After a decade of referring to "data engineering" by asking candidates, "So you want to be a plumber?", this resonates. My dad wasn't a plumber though he was a

After a decade of referring to "data engineering" by asking candidates, "So you want to be a plumber?", this resonates. My dad wasn't a plumber though he was a member of the steamfitter's union at one point. These are similar problems though they may not look alike at a casual glance: Plumbers make good money, but I'm not sure there's deep meaning in the pipes because, like metadata, pipes go sideways too. I'm having trouble thinking of a Turing award winner who won because they went sideways. The key is that the data insights of a Turing award winner are durable, unlike the transient nature of most of what we do with data in modern organizations. Ultimately, this sounds more like Grothendieck in math than computer science: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/201707/the-mad-genius-mystery https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/articles/201707/the-mad... Metadata sounds like it's the wrong word as the structure we are looking for isn't the ephemeral structure that most of us discover, but rather, it's closer to special relativity. The Turing award winner who comes to mind is Leslie Lamport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_clock There may be a better choice that demonstrates the worthlessness paradox of data engineering or metadata or data science in a modern management context. It's not that metadata are actually worthless as in fitness-for-a-particular-purpose. Rather, it's that the insights that we and our organizations reap from that metadata is increasingly short-term - anything but durable. https://plus.maths.org/content/stuff-happens-ordering-history-computer-science https://plus.maths.org/content/stuff-happens-ordering-histor... The only references I can think of on quality are either Pirsig's MOQ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig or Wallace's posthumous Pale King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_King Your friend's experience working in government sounds exactly like the Pale King to me. The worthlessness you're referring to seems much more dependent on the fact that management culture has evolved to somewhere between a cargo cult and celebrating short-term things that don't count, both illuminating an illusion of control. I mean, does anybody, anywhere still get a gold Rolex and actually retire?