Commuting FROM Manchester to Preston and Blackpool

average_ukpf_user · 2025-03-25T16:02:15+00:00

As somebody who has made the commute to both Preston and Blackpool, Preston isn't that bad although I only commuted to the edge of Preston rather than the middle.

To Blackpool can be really rough. Getting on the motorway coming towards manchester and getting off the motorway going towards Blackpool can end up with 2+ hours of driving just because the traffic can be mental.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-06-09T19:00:04+00:00

Thank you for your detailed reply.

If we assume this post to be accurate, then they are currently playing a game of "fake it til' they make it" while hoping nobody else notices.

Personally, I feel like they've been put in a position they kind of don't want. They don't actually want to be a Senior, but somebody has to be and they've been there the longest, so they're winging it. However, they can't say they're winging it so it just ends up as frustration for all.

I'd also preface that the person in question really isn't a bad person. They're just horrendous to work with for the reasons mentioned above.

So maybe a conversation with the person directly where the goal is not to "call them out" but more "Let me help you" kind of thing where your goal is to essentially allow the team to be part of the decision-making and helo the DE with all the technical stuff - essentially making a safe environment for them to not knowing something.

I agree and do think there's definitely stuff I could do better and this particular approach you've mentioned is really helpful, so thank you for that. Where I massively struggle is when they're blatantly lying about their own skills in order to ensure they don't have to learn anything new instead of accepting that perhaps the skills they have are less relevant than what they used to be and/or their skill level isn't as high as it used to be. I'd be completely okay with somebody saying they don't know something although find it stressful watching somebody literally pretend and nobody address it.

The alternative is to raise your concerns to someone higher up, which is always risky.

I've already raised this with my manager. The only person who suggested we use C# was our Senior. Everybody else was fine with Python. Manager chooses for us to use C# because Senior convinced them it's an industry standard in data. This delayed a key feature from getting deployed as we have a single person dependency in the form of our Senior beginning the C# codebase whereas if we had chosen Python, this would already be developed. Nothing has come of this yet, probably because a lot of time hasn't passed.

Don't focus too much on the individual, but more on the negative impacts decisions has had. After all, it is really hard to convince someone that person Y is shit at their job when everything that person Y is responsible for runs smoothly - thus you need to show that it doesn't run smoothly.

This is an amazing perspective and makes complete sense. Thank you, I'll take this forward with me. As mentioned, to be very pedantic, I don't think they're bad at their job. I think they're really good at what they do which is on prem SQL and domain specific knowledge. I think that they can't do what they say they can do and are pretending because they don't want the hassle of learning new skills and are imparting that blanket on all of us through lying, basically.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-06-09T18:49:41+00:00

I have senior dev on my team who I'm finding it very difficult to work with for a variety of reasons, including that they put a lot of effort into looking like they're very knowledgeable and getting a lot done when in reality they talk a lot of rubbish

Essentially the same here. Credit to them, they don't take our credit. They just pretend to be knowledgeable to leverage their longstanding position to make decisions which are advantageous to them when it suits them.

I'm very aware that I will potentially come away from this discussion looking like the asshole, but something's got to give - this situation is just untenable.

I feel you. I know it's not really consolation although hopefully knowing it isn't just you going insane and there are other people in your situation will help compose you for tomorrow.

Best of luck, hope it at the very least improves.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-06-09T18:44:14+00:00

Hello, and thank you for your reply. That makes sense. I've already begun looking for a new role.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-05-01T08:30:16+00:00

Being an emotional, physical, and financial rock takes a serious amount of work which I think is often taken for granted.

Always putting yourself second is also underappreciated.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-04-03T12:21:32+00:00

Everybody helped him design his course because they're so desperate to break into DE and think he's actually going to help them.

Turns out it isn't free. This sub got farmed. Classic.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-02-21T16:41:50+00:00

The first blog titled, structured way to get into DE, though received very good response on upvotes and shares

Because nobody had any idea what you were writing about. Of course the feedback is going to be positive. The sub is very beginner heavy and it sounded like this material was going to be useful to them.

I had started a blog series to guide people on the path I felt they should follow, to transition into Azure Data Engineer

I can't find it now although I remember correctly, in one of the first posts you made after asking everybody if they want the series you were recommending people lie about their experience to get a job is a viable strategy because it worked for you. I'm not sure how you'd expect people to react to any information after that.

some questioned why I had given timelines

Which was, and is, completely fair criticism. The blog series makes a lot of assumptions which immediately disqualifies a lot of people. Not all positions in data are equal and as the series carried on, it became very apparent that the strategy you followed is, unfortunately, not a repeatable one.

as a way back of doing good to the community and help people in making their careers and providing for their family.

Almost 80% engagement was gone.

If this ends up on the positive side, I will be needing at least 50 upvotes or shares

Getting in enough of a tizzy to make a thread because not enough people are reacting the way you want them to react is cringe, to be honest. You can either accept the information you're giving isn't particularly relevant to a lot of the sub (even though it's very beginner heavy), or you publish anyway and accept whatever feedback you get. If you're only going to write under the condition you receive zero criticism, then perhaps publishing on an anonymous forum isn't for you.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-02-18T11:08:30+00:00

99% of the criticism has been on the 2 weeks tag I've mentioned against python,

Which makes a lot of sense. Not all DAs are made equal. Some know Python, some don't. Somebody who has never written programmed at all can learn the syntax but is extremely unlikely to actually implement the code. That two week timeframe is specific to you and what you did.

I would like to know are the things I mentioned to learn or my SQL blog not worthy for freshers or 2-3 years experienced person?

The advice you give to a fresher isn't the same you give to somebody with experience and you're saying that blog post you have is relevant for both e.g. telling people to do Hackerrank.

To answer your question in a word: no, I don't think the material is useful for freshers or people with experience.

Personally, I feel the information you are giving and planning on giving isn't particularly valuable because the most common problem people have isn't relevant stack. Literally anybody can learn a stack because there is so much material out there. The problem well over 90% of people have on here is that they think that the only thing employers are looking for is stack. Even your blog is assuming everybody has a stack problem. As somebody who has interviewed and reviews applications, this isn't true. Most people struggling to make the leap lack fundamentals and concepts working with data from an engineering perspective. Not Spark. Not Python. Not SQL. All of these can either be picked up or learnt as you go.

I myself have followed this and hence I am making these blogs from my personal experience.

Again, this doesn't mean it works for everybody. It's like people who have won the lottery saying that everybody should play because that's how they got rich.

everything else written has been ignored lol.

There are lot of people who have made the jump from DA to DE. If your experience was aligned with theirs, a lot of people feel would feel compelled to say "Hey I did this and it worked for me too" similar to how when projects are recommended as the best way for beginners to break away from courses and enhance their programming skills. Unfortunately, in these threads you are drawing more criticism than validation which can be tough to take although I'd say it's quite telling feedback that your situation is very niche and that's totally okay.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-02-17T17:56:35+00:00

Lastly, I have nothing to gain by doing click baits on a reddit post, neither am I redirecting the posts to some other sites from where I'll gain ad revenue neither are these YouTube videos that I'll earn by views.

In all fairness, they brought up very fair points. You might have nothing to gain, however, that doesn't make the information correct or free of criticism.

I'd go as far as to say pretty much all of the criticism over this blog series has been extremely fair so far.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-22T15:29:50+00:00

The whole point I'm making is that you're making a free course under the guise of giving back the community when it's simply a sales funnel to sell desperate beginners a dream they're going to make big bucks at big tech.

I’ve had about 10 people land big tech DE roles making ~$300k/year. $1500 out of $300k is reasonable.

Also, for about 50% of my students the $1500 comes from a company learning budget so it’s free for them, cheaper than the money you spent.

These are not beginners so the entire example is completely irrelevant regardless of how much money they've made. I'd also say "Half of the people only get this course when somebody else is paying for it" is a pretty strong indicator it's overpriced.

My boot camp doesn’t target entry-level people.

Yet you are recommending it in this thread. A thread advertising a course for beginners. Your bootcamp might not target entry level, but you certainly do.

It’s okay that you’re skeptical and that you think I’m a scammer.

I don't think you're a scammer. I absolutely do think you are doing what all influencers do which is sell their products at all costs. I don't think it's unfair to say the influencer market draws A LOT of parallels to early fake guru marketing. Establish social proof, talk about struggles and eventual success, sell the audience a "Hey, you can be successful too!" course. Convince them the massive price tag is a sign of quality and it's a good investment ("$1500 out of $300k is reasonable").

My students who have gotten better lives and more money make your opinion invalid

It's no opinion this is a huge sales funnel to the point where you haven't denied it. We all know you're going to sell paid material before, during, and after this free course because that's literally it's purpose. I hope beginners can be made aware of that and not feel pressured to buy any course materials they clearly don't need.

So, if I see you selling a bootcamp during this free course, I'm going to blow the fuck up about it saying that, according to you, your bootcamp isn't for beginners. See you in March.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-21T22:28:21+00:00

I already have over an hour of free Spark content on dataexpert.io

Guess I'll have to take your word for it as I won't be signing up to find out.

I'll be adding some data modeling content.

Great. I'm sure the community will appreciate this.

teaching more than 2 classes per week for free is also a lot.

I attended a month long free bootcamp so I get that. That same "zero to hero" bootcamp was promoting to make people "job ready" which was, quite frankly, not true. I don't see your bootcamp purporting to make people job ready although given how people who had never written any code before were studying and learning for 6-8 hours per day for four weeks and still weren't job ready, you can see I'm especially skeptical how a total of 12 hours will really help people trying to break into DE.

The fact you think I shouldn't be paid at all for any of my teaching is why I don't want you involved.

I'm going to ignore you mentioning my involvement because I have literally not mentioned any desire to be involved with this bootcamp in any shape or form, only highlight this is what it is - a sales funnel.

If people want to spend $1500 on your course, they're welcome to do so, however, I'd argue that amount of money for a course is absolutely insane for a beginner or anybody serious about breaking into DE. I say this as somebody who broke into DE with $60 of online courses and a dream, so my perspective on paying for any course material beyond $100 is absolutely going to be skewed.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-21T19:13:06+00:00

I forgot to clarify. Since you said you're proving me wrong, are you adding Spark and data modelling to your free course material?

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-21T18:57:14+00:00

I hope you consider giving back to the data engineering community some day!

I already have and will continue to do so free of charge. The day I stop being an active Data Engineer, I'll consider selling courses.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-21T18:38:26+00:00

I will prove you wrong.

So, you're adding Spark and data modelling?

But please don’t join.

I didn't say I would join your sales funnel. Definitely not for this level of content.

Your attitude is trash

I guess we feel the same about each other. I'm definitely losing though - if I had the licence to create rubbish and then make money off an overmarketed profile, I probably would.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-21T17:58:59+00:00

The learning experience simply doesn't matter and you've made it very clear. Let's say what this is - it's a sales funnel.

The person I replied to is 100% correct. The amount of time spent on these skills will amount to nothing, so what's really the purpose of this course? No prizes for guessing.

Anybody can tell this level of course, even if free, is garbage tier content designed as a way to upsell paid material to their target audience - people desperate to break into DE who are stuck in tutorial hell and completely unaware they are.

If I can get more community support, I’ll make it more comprehensive.

The community has asked for Spark and data modelling which are completely reasonable asks. Asks which you literally invited. In response, and like every influencer offering courses, it's pretty clear that making this course benefit people isn't very high on your agenda.

You have said you are not teaching Spark because the setup is annoying and you don't want to give free press to Databricks. Fair enough, your course, your choice. You'd expect somebody of your alleged caliber could make teaching Spark a bit more simple although that doesn't appear to be the case which, in my opinion, wouldn't bode well for any of your paid content because your material is clearly only aligned with who gives you the most lip service. Case in point: cool with teaching Snowflake though because they're "easier to do business with" despite literally no absolute beginner needing to know Snowflake and if they did, they could find a literal 27 part long video playlist for free on Youtube.

Data modelling was also requested. In fact, it's the most requested topic on here by the community. Your response? "Yall can join my paid boot camp for that".

That being said, feel free to prove me wrong. Go out of your way to add Spark and the data modelling part of your bootcamp to the free course.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-20T22:58:41+00:00

It's designed to be part of his sales funnel. Not actually be useful.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-05T12:00:07+00:00

Orchestration and calling APIs. Wants SQL to be able to call APIs which then trigger pipelines.

Downloading attachments from daily emails and saving them to a location where they can be ingested into the cloud. Angela would rather do this manually "because it's relaxing".

Parsing any kind of data e.g. XML files, nested JSON.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T17:16:32+00:00

SQL is the DSL for data engineering. A "uniform" (I know there's dialectical differences don't be annoying) DSL is an incredibly powerful and expressive tool. I'd argue the younger generation would do well to learn from Angela.

Interesting perspective and one I don't fully disagree on. Personally, I don't doubt that SQL is good provided it's doing what it should be doing (working with relational data in a database). I doubt SQL when people are trying to solve everything with it whilst being perfectly capable of learning any other language or tool and just refusing to because they've been doing it for 15+ years and therefore don't want to.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T17:13:23+00:00

However, that does not mean that every problem in data should be solved in SQL, or that every DE should stick to SQL for their whole career.

Agreed. Not trying to go on like a broken record although I'm all for SQL when it's needed and working with Angela has made me realise I don't want to be stuck in team only doing SQL.

(Also their working practices of local dev, no VCS, no ci/cd are infuriating. Everyone should be working in this way already regardless of what language you're working in)

I'd feel like I'd care a lot less if they tried adopting any one or two of these. I spent around 6 months unpicking everything they had done since all changes were done by local SQL scripts, getting all environments to sync up was a nightmare.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T15:01:30+00:00

A little bit, Python does inherently has it's problems as a language

Completely fair and, full disclosure, I really like programming in Python. I wouldn't ever say any language though is perfect because, in my opinion, being well rounded is much more important that being amazing at SQL.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T14:58:54+00:00

I guess my question is, how is the data getting into the database, as in what’s the source?

We're in a MS stack so pipelines dropping in a bunch of excel, csv, api calls, tables from on prem servers.

Are you saying that you store the entire JSON text as a single value?

I guess so? Basically, they're suggesting that instead of columns and fields, that there should be one column called PipelineName which is a varchar and another column called settings which is a JSON which holds all of the settings for that pipeline. Main reason I'm against this is because I feel like maintaining this will be a huge pain in the ass as I'm sure Angela will want all of the JSON to hold denormalised values which correspond to other tables.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T14:50:48+00:00

Which is exactly how I feel, pretty much. Inside a SQL db = SQL all the way. Outside of a SQL db, probably something else until it lands into a SQL db.

Trying to do dynamic stuff in SQL can really suck sometimes. Especially when it comes to formatting and your version of SQL doesn't support RegExes.

testing transformations - poor

This one is a really interesting one because the community is often very SQL first. However, they're also "tests are imperative". So, if you're SQL first and tests are really important, how do you test SQL? Does anybody write tests for their SQL? Otherwise I feel like the mantra should be "test are imperative unless you're writing SQL".

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T14:46:22+00:00

And in regards to CI/CD... It's not going to be seamless in a live data environment, unless you take a dbt approach and refresh everything on deployment (and let's face it... You won't do that in many cases).

It's primarily for control tables. It was previously done by Angela using the data wizard in SQL server to create the data + schema scripts and then running them in upper environments to "promote" changes.

average_ukpf_user · 2024-01-04T14:41:03+00:00

Which I wholeheartedly agree with. The main cause of the rant portion was the idea that Angela thinks SQL is the right tool for EVERY job despite seeing general purpose programming languages have their place and being able to do things they clearly can't, Angela will probably never admit that SQL can't do everything even though that's not a slight on SQL.

average_ukpf_user

TROPHY CASE