I am a staff engineer at Walmart with about 10 yoe. I am a Java engineer, building micro services, so I guess I can call myself a distributed systems engineer. My current TC is 300k. Somehow, a small company is willing to offer me a staff data engineer role, that will require me to learn new skills around building data lake, pipelines, and can potentially lead to do some machine learning. However the TC is 225k. Is getting into Data engineering worth getting 25% less TC, and leaving a fortune #1 company for a small company? Somehow I feel that a data/AI engineer has a brighter future than a regular SWE.
Can’t you change team or role internally?
No one will give me a data engineering job at staff level without prior data engineering experience. I just got lucky at this small company, hence the dilemma.
DE stands for dead-end. Where do you go after that? Data Scientist? Manager track? DE requires hyper specialization. Good DE is obsessed on good quality data that’s usable and nobody questions has errors.
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Data engineer is just software engineer with focus on data. I am not sure DE has brighter future than SWE. One reason to switch to DE is that you like data, seeing trends, pretty charts and such. Not sure I would do it for TC drop. If you think it has better WLB, then that’s another reason to jump ship. Source: I am a DE.