The whiteboard is covered in blue smudges that won’t come off because someone used a permanent marker back in 2016, and now every new strategy is drawn over the ghost of a ‘Q3 Growth Plan’ that failed before I was even hired. I’m staring at the CMO’s left eyebrow. It twitches when he’s about to say something that will ruin my weekend. He leans forward, his expensive watch catching the fluorescent light, and drops the bomb: “Can you just pull the conversion rate for left-handed users in Ohio during the last 6 full moons? It should be a simple report.”
I feel a sharp, stinging sensation on the side of my index finger. I just got a paper cut from the thick manila envelope he handed me-a packet of ‘inspiration’ from a competitor’s annual report. It’s a tiny, insignificant wound, but it burns with a disproportionate intensity, much like the request he just made. He thinks he’s asking for a cup of coffee. He thinks there is a giant lever in the basement labeled ‘Data’ and all I have to do is walk down there and give it a firm yank.
In reality, he just asked my team to embark on a 106-hour archaeological dig through 36 disconnected databases that haven’t spoken to each other since the Great Migration of 2006. The casualness of the request is the most expensive thing about it. It reveals a structural illiteracy that costs this company roughly $4556 every time a senior executive ‘just’ wants to see something.
High Altitude Rope Work of the Digital Age
Ben J.D. understands this better than most, though he doesn’t work in an office. Ben is a wind turbine technician I met during a layover in a terminal that smelled like burnt Cinnabon. He spends his days 266 feet in the air, suspended by ropes and a prayer, checking for hairline fractures in composite blades that are longer than the wing of a Boeing 747. We were talking about ‘simple’ tasks. He told me about a supervisor who asked him to ‘just’ tighten a bolt on a nacelle housing.
“To that guy on the ground, it’s a bolt. To me, it’s a four-hour climb, a safety lockout that requires 16 signatures, and the knowledge that if I drop the wrench, it’s going to hit the ground at 196 miles per hour. There is no such thing as ‘just’ doing anything when you’re 26 stories up.”
Data engineering is the high-altitude rope work of the digital age. When an executive asks for a ‘simple pull,’ they are standing on the ground, looking up at the turbine, and wondering why the guy in the harness is taking so long. They don’t see the safety checks. They don’t see the 46 different ways the API might fail. They don’t see the legacy code that acts like a 16-knot gust of wind trying to knock the technician off the ladder.
[The cost of curiosity is rarely found on the balance sheet.]
We treat data as if it were a natural resource, like water or air, that is simply ‘there’ for the taking. But data is more like iron ore. It has to be mined, refined, smelted, and forged before it’s worth a damn. When you ask to ‘pull’ a report, you’re asking for the finished sword, but you’re pretending you’re just asking for a handful of dirt.
The Fictional Total Customer Count
I once worked at a firm where we had 16 different definitions for the word ‘customer.’ Marketing defined a customer as anyone who had ever given us an email address. Sales defined a customer as someone who had a signed contract. Finance defined a customer as someone whose check had actually cleared the bank. When the CEO asked for a ‘total customer count,’ the internal friction generated enough heat to melt a server rack. We spent 96 hours in meetings just trying to agree on a noun. By the time we produced the number-64566, give or take-it was already obsolete because the definition had shifted again during a golf game on Sunday.
(Broadest Definition)
(Narrowest Definition)
This is why I find the work of Datamam so fascinating from a distance. They’ve realized that the ‘pull’ is the part that breaks people. Most businesses try to build their own internal infrastructure to scrape and aggregate information, thinking it’s a one-time cost. It never is. The web is a living, breathing, chaotic mess. Websites change their CSS classes every 6 days just to spite scrapers. Servers go down. IP addresses get blacklisted. If you aren’t a specialist, you end up like Ben J.D. trying to fix a turbine with a pair of household pliers. You can do it, but you’re going to lose a finger, or 106 hours of your life, in the process.
The Paper Cut Effect
There is a psychological toll to these requests that we don’t talk about. It’s the ‘Paper Cut Effect.’ A single ‘simple’ request doesn’t kill a team. But 46 ‘simple’ requests over the course of a month create a thousand tiny wounds that bleed out the department’s morale. My lead analyst, a woman who can write Python scripts in her sleep and once optimized a query to run 86 times faster just because she was bored, looked at me after the CMO left. She didn’t say anything. She just picked up a stapler and stared at it for a long time. She was calculating the opportunity cost.
Opportunity Cost vs. Whim Satisfaction
73% Diverted
While we are ‘just pulling’ the Ohio moon phase data, we aren’t building the predictive model that could save us $56666 in shipping costs next quarter. We aren’t fixing the 16 broken links in the checkout flow. We are doing digital janitorial work to satisfy a whim that will likely be forgotten by the time the PDF hits the CMO’s inbox.
The Apology of Action
I’m guilty of it too. I remember asking my intern to ‘just’ find a list of all the local government offices in the tri-state area. I thought it was a Google search. It turned out to be a manual crawl of 456 different PDF directories, some of which were scanned images that required OCR processing. He spent 36 hours on it. When he handed it to me, I looked at it for 6 seconds and realized the data didn’t actually help my argument. I had wasted a week of his professional life because I was too lazy to think through the utility of my request before I made it. I still feel a pang of guilt about that, usually when I’m trying to open a stubborn envelope.
[Action is the loudest form of apology, but silence is the most common.]
We need a new vocabulary for data requests. We need to stop using the word ‘pull.’ We should start using the word ‘construct’ or ‘excavate.’ If the CMO had asked, “Can you spend $8556 of company time to excavate the conversion rates for left-handed Ohioans?” he might have paused. He might have asked himself if that information was actually worth the price of a mid-sized sedan.
Making the Cost Visible
Maybe the solution is to make the cost visible. Every time a ‘simple’ request comes in, I’ve started responding with a ‘Complexity Score.’
The CMO’s Ohio request? That was an 8.6. When I told him that, he looked confused.
He didn’t get the metaphor, but he did get the point. He told me to forget about the Ohio project and focus on the churn numbers instead. A small victory. But I know that by next Tuesday, he’ll have a new ‘simple’ idea. And I’ll have a new envelope to open.
The Price of Ignorance
We live in a world that is obsessed with the ‘what’ and terrified of the ‘how.’ We want the answer, but we don’t want to hear about the 156 failed queries that led to it. We want the data to be ‘available’ without acknowledging that availability is a product of intense, unceasing labor.
Think Altitude
Consider the hidden height of the task.
Ban ‘Just’
It masks effort and inflates assumptions.
See the Currency
Ignorance costs sanity and time.
Next time you’re about to ask for a ‘simple report,’ take a second. Think about Ben J.D. hanging from his ropes. Think about the 6 different ways your request could be misinterpreted. Think about the paper cut. If you still need the data, ask for it. But don’t you dare say ‘just.’
Because in the world of business, those four words-‘Just pull the data’-are the most expensive way to admit you have no idea how your own company works. And the cost of that ignorance is usually paid in the one currency you can never earn back: the sanity of the people who actually know where the bodies are buried in your database. I’m going to go find a Band-Aid now. There’s one in the breakroom, but I’ll have to ‘just’ ask the office manager where she moved the first-aid kit. I expect to be back in 6 minutes, but knowing my luck, it’ll take at least 16.
