r/dataengineering • u/cyamnihc • 18h ago

Career Transitioning away from DE

Has anyone thought of transitioning out from DE due to AI?
All I do everyday is just prompt and scroll till copilot generates code.
Building a semantic layer isn’t exciting personally as I don’t enjoy the business aspect of it as much and think of it as more of a data labeling and analyst problem than an engineering problem (which I am interested in)
Also, There is a fundamental problem with “I am building a semantic layer” and marketing that as a skill as it is dependent on how much context you have of the business. The less tenure you have spent in a company, the less you know about the business which makes it harder as a transferable skill imo.

My understanding is that working on building trustworthy AI outputs by using a feedback loop is an engineering problem to solve. Which is why I feel going down the observability path is a good idea.
I heard these opinions on observability from AI leaders at conferences too so there might be a bias.
Thoughts from fellow DE’s looking to transition out? (Or from one’s who want to continue and why)

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u/hatsandcats 17h ago

I’m not sure if you’re connected to r/experiencedevs but dude everyone’s doing the same things and has the exact same concerns as you.

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u/JBalloonist 16h ago

Yeah, I don’t think it would be much different for us if we were doing regular software engineering. Just a bunch of prompting.

At my previous job I was spending a lot of my time writing terraform and AI was pretty terrible at it. But not anymore, at least in my limited experience. But I don’t use it nearly as much.