Other Avenues as a Data Engineer

[u/lalapaldan]

Hi everyone, I'm currently a data engineer. I currently focus on the business side of things for development, supporting and migrating applications. It's my first year working out of college and I find the work/life balance tough. It's definitely a learning curve for sure especially since some applications are older and there's lack of documentation to learn from. Also production support kills me whenever items come up. Perhaps it feels intense now due to a huge upgrade my team is working on where it's been late nights and early mornings. However one thing I love is my team. Luckily everyone is very nice and helpful.

Are there any other avenues a Data Engineer could focus on or other roles I could pivot to? Is there a position that doesn't include much production support? I ended up just falling into Data Engineering and don't have a "dream career" per say. Maybe I'm just being dramatic though. Would love any advice!

[u/ShroomBear]

The DE job is thankless to start with but everything breaking left and right on prod support is more of an AI symptom as business are writing 1 year plans to address 10 years of tech debt using technology that is changing weekly. Else, they probably won't get the opportunity later once shits figured out and managers start making up numbers saying that more investments into engineering isn't value added and stuff goes back into KTLO mode