Another Zombie Job Posting…Data Architect Designer Implementer Operational Support

I blogged over on Dataversity about Hiring Data Professionals: Mason Dixon Lines and Zombies in Your Job Postings .  In that rant, I talk about organizations that want to hire people who can do everything in the data column of the Zachman Framework.

I call these people "wonder candidates" and write about how they don’t exist in sufficient numbers to supply all the organizations in the world:

It would seem to make sense that if you were hiring a data professional you’d design a position that fills in the Data column, right?  No?  It turns out, though, that most people don’t think and work along a column.  In my experience, people aren’t passionate about tasks that span columns from top to bottom.  They normally aren’t skilled along the whole column, either.  Referring to the Zachman Framework, what sorts of skills and passions would this candidate need: planning, architecting, designing, building systems, building parts, keeping the systems up and running.

I thought about my rant in this area while reading a job posting on Dataversity for a Data Architect.  I’m sure the people at Miami Children’s Hospital do amazing things, probably with very limited budgets.  That’s why these hiring organizations tell me they have to fill their positions with Architect Designer Developer Implementer Operational Support Wonder Candidates.  I’m going to pick on this posting, so apologies to the hospital for using them as an anti-pattern for finding good data architects.  I’m sure they are nice people there and really want to get to successful database and data warehouse solutions.  You might even want to apply for that job.

“Designs and constructs very large relational databases for data warehousing. Develops data models and is responsible for data acquisition, access analysis and design, and archive/recovery/load design and implementation. Integrates new data with existing data data warehouses in design and planning.”

Right there we have the keywords design, constructs, develops, implementation.  These activities are done in different rows in the data column of the Zachman Framework.  There’s also this:

performance tuning, data retention policies, data classification, data security, and data acquisition….Data modeling experience. Database and application object management, including DDL, table constraints and triggers, clusters, object storage allocation and tuning, indexing options and tradeoffs, partitioning, etc., experience.”

Those activities are clearly down in the lower half of the Framework.  Yet data modeling, which exists along the entire data column, is not typically a strong skill set for people who work so far down in the Framework.   So my guess is that professional data architects and modelers will not be qualified to do the clustering/partitioning/indexing/performance tuning part of the job and that implementers who can won’t be qualified to prepare and maintain the data models they also want out of this role.

If I were interviewing for this type of position, I’d focus on why this organization wants data models but doesn’t seem to want to fund a data architect.  It’s sounds crazy, but I recommend that organizations not incur the costs of preparing and maintaining data models when they don’t want to work with professional data modelers.  They won’t see many of the benefits of having an active data model but will incur all the costs and the risks associated with preparing incorrect ones.

I realize that there are many successful IT professionals who can work along many rows and columns.  I’ve worked with these amazing people.  But staffing a team of these amazing people is costly: they are difficult to find, expensive to hire, and tough to keep around because:

There may be people who can do a lot of those things, but in my experience they aren’t passionate about all of them. New hires won’t be happy and the organization will not realize the economies that they think they will. 

I recommend that if organizations want to combine responsibilities that they do so across the columns in the same range of rows.  Combining positions where thought processes are similar (business and data analysts, DBAs and developers, etc.).  Analysts in general make for good analysts in other columns.  Operational people tend to think operationally, builders tend to think mostly of building, not planning well.  Let’s not drag people up or down the rows.

Go now and check your job postings.  Do they reflect the true nature of the job?  Or are they actually full of zombies ready to drag someone to an assignment that they don’t really want?

Do you work with any of these Zombies?  People who have been hired to fill several jobs, but don’t have the passion or skills to do all of them?  How is that working?