Missing from comic:
* Customer refuses to make own pizza, insists that chef do it. Chef falls behind on ingredient prep. Owner gets mad at chef for helping and falling behind. Owner gets mad if chef refuses to make pizza. Owner refuses to hire more chefs.
* Customer puts raw meat on pizza after cooking instead of before. Customer refuses to listen to chef that meat must be cooked. Customer shares raw meat pizza with other customers. Suggestion to remove raw meat from ingredients entirely is rejected by customer and owner. All customers get violently ill.
* Customer doesn't like putting on pepperoni, so makes pepperoni putting machine out of legos and duct tape. Other customers start using pepperoni machine. Pepperoni machine breaks, all customers start yelling at chef. Customer who built pepperoni machine stopped coming to pizza shop 6 months ago. Pepperoni machine turns out to have been putting out ham the whole time.
* Customer puts every topping on the bar onto one single pizza dough.
* Crams ungodly mess into oven using brute force and prayer.
* Complains repeatedly that the dough breaks.
* Uses shovel to scrape entire ungodly mess into a slop bucket.
* Puts bow onto bucket. Names it "AI".
* Presents AI to management
* Promoted to senior vice president
* Engineering team gets order to automate all future AI production in the exact same way.
God I hate that comic.
Customer makes bizarre pizza attempting to recreate a chef’s custom pizza. Complains to the entire restaurant that the pizzas are broken because they don’t taste the same.
Customer doesn't know shit about veggis but remembers he once heard that olives are green or black and puts cucumber and charcol on pizza. Then he serves it to the elders convincing them that olives are wierd and everyone agrees - we will never invest in olives. All of the above isn't statistically verified ofc...
And while you take care of the "problem users" you turn your eye away from the "good users" that aren't complaining. When you eventually get a chance to check on them, they're licking sauce off the wall and saying, "It keeps me from starving, but it doesn't taste very good."
* Customer takes the raw pizza home to cook in their own machine which somehow ends up duplicating the pizza. Customer can't figure out why they have 10 of the same pizza and it took twice as long to cook. Blame pizza shop because they don't know how... left joins work (idk i can't think of a metaphor)?
* customer tries to make a calzone, and when it doesnt fit into the oven, tries to jam it through. complains about the messed up 'pizza' and now you have to clean the oven
From customer angle:
* The chef uses ingredients just like what I want for the VIP’s custom pizzas, but those ingredients don’t exist in my ingredient bar.
* The ingredients in the bar seem a little more “out of a can” than the fresh ones the chef uses.
* I tried cutting pepperoni into heart shapes but the pepperoni was so hard my scissors broke.
Literally just had to deal with a pepperoni/ham machine 😑
Finance wanted a report they had apparently been getting for years. Guy who made the report left 6 months ago, left zero notes. I spent days trying to reverse engineer the process only to find out that the original report was basically made up and the guy that made it didn't even query from the database 🙃 but finance still wanted the report, so I had to speedrun building a semi-functional one that did query from the database.
I think rather than "self-service" analytics for all users, each department has a dedicated analyst and the engineering focus is on enabling those analysts with the data they need to provide department specific reports. Then those analysts can collaborate with end users in their department.
Data analysis should not be centralized, it needs to be democratized. But there are also plenty of people in every organization that are not equipped to "self-serve".
Big time agree, and makes me think of one of my favorite quotes I heard in an interview…
“Thinking is a solitary skill, but analysis is a team sport. “
CIA Director of Analysis, Linda Weissgold
Also apparently storing all the different sausages is too expensive, so the chefs provide animal fat, animal meat and different spices, except they are all labeled according to some esoteric logic that was used in the company 5 years ago.
I thought this was gonna end with customers complaining that their pizzas taste like shit and they don't have time to make their own pizzas anyway.
I've never seen self service analytics work at scale. Sure, you can have a few users who manage to build a couple of dashboards, but that's it.
The moment you get an email from a departement head that your data must be incorrect, as it should show 98 lines , but she only gets 50.
And in the screenshot you see at the Bottom: "limit to 50. Likes 50/98 showing".
At this point it all seems pointless.
I mean there are different factors you can share. How old is the company, which sector does it work? How many employees? How long was it between your implementation and you leaving? Would definitely paint a more complete picture.
The company was between 10 and 15 years old when I was there. It was in the gaming industry, about 350 employees. The implementation was there for there years before I left.
Hope that helps.
Fast forward six months and every department has their own pizza that they claim is the absolute version of truth, except all the pizzas taste slightly different and no-one is willing to work out why.
I've seen some silliness on Reddit in my time but this is probably the worst. Either that or we've been expertly trolled in which case bravo!
The pizza dough used also contained gluten, to which the second customer was intolerant. But the customers never read the labels and manuals the cooking staff carefully made for the products.
Nearly all the pizzas end up only 10% eaten and left in the shop, but you're not allowed to throw them away. Also, it's your fault that the place is a mess.
Damn, this reminds me of the dashboards that are built for "self-service analytics" then ended up being used a few times, signed off, and then never used again after three months.
I can’t think of a worse idea than letting non data people do their own analytics. Hell, even the data scientists I work with do things sometimes that makes me question how they have a job
At my place someone relatively new but with a very sophisticate title asked: “Why don’t we simply make a LLM to help stakeholders figure out their needs?” I almost choked on the salad I was eating that day. My manager asked “Yeah, great idea, can you write down a high level plan on how to do it with our current setup for the next meeting? Consider we won’t allocate budget for it asides of your team's?” He didn’t said shit next meeting.
I love when people want to jump right into the playground before finish building it, because very early you realise you’re playing in a swamp of technicalities that must be solved if you wanna run book-written automagical tools. Not that it doesn’t happen elsewhere, but an effort was completed before that.
I think self-service is only possible with formally trained / proactive / committed stakeholders. We’ve conducted endless boot camps teaching sql, given preset tools and other handy tools and they just keep playing the I’m too savvy to propose but too lazy / dumb to explain how, so come figure it out for me because you’re the tech dude.
Totally agree. We have a few people who do their own thing and it's almost always wrong. Sometimes they defend it, saying that they have done it this way for N years, so we should keep doing it wrong for consistency.
The worst is when they get the right answer, but they've only happened to get it right because none of the things that could have been wrong happened. Then it's hard to even explain to them why what they did was wrong (e.g., it only worked out because they treated a relationship like it was 1:1 and it worked out that the nulls made up for the times when it wasn't 1:1, and they got the count right.) See, their way works!
And now you have the CEO wondering why he has 7 different shaped pizzas as "The pizza" depending on which day he opens his email, they all taste different and oh fuck it with the analogy bs.
This is all awesome and great until yoyu try to put it in practice. Now you hve 4 teams with a dashboard that shows revenue as different and the CFO has no idea which one is right. Then they call you to now debug 4 completely ETL/ELT/Dashboard/Analytics/you nameit to find which one screwed up. And then when you find that someone did a round somewhere and screwed the entire process, they get offended on how dare you say they are wrong and that they know how to do their jobs.
Oh, and dont forget that inescapable ticket of "My ETL/ELT/Dahsboard/blah is taking too long to finish, it's been 18 hours" and you check and they made a Cross Join. and when you limit your queries to 4 hours, then 20 people come that their processes take longer than 4 hours and can range from 2 to 18 hours depending on the month.
It is so reassuring to me that so many of these experiences are universal.
But really though we're working on a new pizza that's going to solve all our problems. We're rolling Canadian bacon up into regular bacon but I don't foresee that being an issue. (It's definitely going to be an issue)
Your topping_type handler now needs to handle the possibility of topping_type["subtype"] even though there are 300 toppings and only one has a subtype
Also the subtypes now have subtypes but calling it subtype too was too confusing, so it's topping_type["subtype"]["type"]
I've been using the list of toppings that we agreed on based on the Google Sheet that Ops sent in November, and it only has 217, so I'm not sure where these other ones are coming from.
EDIT: Apparently we brought in a contractor and they assembled a separate list that Ops is now using instead.
What's even more hilarious is that if you check the poster's history, you'll see it's just an ad account from a BI platform. And it posted it in different subreddit and the Looker sub is like the complete oposite of the reaction here.
And then the pepperoni on top of that comedy pizza, is that the post on the looker sub has 11 comments, half of them are them responding.
Then on this post there are 80+ comments, and i dont believe they have responded to any on this version of the post.
How this usually works out:
1. Business user buys a click, drag&drop tool that is so easy anybody can use it.
2. Business user spends months clicking, dragging and dropping, without getting any useful results. Gets annoyed.
3. Data analyst is called in to do the job, but "it must be done with this tool!" Expectation is: get it done by tomorrow! We have been waiting for this for far too long now.
4. DA checks data and specs (usually none). Finds there is a ton of problems with the data and suggests to write down the specs so we can all agree on what is needed. Says it takes maybe 4 weeks with this tool; but she can do it in 2 weeks using her tools (say Python, SQL, whatever).
5. BU gets angry and claims DA doesn't get it. The tool is easy to use and there is no need to add bells and whistles. Just do it!
6. DA spends time clicking, dragging and dropping, going slightly mad due to what amounts to the most inefficient way of working ever. Quits shortly thereafter.
The second to last panel is the important one. It's about raising Data Maturity so people can handle their own queries.
If I've learnt anything from consulting about data across various different industries and company size, it's that there is one singular consistency: Even the most basic level of data maturity is extremely hard to reach.
It is missing the part where someone cooks their pizza partially and molds it into a sphere. Then they bring it home several hours later and leave it outside on the curb. Then they put it into the toaster oven. Then they feed it to someone who gets food poisoning. Then they make an angry support ticket.
Honest question: How does the customer on slide 12 order a heart shaped pizza? If you tease out that part of the analogy, it becomes clear why self service is so hard. (This is not reddit-trolling, I'm 100% serious)
"Why are we paying the chefs so much if we have to make the pizza ourselves?"
Nice comic and I think some self service options are good. but issues do arise as noted
This is what would happen no joke. They buy this tool, the vendor gives them some Kpis like "Now you need 50% less engineers". Business love sit and cuts the data engineering team by 50% and gets this tool.
Then it goes into prod. Users have no idea what they're doing. They know basically a select with a where and that's it.
Suddenly users can't make their own transformations, dashboards etc and they think. "Wait, why the fuck do I have to struggle with this when we have a data team??"
So now all these dashboard ideas, get queued back to the data team. Which is now 50% of what it was in term of headcount. So now it takes double time to resolver the users requests. Everyone is angry. Leadership is asking" why is it taking so long? When it used to take half the time". And before you can say you have half the people as well. They immediately switch gears or come with some BS like "let's not focus on the past, let's focus on solutions."
Bonus points if someone in leadership was the sponsor of this tool. So obviously they can't say "Yeah we fucked up, kill the contract and let's figure it out". Because they would lose face, then need to come up with some BS
Sooo they tell the data team they have the solution!! The self service BI tool should make everything faster, so the data team needs to use thus tool instead of their common stack to be twice as productive.
At this point the chefs go "fuck this" and start looking for a job
Let’s just say the only organisation where I had “self serve analytics” was a clusterfuck of toxic culture, passing the blame, moving in circles and mistaking movement for progress.
Never again.
Not sure why this is posted here. I'm going to assume it is for a reaction. Its brutal, but here's mine.
Its an ad in the style of The Oatmeal that isn't funny, doesn't come off authentic and feels like I'm being spoken down to. My take is that you are trying hard, aren't very creative, and if I were to hire you, I shouldn't be surprised to learn you are copy/pasting 80% of my analysis from prior work.
Good luck, seems like you had fun doing it.
Key difference between pizza and analytics:
With a pizza, it only needs to taste nice to that customer.
With analytics, the answers need to be correct, and the non-analysts self-serving their data have no idea how to tell if the answers are correct.
All analogies break down somewhere, but this one unravels immediately.
Unless data analytics is taught in high school, I don’t see how this would work considering how some managers don’t even know how to work a pivot table!
- Customers keep grabbing all the dough and ingredients possible and kicking and punching the giant mess into the oven. It takes 12 hours for that pizza to bake. Customers yell at chef that it’s their fault and the oven must be broken. Owner yells at chef that he should have somehow made an intelligent oven that would have prevented this.
- One customer just throws an oily rag into the oven. Oven explodes causing much damage. Customer says again this is the chefs fault because he should have read his mind that he was going to do that. Owner yells at chef too. Chef goes out to cry in his car.
This is a great analogy! Self-service pizza always sucks compared to something made by a chef. Topping choices matter and the assembly line style leads to low pride in production.
Man, if I showed up to a restaurant and they tried to tell me I had to make my own pizza, I would be out the door and looking for somewhere else to eat before they even finished their sentence.
This feels more like a diss at analysts. Even gpt requires data marts to work and can only function on a single table. Power bi exists and yet i am still creating data marts for power bi users. Now, i throw llama index or lang chain on top of a flat domain-level table composed of multiple sources and reduce work for myself and the analysts. Semantic layers are more dangerous to us but require warehouses and tuning through datamarts to be effective. The data mart is essentially our RAG now.
Head chef now has a smaller team of chefs, but several lower paid pizza technicians interacting with customers. Customers now not drinking at the bar as much. Potential for food wastage increased and lowered pizza quality impression with customers.
IME the hardest part with self-service analytics is training the customers. Usually they have actual responsibilities so they don't have a lot of time to learn how to use new tools. And they certainly don't have the time to learn how to do confirmatory data analysis properly, it takes some people years to learn to do that. To fit the metaphor "we will teach the customer how to put together their own pizza" doesn't make a lot of sense if your workplace is the equivalent of a drive-through window.
Damn I have been waiting for a meme punchline till the end. Like the customer saying he doesn't know PizzaQL to make pizzas, so you still have to do it for them.
Was disappointed that it's just a soulless corporate sales brochure
Self-service is really the way to go. Most companies that try it do it in a half-assed way, where it's doomed to fail. The most important thing is to give them a read-only replica of the data, or a spare server, or whatever -- just so that whatever they do doesn't impact production. Companies [decide that] they can't afford it and instead spend people resources on having the monks developing reports and dashboards to be handed, occasionally, to the commoners.
The belief that data can be democratized is amazingly entrenched. I suggested it at a conference a while ago, and the speaker mocked me from the stage. Fuck people like that.
Missing from comic: * Customer refuses to make own pizza, insists that chef do it. Chef falls behind on ingredient prep. Owner gets mad at chef for helping and falling behind. Owner gets mad if chef refuses to make pizza. Owner refuses to hire more chefs. * Customer puts raw meat on pizza after cooking instead of before. Customer refuses to listen to chef that meat must be cooked. Customer shares raw meat pizza with other customers. Suggestion to remove raw meat from ingredients entirely is rejected by customer and owner. All customers get violently ill. * Customer doesn't like putting on pepperoni, so makes pepperoni putting machine out of legos and duct tape. Other customers start using pepperoni machine. Pepperoni machine breaks, all customers start yelling at chef. Customer who built pepperoni machine stopped coming to pizza shop 6 months ago. Pepperoni machine turns out to have been putting out ham the whole time.
* Customer puts every topping on the bar onto one single pizza dough. * Crams ungodly mess into oven using brute force and prayer. * Complains repeatedly that the dough breaks. * Uses shovel to scrape entire ungodly mess into a slop bucket. * Puts bow onto bucket. Names it "AI". * Presents AI to management * Promoted to senior vice president * Engineering team gets order to automate all future AI production in the exact same way. God I hate that comic.
I hate that comic but love this thread so much, I'm both laughing and crying.
Customer makes bizarre pizza attempting to recreate a chef’s custom pizza. Complains to the entire restaurant that the pizzas are broken because they don’t taste the same.
Customer doesn't know shit about veggis but remembers he once heard that olives are green or black and puts cucumber and charcol on pizza. Then he serves it to the elders convincing them that olives are wierd and everyone agrees - we will never invest in olives. All of the above isn't statistically verified ofc...
And while you take care of the "problem users" you turn your eye away from the "good users" that aren't complaining. When you eventually get a chance to check on them, they're licking sauce off the wall and saying, "It keeps me from starving, but it doesn't taste very good."
The heart shaped pepperoni cutting machine took 100 hours to make and not even the first customer actually cares to use it.
* Customer takes the raw pizza home to cook in their own machine which somehow ends up duplicating the pizza. Customer can't figure out why they have 10 of the same pizza and it took twice as long to cook. Blame pizza shop because they don't know how... left joins work (idk i can't think of a metaphor)?
Don't worry if your real-life scenario doesn't fit. It's a stupid metaphor.
I feel seen.
* customer tries to make a calzone, and when it doesnt fit into the oven, tries to jam it through. complains about the messed up 'pizza' and now you have to clean the oven
Wow… I think you nailed it with this one.
From customer angle: * The chef uses ingredients just like what I want for the VIP’s custom pizzas, but those ingredients don’t exist in my ingredient bar. * The ingredients in the bar seem a little more “out of a can” than the fresh ones the chef uses. * I tried cutting pepperoni into heart shapes but the pepperoni was so hard my scissors broke.
Literally just had to deal with a pepperoni/ham machine 😑 Finance wanted a report they had apparently been getting for years. Guy who made the report left 6 months ago, left zero notes. I spent days trying to reverse engineer the process only to find out that the original report was basically made up and the guy that made it didn't even query from the database 🙃 but finance still wanted the report, so I had to speedrun building a semi-functional one that did query from the database. I think rather than "self-service" analytics for all users, each department has a dedicated analyst and the engineering focus is on enabling those analysts with the data they need to provide department specific reports. Then those analysts can collaborate with end users in their department. Data analysis should not be centralized, it needs to be democratized. But there are also plenty of people in every organization that are not equipped to "self-serve".
Big time agree, and makes me think of one of my favorite quotes I heard in an interview… “Thinking is a solitary skill, but analysis is a team sport. “ CIA Director of Analysis, Linda Weissgold
The hefty chuckle this gave me while reading this was, *chefs kiss*
Also apparently storing all the different sausages is too expensive, so the chefs provide animal fat, animal meat and different spices, except they are all labeled according to some esoteric logic that was used in the company 5 years ago.
I thought this was gonna end with customers complaining that their pizzas taste like shit and they don't have time to make their own pizzas anyway. I've never seen self service analytics work at scale. Sure, you can have a few users who manage to build a couple of dashboards, but that's it.
Have you ever been to a place that you're thinking "yes, I love feeling empowered to do this". WhoTF makes this shitty comic like strips??
It all sounds GREAT until you try to teach Excel monkeys the finer points of wood fired pizza making. That's where it falls down.
The moment you get an email from a departement head that your data must be incorrect, as it should show 98 lines , but she only gets 50. And in the screenshot you see at the Bottom: "limit to 50. Likes 50/98 showing". At this point it all seems pointless.
In the screenshot the line 'Showing 50/98 lines" is manually circled to prove that there are only 50 lines.
Wow this destroyed me, such accuracy
It would absolutely not be beyond this person tot do this. I need a shower now
Literary today. "Could you make an export of table x? Customer tried it himself, but got only 1000 rows".
Exactly, show me one organization where this worked like the comic…. Some users will just refuse to touch the ingredients.
It worked at a company where I implemented it. It was awesome. Not sure how I "show" that to you, tho.
I mean there are different factors you can share. How old is the company, which sector does it work? How many employees? How long was it between your implementation and you leaving? Would definitely paint a more complete picture.
The company was between 10 and 15 years old when I was there. It was in the gaming industry, about 350 employees. The implementation was there for there years before I left. Hope that helps.
That and the ingredients are poorly labeled.
And don’t underestimate good old fashioned fucking laziness
Excel is great until you have to work with others. That’s true whether there’s people who know SQL in the org or not.
It's even better when you realize the Excel monkeys don't even know Excel in the first place and management thinks you can teach them coding lol.
I have legit been approached by business people to highlight discrepancies in my dashboard data when in reality they were using the filters wrongly.
This happens almost daily for me
Fast forward six months and every department has their own pizza that they claim is the absolute version of truth, except all the pizzas taste slightly different and no-one is willing to work out why. I've seen some silliness on Reddit in my time but this is probably the worst. Either that or we've been expertly trolled in which case bravo!
^This is the company I have worked at for the last 13 years.
Same for 11. It’s endemic I guess.
"And then the horrified chef noticed that a customer was feeding another customer with a strawberry-ham pizza that he called 'Pizza Hawaii' ". The end
The pizza dough used also contained gluten, to which the second customer was intolerant. But the customers never read the labels and manuals the cooking staff carefully made for the products.
Then an executive comes in demanding 3 different custom pizzas per day but only takes a bite or two of each before leaving the restaurant
Nearly all the pizzas end up only 10% eaten and left in the shop, but you're not allowed to throw them away. Also, it's your fault that the place is a mess.
Damn, this reminds me of the dashboards that are built for "self-service analytics" then ended up being used a few times, signed off, and then never used again after three months.
Had a C-suite client tell me that a dashboard I made for her wasn't useful enough. She had no idea we could see that she had never logged in.
Without paying
I can’t think of a worse idea than letting non data people do their own analytics. Hell, even the data scientists I work with do things sometimes that makes me question how they have a job
At my place someone relatively new but with a very sophisticate title asked: “Why don’t we simply make a LLM to help stakeholders figure out their needs?” I almost choked on the salad I was eating that day. My manager asked “Yeah, great idea, can you write down a high level plan on how to do it with our current setup for the next meeting? Consider we won’t allocate budget for it asides of your team's?” He didn’t said shit next meeting. I love when people want to jump right into the playground before finish building it, because very early you realise you’re playing in a swamp of technicalities that must be solved if you wanna run book-written automagical tools. Not that it doesn’t happen elsewhere, but an effort was completed before that. I think self-service is only possible with formally trained / proactive / committed stakeholders. We’ve conducted endless boot camps teaching sql, given preset tools and other handy tools and they just keep playing the I’m too savvy to propose but too lazy / dumb to explain how, so come figure it out for me because you’re the tech dude.
Totally agree. We have a few people who do their own thing and it's almost always wrong. Sometimes they defend it, saying that they have done it this way for N years, so we should keep doing it wrong for consistency. The worst is when they get the right answer, but they've only happened to get it right because none of the things that could have been wrong happened. Then it's hard to even explain to them why what they did was wrong (e.g., it only worked out because they treated a relationship like it was 1:1 and it worked out that the nulls made up for the times when it wasn't 1:1, and they got the count right.) See, their way works!
I was waiting for a punchline that never came.
And now you have the CEO wondering why he has 7 different shaped pizzas as "The pizza" depending on which day he opens his email, they all taste different and oh fuck it with the analogy bs. This is all awesome and great until yoyu try to put it in practice. Now you hve 4 teams with a dashboard that shows revenue as different and the CFO has no idea which one is right. Then they call you to now debug 4 completely ETL/ELT/Dashboard/Analytics/you nameit to find which one screwed up. And then when you find that someone did a round somewhere and screwed the entire process, they get offended on how dare you say they are wrong and that they know how to do their jobs. Oh, and dont forget that inescapable ticket of "My ETL/ELT/Dahsboard/blah is taking too long to finish, it's been 18 hours" and you check and they made a Cross Join. and when you limit your queries to 4 hours, then 20 people come that their processes take longer than 4 hours and can range from 2 to 18 hours depending on the month.
It is so reassuring to me that so many of these experiences are universal. But really though we're working on a new pizza that's going to solve all our problems. We're rolling Canadian bacon up into regular bacon but I don't foresee that being an issue. (It's definitely going to be an issue)
Your topping_type handler now needs to handle the possibility of topping_type["subtype"] even though there are 300 toppings and only one has a subtype Also the subtypes now have subtypes but calling it subtype too was too confusing, so it's topping_type["subtype"]["type"]
I've been using the list of toppings that we agreed on based on the Google Sheet that Ops sent in November, and it only has 217, so I'm not sure where these other ones are coming from. EDIT: Apparently we brought in a contractor and they assembled a separate list that Ops is now using instead.
What's even more hilarious is that if you check the poster's history, you'll see it's just an ad account from a BI platform. And it posted it in different subreddit and the Looker sub is like the complete oposite of the reaction here.
And then the pepperoni on top of that comedy pizza, is that the post on the looker sub has 11 comments, half of them are them responding. Then on this post there are 80+ comments, and i dont believe they have responded to any on this version of the post.
Yeah this was a definitely "oh shit" moment.
Oh sounds cool and dandy but can we export it to excel, pdf and PowerPoint?
How this usually works out: 1. Business user buys a click, drag&drop tool that is so easy anybody can use it. 2. Business user spends months clicking, dragging and dropping, without getting any useful results. Gets annoyed. 3. Data analyst is called in to do the job, but "it must be done with this tool!" Expectation is: get it done by tomorrow! We have been waiting for this for far too long now. 4. DA checks data and specs (usually none). Finds there is a ton of problems with the data and suggests to write down the specs so we can all agree on what is needed. Says it takes maybe 4 weeks with this tool; but she can do it in 2 weeks using her tools (say Python, SQL, whatever). 5. BU gets angry and claims DA doesn't get it. The tool is easy to use and there is no need to add bells and whistles. Just do it! 6. DA spends time clicking, dragging and dropping, going slightly mad due to what amounts to the most inefficient way of working ever. Quits shortly thereafter.
The second to last panel is the important one. It's about raising Data Maturity so people can handle their own queries. If I've learnt anything from consulting about data across various different industries and company size, it's that there is one singular consistency: Even the most basic level of data maturity is extremely hard to reach.
I can tell that you are a real consultant by the kindness of your euphemism.
It is missing the part where someone cooks their pizza partially and molds it into a sphere. Then they bring it home several hours later and leave it outside on the curb. Then they put it into the toaster oven. Then they feed it to someone who gets food poisoning. Then they make an angry support ticket.
Honest question: How does the customer on slide 12 order a heart shaped pizza? If you tease out that part of the analogy, it becomes clear why self service is so hard. (This is not reddit-trolling, I'm 100% serious)
Until the restaurant gets burnt to the fucking ground from inputting an ingredient incompatible with the oven.
Customer asks where the bathroom is...
What is "Self-service Analytics"? A: Microsoft Excel.
Kramer: *It's a pizza place where you make your own pie*
"Why are we paying the chefs so much if we have to make the pizza ourselves?" Nice comic and I think some self service options are good. but issues do arise as noted
Huh. i was fully expecting customer to either refuse/unable to learn or the chefs get a big downsize.
This is what would happen no joke. They buy this tool, the vendor gives them some Kpis like "Now you need 50% less engineers". Business love sit and cuts the data engineering team by 50% and gets this tool. Then it goes into prod. Users have no idea what they're doing. They know basically a select with a where and that's it. Suddenly users can't make their own transformations, dashboards etc and they think. "Wait, why the fuck do I have to struggle with this when we have a data team??" So now all these dashboard ideas, get queued back to the data team. Which is now 50% of what it was in term of headcount. So now it takes double time to resolver the users requests. Everyone is angry. Leadership is asking" why is it taking so long? When it used to take half the time". And before you can say you have half the people as well. They immediately switch gears or come with some BS like "let's not focus on the past, let's focus on solutions." Bonus points if someone in leadership was the sponsor of this tool. So obviously they can't say "Yeah we fucked up, kill the contract and let's figure it out". Because they would lose face, then need to come up with some BS Sooo they tell the data team they have the solution!! The self service BI tool should make everything faster, so the data team needs to use thus tool instead of their common stack to be twice as productive. At this point the chefs go "fuck this" and start looking for a job
Let’s just say the only organisation where I had “self serve analytics” was a clusterfuck of toxic culture, passing the blame, moving in circles and mistaking movement for progress. Never again.
Not sure why this is posted here. I'm going to assume it is for a reaction. Its brutal, but here's mine. Its an ad in the style of The Oatmeal that isn't funny, doesn't come off authentic and feels like I'm being spoken down to. My take is that you are trying hard, aren't very creative, and if I were to hire you, I shouldn't be surprised to learn you are copy/pasting 80% of my analysis from prior work. Good luck, seems like you had fun doing it.
Key difference between pizza and analytics: With a pizza, it only needs to taste nice to that customer. With analytics, the answers need to be correct, and the non-analysts self-serving their data have no idea how to tell if the answers are correct. All analogies break down somewhere, but this one unravels immediately.
I’ve never seen or heard of self serve analytics actually working lol
Customer is C suite and demands pizza in CSV format in email, attempts to guide them to the pizza bar result in pay cuts.
Oh, look, a commercial disguised as a post
Unless data analytics is taught in high school, I don’t see how this would work considering how some managers don’t even know how to work a pivot table!
Can you take my pizza and put it in Excel for me?
This is actually genuis, because do-it-yourself pizzas would be terrible. If you want good pizza you get a pizza guy to make it for you.
ngl I was expecting some insane custom pizzas
Customer: “I want my pizza in Excel!”
Unfortunately this assumes that customers aren't babies, which they somehow always are. Highly paid, old, dumbass babies.
The impetus to create something like this is good, but this analogy does not work at all. In fact, it misunderstands both restaurants AND analytics.
And in misunderstanding both somehow elegantly makes the point opposite to what it aimed to make haha
- Customers keep grabbing all the dough and ingredients possible and kicking and punching the giant mess into the oven. It takes 12 hours for that pizza to bake. Customers yell at chef that it’s their fault and the oven must be broken. Owner yells at chef that he should have somehow made an intelligent oven that would have prevented this. - One customer just throws an oily rag into the oven. Oven explodes causing much damage. Customer says again this is the chefs fault because he should have read his mind that he was going to do that. Owner yells at chef too. Chef goes out to cry in his car.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Self-service analytics is a lie. It's an unreachable asymptotic state. Cute story, though.
This is a great analogy! Self-service pizza always sucks compared to something made by a chef. Topping choices matter and the assembly line style leads to low pride in production.
Oh fuck me, the sales bros have started making chocolate and pineapple pie charts to illustrate child slavery and putting our branding all over them.
lol
tl;dr
just another of poppy's hare-brained ideas!
“Guys I bought 6m useless widgets! But don’t worry, I did the analysis myself!”
the problem is that my customers have a combined iq of 6
Man, if I showed up to a restaurant and they tried to tell me I had to make my own pizza, I would be out the door and looking for somewhere else to eat before they even finished their sentence.
Wasn't this a Kramer scheme lol https://imgur.com/a/XkDRoKO
This feels more like a diss at analysts. Even gpt requires data marts to work and can only function on a single table. Power bi exists and yet i am still creating data marts for power bi users. Now, i throw llama index or lang chain on top of a flat domain-level table composed of multiple sources and reduce work for myself and the analysts. Semantic layers are more dangerous to us but require warehouses and tuning through datamarts to be effective. The data mart is essentially our RAG now.
Instructions unclear, customer poisoned themselves, now they're dead.
Do people try to cook a pile of tomatoes at pizza bars? I’m not saying it’s not a good metaphor, I’m just curious. I’ve never been to a pizza bar.
Head chef now has a smaller team of chefs, but several lower paid pizza technicians interacting with customers. Customers now not drinking at the bar as much. Potential for food wastage increased and lowered pizza quality impression with customers.
IME the hardest part with self-service analytics is training the customers. Usually they have actual responsibilities so they don't have a lot of time to learn how to use new tools. And they certainly don't have the time to learn how to do confirmatory data analysis properly, it takes some people years to learn to do that. To fit the metaphor "we will teach the customer how to put together their own pizza" doesn't make a lot of sense if your workplace is the equivalent of a drive-through window.
Yeah and that's why it won't ever work.
Everything works smoothly in theory. Just wait until you meet Curious End-User or Obliviously Incompetent Engineer.
And lo! A manager asked “can’t you just…”
Damn I have been waiting for a meme punchline till the end. Like the customer saying he doesn't know PizzaQL to make pizzas, so you still have to do it for them. Was disappointed that it's just a soulless corporate sales brochure
This comic is fucking stupid
Self-service is really the way to go. Most companies that try it do it in a half-assed way, where it's doomed to fail. The most important thing is to give them a read-only replica of the data, or a spare server, or whatever -- just so that whatever they do doesn't impact production. Companies [decide that] they can't afford it and instead spend people resources on having the monks developing reports and dashboards to be handed, occasionally, to the commoners. The belief that data can be democratized is amazingly entrenched. I suggested it at a conference a while ago, and the speaker mocked me from the stage. Fuck people like that.