A Tale of Baseball and Bad Data: Why I Joined Monte Carlo

I guess data runs in the family.

Growing up as a kid in the ‘90s, I distinctly remember my father having to bring his laptop everywhere he went with him. Compared to today’s Macbooks and PCs, my dad’s laptop took forever to load and connected to the internet via dial-up, which made an embarrassing noise whenever we were out.

The dinner table? Check? Vacation? Check. Mets game? Check. Now, he didn’t have his laptop with him so I could look up Mike Piazza’s stats during the game. He brought it for work. 

As one of his company’s first data warehouse managers, my dad was responsible for managing what companies know now as “data downtime,” or rather, periods of time when data is inaccurate, missing, or otherwise erroneous. But regardless of the words you use to describe this scenario, it was frequent and frustrating.  

Back then, the data industry had a lack of tools available to use, forcing my father to manually dig through thousands of tables looking to see where there was an error with the data. 

Once he was able to find the error (hopefully in a reasonable amount of time so he could get back to watching the Mets) he then had to figure out what systems downstream were affected and notify those who needed to know (i.e., business analysts, operations teams, etc.)  while rushing to find a solution to fix the broken pipeline before they emailed him: “the data is wrong again!”

If you are a data analyst or data engineer, this experience is probably all too familiar to you. 

Working for Monte Carlo was a no-brainer

Fast forward 20+ years later, and I’m excited to announce that I’ve recently joined Monte Carlo, an organization that is pioneering Data Observability and tackling head on the costly and time-intensive problems my father spent a large portion of his time struggling to solve. After working for Animalz, a leader in the technical content marketing field, and writing for various organizations in the data industry, it was a no-brainer for me to join Monte Carlo to help them grow their content and marketing strategy. 

Here are the two main reasons as to why I joined Monte Carlo:

1. Data runs our lives. From Facebook advertising algorithms to baseball teams,  industries across the world are powered by data and rely on this information to make critical business decisions. It’s hardly an overstatement to say that the world strives to be data-driven, and only over the last few years have teams begun to unlock the full potential of their data and truly utilize it to its advantage.

2. End-users need to trust data – With the need to rely on data comes the need for the data itself to be reliable. Because of the value data brings to organizations, companies cannot afford periods with unreliable data – in other words, data downtime. Monte Carlo was founded for that very reason, to help companies eliminate this downtime and achieve trustworthy data.

To the Moon we go

After my first full week at Monte Carlo, I became increasingly confident that I made the right decision to join. The data industry is booming; just look at companies like Snowflake and Databricks, pioneering the way for data teams to accelerate the adoption of data. We have the technologies in place to ingest and operationalize data; now, we just need to trust it! . 

I might be biased, but I truly believe that  Data Observability platforms like Monte Carlo are a must for organizations that are reliant on data. As an organization, you can no longer afford to have data that is unreliable.  Once trust is lost with your data, just like anything else in life, it takes time to gain back. And with revenue and resources on the line, this time is far too valuable to be wasted.

By adopting a Data Observability platform like Monte Carlo, your employees can rest assured that the data is accurate. With such trust,  data engineers  do not have to be constantly glued to their computer late at night and early in the morning just like my dad was, praying he could resolve the error in the parking lot before the game started so we make it into our seats at Shea Stadium before the first pitch.

Interested in joining our rocket ship? Check out our open roles!