineering skills. If you never prepare data, wouldn’t that make you an analyst? Maybe data scientist are the analysts with special skills just like in science fiction movies! Ok, maybe in really large organizations, the roles can be separated but more often than not I see the same person doing soups to nuts!

History repeats itself

It has been a while since my last post. My head has been in the cloud, literally and figuratively.

Here are a few lessons I have learned:

  1. No matter how amazing of a development team you have, management can run entire projects into ground by not providing support, direction, or not having the ability to make decisions.
  2. Assigning the same project to two teams under the same management is not a healthy or productive way of creating motivation or progress.
  3. Don’t make two peer teams decide whose work is better. You need a tie breaker and if you cannot be the tie breaker, refer to item 2. Don’t create this situation in the first place.
  4. Agile does not work for everything as much as we want it. Go ahead and debate that agile is not implemented correctly in most cases… For a second, let’s assume you are right. In that case, why do we keep using something that is so hard to implement and is misused so frequently? Maybe we need something else or nothing at all.
  5. Calling a team agile and holding daily calls does not turn the team or their work agile.
  6. What’s worse than waterfall? Traversing waterfalls with agility with no real consumer waiting at the end.