Here is how I voted in this U.S. Presidential Election 😱

Plus the political world of data vendors

This year I found myself voting for the first time in the U.S. Presidential election. Perhaps it is the nature of being an immigrant and not a US-born citizen that made me cynical about the whole thing, such that I largely skipped presidential (not local) elections until now.

Voting was just never a big priority for me. At some point in my early 20s, I did a quick calculus on the whole electoral process and realized that my vote won’t matter in my then-native state of California.

Family members called me apolitical, but it was not true. For many years I have watched politics from the sidelines, and largely was in awe of the striking difference between politics around the world—where political manipulation was plainly evident—and the United States—where it was often hard to follow how exactly the sausage was getting made.

Speaking of which, Dick Cheney, now a person from another era, whose name recently again came up in the context of endorsing Kamala Harris, of course, deserves the top prize for political manipulation. I was just coming of age when Bush Jr. declared the war on Iraq. When it all happened, like everyone, I naively watched the events unfold with little context as to what it all means.

Meanwhile, across the world, by some broad estimates, as many as 500,000 (likely more) people were killed in the ensuing violence, giving birth to, among other things, ISIS, and the modern makeup of Iran-Iraq alliance. More deaths around the world resulted from the war in Iraq than the deaths of all the American soldiers since the signing of American constitution. Nuclear weapons were never discovered, and largely everyone understood that Iraq was a personal Bush-Cheney project, setting the Republican Party back for more than a decade.

But that was early 2000s. As I think about this year’s presidential elections, I am amazed at how American politics is starting to resemble the politics of a banana republic I was so used to seeing in other parts of the world as a child.

Perhaps it is just me aging… But I don’t think so! For one, this is not just about presidential politics. The politics of tech has changed too.

The banana republic politics of Data Tooling

This blog originally started with me talking about data vendors - not politics. And over this time, I have made my views quite public. So in the continuation of that same tradition, here goes nothing…

For 15+ years, we, as data professionals have debated the best practices and the best choice of a tool for one use case, or another. And perhaps like in the world of politics, many of us are now walking away disillusioned:

Is being data driven a fad?

There is so much wrong in the data vendor selection process that U.S. politics might actually be a more honest competition. At least in the politics, candidates are tasked with putting themselves up on stage in first person (many founders of data vendors hire armies of Sales People to do it on their behalf).

Yet, one common problem current data vendor landscape has with elections is: Identity Politics

Believe it or not, data vendors have Identities:

1) Alteryx & Atscale

A & A tailor to the boring corporate buyer:

2) DBT & MotherDuck

DBT & MD tailor to the alternative view points (or as a friend would say: “Business Intelligence engineers who want to get paid 1.5-2.5x the market salary and be called under a special title”)

3) Looker & PowerBI

Looker and PowerBI tailor to the main street buyer. You pick one of these like you would if you were buying a kitchen pot, while shopping for groceries at Walmart - it is just convenient.

4) Tableau & Oracle

And finally, Tableau and Oracle tailor to the type of buyer, who buys from Accenture because no one ever got fired for hiring Accenture.

Reclaiming my North Star

Perhaps I am just naive about both politics and the data vendor landscape. I remember crystal clear the moment I decided to become good in data. The year was 2008. I was interning for one start-up and looking at their web logs. No one inside the organization could make heads or tails what any of it meant. Right there and then I decided that I wanted to understand facts and the truth of how systems and the world work.

But in my many years in this profession, I have encountered many types of people. And just as in politics, people enter the data profession for different reasons. Increasingly, fewer and fewer people practice the craft for the desire to understand the real truth. People do it for all reasons but the truth and facts. Vendors are picked for their perceived political identities. Investments are made in companies based on anything but the fundamentals.

It was not always like this. For instance, back in 2015, everyone at Looker was deeply passionate about data. And it was also an organization without a political polarization. I remember one engineering kid loudly announcing to the entire org. that he was a conservative republican - something no one really cared about. Would that be possible today inside Google’s Looker? Would that be possible today inside DBT? I suspect, the answer is a “no”. And if so, can those organizations honestly claim to respect the truth of data if internally they are not tolerant of all political views?

In the midst of thinking about this I realized that 2024 is when I do finally vote in the presidential elections. And my thinking went something like this:

You Vote at the booth so you can tell your kids you did.

You Vote with Polymarket so you retain your ability to tell which way North is.

So that’s how I voted! 😄

And if you read this far, I suggest you take another 1-2 extra steps and follow me on here: