The Two Engineers
This is a story. The two men in it do not exist. Everything that happens to them does.
Year One
They had studied together, and so once a year or so they met at the same café near the old university, ordered the same coffee, and compared the shape of their careers. In the first year, the shapes were identical. Both were data engineers. Both were good. Both were, at that point, indistinguishable.
The first man — we will call him Marek — arrived at the café already talking.
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"I have just finished my third certification this quarter," he said, before sitting down. "Streaming platform, the new one. Everyone is hiring for it. I have four offers. Four. I told my entire LinkedIn network. The recruiters will not leave me alone."
His friend — Tomas — congratulated him sincerely and asked what the platform did.
"It moves data," said Marek. "Very fast. It is the future."
Tomas said that sounded useful. He had spent the year on a single long migration for a bank, mostly, he admitted, in meetings. A great deal of the work had been arguing with people about what the system was actually for before anyone built anything. It had been slow. It had not produced a single certificate.
Marek paid for the coffee. He could afford to. He was, he pointed out, very much in demand.
Year Three
Marek arrived with a new laptop and a new vocabulary.
"The streaming platform is finished," he announced. "Dead. Nobody uses it anymore. But I saw it coming, so I retrained. I now do the orchestration framework, the one with the directed graphs. Also, the new table format. Also, a thing called a lakehouse, which is a warehouse, except it is a lake. I have six certifications now. Look."
He turned the laptop around. There were badges.
Tomas looked at the badges and said they were very colorful. He asked whether the orchestration framework was difficult.
"Brutal," said Marek. "Took me a whole weekend."
Tomas observed, mildly, that a thing learnable in a weekend might not pay like a thing that took twenty years. Marek waved this away. The rates were still excellent. The recruiters still called. He had recently told a man at a conference that he was "platform-agnostic but bleeding-edge," and the man had been visibly impressed.
Tomas had spent the year on another migration. The bank had called him back because the first one had not fallen over, which he said was a low bar that a surprising number of projects failed to clear. They had asked him to look at a plan another firm had drawn up. He had read it and told them, in writing, that it would not work and why. They had paid him quite well to write a single page that said no.
Marek found this hilarious. "They paid you to say no? I would have built the whole thing for them."
"I know," said Tomas. "That was the problem with the plan."
Year Five
Marek was a little quieter this year.
The certifications now numbered, he said, somewhere past a dozen; he had stopped counting precisely because the counting had begun to feel less like a trophy shelf and more like a treadmill. Each tool he mastered was declared obsolete roughly around the time he mastered it. He had noticed, too, that the new hires at his client were learning these same tools in a fraction of the time it had taken him, and asking for less money, and that something called an assistant — he gestured vaguely — now wrote most of the actual connecting code anyway, so the certifications proved he could do a thing that increasingly did itself.
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"But the market still wants the latest," he said, rallying. "So I stay on the latest. That is the strategy. Be where the demand is."
Tomas asked what happened when the demand moved.
"You move with it," said Marek, as though explaining something to a child. "Obviously."
Tomas nodded slowly. He had not learned a new platform in two years, he confessed. He had instead written a small book about why migrations fail, which had sold modestly and embarrassed him slightly, and which had also caused three banks to call him without a recruiter in between. He had raised his rate. Nobody had argued. He was working less than Marek and, he suspected, though he was too polite to say it, earning more.
Marek paid for the coffee again. It was, by now, a point of pride, and Tomas let him have it.
Year Eight
Marek did not bring a laptop.
"I am between things," he said. The word between did a great deal of work in the sentence. The latest platform, it turned out, was now operated almost entirely by the assistant he had once gestured at; a junior with a prompt and a free afternoon could produce in an evening what Marek had certified himself across a decade to produce. The recruiters had grown quiet. When they called now, they named a rate, and the rate kept arriving lower, and the last time he had pushed back, the recruiter had simply moved on to the next of the four hundred people holding the identical certification.
"It is a temporary correction," said Marek. "The market is irrational. They do not understand the value of staying current."
Tomas said he was sorry to hear it and meant it. He asked, gently, what Marek thought the value of staying current actually was, if four hundred other people had stayed equally current and the work itself had been quietly automated underneath them all.
Marek did not have an answer, which was unusual, and so he asked Tomas about the bank.
There was no single bank anymore, Tomas explained. There was a small practice now — himself and two others he trusted — and the work was no longer building. It was a decision. Firms brought him a plan, a budget, and a fear, and he told them which of the three was wrong. He had not touched a pipeline in person in years. He did not need to. He understood what they were for, and that, it had turned out, was the part nobody could download.
Marek paid for the coffee. Tomas noticed that he hesitated before doing so, and pretended not to.
Year Ten
They met for the last time in the story, though of course they did not know it was the last time, because people never do.
Marek looked well, which was a surprise. He had stopped chasing, he said. He had taken a steady role at a company that used a stack three versions behind the bleeding edge precisely because it was stable, and he was, for the first time in a decade, not learning anything new in a panic. His rate was a fraction of what it had been at the peak. He mentioned, ruefully and with the particular honesty that only arrives after pride has been thoroughly disassembled, that he had recently worked out that his hourly rate had fallen below what he paid the woman who cleaned his apartment twice a week — and that she, unlike him, had never once worried about a platform being deprecated.
Tomas laughed, and then apologized for laughing, and then Marek laughed too, which was the moment the friendship survived the decade intact.
"How did you know?" Marek asked. "Ten years ago. You must have known."
Tomas thought about it.
"I did not know," he said. "I just noticed that every tool I learned, somebody was trying to sell me the next one before I had finished. And I got tired. So I stopped learning things and started learning why things break. That part nobody ever tried to sell me. There was no certificate for it. I think that is precisely why it was worth anything."
He paid for the coffee. It seemed, finally, like the right year to do it.
The two men do not exist. But you have met them. You may, on a difficult morning, suspect you are one of them, and the suspicion is worth sitting with, because the decade in the story is not hypothetical and it has, for most readers of this letter, already begun.
The tools will keep arriving. Someone will keep trying to sell you the next one before you have finished the last. The only durable question is whether you are accumulating things that can be downloaded or judgments that cannot.
One of those is on sale. The other is not.
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Written by Roland Wenzlofsky, founder of DWHPro and author of Teradata Query Performance Tuning. DWHPro has helped data warehouse practitioners for 15+ years.