How Good Do You Need To Be At Your Job?

Joe's Nerdy Rants #51 - Weekend reads and other stuff

Sep 07, 2024

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I recently chatted with a friend who’s been a commercial pilot for 30+ years. He brought up an interesting point. For pilots, there’s a limit to how good you can get. The maximum expectation is to move your cargo from point A to point B safely. This means 1) the passengers or cargo are in good shape and safe, 2) you don’t crash the plane. As long as you can do those two things, with #2 being the most important, you’ve done your job.

My friend says flying gets boring once you’ve hit a certain level. There’s also a ceiling on pay. Boredom and a pay ceiling are big reasons pilots burn out and quit. It’s not like you’ll get a bonus for doing rolls in a full-passenger plane at 30,000 feet. That defies the safety protocol of #1, and doing that will get you fired.

In tech, there’s the mythology of the “10x engineer,” many standard deviations above other engineers in skill, competence, and execution. It got me thinking - what’s a 10x pilot? Maybe the one who can land a plane in gnarly circumstances, like Sully Sullenberger, who landed a plane in the Hudson River. That takes great skill and temperament. My friend told me about how he’s expected to be able to land a plane in various situations and at different altitudes. For instance, if one of your engines blows out at 30,000 feet, how do you navigate the aircraft to safety amidst turbulence? What about if you just took off and both of your engines stopped? Now, the plane is a glider, and you had better find a flat surface or water in the next few seconds. So, a pilot needs to have an arsenal of skills and nerves in the extremely rare case something happens. But they’re not expected to be 10x’ing as a pilot every day. That would be weird and probably very concerning for passengers.

After pondering the 10x pilot, I wondered how good you must be in any job. Some jobs, like those in tech and data, often require you to keep pushing your skills forward and stay on top of advancements in the field. This also varies, depending on where you work and the nature of your work, but by and large, this statement is true. Other jobs, like being a pilot, require regular training so you don’t lose the skills you have. But it’s not like you have to re-learn your craft every few years, like in tech.

Here, we have two opposite expectations—one where you constantly reevaluate your skills to execute and deliver daily, and another where you retain your skills in case of rare events. In both cases, assuming you’re employed, you’re good enough for your job by definition.

How good do you need to be at your job?

The legendary Andrew Ng joins us for the Monday Morning Data Chat on September 16! We’re talking about how data engineering is key to data-centric AI. Watch it on YouTube or LinkedIn.

Also, my Data Engineering Professional Certificate drops on Coursera on September 18th! Shoutout to the amazing people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.

On another note, the very popular Data Therapy Session calendar is posted here. It’s an incredible group where you can share your experiences with data - good and bad - in a judgment-free place with other data professionals. If you’re interested in regularly attending, add it to your calendar.

Hope you have a fun weekend!

Thanks,

Joe

P.S. If you haven’t done so, please sign up for Practical Data Modeling. There are lots of great discussions on data modeling, and I’ll also be releasing early drafts of chapters for my new data modeling book here. Thanks!

Cool Weekend Reads

Founder Mode (Paul Graham) - This article got a LOT of attention. I might write about my thoughts at some point, once it’s clearer what founder mode means.

The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers (SSRN)

Bill Gates Talks to CNET About AI, Misinformation and Climate Change (CNET)

The dawn of a new startup era (Gian Segato)

Was Linguistic A.I. Created by Accident? (The New Yorker)

State and time are the same thing (Buttondown)

Unified Grid: How We Re-Architected Slack for Our Largest Customers (Slack Engineering)

How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing (FT)

Buy, Pose, Post: a semi-triumphant return of physical media (Posting Nexus)

New Show & Upcoming Events

The Joe Reis Show

5 Minute Friday - How Good Do You Need To Be? (Spotify)

Jordan Tigani - Why Small Data is Awesome, DuckDB, and More (Spotify)

Demetrios Brinkmann - AI Hype vs Reality, Building a Global Community, and More (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Zero-Sum vs Positive Sum Games (Spotify)

Vinoo Ganesh - Strong Open Source Communities (Spotify)

Lekhana Reddy - Building Technology Mindfully (Spotify)

Nik Suresh Will F*cking Piledrive You If You Say AI Again (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - 5 Minute Friday - Most Companies Want to do AI, Most are Barely Doing BI (Spotify)

Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.

Monday Morning Data Chat

Tevje Olin - What Should Data Engineers Focus On? (Spotify, YouTube)

Rob Harmon - Small Data, Efficiency, and Data Modeling (Spotify, YouTube)

Joe Reis & Matt Housley - The Return of the Show! (Spotify, YouTube)

Nick Schrock & Wes McKinney - Composable Data Stacks and more (Spotify, YouTube)

Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)

Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)

Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Events I’m At

SLC Low Key Happy Hour - Salt Lake City. September 10. Register here

MLOps Community - Data Engineering for AI/ML (Virtual). September 12. Register here

Big Data London - London, UK. September 18-19. Register here

DataEngBytes - Australia/New Zealand. September 24 - October 4. Register here

dbt Coalesce - Las Vegas. October 7-10. Register here

Helsinki Data Week - Helsinki, Finland. October 28 - November 1. Register here

NYC - TBA. November 13.

Forward Data Conference -Paris, France. November 25. Register here

AWS ReInvent - Las Vegas. Early December. Doing the after-conference scene. Let’s meet up.

CES - Las Vegas. Early January 2025.

Data Day Texas - Austin, TX. January 25, 2025. Register here

Data Modeling Zone - Arizona. March 4, 2025. Register here

Winter Data Conference - Austria. March 7, 2025. Register here

Netherlands - TBA. April 2025

Much more to be announced soon…

Thanks! If you want to help out…

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You can also find me here:

Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted.
My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted and free of shilling.
Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.