The Power of Mentorship

Joe's Nerdy Rants #58 - Mentors matter, plus weekend reads and other stuff

Bill Inmon and his “little brother”

When I first got into the data field decades ago, I often heard about things called “Inmin,” “Kimbowl,” and “data warehousing.” Frankly, I didn't think much about those things at the time. My background was in math and stats, and I was more into programming in Matlab. I begrudgingly accepted the Lord Savior Excel into my life. At some point, I found data warehousing. I just figured it was another place to plop data, do analysis, and make some neat graphs.

A few years ago, a friend introduced me to Bill Inmon. By then, I was very familiar with him and his contributions to the data industry. I flew to Denver to meet Bill, and we hit it off immediately. It turns out we’ve got a very similar background. We are math nerds and have spent time in El Paso, worked on ranches, etc. This turned into a strong friendship for both of us and mentorship for me (I teach him new things, but it’s very disproportionate to what he teaches me).

This week, I was supposed to be at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, which is only a 50-minute flight for me. However, that wasn’t in the cards (bad Vegas pun). This Fall, I traveled the globe, attended conferences every week, and met many people. So much so that I was exhausted. I needed a break from crowds and wanted the company of close friends, so I decided to visit Bill instead. Every time we hang out, we chat nonstop for hours. In this case, days.

Bill’s been programming since 1965, has significantly contributed to the computing field, and has known many of the legends of our industry. Along the way, he also became one of the legends himself with his contributions of the data warehouse and ETL, among many others. I can argue that without him and a few others, the data industry as we know it wouldn’t exist today. I’m grateful I have Bill as a close friend. His advice has helped guide my career. And it’s crazy. If you were to ask me when I got into my data career if having Bill as a close friend was on my bingo card, I’d have laughed. But here we are. Today, Bill is basically my big brother.

More broadly, my friendship with Bill got me thinking about the importance of mentorship. I’ve had other mentors over the years. Back when I got into rock climbing, people like Todd Skinner and Paul Piana were there in my hometown of Lander, WY. They were the first people to free the big walls in North America and elsewhere and are some of the most badass climbers ever. Climbing with them helped accelerate my climbing skills and knowledge. I’ve had similar experiences in DJing (thanks to Steve Santoro (Bam Bam), John Creamer, and many others) and my early career (thanks to Dennis and Mitch, among many others!).

No matter the stage of your career, mentorship is essential. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Find someone who can guide you in your career and show you the ropes without judgment. Learn from their success and mistakes. This should be a friendship, by the way. I see some people offering advice on a pay-to-play basis. That’s advice, but it’s not mentorship. Mentorship is provided on a non-transactional basis. People mentor because they come from a pure place of paying it forward.

But understand that a mentor also has to find you worth mentoring. There are different levels to this. A mentor wants to mentor people they feel are capable of rising to a certain level. In most cases that I’ve seen, a mentor feels you’ve got the potential to carry on from wherever they are. The top expert won’t likely mentor a complete newbie. There’s just too much of a gap at that point. You need to be at the level a mentor will find you respectable and capable enough to be worth their time investment. This usually means being close to their level or at least having the potential to get there with hard work, grit, and listening to the mentor’s advice. Iron sharpens iron, as the saying goes.

How do you find a mentor? They’re everywhere. You probably know one right now. Find someone who’s ahead of where you want to be and whom you admire. In the case of Bill and I, he’s light years beyond, but it’s not a contest. He’s also way older than me and started his career before I was born. Just find someone who will take you under their wing. They’re out there.

Finally, if you’re experienced in your profession and can give back to the world via mentorship, please do so. It’s very rewarding. I mentor a handful of close friends (sorry, the door to more people is closed for now). It’s a chance to show others the obstacles I saw and either avoided or overcame. And it’s a chance to help the new crop of people get to where they need to go.

This is also why I’m moving toward education. It’s the classic 1:1 vs 1:many solution. I choose the latter at this stage in my career. Helping as many people as possible with skills and knowledge is very important to me. And I’m just getting started. Stay tuned for details early next year :)

Finally, thanks to everyone who took advantage of the Practical Data Modeling holiday sale. It means a lot, and you have much to look forward to!

Thanks, and have a wonderful weekend.

Joe

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Cool Weekend Reads

Wall Street’s AI-powered rally risks ‘correction’, Vanguard warns

How to Grow Professional Relationships | Tejas Kumar

2025 IT headcount expectations lowest in over a decade | CIO

Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model - Google DeepMind

The square roots of all evil – Neil Madden

Scheming reasoning evaluations — Apollo Research

How Systems of Agents will collapse the enterprise stack - Foundation Capital

The State of Production ML in 2024

New Show & Upcoming Events

The Joe Reis Show

Bill Inmon - Data Warehousing Facts and Myths (Spotify)

Valentin Becerra - Engineering for Space, DJing, and More (Spotify)

Gwen Shapira - Multi-Tenant Databases Done Right (Spotify)

The Negative Net Present Value of Consulting (Spotify)

Ole Olesen-Bagneux - The Meta Grid (sneak peek) (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - The Skills Gap in Data (Spotify)

Albert Bellamy - Getting Your Job in Data (Spotify)

Tanya Bragin - Clickhouse, Open Source vs Commercial, and More (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - Obscurity is Your Enemy (Spotify)

Chris Riccomini - Building (and Writing About) Data-Intensive Applications (Spotify)

Beers and Data with Friends in Helsinki, Finland (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - The Quality Paradox (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Asking Good Questions at Conferences (Spotify)

Wes McKinney (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

Note—The Monday Morning Data Chat is over. However, you can still find the back catalog on your podcast platform of choice or YouTube.

The Finale! - YouTube

Paco Nathan - (Spotify, YouTube)

Weimo Liu - (Spotify, YouTube)

Matthew Mullins - (Spotify, YouTube)

Ricky Thomas and Paul Dudley - (Spotify, YouTube)

Andrew Ng - Why Data Engineering is Critical to Data-Centric AI (Spotify, YouTube)

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

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

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

More to be announced soon…

Please note: I've traveled a lot for the last few years—probably too much for a person to stay sane or healthy. I tried to figure out how many times I’d traveled the globe. I have no idea. It’s a lot. And…

In 2025, I’m reducing my travel. For one, I'm hyper-focused on a new company I’m starting (stay tuned for details). I also want to spend more time with my family and get outside in the Mountain West. I live in one of the most incredible places on the planet and never see it. Nature calls.

Same as it always was, I only accept workshops and speaking engagements that meet my fee requirements, except for rare exceptions (we’re friends, you’re not charging for tickets, etc). You’re working hard on your event. So are the speakers. Let’s mutually benefit each other. If you’re making money, pay the speakers too.

With me, you get what you pay for and then some. You'll get a ton of enthusiastic attendees and a very entertaining and informative talk/session. Your event will be on the global map. My track record speaks for itself. Please submit a speaking request if you want me to speak or give a workshop at your event.

Thanks! If you want to help out…

• The Data Engineering Professional Certificate is one of the most popular courses on Coursera! Learn practical data engineering with lots of challenging hands-on examples. Shoutout to the fantastic people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS, who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.

• 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.

• The 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.

• My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted, always fun, and free of shilling.

Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.

Thanks!

Joe Reis