Back then, the query was my whole personality.
I wrote the window functions the rest of the team avoided. CTE versus subquery, recursive joins, the weird edge cases of the planner – that was home turf. The pipeline that died at midnight? Mine to resurrect.
And I loved that reputation. Loved it a little too much.
What I missed for years: the more elaborate the SQL got, the easier I was to walk past. I'd deliver a flawless 200 lines and a beautifully normalized table, and the CMO would glance at it and ask, "Okay, but what do I actually do Monday morning?"
I never had the answer ready. I had data, and I'd quietly decided data and answers were the same thing. They aren't.
A mentor put it bluntly one afternoon: "You've gotten excellent at the exact thing that's getting automated first."
That landed. SQL was my entry ticket. It was never the thing that kept me in the room.
So I rebuilt how I spent the day. I quit perfecting queries no one had questioned and started writing the single sentence the query existed to prove. I dropped "here's the data" in favor of "here's the call, and here's the cost of getting it wrong." And I let the hard parts disappear under the hood – the decision was the deliverable, not the cleverness behind it.
Shorter queries. Louder voice in the room.
The part that still gets me: the skill I bragged about most was the ceiling I'd quietly poured over my own head.
Depth gets your name on the offer letter. It rarely gets your name on the promotion.
Free advice from me as a Fractional Head Of Marketing Analytics. If you're early and grinding through the next tier of SQL – keep going, genuinely. Just don't mistake being hard to replace for being impossible to overlook.
Want all my best GA4-BQ queries in one place? I turned them into a Chrome extension — top SQL queries you can search and copy in seconds.
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Prefer the web version? It’s here.
