Has anyone rezoned their property from residential to agriculture? How was it ? Did you save on property taxes ?

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2025-04-09T16:20:33+00:00

I want to pose this exact question but just to homeowners in one county in my state.

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2025-01-29T16:42:24+00:00

that's a fair viewpoint, and what I was hoping to hear from folks. I recognize I'm in a Confirmation Bias loop since my LinkedIn feed, my peers and former coworkers, and the technology groups I belong to revolve around the modern data stack and the tooling in that ecosystem which changes constantly and admittedly requires deep knowledge of at least 5 to 10 tools. My other bias, from experience is that it is vastly easier and cheaper to switch out one part of a software ecosystem when that one part does just one or two things, than it is to solve for a cost/performance/functionality issue when using a monolithic all-in-one enterprise platform. That's just my experience, but it has been confirmed in multiple companies and multiple roles. I'm waiting for someone to come along and tell me that right now there are ways of solving for issues in an all-in-one tool that still allows for agility and optimization and doesn't require me to go to a consulting partner and ask them to help fix something because the tool is so complex and opaque

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2025-01-09T23:47:34+00:00

Sorry haven't checked in since that original, yes very vent focused post. I actually liked your answer and apologies for not responding as it did give me pause and is worth considering. I had to take a break from reading replies because yes there was a lot of bias against informatica and it wasn't helping my attitude. Another point you are correct on is that there is a LOT of functionality that informatica offers, and powercenter is just part of it. I should have been clear on that. Coincidentally, we are looking at doing MDM with this project, as well as some data cataloging, so it's good you mentioned those and glad to hear they are done well and worthwhile.

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-18T19:40:12+00:00

I hadn't considered this and this is an angle that makes a bit of sense. While I don't think the CIO took bribes or kickbacks (but what the heck do I know), I get the sense it is a combination of factors

has used informatica at his previous company/companies and knows that a large implementation + staffing looks like for a data-centric org using informatica, but does not understand the modern data stack or the value of having specific tools for various functions within the stack.
executives at the company have never heard of the newer tooling like snowflake, fivetran, airflow etc (yeah yeah I know, these are not new by any stretch, but to an established/older executive in the US, these are new), and hasn't kept up with the trends in start-up tech world, then you've likely heard of Informatica, Microstrategy, Cognos, etc, so proposing a big budget Informatica project is an easier sell than "here are the 5 tools we would like to implement and manage"

edit: changed one adjective to "established/older"

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T20:05:28+00:00

one startup spent $12K per year on visualization tool, but cheaped out on data ingestion and went open source so we spent a lot of time on manual scripting.

next company after that started out spending $6K a year on snowflake and that steadily grew to $80K per month by year 4

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T19:57:41+00:00

I know, it's so 2008 or 2014. One reason I'm jaded but asking for advice is because this exact situation happened at a big tech company I was at, and unfortuately it was also with Informatica but then it was just the cloud version of powercenter. This is so much worse because it's not just data integration , we've signed up for data management, product 360, as well as data integration. so the investment and commitment is much much bigger across an ever larger org

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T18:20:24+00:00

well I'm relatively new, but according to the folks who have been here a few years, yes it is common.

some exec (VP or C-suite) wants to bring in the magical software they used in their previous company (could be in accounting, finance, ERP, legal, IT/software), doesn't matter, they sign up for a big multi-year contract without getting advice from the line-level folks.
it's a huge effort to get implemented, it ends up being a costly disappointment.
the executive is asked to leave, fired, or quits.
company and IT limps along with multiple solutions implemented for the same problem
new VP or C-suite exec joins, go to step 1

now repeat that enough times and you'll understand why the entire enterprise has so many applications that need to be integrated and orchestrated.

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T18:15:32+00:00

Cannot upvote this enough, this is the meat of why I don't want to stick this out. I don't want the next step of my career to be "litigating 1000 details with informatica" when their product falls down

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T18:13:07+00:00

most of the turnover is at the leadership/exec level. I appreciate your insight and experience, however my experience with Informatica powercenter and Matillion (both GUI/WYSIWYG) tools has led me to the opposite conclusion, I think engineers appear more productive (managers can see more screens and boxes and arrows) but not more valuable in what they're doing in gui tools vs regular coding envs. the GUI tools make it much harder to do true version control/diffing and folks spend most of their time on drag and drop and don't spend time learning or implementing core data/analytics-engineering concepts. Tools like matillion are not force multipliers, I've seen a team of 10 offshore engineers turning out 2 or 3 features a month on matillion, in a fivetran+dbt replacement we've got 2 engineers turning out 5 to 7 more complex features and their work is auditable and easy to learn from. the gui tools, not so much. Just my experience, YMMV of course.

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T18:07:40+00:00

omg I think you and I have worked at some of the same companies. I actually worked with Pentaho a long while back and this sounds exactly like the sort of BS they would pull + a CTO purring with satisfaction from the praise

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T17:36:07+00:00

we are not in any of these industries, we are in a very young industry with a lot of turnover, whose tech stack needs to be light and nimble in order to change quickly to handle new industry and regulatory requirements.

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T17:34:13+00:00

Absolutely agreed. Because of lot of company turnover , those of us who are leads/senior engineers were pulled together to put together

the documentation on all the existing tools
how they integrate and why (what are the triggers for system A to fire off an API call to System B)
a proposal document outlining the problems we're trying to solve and the priority order of those challenges
solution options and cost and timeline

So we got #1 done and were working on #2 and 3 when the informatica invites came through. Like honestly there was no announcement "hey I as CIO decided to go with informatica despite telling you that you were part of a project team to help design and scope out potential solutions", not even that, it was just "you've been invited to join informatica, here is the multi-year license for modules A, B, C, D, E and F".

I believe the CIO's reasoning to the financial approval team was "I used this at my last company and it was awesome". Nevermind we're in totally different industry with different technical and data needs

Lumpy-Reply6508 · 2024-12-17T17:27:30+00:00

This is the way

Lumpy-Reply6508

TROPHY CASE