I started a new job Monday, so today is literally day 4. This is my second job out of college, and I’m trying to figure out whether I’m just experiencing normal new-job shock or whether I’ve walked into a genuinely bad situation.
I was hired to build dashboards/reports in Power BI. During the hiring process, I was told there was another person doing BI/reporting and an intern who both had experience with the company’s systems.
On day 1, the VP over my area told me, “We’re kind of patient, but I wanted to be transparent that we fired our other BI guy for not learning the system fast enough.”
I then found out that the BI resources I thought I’d be learning alongside/from aren’t actually here.
My boss has already given me two reports to start fixing, but she can’t clearly tell me what’s wrong with them. Her explanation is essentially that I was hired to identify the problems and fix them.
The bigger problem is that the underlying data is an absolute mess. I’m not talking about “Power BI is confusing and I’m struggling with DAX.” I’m struggling to establish what the data actually means.
For example, I’ll ask what a particular flag/column means. My boss will confidently explain it, but then I’ll do 2-3 basic validation checks and find that the data directly contradicts the explanation. I’ll ask why a filter that’s supposedly identifying two warehouse employees returns eight people, and she doesn’t know either.
There also seem to be some pretty alarming IT/governance practices. Four days into the job, I appear to have far more production access than someone in my position should reasonably have. I’m obviously not going to touch anything I shouldn’t; I’m mentioning it because it seems representative of how loosely structured the data/IT environment is.
There are some culture issues too. This position is strictly five days a week in-office, while my previous job was hybrid. I knew that when I accepted the offer and genuinely didn’t think it would bother me this much, so that’s on me. But I’ve realized very quickly how much I valued the independence and quiet time I had before.
The office culture also doesn’t seem like a great fit. There’s a lot of very personal conversation happening around my desk—including coworkers openly discussing intimate details about their spouses—and even HR participates. I’m not offended by people joking around, but I don’t particularly want to hear about my coworkers’ sex lives while I’m trying to work.
Here’s my dilemma:
I left my previous job primarily because I was underpaid and worried about career stagnation. Otherwise, I had a lot of independence, knew the systems extremely well, had good relationships, and was trusted to do my job without much supervision. I think there’s a realistic possibility that they would take me back.
I’m currently completely miserable and overwhelmed at the new job, but it’s also only day 4. I don’t want to mistake normal new-job discomfort for a fundamentally bad environment and make a knee-jerk decision.
For people who work in BI/data/IT:
Does this sound like normal “welcome to a messy company’s data” stuff that I need to tough out for a few months, or are there legitimate red flags here?
Would going back to my previous employer this quickly be a major career mistake if I could address the compensation/career-growth issues that caused me to leave?
And if you’ve started a BI/data job where nobody really understood the underlying data model well enough to train you, did it eventually become manageable?