I Almost Got Fired Because of Pandas on Databricks — Here’s What You Should Learn From My Mistake

Just because your code works doesn’t mean it scales.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

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The Mistake That Almost Ended My Data Engineering Career

I still remember the anxiety in my chest when the production job failed.

I was a few months into my first full-time data engineering role, working with a cloud-native stack on Databricks. Everything felt familiar enough: Python, notebooks, some new UI elements, but nothing I couldn’t figure out.

Then came the big moment.

A client needed a transformed dataset pushed into production — millions of rows with business-critical insights.

I knew exactly how to handle this. I opened Databricks, pasted in the same Pandas code I had relied on in Jupyter notebooks for years…

It worked flawlessly in dev.

So I scheduled the job, pushed it to production, and logged off feeling like a rockstar.

That night, I got an urgent call.
The production pipeline had failed.
The cluster had crashed.
SLAs were missed.
Our reporting dashboards were blank.
And I was this close to losing my job.