We favour moving quickly over reliability

Data engineers typically favour moving quickly over reliability.

That’s not how most of us would say it, but it’s true!

• How often do you put a quick fix in to your ETL that stays forever?
• How often do you invest in tooling to help you build more reliable pipelines?
• How often do you deduce something and build a brittle reimplementation of upstream logic rather than ask for better data?

If you’re deliberately making that trade-off, then that’s fine! Ensure your users have the same expectations and continue delivering this way.

If, however, your users want reliable data they can build on with confidence to deliver a data application that drives key business processes, or powers a (possibly ML-based) product feature that generates revenue…

Then either you’re setting the wrong expectations.

Or making the wrong trade-off.