5 pieces of advice I wish I would’ve gotten before becoming a data engineer

After several years working in business analytics, I recently did an interesting pivot in my career and became a data engineer.

Data engineering is a word in everyone’s mind nowadays, with different meanings across different companies (and even across teams). Still, it’s the fastest growing profession with +50% yearly growth and every tech company is looking for.

The following are my key learnings that helped me during my journey becoming a data engineer and that I wish someone would’ve told me before.

1. Be direct

If you are curious about data engineering, just tell people about it. And even more if you are really committed to it. Don’t keep it to yourself, make it clear that this is what you want to pursue. Talk to your managers, peers, data engineers around. Ask people for advice, it’s the best way to network and get to know different career paths.

You can even ask to get side projects that will feed your curiosity until you finally transition 100%.

2. Leverage your business background

Although you are interested in writing super complex code and making your pipelines efficient, remember that you come from a business background and leverage it. There is a lot of value you bring to the table once you understand what a data engineer can do and how your business unit works.

Once you get this, you can be proactive and push your own ideas into projects that you can develop yourself and bring value to your team.

3. All you need is self learning

Feeling curious is important, but not enough. In data engineering (and generally, in any developer role) you will need to read, research and implement new technologies. Feel confident to self-learn, everyone does it. It’s one of the best parts of this job.

There are many tools out there to do it. Udemy, Edx,Coursera, etc. And if you need a specific solution to a problem, Google is the king.

4. Own what you do

Applies to any field but it’s a key for engineering. Most likely you will develop critical processes for your team, so owning your projects it’s a MUST.

Specifically if you are trying to transition, show your peers, managers that you are a true owner of your projects and that anyone can trust you to bring wins for the team.

5. Tooling and technical skills

I personally believe that curiosity and proactive nature are far more important than the technical skills itself. Still, if you are looking for what to learn before transitioning into data engineering, you will find gazillions of posts out there.

I think that going back to the basics it’s the best, considering that every team uses its own tech stack and you can’t know them all. Harvard CS50 is the best free online course that explains the basics of computer science you need to know. I did it twice and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

You will probably need strong Python and SQL understanding and there are tons of really well done online courses. Personally, dataquest.io worked the best for me (also, datacamp is a good one). Practice as much as you can, get side projects based on the technical skills needed.

Are you looking for a career change into data engineering? I’m happy to talk about it :)