97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know

Chapter 76. The Six Words That Will Destroy Your Career

Bartosz Mikulski

Six words can destroy your credibility and jeopardize your career: “This number does not look correct.” When you hear those words, it is already too late. People don’t trust you anymore. They are suspicious about everything you have done so far. Suddenly, you become a person who makes mistakes—the person who has probably been feeding us false data for years.

Is there anything to worry about? What if the timing was terrible, and somebody recently made a wrong decision that caused the company to lose tons of money? Suddenly, every decision becomes data driven. Even the people who ignored the data for years claim that they were making data-driven decisions. The problem is that the data is incorrect.

The data is wrong because you have made a mistake! Congratulations! You’ve been promoted to a scapegoat! Everybody in the company is going to know your name. You have just become the Excuse of the Year.

Do you want that? No? What are you doing to avoid such a situation? How often are “hope” and “luck” a vital part of the data pipeline? We hope that the data format does not change. If we get lucky, the files get uploaded before we generate the report for the CEO. Of course, if it fails, we have a person who restarts it manually, and nobody notices the problem.

Data engineering is no different from other branches of ...