It is not surprising that startups with promiseware are hit when the market gets risky; some investors who were pseudo-rich with a stock portfolio, have now been punched financially so hard they are closing their outbound money-streams to survive, and pull funding.
But.
Companies with strong working products (like grocery trade) realize they don’t need less data analysis, they need more of it. To have the un-fragility to survive, maybe even thrive during and after the COVID-19 reality-quake, companies need at least the data they used to have, if not more. They need at least the ML models which used to work for them, likely more and even the previous ones which used to work with semi-static training, need to be auto-calibrated week to week with new data and maybe change of methodology too to create something of use. Developing MLOps makes very much sense, since data in many areas sure does behave differently now.
Thus, unsurprisingly, data engineering and analytics jobs for actual doers helping existing companies with strong legs is going nowhere. I claim there will be more of it.
I myself noticed hardly anything. One client got their cashflow hit so hard, they had to scale back. Totally expectable. But most clients are dancing on their cloud datalakes as if nothing happened.
Code flows to repository, batches and events pour data to Azure/AWS just as they used to. Only difference is that the analyst you used to chat over the coffee cup now talks over the video with a Minecraft or Halo background in Teams. After work beers have people with unkempt hairs and beards, maybe with drinks they actually like (because own bar)…but people “meet”.
I have not seen the cloud-native workers for sturdy companies, delivering things people actually need suffering at all yet.
What do you think? How has it been for you?
Am I just ignorant/in denial of a future threat?
Tell me.