Extract. Transform. Read.
Don’t Bother Learning These Data Engineering Skills
Many aspiring data engineers become overwhelmed by trying to learn too much; understand how to focus on skills that matter.
The following short read is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Extract. Transform. Read. sent to 2,000+ aspiring data professionals. If you enjoy this snippet, you can sign up and receive your free project ideation guide.
To clarify the focus of this edition of the newsletter, the reason you shouldn’t bother learning certain data engineering skills is due to one of two scenarios —
- You won’t need them
- You’ll learn them on the job
You won’t need them
Generally these are peripheral skills that you *technically* need but will hardly ever use.
One of the most obvious skills, for most data engineering teams, is any visualization tool.
This might involve out-of-the-box BI tools like Looker. Or we might be talking about scripting-based visualizations like the kind you’d generate using Matplotlib or Ggplot (shout out to any R users in the house).
Speaking of R, remember those statistical languages (R, Matlab, SAS) you learned as part of your data science degree? Yeah, you’ll almost never use them to build production pipelines.
In some circumstances you may, however, use these tools to validate data or build analytic models. But modeling is typically outside the scope of a data engineering role.
Unless your company isn’t yet in the cloud (there are some *ahem* late adapters out there), you likely won’t use paradigms like Postgres or obscure SQL variants like T-SQL.
You’ll learn them on the job
I’ll caveat this category with the assumption that you’re fortunate enough to land in an org that provides proper training and mentorship for new engineers. Even with the cynicism that comes with being a senior engineer, I believe most team members want to help each other; data engineering is a team sport, after all.
One of the regular exercises this team executes is commits, reviews and merges into a production code base. If you’re like the majority of companies, you’ll do this through GitHub.
I disagree with those who say you need to learn git before working professionally. I only knew the UI and picked up the CLI commands quickly. It’s not technically complex.
Another big skill you don’t really need to worry about is a team’s codeless pipeline (assuming they use one). Some job listings include FiveTran (a big codeless provider), but there is often plenty of documentation and third-party support to help you acclimate to the platform and troubleshoot issues.
Finally, something useful you’ll pick up on the job is how to properly validate data. It’s important to have a baseline understanding of “what looks right” when completing school or portfolio projects, but there’s no way to know what your team/org expects until you’re completing a deliverable.
If you want to get a sense of how to “smell check” the data in SQL, you can refer to one of my previous articles.
When acquiring skills or upskilling one of the most valuable things you can learn is where to focus your time and attention.
Thanks for ingesting,
-Zach Quinn
