Our organization adopted dbt early in 2022. I’ve written a bit about how much of a phase shift dbt was for us at the time. I joined the dbt Slack shortly after we adopted the tool, primarily because I thought it would be a good source of technical help in using dbt.
It sort of was. dbt’s Slack is actually too big now to be helpful in getting your questions answered. That’s better done on their Discourse these days. Regardless, coming to the dbt slack in search of questions but actually finding community was so exciting for me.
I’m not sure if dbt originated this trend of having a slack community to go with your open-core SaaS product, but for me, they’re the only ones who really do it well. The other product-oriented Slack communities I have joined have just felt like thinly veiled prospecting for paying users of their product. Sure, there’s a sales angle to the dbt slack as well, but it doesn’t quite feel as obvious.
I found out about dbt’s conference, Coalesce, via the Slack channel. I was, and am, a heavy user of dbt, so a conference focused on improving my dbt skills sounded like an absolute home run. At the time, the conference offered scholarships geared towards under-represented folks in data, so I applied.
Miraculously, I was granted the scholarship! I was able to attend dbt’s first in-person conference in New Orleans, and I had the time of my life.
Coalesce was an inflection point for me as a data professional. As I start to get excited for Coalesce 2023, I wanted to revisit some of the highlights of 2022’s conference.
Networking 😱
Part of my motivation to attend Coalesce was to improve my professional network. At this time in my data career, I had finally experienced what I now see as a necessary mindset shift when it comes to networking.
In college, my leadership professors were constantly hammering home the power of networking to us. I didn’t necessarily disbelieve them, but I was an achievement-focused Ecology major with an obsession with Beatnik poets. I believed in authenticity and the power of merit, goddammit! “Networking” felt like making friends under false pretenses, and with the underlying hope that those “friends” could help you get a job.
The mindset shift came for me when I realized that it is simply fun to have friends that share your professional inclinations. Could those friends refer you for a job someday? Maybe, and that’s definitely a benefit. But when the key goal of “networking” is to have friends with the same job that you have, it becomes infinitely more simple.
I went to Coalesce wanting to make friends in data. In my proposal to attend Coalesce that I wrote for my boss, I, of course, phrased this as “expanding my professional network”. Because that’s all networking is for me—making friends in data.
Naturally, this excitement meant that I accepted two meeting requests from people I later realized were SaaS vendors that wanted to use me as a warm lead into my company. But who among us hasn’t been bamboozled by a vendor or two in our lifetimes?
Can you see my skills, can you see my certified skills
Another big part of my motivation to attend Coalesce was the dbt certification exam and the skills classes offered during the conference. I wanted some level of external proof that I knew what I was talking about when it came to dbt, so I studied and studied and re-upped my knowledge around all of dbt’s functionality before taking the exam onsite during Coalesce.
And, I failed it by 4%. That was one of those close failures that lit a fire under my ass to study up and retake the exam a few weeks later, where I did in fact pass it with flying colors.
Certs are certainly not a make-or-break move when it comes to your career. I tend to want to apply them sparingly. I wanted proof that when I say I use dbt every day at work, I mean it and I have the certification pass certificate to prove it.
dbt also offered live dbt Learn sessions. I went to one about incremental models, and thoroughly enjoyed the hands-on time tinkering with large sample data sets to improve my own incremental model-building skills.
There’s something quite satisfying about hands-on sessions like that. It feels more well-rounded to attend sessions that are both listening to what others have done with dbt to get inspiration, and to practice your skills with the tool hands-on.
Either that, or I’m an incurable Capricorn and I like to feel as though I’m getting an A in work.
You deserve to be here
I have been at semantic satiation with the phrase “impostor syndrome” for a long time. I find it to be frivolously applied, and even weaponized occasionally when the users of the phrase simply are not willing to admit that they have significant learning to do in their position. Imposter syndrome is certainly a real thing, but feeling like you don’t know enough about your current job is a sign of intellectual humility. It is best used as fuel to systematically assess the places where your knowledge is lacking, and work on bringing them up to speed.
This feeling is why I’ve been reticent to label my struggle to adjust to the data world as imposter syndrome. The reality is that I am new to this. I bring significant skill to the table when it comes to communication and organization, but I have been through a massive learning curve over the last (almost) 2 years as a data professional. I’m not sure that feeling insecure about that is really impostor syndrome. I think it’s just a thing that adults don’t like to feel like novices, and I have felt like a novice.
The challenge is figuring out when it makes sense to slowly shed the novice label (both externally and internally). I certainly struggled with feelings of inadequacy at work, and for very good reason. My job attracts highly accomplished individuals. There are 2 PhDs on my team, and at the time of me going to Coalesce, 2 of my coworkers were Ivy grads whose brains are constantly moving 30 mph faster than mine.
I found myself much more among my peers at Coalesce. There were many attendees there who were at a similar experience level to me professionally, and there were actually quite a few career changers. The immediate feeling of belonging among other professionals on my level showed up in several interactions.
Insurer? I barely know ‘er!
I had breakfast one morning with a woman who worked in insurance. Insurance is part of what we do at my job, so we immediately started comparing notes about the nature of insurance data. The conversation itself was genuinely fascinating and likely incredibly boring to folks not in the industry, but it wasn’t really the content of the conversation that stuck out to me.
The fact that this woman immediately assumed I knew what I was talking about, solicited my opinions and offered her own, and engaged in a genuine exchange of ideas between peers was so encouraging. I didn’t tell her anything about my career-changing journey, and didn’t say a damn thing about how my job can be intimidating because it’s full of people who do shit like go on jogs with the Obamas when they visit Chicago.
I didn’t need to. The conference environment was very equalizing, and I felt no need to prove myself, only a need to bring what I have to offer to the table1.
Raise the floor beneath everyone
At one of the happy hours after the conference, I found myself in conversation with two incredibly brilliant female data engineers. One of them wanted to know why my organization chose Databricks over Snowflake, and the other happened to actually work for Databricks.
This was a conversation where I was absolutely outclassed intellectually, and I knew it. But somehow, it wasn’t a problem at all. I offered what I knew about Databricks and why we chose it over Snowflake, and acknowledged that as an analyst I wasn’t as close to that side of our data stack, so I couldn’t really give a full explanation.
The two women took this information in stride, and then included me on a conversation about data warehousing and their experiences as to why some shops choose Databricks vs. Snowflake. I didn’t have much to offer to this conversation. But the environment was such that I was welcome to listen to it and interject with questions to be able to follow it.
That conversation was also incredibly refreshing. Up until then, I hadn’t really experienced being the least experienced in the room, but didn’t feel stupid for a single minute. I really couldn’t put my finger on why that is. Social dynamics are complex and difficult, and it is always a collection of environmental factors and choices that can make participants walk away feeling one way or another.
Even though I couldn’t really tell you why that conversation went so well, I still treasure the memory. It was a very much-needed boost of encouragement for me to feel as though I could hold water in a technical conversation, even when I didn’t have anything to contribute.
Let the good times roll
Changing careers is often a really lonely experience. It’s not always fun to feel like a novice, especially when you know that the only cure for being a novice is time and effort2. Emotionally, it’s just not always possible to calm your lizard brain enough to be completely self-assured in every circumstance.
Maybe it was a combination of novelty, a hell of a location, and meeting people I only knew from the internet in real life, or maybe there was something secret in the water. Whatever it was, Coalesce left me feeling like I belong in data. That’s a gift that doesn’t have a price.
I certainly don’t intend to imply here that I constantly feel the need to prove myself at work. It’s more that the nature of getting a new job is vulnerable (you have to say your whole history! You have to answer vulnerable questions!), and when you feel outclassed by your fellow employees so often it can be difficult to shake that impulse.
Time continues to be a cruel mistress.