I’ve spent 25 years of my career in tech and the last 15 years as an analytics leader across Amazon, eBay, VMware, and more. During that time I’ve consistently witnessed non-technical leaders ask for more self-service enablement for data for stakeholders. They aren’t wrong to ask for this, and many ...

During a recent visit to the grocery store I stood in the checkout line, placing my items onto the conveyor belts as fast as the cashier could scan my items.  As I watched her scan one of my items and type into the keyboard, I bit down on my lip. I was holding back my unsolicited feedback, as I anti...

After 25 years working in the technology space and 15 years of leading analytics teams at companies including Amazon, eBay, VMware, and more, I’ve heard one resounding theme from leaders. They want their data analysts to be more proactive and to provide more recommendations to the business. I agr...

I’ve been writing SQL for about 26 years, and I’ve been building world-class analytics teams for the last 12 years across Amazon, eBay, VMWare, and a lot more. I’m also a six-sigma process engineer and I incorporate process improvement techniques into every part of my work as well my team’s work. Wh...

I’ve been a people manager for over 12 years of my 20+ year career across Amazon, Ebay, VMWare, and more, and I’ve conducted a lot of interviews throughout that time. Unfortunately, I’ve seen about 90% of candidates fail their SQL interview due to a lack of understanding of SQL functions, how the da...

I’ve spent over 20 years of my career in tech and the last 12 years as a people leader, building world-class analytics teams and organizations. Throughout my career I’ve held in roles in analytics, software development, software QA, and more. and I’ve had the opportunity to work at Amazon, eBay, VMw...

When writing SQL code or creating a dashboard, rarely will you run into an error that prevents data from being displayed on your screen. Sure, these run-time errors happen and as an analyst, you’re forced to resolve these errors before any output can be displayed. But just because there isn’t a run-...

Finding your first job can be challenging and we all go through it on our career journey. But regardless of if you’re looking for your first job or your tenth, you’ll likely find difficulty with connecting with recruiters and getting your resume reviewed. One of the main reasons for this is that at ...

Documentation is frequently seen as important, but at the same time, too costly to spend time working on. But the real cost occurs after the project has been completed. Stakeholders rarely think about documentation as part of their requests and analysts will usually state that they are too busy to c...

Throughout my career leading analytics teams at eBay, Amazon, GameStop, and a handful of other companies, I’ve seen a lot of data analysts overlook potential performance issues. Whether through SQL written directly against the database or through derived SQL from Tableau and Power BI dashboards, que...

A key element of getting hired is being relatable, but it’s something that is frequently overlooked by candidates during the interview process. One reason for this is because it is natural to take the job description or interviewers questions at face-value and simply provide answers to their questio...

Employees frequently cite tenure in their list of reasons for a promotion or a raise. While tenure may show dedication, it doesn’t necessary correlate with value to a company. To get a raise, you’re going to need more than tenure – you’re going to need to add additional value. So, let’s discuss whil...

I’ve been writing SQL for about 20 years and while some things have changed, much of the language is still the same, including the overuse of sub-queries within SQL statements. While sub-queries are very helpful and aren’t inherently bad, they tend to be overused and many times a more optimal and pr...

Almost every analyst is doing it — producing an analysis by using visualization tools such as Tableau and Power BI. This is a bad practice and a quick way to be viewed as an inexperienced data analyst and stunt your career growth potential.

Visualization tools such as Tableau and Power BI are incre...

Stakeholders frequently ask for data from analysts without providing context. Worse, with the increase in self-service tools, stakeholders are drawing their own conclusions with data, even though they lack the proper understanding and training to use the data. These conclusions are then used to make...

Almost every time you present a data analysis, your presentation is delivered with the help of PowerPoint. While this is the most common way of presenting in the corporate environment, PowerPoint is the worst tool for the job. Days, weeks, and months of hard work, time, and energy is rendered wor...

Most analytics leaders put self-service analytics at the top of their list of items on their annual roadmap, but they never seem to talk the potentially disastrous implications of creating self-service tools. Enabling self-service analytics sounds straight forward where data engineering teams wor...

Early in my career in the analytics field I started to become inundated with task request from stakeholders.  I felt overwhelmed and confused at times by what my stakeholders were asking for.  There were already countless dashboards and metrics, yet I was receiving more request to produce additional...

If you’re like most people in the world, you probably want to grow and improve your skills.  And somewhere along your journey, someone has probably suggested having a mentorship to help you improve. 

What typically occurs is that you’ll be introduced to another co-worker, put a meeting on the calen...

In this post I’m going to share some best practices for formatting SQL that I’ve learned and used over the last 20 years. Many of these tips are things that I’ve collected along the way out of frustration with inheriting code, needing to perform updates, chasing down bugs, and performing code review...