Tl;dr - You might be applying for what you think is a data analytics role, but in reality you’ll be working under a sales donkey who sees data analysis as basically just looking at a chart someone else made for the line to go up. 1. Sales managers/executives should never, ever have a say in what the company’s tech stack (not the sales donkey tools that run on a computer) (data related or otherwise) is. 2. When you apply for a role as a Data Analyst of some flavor, there is a not-insignificant chance you are applying for a sales analytics role under a sales donkey executive who has no business directing data analytics let alone initiatives. 3. Many, many people employed in data analytics do about as much data analysis as I do looking at the digital speedometer in my car while on the freeway - look at charts, see line go up, sales-donkey their way into a big commission or bonus Yes, yes, I know, stakeholders this, stakeholders that, you gotta provide value where the revenue centers need it to drive more value, blah, blah, blah. There always one person with one anecdote of the exception tot he rule. We should not be establishing group policy based on single exception observations. — After an awkward conversation with our acting executive of marketing and current sales director yesterday, I realize my overly biased towards sales employer of a company values her say in our tech stack (literally what technology we use to collect, store, process, analyze, present, predict, etc data) over my own (the person who actually manages our data analytics function and team - or for that matter, even members of the IT department or any engineering roles/directors/managers). What does that mean? It means she literally asked, “are we going to keep BI?” What does that translate to? She was referring to PowerBI not BI as a function (although I’m sure she’d love to shutter my team and take our budget into her own bloated and ineffective budget), and was asking if we intended to keep PowerBI as the primary presentation tool for data in the company… yeah… and she wasn’t implying a preference for tableau either or another tool either. What she was implying was that for the last month or two her “analysts” have been actively courted by some random analytics firm that probably cold messaged them on LinkedIn and wowed them with some amazing cringe posts about Whatever But it had too Many new lines To understand bent on charging us $18,000 per dashboard with a $250/hr customization fee in a modular a la carte style contract that would also grant them unfettered access to and “rights” to store all of our data (banking so this is a major issue). Not only that, they offer to do all of the “heavy lifting so that you don’t have to involve IT.” Music to any sales donkeys ears - solutions that don’t involve IT. What it literally translates to is a free hall pass to suck up all of whatever data the company’s vendors and systems are producing into vendor locked data stores, and we only get a few pre-baked charts decided by the company, unless of course we opt for paying them 4-5x my hourly (yes I’m under paid) to modify those. No direct access to the data, no API, nada. Meaning that we blow a few hundred k on nothing that moves us forwards, creates more silos, creates more vendor lock, and provides questionable value outside of her ineffective sales squad. Why? Because her team has “data analysts” supposedly who need to analyze the data. By that it is meant that she has a team of speedometer readers and a clear motive to only present data in a way that makes it look like sales is doing more than they are. She got one bad Glassdoor review about how old and archaic or technology was (not really a lie) by an ex-sales donkey, and now she’s on a mission to recolor their pitiful sales results by running a quarter million dollar shadow analytics operation headed by people who likely can’t read their own cars speedometer correctly. Basically these jerks just sit around on Facebook all day or travel out to wherever, blow a fuck wad of cash, and pull in maybe 20 organic new customers of questionable profitability a quarter when we have 100/month attrition rate. They post once a week to social media and have fewer followers than my personal accounts and get a quarter of the interactions per post. It’s way easier to hide how bad a sales team is doing when they control their own data and use charts someone else who has no vested interest in the company actually succeeding long term made for them as opposed to that pesky actual analyst who keeps highlighting the fact that they aren’t doing anything meaningful or with significant results over previous years, the same person who works with the IT department to do computers things that cost money they could otherwise use to buy more customers or fly her team around the country and keep them eating steaks and wearing suits. Her and her team lack vision of the bigger picture that is both preventing us from advancing the tech stack and tooling available, and also particularly the strategy the org needs to follow to build a functional analytics ecosystem. This is an org that will happily throw sales donkeys hundreds of thousands of dollars for some whiz bang you-don’t-need-to-involve-IT we’ll solve 100% of your problems silver bullet because they bought the best steak dinners for them solution, while IT is literally pulling bad RAM out their servers daily and not replacing it because they don’t have the budget and they hire half rate CTOs afraid of cloud and using “freeware” like Python… TC: 75k
Rough morning there. Data analytics jobs for sales and marketing are typically as you described. It’s just tech companies in the valley pay you more to deal with the same bad.
Yup that’s why you go for data science roles instead as they are usually under eng even if it’s a glorified analyst role
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