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My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire cours

by dijit 3y ago

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se https://medieinstitutet.se) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6-12mo on new analytics systems (or, god forbid, not be an analyst at all!). I think we don't really assess the amount of lock-in we allow when we learn something that supposedly makes our lives simpler. Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard! and the cost is that google gets your information too- which most webmasters don't care about individually. However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson.

znpy 3y ago
what you wrote is mostly true but also partially incorrect: many competencies are transferrable. there are privacy-compliant products in that sense, unless you've been literally told "click here and click there" you should be able to employ old concepts with new tools.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  Given GP's paragraph: > Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. I wouldn't be surprised for this to be a "click here and click here" kind of training. I've seen a painful amount of those. And then, when the inevitable "new and improved ui" comes along, these people are lost and require a new training.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    These are essentially "IT Factory Workers". To be honest, I think there's value in that, with the same economics of "traditional" factory workers.
- fendy3002 3y ago
  You'll be surprised at how many competent (or looked like) people that cannot connect the dots between technologies / tools. They excel at one tools and will having a very hard time migrating to new one since they cannot connect the concept and similarity between both. Not all, but there's many.
  - bsenftner 3y ago
    There was a time when "Six Sigma" was all the statistical analytics rage for everything and anything corporate. However, if one already knew statistics they'd encounter a franchise branded school of terminology, different formulas than the accepted standards, and their own separate "z-tables" that apparently backed in corrections for their use of non-standard formulas. It was a hugely successful re-branding of standard statistics with a branded hierarchy of made up human hierarchies and Scientology-level made up technical terms. All the "Six Sigma Black Belts" - an actual title in corporate pointy head world - are 1000% useless now, unless they are at some dinosaur still following that nonsense. This is how corporations and the will to profit undermines first principal knowledge and leaves a wake of fake education that ultimately needs to be unlearned or unwisely held as a fragment of useful adrift in an island of potential non-logical nonsense
pmontra 3y ago
> Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant Or this could be the right time to check one of the self hosted alternatives (Matomo, Snowplow, etc), apply what she learned about Google Analytics, learn how to do it on those systems and sell her skills on two different classes of customers: the ones that will keep using Google Analytics, the ones that will try alternatives, at least not to be fined if not out of genuine compliance with the local laws.
ramraj07 3y ago
You can learn the most generic course out there and still turn out clueless, you can also learn the most specific tool and come out and be able to generalize. As far as I can tell this depends entirely on the individuals ability to be resourceful. In that respect a GA specific course might help them Get their first job faster so maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.
- namaria 3y ago
  If you already have the background to understand computation and software, you're: a) not one of the people at risk of making this bad decision or getting stuck there; b) already in possession of much more valuable skills than knowing some software suite. Getting this background requires a non trivial amount of time. It's easy to take our ability to generalize different computer based tools when you already understand digital computer architecture and know a few programming languages. The vast majority of people do not start from such a broad base of knowledge when choosing some software tool to learn.
smcin 3y ago
That's just as true as it used to be with proprietary statistics tools such as SPSS, Minitab, SAS, STATA, JMP, etc. They used to own the market, pre-cloud; and all the university courses and commercial trainings. Eventually, people migrated off those platforms in favor of the current cloud-vendor ones (or else migrated to code in R or Python, or even MATLAB). > However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. Not really, there is no GoogleAnalytics-industrial complex yet, but yes apparently they have quite a lot of lock-in on nonprofits. I see this story as a privacy regulatory story driven by the EU and GDPR. They will order GoogleAnalytics to fix violations, and then Google roll another version of GA. Customers who want to take a stronger stance on privacy would migrate off GA. I doubt there is anyone whose entire livelihood depends on GoogleAnalytics (I don't think your relative's "entire value" does, for example) and even if there was, they could reskill in the medium-term, but anyway you could make the same comments about certification, lock-in and perverse incentives about AWS, or plenty of other companies in previous decades.
ori_prior 3y ago
This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in certain tools and products. Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. > Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher. IME, the sales are done by shops that carry many brands, and delivery, installation, repair donw by firms that often have relations with the retailers and handle whatever you get from them, including multiple unita of different brands that come together with the same team. They may also have relations with the manufacturers, but those don’t seem usually to be exclusive.
  - ori_prior 3y ago
    > Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. Yes, I'd expect any car guy to be able to change your tires. Or change your oil. But even resetting the oil-change alarm or tire-pressure sensor can be a hurdle here: Manufacturers also use skill issues to their advantage to bind tradespeople. Modern cars do need manufacturer-specific diagnostic devices that used to be unobtainable for independent shops. Since that practice has been largely forbidden by the authorities, now the software, cabling, and diagnostic output are made intentionally hard to understand without having taken the corresponding lessons that the manufacturer provides for a modest fee.
mschuster91 3y ago
> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. As long as you don't depend too much on highly vendor-specific stuff, most of the stuff a "cloud engineer" uses day-to-day is just the same fundamentally - EC2/Azure VM/GCE, ECS/Azure Container Apps/Cloud Run, Security Group/Azure Network Security Group/Google Firewall, whatever. Different names, same or very similar stuff.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I can tell you thats not the case…
  - bshacklett 3y ago
    I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next. I put most of my effort into AWS, but when I get staffed on a Google Cloud project, there isn’t much that I can’t figure out pretty quickly, especially with IaC managing everything. As long as the CSP has good docs, I find it relatively easy to move from one to the next. There are certainly some cases where that breaks down, but it’s usually in specialized areas that I’d have to do some upskilling on in my preferred cloud anyway. The benefit of the cloud is its service and resource (i.e. building block) oriented nature. There’s a level of transparency to cloud-based services that just didn’t really exist before.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      > I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next. I work here: https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/ https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/ There is a lot more to any of the cloud providers than just VMs and networking. I haven’t done anything hardly with a raw EC2 instance in 5 years except for one or two deployment pipelines. AWS alone has 130 services. True many of them are hosted versions of open source products I work with call centers (Connect), Athena (Apache Presto), Step functions, and I have done some IOT work and of course Lambda and a lot more. I don’t do anything with traditional VMs. My specialty is “application modernization” meaning my work is a combination of DevOps and traditional application development using AWS services. There are all kinds of specialties within any of the major cloud providers.
belorn 3y ago
Naively I would assume that the purpose of a data analyst is about presenting the relevant information to a company. How that data is collected, stored, processed and indexed is the role of system administrators, web developers and database designers. It seems very inappropriate to allow a data collecting tool to dictate what information is relevant for a specific company.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  Once upon a time I might have agreed with this take, but having years worth of battle scars on me now - the interface that any company’s data presents about its operations is entirely coupled to the implementation of how it’s collected and the assumptions with which the system generating it is built. This is a good thing, because there is very little new under the sun, especially in business. However, most young businesses will waste tons of time and money reinventing the wheel of these systems and trying to customize them to their business’ unique needs, but the much more effective path is to really (re)think through your business process and figure out how to align it with the grain of the tool instead. This option is only obvious to those with experience in failing to execute on the former option, unfortunately. To your point, an effective analyst doesn’t just present data, they have to understand the entire world around that data - tooling, people, processes.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Many people depend on YouTube or Instagram to make money. If YouTube and Instagram bans them - and it happens - they lose the ability to make money.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Then they will learn an important lesson.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Don't specialize in something that you are good at?
  - sccxy 3y ago
    What is the lesson here?
    - DrScientist 3y ago
      The business lesson is if you are entirely dependent on somebody else you are not in a good position. Especially if your interests aren't aligned. When people are banned, it's the platform deciding the reputational risk of association isn't worth the money you bring in. Given reputation impacts can be huge - it's hard to see how you'd ever be the right side of that equation. Even worse, the platform may decide it's not even economic to make sure each banning is fair.... Ultimately I suspect the only way to rebalance the balance of power is to use collective power. So having large number of friends on the platform that will campaign on your behalf, taking out insurance ( another pooled method ), or even having formal Unions. In essence that puts some of the economic cost of getting the decisions right onto the platform users ( as the friends/union does the work, and makes the case ). Pooled insurance has a similar economic basis ( platform users bear the cost of the insurance ).
    - rabuse 3y ago
      Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We're taught that for everything from investing to dating.
DrScientist 3y ago
For practical things it's hard to teach in the abstract - you have to do - and doing means choosing some sort of toolchain - typically the most popular is a frequent choice. As an example imagine learning programming - without some real world practice. And if you do some real world practice you have to choose which tool to use. I take your broader point - but I think it's inevitable that most courses of this type are based around a particular tool chain. Most Data Science courses use Python for example.
- tuhriel 3y ago
  I see your point to a certain...eh point. During my studies we also had our ERP course accompanied with some specific tasks on one tool (don't ask me for the name now, its been some time). BUT it was accompanied only, we usually had the concepts presented beforehand. If you want to go a step further...show an alternative from time to time. But I don't agree with the python comparison. Python is only a language and even Numpy/Pandas still need you to know the concepts and knowledge attained using them are definitely transferable.
  - DrScientist 3y ago
    It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one. All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not.
    - tuhriel 3y ago
      >It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one. totally agree here >All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not. I totally agree! My comment was related to the commented mentioned that the whole 6 month training is worthless if GA get's blocked I guess we aren't that far apart :)
anonylizard 3y ago
Wow, job for people who only knew google analytics exist? I thought at minimum SQL is required, and today's analysts also need to know python/pandas at minimum. Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use squarespace.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  > Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use squarespace. More likely: Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use React.
  - fredoliveira 3y ago
    Seems horribly limiting regardless of how we slice it.
  - muzze85 3y ago
    It's sad because it's a reality for many
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- gostsamo 3y ago
  There are people who are trained and know mainly Wordpress, so not a surprise. However, if they can transition to a second product, they will be able to generalize to a n-th as well.
- rvense 3y ago
  IDK, I used to worked with "Drupal consultants" who barely knew PHP. They delivered the sites they were asked to, usually on time and within budget.
  - Jgrubb 3y ago
    Drupal was the only accessible door to me to this entire industry in 2010, with no CS knowledge or available mentors. I was one of those people and I barely fed my family, and I eventually learned PHP, JS, the hosting stack, automating the hosting stack, Varnish and HAProxy, Linux sysadmin, how the internet works, and a decade of topics since. We all need a door into this stuff, a place to be dropped in to start putting it together. Maybe the OP’s sister in law is totally out of luck, or maybe she’s now got a few of the hundreds of tools she’s going to need to build out a career. Luckily she has a brother in law in the industry, hopefully he’s the helpful type.
bdcravens 3y ago
How many bootcamp "developers" tooled up in one framework and struggle outside of that?
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Im still waiting for the Scrum fad to passover and the entire scrum masters guild to be without a job.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DrScientist 3y ago
  A bit like Instagram etc - there has to be a new fad for those people to move to for that to happen. So sadly these things don't tend to go away, they just evolve.
ttctciyf 3y ago
> will be economically useless if it is banned. Economically set back, maybe. "Useless" (with its implication of permanence) is way OTT.
- dijit 3y ago
  How many can afford to spend 6 months re-training, and even worse: how many companies are willing to hire people who have no experience in their specific tool. I don't think it's permanent, but it does make them economically useless until such a time as they retrain.
  - jabradoodle 3y ago
    If Google analytics was banned companies would have no choice but to hire and retrain people.
  - dfadsadsf 3y ago
    You are stretching credibility when you talk about 6 months to retrain from GA to some other analytics tool. 1-2 weeks is much more realistic timeline considering standard industry terms and similarity between tools.
    - dijit 3y ago
      if it was a 1year bootcamp, then I think saying 6mo is.. "fine". Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable.
      - itsoktocry 3y ago
        >Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable. Silly hypothetical. I can't imagine a scenario where a company heavily utilizes advanced Excel, and then decides they want to use Google Sheets instead. Besides, we're programmers, and learning new tools all the time. Things are deemed obsolete regularly.
fullstackchris 3y ago
> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics, kind of a wierd comparison IMO. The entire pattern of tech is towards the "cloud" - even if you refuse to use the big ones like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, it's still technically "cloud" if it's managed servers (wherever they may be). To be honest I never got into the hype behind Google Analytics and I'm glad that I never spent more than 5 minutes at a time dropping the occasional tag on sites I built. (I've also never worked for anyone big enough where the analytics ultimately proved useful or valuable anyway). These tags are now easy to remove by deleting a few lines of code. I really wonder if the larger orgs really should have spent the extra few hours / weeks of development to develop an in house solution all along...
- pbmonster 3y ago
  > Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other... I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.
  - moduspol 3y ago
    At this point, being a "cloud" engineer essentially means that you're good at understanding and adapting to new services / value propositions, since they become available quite regularly. It doesn't mean, "really good at EC2, and incapable of learning more."
    - delecti 3y ago
      If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.
err4nt 3y ago
There's a saying: You'll never get rich harvesting in someone else's garden. It's not just Google Analytics, all Google products can be killed off at Google's whim any time, and it's not just google. That's why it's so important to work with tools you could own.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  So are you suggesting that the standard company that uses 39 different SaaS products (https://financesonline.com/saas-software-statistics/ https://financesonline.com/saas-software-statistics/) should give up all the products that meet their needs and only use free software?
  - err4nt 3y ago
    This is a strawman: I didn't say a word about free software.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  What if you don't want to get rich and just want to work enough to be comfortable and then come home and do other things besides tending a garden? In that case pay me to tend your garden so I can ignore it when I am not on the clock.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Or be ready to move to a new garden. Off the grid Homesteaders aren't more profitable than people who engage in the compromise of society.
prime17569 3y ago
This is almost like U.S. high schools, which almost exclusively require students to have Texas Instruments TI-84 series calculators in math class.
- verall 3y ago
  With a student:teacher ratio around 30:1 I'm not sure what the alternative would be
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  I had a TI-85, which was just a little different than the required calculator and didn't do everything quite like the book described. That was good. It meant that I had to learn to program it to do the things it didn't do like the 5 number summary and something else. Which meant I actually learned that stuff pretty well.
andix 3y ago
It is nothing new, that using Google Analytics is in violation of the European GDPR, I guess this was covered in the course. So why would she learn a technology, that is mostly illegal to use?
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  Maybe because most companies use it. Also, it is quite new for it to be considered illegal, GDPR only came into effect a few years ago. It would only seem "nothing new" if you're extraordinarily young and inexperienced.
  - andix 3y ago
    Or if you work in web development in Europe. Moving away from Google Analytics and Google Fonts was a huge deal in the last 3-5 years. Companies kept looking intensively if they still use it somewhere and it was a lot of work.
thissitesucks0 3y ago
[flagged]
floomk 3y ago
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zelphirkalt 3y ago
If the ability to work with the things taught in that course is so dependent on GA, then I dare question the term "data analytics" for that certification. Data analytics is a general area of expertise, that is not bound to GA. Perhaps the certification should be called "Google Analytics Certification", instead of implying more knowledge and skill than is actually there. Data analytics has some statistics in it, these days probably a pinch of training ML models and using them and understanding them in the basics as well. Source: I did some work for a company specializing in creating courses for actually learning data analyst skills, as a preparation for switching careers towards data analyst jobs. I myself helped creating course content. The course is officially certified for job-seeking people as a means of learning a new job.
- hanspeter 3y ago
  Exactly. It's interesting to observe how the existence of a mediocre course in Sweden is leveraged to make the popularity of Google Analytics a major concern. And maybe the course is not even that Google-dominated. Looking at the content here https://medieinstitutet.se/utbildningar/digital-analytics-digital-analytiker/ https://medieinstitutet.se/utbildningar/digital-analytics-di..., they use both Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics and mention other tools like Hotjar.
dsflakjasdfklj 3y ago
> where at least a few thousand people depend on this tool Just taking Google employees alone, a few *tens* of thousands of people depend on this tool. Millions of non-Googlers depend on the tool.
lettergram 3y ago
Not really important to the rest of your comment, BUT — Sister-in-law means they have to be a “sister in the law”, a girlfriend has no legal basis in fact. All that said, there are other analytics systems out there mixpanel, amplitude, roll your own, etc. they might not be quite as full-featured but 95% if the value comes from a few features everyone has
harlanji 3y ago
> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. The argument for Universities right here. I always find the opinion that Universities should make students job ready to be naive, even if well intentioned. There's a place for certifications that focus on job readiness, and there needs to remain a place that focuses on first principles and primitives. I went to University about a decade into my career as a programmer to fill in the pot holes and absorb the first principles and primitives. I advocate that route every time I can. It's great if people can get a certification and start working with GA right away, and they have a place to level up their career with the money they make if they want to.
primax 3y ago
As someone whose total compensation went up 600% over 5 years as a 'cloud engineer' from a sysadmin background, I think your comment is kinda silly. Those skills are very transferable to new products and very little of the worth I bring is from my certs
- dijit 3y ago
  Sysadmin background is akin to first principles when it comes to Cloud. I also have a sysadmin background and my journey to the cloud has been "I can learn new things that make things easier or just use some pretty standard Linux VMs at any time". Most new entrants to cloud learn the following: * an object storage system (GCS, S3) * A functions as a Service system (Cloud functions, Lambda) -- if you are lucky, Cloud Run; since that also gives you Docker. * Message systems (Pub/Sub, SQS) * Maybe an orchestrator (GKE, ECS), but only surface level. * Some very minor information on how to create and access VMs; but it's clumsy, since you have to also learn Linux, this is unused. For me, I can always fall back to my foundational knowledge of DNS, Networking, Linux and the systems I used to run, like databases, app services, mail systems, queue systems etc; For people who are trained only on FaaS and SQS they do not have foundational knowledge to fall back on. That's not to say they can't get it, but it's not helping them make money and it's usually not taught, and worse: it's not something you ever reach for- and people typically learn through failure or by doing. For me: Cloud just makes my life easier. But I can also use an iPad as a consumption device; if I was only ever given iPads I would not be able to write C++ or Perl. That's just the nature of exclusively using simplified tools and abstractions.
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    What you are describing is a "developer doing devops" arrangement, or maybe some junior guy with an associate-level certification. A well paid Cloud Engineer is 100% expected to know architecture, Linux, networking and all the things you mention.
    - dijit 3y ago
      there are engineers who specialise on systems that have been in industry long enough to be called senior that have never touched anything non-cloud. Most people who are “devops” with <8 YoE are unlikely to have touched non-cloud systems. Worse still, whether you want to admit it or not: some people are "DevOps" with no prior developer or sysadmin experience. (Since the term "Systems Administrator" is out of vogue but the need for systems administrators has never gone away.) There are so many bootcamps for this too, and they mainly focus on AWS skills. Here's a few bootcamps that people might decide to take to break into "DevOps" of which none are assuming prior knowledge, though techworld with Nana does teach a little Linux. https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/devops-bootcamp https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/devops-bootcamp https://clarusway.com/aws-devops/ https://clarusway.com/aws-devops/ https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-devops-bootcamp/ https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-devops-bootcamp/ https://techproeducation.com/courses/aws-devops-engineering/ https://techproeducation.com/courses/aws-devops-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/training/classroom/devops-engineering-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/training/classroom/devops-engineering...
browningstreet 3y ago
When I got my AWS certification it didn't promise any applicability to Azure or GCP. But I brought skills, and took knowledge away, that would apply. Some of this is just on the practitioner.
mettamage 3y ago
> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. Even if we would train them on first principle primitives, recruiters don't view it that way. That's even true in the software dev world. If you don't have 3 years of experience in Java, then it doesn't matter that you're a 5 years experienced software engineer in all kinds of languages.
deleted 3y ago
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anjel 3y ago
Occupational lock-in was a theme explored repeatedly and with nuance in The Sopranos.
tesdinger 3y ago
> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. That's an elitist perspective that doesn't include the average worker making a living by knowing their tools and not much else.
- dijit 3y ago
  Please tell me more about what you think is elitist here. My personal situation is possibly the least background elite possible and even I know that first principles are important in a field that is shifting -- which happens to be most fields, just tech is a bit faster at churning.
totallywrong 3y ago
> we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title Not quite the same, the core concepts and skills of a Cloud Engineer should be easily transfereable between providers and even to on-prem infra.
di456 3y ago
Some business area pivots could be into user analytics or marketing analytics. Product management even. Data engineering could be another path to explore. I'd view your sister-in-law's certification course as more of a first step than an end. It could open doors but still have to stay relevant with broader skills.
Shorel 3y ago
> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. Completely agree. So it is their personal decision. It has been forever. People getting Macromedia Dreamweaver certifications instead of web development, and so on.
marcosdumay 3y ago
IT is full of those tools that have so many undiscoverable but (arcanelly) documented problems that there's an entire market for people that spent years studying them. The side effect is that for each of those tools, there's an army of people that spent years studying them, and will push them at every opportunity they can. And interestingly, those tools keep being pushed at places even when perfectly fine alternatives exist that won't give you almost any of those problems and don't require any specialization.
thatwasunusual 3y ago
> she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant Skills are very seldom tied to a specific product these days, so she will be good.
nielsbot 3y ago
No snark intended--sounds like it may not have been a well designed course. Hopefully it was at least explicit about being GA-based.
deathanatos 3y ago
> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. I don't bill myself as such, but I am basically a "Cloud Engineer". My expertise is in no way dependent on a particular cloud, and I've done work in GCP, AWS, Azure, Rackspace, and even a private cloud or two. A VM is a VM, Postgres is still (more or less) PG regardless of who is hosting it. Sure, there are specifics, but even cloud-specific stuff really doesn't differ too much, and it's pretty easy to find the common memes between the two. I can assign a role to VM in AWS, an IAM service account to a VM in GCP, and an "identity" in Azure. All 3 then permit the VM to make API calls to the respective cloud. All 3 fetch their access token in basically the same (but incompatible, of course) ways: HTTP request to a magic link-local IP. A lot of the concerns I deal with, such as "can we survive an outage? what types?" depend on concepts like failure domains that apply equally to a cloud or to a datacenter. But at some point, I had to dip my toe into a new cloud. I started a new job, and they used this thing called "Azure", and at that point, I'd never heard of it before. But you approach it with an open mind and the right balance of "some of my old knowledge might be relevant, but this new thing might also work differently and I should be prepared to build a separate mental model around it if the old knowledge is leading me astray." … and I'd expect the same from someone doing "data analytics"; I'd expect something like "math is math, how I collect the data might change, what APIs I use to process it might change but the math is the same."
pyrale 3y ago
> However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. If a 6-12 month training has no skill transferable to another analytics tool, I strongly suspect the training was useless to begin with. Other analytics tools are not so dramatically different from GA that you'd lose all methodology on what to monitor, how to conduct a study, etc. To make an analogy, you don't suddenly become useless if you move from Java to C#.
- dijit 3y ago
  Java to C# is pretty close though to be fair. Going from Haskell or Scheme to Rust or even Python is going to take some time before you're completely comfortable with all the built-in's the standard libraries, the "pythonic" or "rustic" way of writing, tools and so on. It's a lot of hidden things, you're not completely useless of course, but it's not like you write "production quality" code and have the ability to work completely independently or be an SME (like you probably were) within 1 month or even 2. It's a lot of little work to get back to where you were professionally. Because it's not just a training course that is lost, it's all the incidental knowledge that was picked up on the job too.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    I chose the languages used in the comparison with that in mind. Moving from GA to e.g. Matomo or Plausible does not require to completely reshape the way you think about your problems, you don't have to change the way you work, you just have to learn how your new tool implements it. (Also Haskell to Rust is pretty straightforward, the typesystem knowledge you learn in Haskell usually means the harder parts of learning rust are made easy. Having done that transition, 1 month is reasonable to be productive in Rust)
victorbjorklund 3y ago
Probably, not totally wasted. If you learn the principles of analytics (what KPI:s to measure, why, how to diagnose based on analytics data etc) you can hopefully transition to another analytics platform such as matomo. Kind of like how it isn't wasted time to learn a programming language even if you later have to switch language.
pyeri 3y ago
>> Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard It's not hard at all, it's just that we have become too lazy and mentally dependent on big tech companies! If all you want is user tracking, a few lines of JavaScript is all you need on the frontend. A popular WordPress plugin named jetpack gives you almost all data needed for site analytics, for example. There are other tools too like tableau and python based tools like pandas and numpy which help you with all kinds of analysis. Humble techies are everywhere with their tools, you just have to trust them a little bit, that's all! It's almost like trusting your Uncle Joe's pizza dude next door instead of the familiar Domino's or McDonald's. It takes a while but you'll eventually discover there's no difference.
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
This is why I suspect most cloud certifications are garbage. Most often they are just teaching you their product offerings. Even the implementation details aren't that useful because they change so often. Compared to something like a Cisco networking certification: The CCNA will cover practical use of their products, sure, but they're also going to teach you subnetting, both standard and Cisco proprietary routing protocols and how they work, in theory, as well as how to employ them in practice. I've mostly moved on from using Cisco products day to day, but all of the understanding was directly translatable to any other platform I've worked with.
rodgerd 3y ago
> Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant On one level it's an important observation, on another it's mundane: DBAs will fight one another over Oracle vs DB2 vs SQL Server. Traditional bare-metal DBAs will fight RDS. C programmers are upset by Rust. People who invested a lot of effort in shell scripting for SysV init dislike systemd or s6.
DropInIn 3y ago
Sounds a lot like the tech programs when I grew up being MS exclusive with active efforts to undermine non-MS products....

by dijit 3y ago

znpy 3y ago

what you wrote is mostly true but also partially incorrect: many competencies are transferrable. there are privacy-compliant products in that sense, unless you've been literally told "click here and click there" you should be able to employ old concepts with new tools.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
Given GP's paragraph: > Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. I wouldn't be surprised for this to be a "click here and click here" kind of training. I've seen a painful amount of those. And then, when the inevitable "new and improved ui" comes along, these people are lost and require a new training.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  These are essentially "IT Factory Workers". To be honest, I think there's value in that, with the same economics of "traditional" factory workers.
fendy3002 3y ago
You'll be surprised at how many competent (or looked like) people that cannot connect the dots between technologies / tools. They excel at one tools and will having a very hard time migrating to new one since they cannot connect the concept and similarity between both. Not all, but there's many.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  There was a time when "Six Sigma" was all the statistical analytics rage for everything and anything corporate. However, if one already knew statistics they'd encounter a franchise branded school of terminology, different formulas than the accepted standards, and their own separate "z-tables" that apparently backed in corrections for their use of non-standard formulas. It was a hugely successful re-branding of standard statistics with a branded hierarchy of made up human hierarchies and Scientology-level made up technical terms. All the "Six Sigma Black Belts" - an actual title in corporate pointy head world - are 1000% useless now, unless they are at some dinosaur still following that nonsense. This is how corporations and the will to profit undermines first principal knowledge and leaves a wake of fake education that ultimately needs to be unlearned or unwisely held as a fragment of useful adrift in an island of potential non-logical nonsense

pmontra 3y ago

> Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant Or this could be the right time to check one of the self hosted alternatives (Matomo, Snowplow, etc), apply what she learned about Google Analytics, learn how to do it on those systems and sell her skills on two different classes of customers: the ones that will keep using Google Analytics, the ones that will try alternatives, at least not to be fined if not out of genuine compliance with the local laws.

ramraj07 3y ago

You can learn the most generic course out there and still turn out clueless, you can also learn the most specific tool and come out and be able to generalize. As far as I can tell this depends entirely on the individuals ability to be resourceful. In that respect a GA specific course might help them Get their first job faster so maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.

namaria 3y ago
If you already have the background to understand computation and software, you're: a) not one of the people at risk of making this bad decision or getting stuck there; b) already in possession of much more valuable skills than knowing some software suite. Getting this background requires a non trivial amount of time. It's easy to take our ability to generalize different computer based tools when you already understand digital computer architecture and know a few programming languages. The vast majority of people do not start from such a broad base of knowledge when choosing some software tool to learn.

smcin 3y ago

That's just as true as it used to be with proprietary statistics tools such as SPSS, Minitab, SAS, STATA, JMP, etc. They used to own the market, pre-cloud; and all the university courses and commercial trainings. Eventually, people migrated off those platforms in favor of the current cloud-vendor ones (or else migrated to code in R or Python, or even MATLAB). > However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. Not really, there is no GoogleAnalytics-industrial complex yet, but yes apparently they have quite a lot of lock-in on nonprofits. I see this story as a privacy regulatory story driven by the EU and GDPR. They will order GoogleAnalytics to fix violations, and then Google roll another version of GA. Customers who want to take a stronger stance on privacy would migrate off GA. I doubt there is anyone whose entire livelihood depends on GoogleAnalytics (I don't think your relative's "entire value" does, for example) and even if there was, they could reskill in the medium-term, but anyway you could make the same comments about certification, lock-in and perverse incentives about AWS, or plenty of other companies in previous decades.

ori_prior 3y ago

This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in certain tools and products. Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. > Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher. IME, the sales are done by shops that carry many brands, and delivery, installation, repair donw by firms that often have relations with the retailers and handle whatever you get from them, including multiple unita of different brands that come together with the same team. They may also have relations with the manufacturers, but those don’t seem usually to be exclusive.
- ori_prior 3y ago
  > Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. Yes, I'd expect any car guy to be able to change your tires. Or change your oil. But even resetting the oil-change alarm or tire-pressure sensor can be a hurdle here: Manufacturers also use skill issues to their advantage to bind tradespeople. Modern cars do need manufacturer-specific diagnostic devices that used to be unobtainable for independent shops. Since that practice has been largely forbidden by the authorities, now the software, cabling, and diagnostic output are made intentionally hard to understand without having taken the corresponding lessons that the manufacturer provides for a modest fee.

mschuster91 3y ago

> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. As long as you don't depend too much on highly vendor-specific stuff, most of the stuff a "cloud engineer" uses day-to-day is just the same fundamentally - EC2/Azure VM/GCE, ECS/Azure Container Apps/Cloud Run, Security Group/Azure Network Security Group/Google Firewall, whatever. Different names, same or very similar stuff.

scarface_74 3y ago
I can tell you thats not the case…
- bshacklett 3y ago
  I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next. I put most of my effort into AWS, but when I get staffed on a Google Cloud project, there isn’t much that I can’t figure out pretty quickly, especially with IaC managing everything. As long as the CSP has good docs, I find it relatively easy to move from one to the next. There are certainly some cases where that breaks down, but it’s usually in specialized areas that I’d have to do some upskilling on in my preferred cloud anyway. The benefit of the cloud is its service and resource (i.e. building block) oriented nature. There’s a level of transparency to cloud-based services that just didn’t really exist before.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    > I’m curious what you’re working with that is significantly different from one CSP to the next. I work here: https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/ https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/ There is a lot more to any of the cloud providers than just VMs and networking. I haven’t done anything hardly with a raw EC2 instance in 5 years except for one or two deployment pipelines. AWS alone has 130 services. True many of them are hosted versions of open source products I work with call centers (Connect), Athena (Apache Presto), Step functions, and I have done some IOT work and of course Lambda and a lot more. I don’t do anything with traditional VMs. My specialty is “application modernization” meaning my work is a combination of DevOps and traditional application development using AWS services. There are all kinds of specialties within any of the major cloud providers.

belorn 3y ago

Naively I would assume that the purpose of a data analyst is about presenting the relevant information to a company. How that data is collected, stored, processed and indexed is the role of system administrators, web developers and database designers. It seems very inappropriate to allow a data collecting tool to dictate what information is relevant for a specific company.

Jgrubb 3y ago
Once upon a time I might have agreed with this take, but having years worth of battle scars on me now - the interface that any company’s data presents about its operations is entirely coupled to the implementation of how it’s collected and the assumptions with which the system generating it is built. This is a good thing, because there is very little new under the sun, especially in business. However, most young businesses will waste tons of time and money reinventing the wheel of these systems and trying to customize them to their business’ unique needs, but the much more effective path is to really (re)think through your business process and figure out how to align it with the grain of the tool instead. This option is only obvious to those with experience in failing to execute on the former option, unfortunately. To your point, an effective analyst doesn’t just present data, they have to understand the entire world around that data - tooling, people, processes.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Many people depend on YouTube or Instagram to make money. If YouTube and Instagram bans them - and it happens - they lose the ability to make money.

MrVandemar 3y ago
Then they will learn an important lesson.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Don't specialize in something that you are good at?
- sccxy 3y ago
  What is the lesson here?
  - DrScientist 3y ago
    The business lesson is if you are entirely dependent on somebody else you are not in a good position. Especially if your interests aren't aligned. When people are banned, it's the platform deciding the reputational risk of association isn't worth the money you bring in. Given reputation impacts can be huge - it's hard to see how you'd ever be the right side of that equation. Even worse, the platform may decide it's not even economic to make sure each banning is fair.... Ultimately I suspect the only way to rebalance the balance of power is to use collective power. So having large number of friends on the platform that will campaign on your behalf, taking out insurance ( another pooled method ), or even having formal Unions. In essence that puts some of the economic cost of getting the decisions right onto the platform users ( as the friends/union does the work, and makes the case ). Pooled insurance has a similar economic basis ( platform users bear the cost of the insurance ).
  - rabuse 3y ago
    Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We're taught that for everything from investing to dating.

DrScientist 3y ago

For practical things it's hard to teach in the abstract - you have to do - and doing means choosing some sort of toolchain - typically the most popular is a frequent choice. As an example imagine learning programming - without some real world practice. And if you do some real world practice you have to choose which tool to use. I take your broader point - but I think it's inevitable that most courses of this type are based around a particular tool chain. Most Data Science courses use Python for example.

tuhriel 3y ago
I see your point to a certain...eh point. During my studies we also had our ERP course accompanied with some specific tasks on one tool (don't ask me for the name now, its been some time). BUT it was accompanied only, we usually had the concepts presented beforehand. If you want to go a step further...show an alternative from time to time. But I don't agree with the python comparison. Python is only a language and even Numpy/Pandas still need you to know the concepts and knowledge attained using them are definitely transferable.
- DrScientist 3y ago
  It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one. All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not.
  - tuhriel 3y ago
    >It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one. totally agree here >All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not. I totally agree! My comment was related to the commented mentioned that the whole 6 month training is worthless if GA get's blocked I guess we aren't that far apart :)

anonylizard 3y ago

Wow, job for people who only knew google analytics exist? I thought at minimum SQL is required, and today's analysts also need to know python/pandas at minimum. Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use squarespace.

bdcravens 3y ago
> Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use squarespace. More likely: Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use React.
- fredoliveira 3y ago
  Seems horribly limiting regardless of how we slice it.
- muzze85 3y ago
  It's sad because it's a reality for many
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gostsamo 3y ago
There are people who are trained and know mainly Wordpress, so not a surprise. However, if they can transition to a second product, they will be able to generalize to a n-th as well.
rvense 3y ago
IDK, I used to worked with "Drupal consultants" who barely knew PHP. They delivered the sites they were asked to, usually on time and within budget.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  Drupal was the only accessible door to me to this entire industry in 2010, with no CS knowledge or available mentors. I was one of those people and I barely fed my family, and I eventually learned PHP, JS, the hosting stack, automating the hosting stack, Varnish and HAProxy, Linux sysadmin, how the internet works, and a decade of topics since. We all need a door into this stuff, a place to be dropped in to start putting it together. Maybe the OP’s sister in law is totally out of luck, or maybe she’s now got a few of the hundreds of tools she’s going to need to build out a career. Luckily she has a brother in law in the industry, hopefully he’s the helpful type.

bdcravens 3y ago

How many bootcamp "developers" tooled up in one framework and struggle outside of that?

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

Im still waiting for the Scrum fad to passover and the entire scrum masters guild to be without a job.

deleted 3y ago
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DrScientist 3y ago
A bit like Instagram etc - there has to be a new fad for those people to move to for that to happen. So sadly these things don't tend to go away, they just evolve.

ttctciyf 3y ago

> will be economically useless if it is banned. Economically set back, maybe. "Useless" (with its implication of permanence) is way OTT.

dijit 3y ago
How many can afford to spend 6 months re-training, and even worse: how many companies are willing to hire people who have no experience in their specific tool. I don't think it's permanent, but it does make them economically useless until such a time as they retrain.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  If Google analytics was banned companies would have no choice but to hire and retrain people.
- dfadsadsf 3y ago
  You are stretching credibility when you talk about 6 months to retrain from GA to some other analytics tool. 1-2 weeks is much more realistic timeline considering standard industry terms and similarity between tools.
  - dijit 3y ago
    if it was a 1year bootcamp, then I think saying 6mo is.. "fine". Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable. Silly hypothetical. I can't imagine a scenario where a company heavily utilizes advanced Excel, and then decides they want to use Google Sheets instead. Besides, we're programmers, and learning new tools all the time. Things are deemed obsolete regularly.

fullstackchris 3y ago

> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics, kind of a wierd comparison IMO. The entire pattern of tech is towards the "cloud" - even if you refuse to use the big ones like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, it's still technically "cloud" if it's managed servers (wherever they may be). To be honest I never got into the hype behind Google Analytics and I'm glad that I never spent more than 5 minutes at a time dropping the occasional tag on sites I built. (I've also never worked for anyone big enough where the analytics ultimately proved useful or valuable anyway). These tags are now easy to remove by deleting a few lines of code. I really wonder if the larger orgs really should have spent the extra few hours / weeks of development to develop an in house solution all along...

pbmonster 3y ago
> Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other... I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.
- moduspol 3y ago
  At this point, being a "cloud" engineer essentially means that you're good at understanding and adapting to new services / value propositions, since they become available quite regularly. It doesn't mean, "really good at EC2, and incapable of learning more."
  - delecti 3y ago
    If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.

err4nt 3y ago

There's a saying: You'll never get rich harvesting in someone else's garden. It's not just Google Analytics, all Google products can be killed off at Google's whim any time, and it's not just google. That's why it's so important to work with tools you could own.

scarface_74 3y ago
So are you suggesting that the standard company that uses 39 different SaaS products (https://financesonline.com/saas-software-statistics/ https://financesonline.com/saas-software-statistics/) should give up all the products that meet their needs and only use free software?
- err4nt 3y ago
  This is a strawman: I didn't say a word about free software.
Eisenstein 3y ago
What if you don't want to get rich and just want to work enough to be comfortable and then come home and do other things besides tending a garden? In that case pay me to tend your garden so I can ignore it when I am not on the clock.
hgsgm 3y ago
Or be ready to move to a new garden. Off the grid Homesteaders aren't more profitable than people who engage in the compromise of society.

prime17569 3y ago

This is almost like U.S. high schools, which almost exclusively require students to have Texas Instruments TI-84 series calculators in math class.

verall 3y ago
With a student:teacher ratio around 30:1 I'm not sure what the alternative would be
Falkon1313 3y ago
I had a TI-85, which was just a little different than the required calculator and didn't do everything quite like the book described. That was good. It meant that I had to learn to program it to do the things it didn't do like the 5 number summary and something else. Which meant I actually learned that stuff pretty well.

andix 3y ago

It is nothing new, that using Google Analytics is in violation of the European GDPR, I guess this was covered in the course. So why would she learn a technology, that is mostly illegal to use?

Falkon1313 3y ago
Maybe because most companies use it. Also, it is quite new for it to be considered illegal, GDPR only came into effect a few years ago. It would only seem "nothing new" if you're extraordinarily young and inexperienced.
- andix 3y ago
  Or if you work in web development in Europe. Moving away from Google Analytics and Google Fonts was a huge deal in the last 3-5 years. Companies kept looking intensively if they still use it somewhere and it was a lot of work.

thissitesucks0 3y ago

[flagged]

floomk 3y ago

[flagged]

zelphirkalt 3y ago

If the ability to work with the things taught in that course is so dependent on GA, then I dare question the term "data analytics" for that certification. Data analytics is a general area of expertise, that is not bound to GA. Perhaps the certification should be called "Google Analytics Certification", instead of implying more knowledge and skill than is actually there. Data analytics has some statistics in it, these days probably a pinch of training ML models and using them and understanding them in the basics as well. Source: I did some work for a company specializing in creating courses for actually learning data analyst skills, as a preparation for switching careers towards data analyst jobs. I myself helped creating course content. The course is officially certified for job-seeking people as a means of learning a new job.

hanspeter 3y ago
Exactly. It's interesting to observe how the existence of a mediocre course in Sweden is leveraged to make the popularity of Google Analytics a major concern. And maybe the course is not even that Google-dominated. Looking at the content here https://medieinstitutet.se/utbildningar/digital-analytics-digital-analytiker/ https://medieinstitutet.se/utbildningar/digital-analytics-di..., they use both Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics and mention other tools like Hotjar.

dsflakjasdfklj 3y ago

> where at least a few thousand people depend on this tool Just taking Google employees alone, a few *tens* of thousands of people depend on this tool. Millions of non-Googlers depend on the tool.

lettergram 3y ago

Not really important to the rest of your comment, BUT — Sister-in-law means they have to be a “sister in the law”, a girlfriend has no legal basis in fact. All that said, there are other analytics systems out there mixpanel, amplitude, roll your own, etc. they might not be quite as full-featured but 95% if the value comes from a few features everyone has

harlanji 3y ago

> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. The argument for Universities right here. I always find the opinion that Universities should make students job ready to be naive, even if well intentioned. There's a place for certifications that focus on job readiness, and there needs to remain a place that focuses on first principles and primitives. I went to University about a decade into my career as a programmer to fill in the pot holes and absorb the first principles and primitives. I advocate that route every time I can. It's great if people can get a certification and start working with GA right away, and they have a place to level up their career with the money they make if they want to.

primax 3y ago

As someone whose total compensation went up 600% over 5 years as a 'cloud engineer' from a sysadmin background, I think your comment is kinda silly. Those skills are very transferable to new products and very little of the worth I bring is from my certs

dijit 3y ago
Sysadmin background is akin to first principles when it comes to Cloud. I also have a sysadmin background and my journey to the cloud has been "I can learn new things that make things easier or just use some pretty standard Linux VMs at any time". Most new entrants to cloud learn the following: * an object storage system (GCS, S3) * A functions as a Service system (Cloud functions, Lambda) -- if you are lucky, Cloud Run; since that also gives you Docker. * Message systems (Pub/Sub, SQS) * Maybe an orchestrator (GKE, ECS), but only surface level. * Some very minor information on how to create and access VMs; but it's clumsy, since you have to also learn Linux, this is unused. For me, I can always fall back to my foundational knowledge of DNS, Networking, Linux and the systems I used to run, like databases, app services, mail systems, queue systems etc; For people who are trained only on FaaS and SQS they do not have foundational knowledge to fall back on. That's not to say they can't get it, but it's not helping them make money and it's usually not taught, and worse: it's not something you ever reach for- and people typically learn through failure or by doing. For me: Cloud just makes my life easier. But I can also use an iPad as a consumption device; if I was only ever given iPads I would not be able to write C++ or Perl. That's just the nature of exclusively using simplified tools and abstractions.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  What you are describing is a "developer doing devops" arrangement, or maybe some junior guy with an associate-level certification. A well paid Cloud Engineer is 100% expected to know architecture, Linux, networking and all the things you mention.
  - dijit 3y ago
    there are engineers who specialise on systems that have been in industry long enough to be called senior that have never touched anything non-cloud. Most people who are “devops” with <8 YoE are unlikely to have touched non-cloud systems. Worse still, whether you want to admit it or not: some people are "DevOps" with no prior developer or sysadmin experience. (Since the term "Systems Administrator" is out of vogue but the need for systems administrators has never gone away.) There are so many bootcamps for this too, and they mainly focus on AWS skills. Here's a few bootcamps that people might decide to take to break into "DevOps" of which none are assuming prior knowledge, though techworld with Nana does teach a little Linux. https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/devops-bootcamp https://www.techworld-with-nana.com/devops-bootcamp https://clarusway.com/aws-devops/ https://clarusway.com/aws-devops/ https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-devops-bootcamp/ https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-devops-bootcamp/ https://techproeducation.com/courses/aws-devops-engineering/ https://techproeducation.com/courses/aws-devops-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/training/classroom/devops-engineering-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/training/classroom/devops-engineering...

browningstreet 3y ago

When I got my AWS certification it didn't promise any applicability to Azure or GCP. But I brought skills, and took knowledge away, that would apply. Some of this is just on the practitioner.

mettamage 3y ago

> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. Even if we would train them on first principle primitives, recruiters don't view it that way. That's even true in the software dev world. If you don't have 3 years of experience in Java, then it doesn't matter that you're a 5 years experienced software engineer in all kinds of languages.

deleted 3y ago

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anjel 3y ago

Occupational lock-in was a theme explored repeatedly and with nuance in The Sopranos.

tesdinger 3y ago

> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. That's an elitist perspective that doesn't include the average worker making a living by knowing their tools and not much else.

dijit 3y ago
Please tell me more about what you think is elitist here. My personal situation is possibly the least background elite possible and even I know that first principles are important in a field that is shifting -- which happens to be most fields, just tech is a bit faster at churning.

totallywrong 3y ago

> we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title Not quite the same, the core concepts and skills of a Cloud Engineer should be easily transfereable between providers and even to on-prem infra.

di456 3y ago

Some business area pivots could be into user analytics or marketing analytics. Product management even. Data engineering could be another path to explore. I'd view your sister-in-law's certification course as more of a first step than an end. It could open doors but still have to stay relevant with broader skills.

Shorel 3y ago

> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. Completely agree. So it is their personal decision. It has been forever. People getting Macromedia Dreamweaver certifications instead of web development, and so on.

marcosdumay 3y ago

IT is full of those tools that have so many undiscoverable but (arcanelly) documented problems that there's an entire market for people that spent years studying them. The side effect is that for each of those tools, there's an army of people that spent years studying them, and will push them at every opportunity they can. And interestingly, those tools keep being pushed at places even when perfectly fine alternatives exist that won't give you almost any of those problems and don't require any specialization.

thatwasunusual 3y ago

> she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant Skills are very seldom tied to a specific product these days, so she will be good.

nielsbot 3y ago

No snark intended--sounds like it may not have been a well designed course. Hopefully it was at least explicit about being GA-based.

deathanatos 3y ago

> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. I don't bill myself as such, but I am basically a "Cloud Engineer". My expertise is in no way dependent on a particular cloud, and I've done work in GCP, AWS, Azure, Rackspace, and even a private cloud or two. A VM is a VM, Postgres is still (more or less) PG regardless of who is hosting it. Sure, there are specifics, but even cloud-specific stuff really doesn't differ too much, and it's pretty easy to find the common memes between the two. I can assign a role to VM in AWS, an IAM service account to a VM in GCP, and an "identity" in Azure. All 3 then permit the VM to make API calls to the respective cloud. All 3 fetch their access token in basically the same (but incompatible, of course) ways: HTTP request to a magic link-local IP. A lot of the concerns I deal with, such as "can we survive an outage? what types?" depend on concepts like failure domains that apply equally to a cloud or to a datacenter. But at some point, I had to dip my toe into a new cloud. I started a new job, and they used this thing called "Azure", and at that point, I'd never heard of it before. But you approach it with an open mind and the right balance of "some of my old knowledge might be relevant, but this new thing might also work differently and I should be prepared to build a separate mental model around it if the old knowledge is leading me astray." … and I'd expect the same from someone doing "data analytics"; I'd expect something like "math is math, how I collect the data might change, what APIs I use to process it might change but the math is the same."

pyrale 3y ago

> However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. If a 6-12 month training has no skill transferable to another analytics tool, I strongly suspect the training was useless to begin with. Other analytics tools are not so dramatically different from GA that you'd lose all methodology on what to monitor, how to conduct a study, etc. To make an analogy, you don't suddenly become useless if you move from Java to C#.

dijit 3y ago
Java to C# is pretty close though to be fair. Going from Haskell or Scheme to Rust or even Python is going to take some time before you're completely comfortable with all the built-in's the standard libraries, the "pythonic" or "rustic" way of writing, tools and so on. It's a lot of hidden things, you're not completely useless of course, but it's not like you write "production quality" code and have the ability to work completely independently or be an SME (like you probably were) within 1 month or even 2. It's a lot of little work to get back to where you were professionally. Because it's not just a training course that is lost, it's all the incidental knowledge that was picked up on the job too.
- pyrale 3y ago
  I chose the languages used in the comparison with that in mind. Moving from GA to e.g. Matomo or Plausible does not require to completely reshape the way you think about your problems, you don't have to change the way you work, you just have to learn how your new tool implements it. (Also Haskell to Rust is pretty straightforward, the typesystem knowledge you learn in Haskell usually means the harder parts of learning rust are made easy. Having done that transition, 1 month is reasonable to be productive in Rust)

victorbjorklund 3y ago

Probably, not totally wasted. If you learn the principles of analytics (what KPI:s to measure, why, how to diagnose based on analytics data etc) you can hopefully transition to another analytics platform such as matomo. Kind of like how it isn't wasted time to learn a programming language even if you later have to switch language.

pyeri 3y ago

>> Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard It's not hard at all, it's just that we have become too lazy and mentally dependent on big tech companies! If all you want is user tracking, a few lines of JavaScript is all you need on the frontend. A popular WordPress plugin named jetpack gives you almost all data needed for site analytics, for example. There are other tools too like tableau and python based tools like pandas and numpy which help you with all kinds of analysis. Humble techies are everywhere with their tools, you just have to trust them a little bit, that's all! It's almost like trusting your Uncle Joe's pizza dude next door instead of the familiar Domino's or McDonald's. It takes a while but you'll eventually discover there's no difference.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

This is why I suspect most cloud certifications are garbage. Most often they are just teaching you their product offerings. Even the implementation details aren't that useful because they change so often. Compared to something like a Cisco networking certification: The CCNA will cover practical use of their products, sure, but they're also going to teach you subnetting, both standard and Cisco proprietary routing protocols and how they work, in theory, as well as how to employ them in practice. I've mostly moved on from using Cisco products day to day, but all of the understanding was directly translatable to any other platform I've worked with.

rodgerd 3y ago

> Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant On one level it's an important observation, on another it's mundane: DBAs will fight one another over Oracle vs DB2 vs SQL Server. Traditional bare-metal DBAs will fight RDS. C programmers are upset by Rust. People who invested a lot of effort in shell scripting for SysV init dislike systemd or s6.

DropInIn 3y ago

Sounds a lot like the tech programs when I grew up being MS exclusive with active efforts to undermine non-MS products....