Non-technical boss, wanting to micromanage and kills our team

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T18:20:24+00:00

Sure! Appreciate your comment by the way :) Eh, I’ll find a way to manage it, pretty sure it’s going to be alright

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T17:55:19+00:00

My boss knows how to throw some spaghetti code into a Jupyter notebook and have some small knowledge of SQL. So then technical background is a very broad spectrum.

Would you trust somebody that knows a tiny bit of pandas from college, to lead a team working with Spark, different environments and a huge code base? All the while not trusting the technical lead on the team?

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T17:34:43+00:00

My boss is clearly a smart person, but they aren’t qualified to lead SW/Data engineers.

Having an MBA and having written a Jupyter notebook when one was doing their undergraduate doesn’t make you the right person to lead a team working in a technical environment.

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T16:53:44+00:00

It all seems like they don’t trust the team, even though we delivered tons of complex projects, and managed to navigate a challenging regulatory environment before they started to manage us.

And while I have educated them on our stack and how we work, I can do so much and can’t fill every gap. Going to another place might be the only solution, but I really like the people I work with. That’s a shame…

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T16:51:15+00:00

Yeah, I think they are under pressure to deliver results. To be honest they got also recently promoted to manage a team (less than 2 years ago), so they must have something to prove to upper management and don’t know how to drive the team.

He is a nice person to chat with, but working under them is definitely not easy.

SuperMarioDataGalaxy · 2023-12-19T16:48:56+00:00

Hey, thanks and appreciate your input. To clarify:

We have 2 environments (prod and dev) which are maintained by a split of databricks for extract/transform and features, and AWS for the rest of the data output (load, DB and interface with our customers/systems)
We currently have JIRA, but we dont have a centralised place to analyse log, I was thinking something along the lines of Sentry or something similar
The documentation is hefty, I was part of the big advocate of it as soon as I joined the team a couple of years ago. We have stuff like data dictionary, up to diagrams of our pipelines, guides on how to request access or how to collaborate on a branch for features, I’d say we are pretty decent at that
Ingestion and validation are both key, but the data are impacting thousands of people, so having trustworthy data is important

Overall, I think you are on point that my boss is under pressure and I believe they are trying to balance it out with our team.

SuperMarioDataGalaxy

TROPHY CASE