[mfdupuis]

Love DuckDB. Definitely a great place to start.

> A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores

I think this extends beyond just engineering, and I wish more data teams made the raw data (or at least some clean, subset) more readily available for folks across organizations to explore. I've been part of orgs where I had access to read-only replicas, and I quickly got comfortable querying and analyzing data on my own, and I've been part of other orgs where everything had to go through the data team, and I had to be spoon-fed all the data and insights.

[ryanwaldorf]

Totally agree. In my last job I was able to create my own ETL jobs as a PM to get data for my own analyses and figured out a fairly minor configuration change could save us $10M per year. It was from one of many random ETL jobs I created myself out of curiosity that, if I had been forced to rely on other people, I may not ever have created.

[wjnc]

If you’d just had a business controller, you’d have x*$10M saved and have more time for your PM-role.

Yes, calling BS on leadership running their own SQL. Bring strategy and tactics, find good people, create clear roles and expectations and sure don’t get lost in running naive scripts you’ve written because you can do all roles better than the people actually occupying those roles.

[mble_]

Agreed, if you have the budget for it. There are often times where living off the land is necessary.

[wjnc]

I know nothing about working in small firms. So that is probably very true. The smaller the firm, the more you do yourself. But ... if a company can save $ 10 mln. ... it can afford a set of financials.