It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money.
What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a deliberate strategy) unless you waste time thinking they want to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it's totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if you try to do your job better.
But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc)....
Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which the org does not care about the data. But also there's probably a point where they would care! Being data driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see: the post-covid logistic crisis).
To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked them down.
I guess like...do you have the impression the data should drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?
Author here once again. I have the worst possible answer for this - most data teams that I've seen (and my network is large enough through my own socialising + my blog to be reasonably confident on this) are working on dashboards that could not conceivably be acted upon. As in, the nature of the thing they are reporting on is not susceptible to top-down intervention.
You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.
This. It's like arguing that we are wasting time with application logs because 99% of devs aren't reading them. They aren't there for your pleasure, they are there because, the one time you actually need them, you'll be sorry they aren't there.
I think this highlights the big difference between being Data Driven versus Data Reactive. If a dashboard surfaces a strategy problem; you're reacting to data. If you're forming strategy based on a dashboard; you're being driven by data.
That’s true from a top-down corporate perspective, but this blog post is addressing the perspective of an individual on the team, who is repeatedly told that the company really cares about data, and then can’t seem to understand why serious problems with the data are just ignored.
I don't think that's actually what it says though! The blog post talks about how no one looks at the data (implying that the data is not used) and it separately talks about the inconsistent and disconnected ways that companies allocate funds. It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring. Obviously if they are that's different from what I said!
> It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring.
I guess I wasn’t clear: The metrics work isn’t _revealing_ anything new, the data requested is what is produced. The fact that the data is _ignored_ means that it can have serious errors, but then nobody seems worried about correcting it except for our frustrated conscientious developer because producing the reports is a performative act. Nobody really uses the data for anything.
Are you hiring? I'm looking for a job that will allow me to explore my passions. My passions are: video games, anime, and watching youtube videos about video games and anime.
If you enjoy anime I can't think you'd get much enjoyment out of the horrifying low quality of anime YouTubers. They certainly don't seem to like it much.
One of the most popular channels is called Trash Taste in an attempt to act like it's all foreign oriental nonsense they're wallowing in.
(Although to be fair, the current anime trend is "guy who hates women gets transported to a fantasy novel where he gets a sex slave", and the previous trend was "incest romance".)
>I can't think you'd get much enjoyment out of the horrifying low quality of anime YouTubers. They certainly don't seem to like it much.
I love game reviews and they give me very different lenses on how to view video games. Even the ones that absolutely hate a game.
I have yet to really find a useful anime reviewer. There are a few videos from a few youtubers that offer some interesting insight, but seasonal anime reviewers are either poor writers/critics or are simply trying to appeal to an audience who wants to hear their opinions regurgitated. So they focus less on insightful interesting anime and more on hating [current anime trend].
>the previous trend was "incest romance"
it's still around in manga/light novels. I think the "issue" is that these days most anime use it as a small trope instead of the entire premise. Heck, even in most of the infamous examples the element wasnt omnipresent.
- 75% of OreImo is not focused at all about the romance of the siblings. In fact, the male lead dates someone else entirely in the 2nd season.
- Kiss X Sis opens up to a more general harem in the middle of the anime and that MC dates the teacher for a while (SPOILERS I guess, for anime only. But that anime is a decade+ out and the manga ended 2 years ago. You're not getting that arc animated).
- Domestic girlfriend is the most recent and probably tamest example. Yes, I guess it's technically incest to date your new 17YO stepsister that you had sex with before you even knew your parents were getting married. We're well past Westermarck effect though.
What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a deliberate strategy) unless you waste time thinking they want to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it's totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if you try to do your job better.
(Excellent critique though.)