What I find most annoying and frustrating (found other IC4 or 3 DEs also share the same frustration) are:
1 - The role: Like someone else mentioned I can’t see why we have ‘engineer’ in our title. It’s like 80% of your day goes about project management, expectation management, navigating team and product priorities, finding work for yourself and just what you need to do next. Then keeping others and yourself updated about what’s going on. When you can get a break from constant meetings and notifications and pings in chat then you can get some work done (Hello overtime). Also put aside time for advertising yourself, writing posts about what great things you are going to do, doing now, and have already done. Add a ton of stress on top of that for delivering IMPACT and constantly wondering if what you are doing is going to create enough noise to get you somewhere.
2 - Lack of well defined projects: you have to put in so much time and energy just to find something to work on. It’s like a manager decides they need some more headcount on their the team and hire the person and then tell them I don’t know what you need to do but there’s something out there for sure, go find out! Good for you if you can find or define a new impactful project, otherwise take on someone else’s work which they abandoned for something with more IMPACT or start working on some product that’s not going anywhere but some vp cares about.
Other things to consider:
- The role : Data Engineers at FB are in a tough position. Usually noone in other roles really know what you are supposed to do, even DEs themselves will have a bootcamp course to tell them what they are supposed to do. As such you are always in the position of pushing back on requests, trying to define what you should do, or seeking to do the job someone else is already doing but in a better way. If you fail to push back you’ll be flooded with meaningless work (adhoc requests).
Other cons:
- Lack of Knowledge sharing and documentation: A piece of info you seek could be in a post on workplace, stored on some random quip, a file on dropbox, a sheet on google drive, or some random wiki page. And when you find it you can never trust what you see because it is possibly wrong or already outdated. Better to directly ask someone and hope they have the correct answer to your question. Enjoy waiting for responses or not finding any available time on their calendar to book a meeting.
-Moving Fast= Tons of junk: Moving fast to deliver short term impact has plagued the analytics org with tons of garbage. Noone cares about optimizing their solutions or documenting their work, and when they get credit for the IMPACT they move on to the next thing. Good luck if you inherit someone’s work which you need to make sense of on your own.
