Fun Facts about Data Engineers

1. Data engineers are hard to find.

Data engineers are new and rare. Just 18% of companies have a data team and less than 6% of companies have a data engineer or team (Data Engineer Hiring Report from LinkedIn).

2. Data engineers aren’t considered “real engineers.”

Data engineers aren’t considered “real engineers” because many companies reporting to a product lead (for example) don’t consider building analytics to be an engineering problem. They instead view it as a marketing problem.

3. Data engineers are experts in a narrow field.

Most data engineers are experts in big data systems, building data pipelines, and open-source tools (such as Hadoop, Hive, and Spark). They might not be familiar with business problems or frameworks such as SQL.

4. Data engineers are new to product engineering.

Most data engineers are new to both product and engineering roles. Kubernetes, CI/CD, and data science are often new to them.

5. Data engineer education is limited.

Only one US university offers a bachelor’s degree in Data Engineering. The number of universities offering a bachelor’s degree in Data Engineering is very limited and is predicted to increase in the future, but very slowly.

6. Data engineers are paid less than software engineers.

The median pay for a data engineer is $92,000 per year, while the median pay…