Data Stewards Have The Worst Seat At The Table

In his seminal 2017 blog post, The Downfall of the Data Engineer, Maxime Beauchemin wrote that the data engineer had the worst seat at the table. Data technology and teams have changed tremendously since that time, and now the Preset CEO and creator of Apache Airflow and Apache Superset has a brighter outlook on the future of the profession. I have also seen what was once a thankless position turn into a strategic driver of company value as data expanded beyond dashboards to machine learning models, customer-facing applications, and systems of record. So, if the data engineer no longer has the worst seat at the table, who then on the data team has inherited this unfortunate title? When you infer some of Maxime's original criteria–tedious tasks, low recognition, a lack of authority, and victim of operational creep–the data steward becomes the obvious choice.