We, the Data Magicians

Stefan Fischerländer

25 Sep 2025 — 2 min read

Modern companies are held together with duct tape — and that duct tape is us.

If you’re like me, you didn’t apply to be a “data person.” You weren’t trained in databases or machine learning. Yet here we are, every day, doing a job that has no name.

I call it being a data magician.

What a data magician does

The role isn’t in any HR system. But if you’re reading this, chances are it’s you, too.

We wrestle with Excel, CSVs, and APIs — anything that spits out rows and columns.
We clean data that nobody else wants to touch. We spot outliers, missing values, silent errors.
We stitch datasets together that were never meant to meet.
We explain the numbers to managers who think in PowerPoint, not Python.
We make quick charts that are “good enough” for a meeting, even if the axis labels annoy us forever.
We run some stats — not because we love them, but because someone has to sanity-check the results.
And sometimes, we even dip a toe into machine learning — because some obscure newsletter insisted it could help with our daily work… 😉

It’s a messy mix of skills: part data engineer, part analyst, part visual storyteller, part diplomat. And nowadays, often enough, full-time AI prompt engineer.

Why it matters

Modern organizations depend on this role. Tools break. Data is ill-defined, ill-documented — in a single word: messy. Stakeholders want answers yesterday. Without data magicians, the machine grinds to a halt.

But because the role isn’t official, it’s invisible. Our work is often underappreciated — until something goes wrong.

Seeing the patterns in our work matters. Naming things and roles matters. Once we realize this is what we do, we can better explain our value, better improve our skills — and see where to grow next.

While companies may never print “data magician” on our business cards, we’re part of a hidden layer. A layer that keeps the machine moving, because we remove the friction that the all-too-glorious “data-driven” approach creates once it collides with reality.

Thanks for reading,
Stefan

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