Data engineer: AI agents doubled our pipeline load — 40 to 85 pipelines, same 4 people, same pay
Specialist_Agent3599 · reddit · 2026-10-09
A data engineer with 5 years of experience posted a long thread on how AI agents changed job expectations: generating a dbt model or a full DAG takes 20 minutes, but understanding requirements, checking joins, validating against source, backfills, catching silent nulls, and owning wrong finance dashboards remain fully the engineer's responsibility. The speed gains were converted directly into more work — his 4-person team went from owning 40 pipelines last year to 85 this year, with the same title and pay. He's already job hunting and asks if others see the same pattern.
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