Data Engineer looking to figure out what next

Question

My employer was new to the cloud when I joined 3 years ago; and have built/maintained pipelines that replicate data, archive change history, etc, plus support others in deployment of projects. I use Python and SQL, and my company uses Snowflake, AWS, dbt, etc. I want to switch to a new technical role, but I am not sure what that would be.

How would working as a software engineer be different from data engineering? What would it take for a person of my skills to become a SWE?

p.s. I am not an engineer by education, my skills are mostly self taught.

arfinator · Accepted Answer

In my experience through reorgs and different shifts in companies, software engineering does way more programming than DEs; where as the DE is the jack of all trades and master of none.

Software engineers strictly focus on helping other business units with their code and platform code-writing. Some platform "writing" that you could expect is Terraform and K8s.

acjme101 · Answer

I guess it depends on the team you end up with. You could be doing frontend coding (React, Vue, or pure Javascript with HTML & CSS), backend (mostly developing APIs with Java, .Net, or Node that is consumed by the frontend folks), or working on some internal tools used by your org or company.

Going on a self-taught route shouldn't be difficult for you since you are already in tech. This will help you brush up on some of those SWE skills that are needed in the industry. Tons of courses on YouTube or Udemy.

Goodluck man.

Data Engineer looking to figure out what next

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