From an architectural and business viewpoint, you should have no hesitation in describing your data platform to another technical user in a few simple sentences, without using the specific name of a tool or framework.

Maybe when queried about your data by an outside consultant, you say, “Our business revolves around once-a-day tabular data dumps by our clients, who expect results the following business day. We focus on supporting batch operations in a timely manner.”

This is a great response and should show anyone that you understand more than just what tool your team happens to be using at that particular moment. If, when asked the same question, the reply is, “We heavily use the Databricks platform on our team, we use PySpark for most of our data pipelines.”

This answer, while accurate to some extent, shows a real lack of care and knowledge of the data platform, the data, and the business as a whole. It indicates a mindset focused on specific tools rather than a solid grasp of the data platform and the business as a high-level system driven by business needs.

---

This is a snippet from my forth coming book