Joel Labes

WORK HISTORY

ABOUT JOEL LABES

I find companies that make tools I love, go and then get hired there. Today, that\'s dbt Labs - makers of dbt + dbt Cloud and stewards of the dbt Community, where we\'re all inventing Analytics Engineering together.I spent 10 years as an early employee at Education Perfect, the company that grew out of my favourite foreign language learning tool from high school. After doing everything from customer support to sales to back-end development of internal systems, I wound up becoming the Head of Data. While building out our data capability, I discovered dbt and the dbt Community. Both were instrumental to my professional development and helped me be dramatically more effective in my role. As my skills developed, I spent more time engaging in the community, paying forward the help I\'d received to the next generation of analytics engineers. When I started using dbt, there were of us in Slack. Today the dbt Community exceeds practitioners across a half dozen platforms. As a member of the Community team at dbt Labs, I spend my time ensuring two things remain true: 1. dbt is the most effective AND most delightful way to work with data2. the surrounding community is one of the most supportive spaces in tech I\'ve ever seen.On here, I mostly share what I\'m doing at work in pursuit of those goals!