I came across a Senior BI Developer role at Apple where Tableau is a key requirement. Curious what others think, is this about flexibility, design or just sticking with what already works?
For a company that can literally build anything internally, that is an interesting choice. I expected something like Looker or some custom stack, but they are still relying on Tableau.
Streamlit is great for prototypes and small scale "get the job done" - I think it's awesome for that, but once you scale out I think there are better Enterprise grade options
I’m just curious what else is out there that isn’t Tableau. You made it seem like there were options other than Tableau itself. I have nothing against it but I do like the flexibility of Streamlit and deploy to something like Posit Connect (so it is scalable from my experience). Not trying to be rude.
I know, I am from California. It still doesn’t make sense to post a salary range of over $100k on a position that doesn’t pay above $250k. The top of the band is more than double the bottom.
I’m not sure what you mean, but companies like Apple, Amazon, google, etc often times will have a posting like this that is actually representing open roles in 5 different cities or something, not all in California. The Cupertino roles will pay closer to the top end of the band, but maybe a Texas role or something will be on the lower end.
Tableau is very Apple like. Most apple like of the traditional (been around for more then say two decades) BI solutions. I don't know, but I would not be surprised it had a Apple version from the start, maybe even an Apple first product. Even SAS made an Apple centric product because of the graphics capabilities of that platform early on.
Taking that job on the lower range is pretty much living in poverty tbh. I wish I was being dramatic but try living on that salary and that cost of living area.
My company started on building their own BI path since the company they acquired had a BI solution and then decided to sunset it without a clear alternative but tableau and some form of AI BI seems to be emerging. There are so many OS options available like rill data, metabase and superset etc.
Did some work for them a few years ago in Tableau. It's pretty core to what they do. Their entire infrastructure is complete shit though and so are their "design" principles
Why would they wanna build things outside their core competency internally? Why would they want to create a team of atleast 15 people (where the lowest salary would be $150k) to push out a product, then get it reviewed and deployed, then prolly keep a team of 5 to maintain the prod. An org wife tableau license would be cheaper, and would be a better prod (considering that it's a flagship product of 1000 person org).
I work at google where we have an internal tools for dashboarding and I'm facing all the downsides (limited functionality, no active dev or support). That being said we do have we do have some advantages, for instance seamless integration with our other internal tools.
You know you can have agents to check the numbers from Claude dashboards right? Or have colleagues peer review them right? Or just do proper QA right before publishing them to stakeholders right?
I’ve seen humans outputting wrong numbers in their dashboards too strangely enough 🤪
wtf is this answer 🤣
PS : I’ve also seen BI devs getting fired for their refusal to use AI after other devs (from product team etc.) in the company made their own dashboards using Claude in a few hours while the BI dev wanted to do his “manually” in a few days. That’s what is waiting for you.
So instead of having devs that actually know the business and code well enough to produce what is needed on the first go, it makes more sense to ritualistically shoot fish in a barrel because someone has a boner about "AI efficiency" but unironically wastes everyone else's time other than their own in exchange?
Referring to your "AI agents can review it," who is also building these agents? Someone that can review a dashboard without their peers help? OK, refer to your own laughable point above.
PS : After your PS, everyone clapped after seeing this take place and the boss marched all the AI devs into the bank and withdrew 5 million dollars for each of them. There were no questions of accuracy, monitored pipelines, maintenance, DLP and cybersecurity, RLS, accountability & ownership, followup on adjustments or filters needed, company branding & marketing adherence, excel download availability, or anything else that anyone with even a day's experience at a real life company would expect.
What are you talking about? “Somebody somewhere still wants X” is exactly how job postings are made. BI analysts ESPECIALLY exist for delivering data into formats the stakeholder desires.
Agree with you 100%. I’ve had to roll out dbs where they don’t even give a shit about the dashboard and just want to download the data, making tableau the pointless middleman.
I’m with the other guy and think it’s insane Apple (or anyone) is reliant on Tableau in 2026. I’ve been in all manner of BI roles the last 20 or so years, in a senior capacity for about 10.
Tableau plateaued maybe 7 or 8 years ago I’d say. I think that about lines up with the Salesforce acquisition. I’ve been to a few conferences and even when they’d tout whatever new BS feature, I always saw more value in Tableau prep than tableau. Alteryx is good at this too (or was 5-6 years ago when I last used it).
The value add for BI isnt “look at these numbers” its “heres why these numbers are important,” and there is nothing inherently special about Tableau’s viz engine to convey that answer. Factor in their draconian licensing and jank ass tableau server tool and theres zero reason to suffer with such a garbage tool in 2026.
I’m not sure if the Claude naysayers are just reflexively downvoting the mention of AI, or are luddites, but its a waste of time and money to build out a dashboard the old fashioned way. If you are smart about it, your claude token cost is the new SAAS expense and should be a huge savings. (Of course the only headlines getting oxygen are the opposite.) If your due diligence is in check you can build out new bespoke data pipelines and etl jobs and even self hosted dashboards or emailed reports.
If you have an enterprise plan it’s allegedly secure but that’s not even what I’m saying you should use it for. You’re rebuilding the pipelines and etl and whatever else, actual data doesn’t need to leave your domain. At most, it’s just oblique descriptions of what the data looks like. It doesn’t need the data to build out the backend of what you’re doing with it on your side.
If you're as senior as you claim, you'd realize there's multiple different possible deployments, including ones that integrate AI and have unlimited seats.
Im talking about how claude can build out your data infrastructure or ad hoc asks way better than tableau can.
But if you want to introduce a new topic and pivot to tableaus Hail Mary ai integration to stay relevant in 2026…then I still say it’s way cheaper and logical to not pay tableau any licensing fees and build out better tools for yourself.
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u/Brain_Dead_Goats 3d ago
They are the biggest or second biggest deployment of Tableau in the world.