So, here's a weird feeling I can't shake:

Somewhere along the line, working on data started feeling … fake.

A few years back, data engineering wasn't something you'd casually mention to impress your Tinder date. Being a data engineer meant serving as the a duct tape of the tech stack, hacking things together to get data where and how it was needed. It was chaotic, and kinda ugly.

It meant Spark jobs silently dying at the 6th stage and nobody knowing why, or panic-deploying fixes to broken Airflow DAGs five minutes before standup, or a casual Slack panic: "Who the f touched the Parquet schema this time?!"

It was chaotic. It was painful. It was real.

Everything's a Pitch Now

Now it feels like every community I turn to — X/Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, even Stack Overflow — has turned into a SaaS pitchfest dressed up as a support group. Everybody's got a slick solution. Every question sounds like a setup. Every post ends with a link.

Nobody has real problems anymore.

We used to talk about problems. Like real ones.

"Hey, I need to backfill 3TB of historical data into Snowflake and I'm 90% sure I'm going to bankrupt the company if I run this query. What should I do?" "I have this weird data model issue, how would you do it?" "Kafka lag spikes every time I deploy a new consumer group. No logs. No clue how to proceed." "What's the best way to configure this in Spark?" "dbt works alright on dev. On prod it sets the warehouse on fire. I haven't changed anything — literally nothing. Help!"

Now you ask a basic question and get hit with a VC-backed answer:

"Hey there! Have you checked out our stealth AI-driven, Rust-based, blockchain-enabled CDC pipeline orchestrator? DM me if you're interested — early adopter discounts available!"

Bro. I literally just needed syntax help for a LEFT JOIN.

Even the conferences have changed. It used to be the case that you'd go to a talk, hear someone tell a war story about how they barely survived their first GDPR audit, or how they scaled up PostgreSQL to the stratosphere. Now it's just keynotes filled with startup jargon and architecture diagrams that have never seen prod.

You used to hear real pain. Now you hear product strategy. Reddit (and similar tech forums) have become attractive, zero-cost marketing channels for early-stage startups.

The current wave of AI hype has only amplified this problem. Every subreddit, blog, and timeline is swamped with half-baked AI takes and ChatGPT-generated tutorials that feel more like SEO spam than real knowledge.

Once upon a time, someone would write a post entitled "How I Accidentally Dropped Production and Survived" and it would go viral. Now it's all Gemini SEO-driven listicles about "9 Essential Data Governance Best Practices for SMBs in 2025".

Barf, fuck that. LLMs now have people believing they know more than they actually do.

💡 I feel sorry for beginners who are constantly thrown AI and tutorial hell slop from content creators who are more interested in profiting than actual knowledge sharing.

Tool Fatigue Is Real

Look — I get it. I really do.

You wanna monetize your pain? Respect. Building things has value, and turning your pain into a technical solution you can sell is fantastic. Hell yeah, go build your dream. But there's a fine line between sharing your experience and endlessly shilling your product.

We all know the difference. We're engineers — not idiots.

Right now, it feels like we've crossed that line.

There are over 500 different "modern data" tools out there. Picking one is like trying to choose a toothpaste brand in a supermarket with 84 options. When you have too many choices, it's more of a hindrance than a help. It becomes noise. And worse — it becomes performative.

💡 What's annoying is that the new tools coming out every year still can't solve the basic data issues. Change my mind.

Now everything has to be "modern". Even when all you really needed was a nightly cron job that quietly worked. But that's not sexy enough or AI-enabled enough to tweet about, is it?

The best pipelines are the ones no one talks about — because they just work.

The Modern Data Survey, 2024

Maybe the most punk-rock thing (am I old now?) we can do in this industry right now… is be boring again. I feel like we've made simple things feel outdated.

We're heading towards a world of gated knowledge. Closed blogs, private clubs, and expertise behind paywalls.

What's Next?

The mass internet is no longer a place for sharing knowledge anymore. It's for entertainment. And that's fine — but let's call it what it is.

Back in the 90s and 2000s, the people online were mostly those who worked with information. Researchers, tinkerers, engineers. Now it's everyone — and everyone spends money here. Which bends the whole system toward "entertain me, I don't want to think". AI has only accelerated this process.

We're drifting into a world where knowledge is monopolized, entertainment is algorithmized, and curiosity is satisfied by looking at just one or two sources without verification. Not for everyone — but for the masses. For most people, that's enough.

But for the ones who still build things? There will never be one perfect answer. No "final" tool. No single best programming language. Just the same messy, weird, duct-tape engineering we've always done. And that's the point.

To Wrap It Up

I'm not anti-tool. Good tools are life-saving. But honestly, I miss those genuine, messy conversations.

I miss the engineer who shared a screenshot of an exploding DAG with the caption "well that's new".

I miss the forum threads that went 40 comments deep on whether you should just use Airflow instead of adopting your fifth orchestrator in three years.

I miss someone saying "this works, but it's kinda gross — here's why" and then dropping the most cursed shell script you've ever seen … that actually worked.

I miss being told "no, you're not crazy — that is just how BigQuery behaves sometimes".

So if you're still fixing broken ETL jobs, bash scripts, optimizing Spark jobs or still battling schema drift and flaky DAGs and budget alerts that make no sense — just know this: You're not doing it wrong. You're not out of touch. You're just an actual engineer. Regardless of what you read on the internet.

And if you're building tools? Awesome. Just remember to be human first. Be real.

Tell us stories — not sales pitches. Maybe even ask how we solve our problems, instead of assuming your solution fits.

Thank you for reading! Curious about something or have thoughts to share? Leave your comment below! Follow me via LinkedIn, Substack, or Telegram.