Organizational Dynamics
79 posts filed under Organizational Dynamics.
Hiring Retention Via Culture Fit
We changed one screening step and two senior data engineers are still there, past year two.
Read →Phoenix Project Lessons For DE
The Phoenix Project is 13 years old. Data teams still run their backlogs the way it warns against.
Read →Team Complexity Post-MVP
By 20 engineers, most data teams have one person every change waits on. The backlog put them there.
Read →Brooks Law In Data Hires
A scaleup added 3 data engineers to catch up. Delivery got slower for 2 months.
Read →Hero DE Burnout Cycle
Praising the engineer who fixes everything at 2am rewards the exact dependency that eventually takes the platform down with them.
Read →Wrong DE Hire Cost Matrix
A wrong data engineering hire runs you about three salaries by the time you count the ramp, the re-hire, and the work that stalled in …
Read →Leadership Bottleneck In Stacks
The 2026 data tooling is the best it's ever been. The bottleneck in most teams I see is still a leader who can't say, in two sentences, what …
Read →Stack Overflow On DE Shortage
The best data engineers move for ownership and a manager who can describe the strategy. A 10% bump alone rarely does it.
Read →Ownership Vacuum After First Hire
The junior left in March. In May, marketing's dashboard broke and nobody knew who to call.
Read →DORA Metrics For Data Pipelines
The DORA metrics work for data teams. Most data teams aren't measuring them.
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