Three career lessons for data engineers: business outcomes, tech debt, soft skills
Zachly · x · 2026-11-10
Data engineer Zachly shares three lessons: focus on business outcomes rather than pipelines (impact shows via stakeholder feedback, ML support, and experimentation support); manage technical debt instead of eliminating it — build the 80/20 data model and keep low-value long-tail requests out; and past senior level, soft skills like influence without authority matter far more than hard skills, and can't be learned by grinding Leetcode.
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