I love data engineering - atleast when I practiced it at an adtech company, it involved lots of interesting challenges around performance, distributed systems and a mix of SWE & Ops work. Buut, applying to data engineering jobs I see where the parent poster is coming from (minus the condescension) - a lot of them are about writing simple ETL jobs, and they tend to be lower paid & less prestigious.

Those certainly exist, but aren’t what I was referring to in my post. The “data engineers” I’ve worked with (and am) are usually distributed systems people who also know a bit of data science. In that case it’s basically a higher “prestige” software engineering role