Full of contempt, she refused to talk to the engineers

&gt; Robin: The COO can’t waste time trying to track down some engineer and talk to them about… uh… God knows what.<p>At my first job (infrastructure monitoring, 24&#x2F;7 shifts) the COO appeared one morning at 7:30 am in the office because he had seen a ticket opened a few minutes before from a particularly annoying but important client.<p>He proceeded to give us some additional context on that client, added some clues about their infra and we went on our way to handle the case. In all this he was knowledgeable and kind. I have a fond memories of that man.<p>Holger if you’re reading this, you’re great.

&gt; The whole company was dependent on the internal content management system (the CMS). It was built from scratch using the Ruby on Rails framework. Robin had overseen its development. Various teams had been working on it for 7 years.<p>Hahaha, oof. Tale as old as time, and I mean <i>specifically this exact thing</i>: Rails, passing through the hands of multiple teams, some or all outsourced. Anyone who&#x27;s seen this before knows exactly what that codebase was like to work on.

I have to confess I don’t know what a data lake is. Halfway between a data puddle and a data ocean? There’s a lot of terms in this industry that you can avoid if you don’t work on that specific subset of functionality.<p>I do wonder if the marketing data from a 150-person org wouldn’t fit on a good old-fashioned database server. No need to get your feet wet.

If that “data lake” is going to be less than 100 GB, all these people are idiots.

Once you threaten to fire someone (company or otherwise) a few times, <i>they have already quit</i> even if they continue to show up and collect the checks.

&gt; Sadly, I was unable to convince Robin that she should change her habits. In 2018 the Board Of Directors fired her. She had wasted 9 years and millions of dollars building a CMS that still lacked crucial features that the staff needed, and so she had done great harm to the organization.<p>This reminds of the System Engineering Maxim &quot;User rejection is the number one cause for system failure&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t know that that is 100% correct, but I think one of the strengths of iterative processes is regular customer input &amp; fast feedback loops

The good thing about anecdotes is that they convey an idea in a concise manner. The bad thing about anecdotes is that they convey someone&#x27;s idea about a real thing which we don&#x27;t know about and have to rely on their storytelling which is usually self serving and rather subjective.<p>We don&#x27;t know so many things about the project that all the solutions I see in the comments could be wrong for one reason or another.

Lot of comments here regarding how to implement the solution, but IMHO, The key takeaway was at the end -<p>&gt; Respectful leadership pays dividends in all circumstances. But it especially pays dividends when we are talking about the relationship between top leadership and those teams on whom they are utterly dependent. Respectful Leadership does not mean that you have to spend your time listening to everyone in the organization — in a large enough organization that is not even possible. But it does mean that when you are dependent on someone’s work, you commit to working with them in good faith, and you make time to hear their concerns and their suggestions.

For a question that ought to be one SQL query.

Is Open Verse real? Or is thar a fictional tale to make a point?

This was a bizarre thing to read. I felt like it was straight out of the uncanny valley of human interaction. “No one talks this way!” I thought. Except for that little voice in the back of my head that reminded that, yeah, some people do actually talk this way, and reading this feels like I’ve crash-landed on a planet full of them.<p>Regardless, “data lake” is a fucking stupid and nonsensical metaphor.

Robin seems like a dysfunctional leader.<p>I would interpret the first conversation as a giant red flag and get the hell out of there. Unless you&#x27;re getting paid stupid amount of consulting dollars, it isn&#x27;t worth the time dealing with COOs with inflated egos.<p>Milk it if you need the money, but avoid putting your reputation or long-term goals on the line for people like that.

Can&#x27;t they just use QuickBooks &quot;Marketing&quot; line?<p>Full of contempt, he refused to open QuickBooks.

Oh, so <i>this</i> is how my PII winds up in any number of jointly shared &quot;data lakes&quot;...<p><i>Amelia: Okay, but what does this project involve? I mean, really? Have you thought about the details? You want us to get all of your Facebook data, all of your Google Ad Words data, all of your Amazon data, all of your print data? And your entire catalog? And all of your sales data? That’s an enormous amount of data.</i><p><i>Me: Oh, I see. You need a place to put it.</i><p><i>Amelia: We need a place to put it. So we are going to build our own, internal data lake, and we will put your data there. But I’m thinking, wait, does that make sense? We build a private data lake full of your data? Won’t you want access to that data lake?</i><p><i>Me: Yes, of course. If it’s our data, then we would want access to the data lake.</i><p><i>Amelia: That’s what I’m thinking.</i><p><i>Me: Since you have to do it anyway.</i><p><i>Amelia: Exactly. There is no other way we can do it.</i><p>what I&#x27;m thinking is that there is another way to do it.

Umm... Robin is a terrible leader. Next.

Ruby on Rails does suck. A lot.

&quot;Please note, this is not a rant about out-sourcing.&quot;<p>This should have been a rant about out-sourcing. If understanding what they are spending money on is not a core requirement for a capitalist organization, I&#x27;m not sure what could count as one.<p>The business needs a database, the database needs someone competent in SQL along with some basic accounting and finance education.

… or he could have just made a simple report like she asked. A very cringey take down of someone just asking for basic information a COO would logically need to do her job. A good developer would have got that work done without being so obtuse.