Most of us have known this poem from our childhood where a guy stands at a point leading to two roads, and after a long thinking process, he chooses that road which has been less traveled. The author points his decision has made a massive difference from others.
Most of us or almost all of us have faced the similar situation in our lifetime may it be in education or career or even choosing our life partner. Picking the right road different from our peers marks the difference and makes us unique.
So keeping education and life partner part aside for some time, let us focus on career. Have a look at my title. It says Data Engineering a best road to building a career.
Is it so? Of course yes.
How? Before knowing the answer to this let’s have a detailed look at Data Engineering.
What is Data ?
“Data, data” everywhere we hear about this word data. What is data? Every person has his data may it be either his details like name, address, etc. Even a name is considered as that person’s data. So everything in this world has its big data whether it is living or nonliving. Some of it may be useful some may not. In precise data can be defined as collection limitless facts. So to maintain such endless facts we require tools such as records, books, machines, etc., In good olden days, documents and papers were used to keep track of the data whereas today we have digital maintenance of data.
Now, what is data Engineering?
As the word engineering is found synonymous with designing, constructing and maintaining, Data Engineering is also defined as the collection, storage, and maintenance of data.
So what does a Data Engineer do?
Data engineers build up, examine and sustain data storage and processing systems. When the engineering work is done, pipelines to transfer the data are installed to and from these data reservoirs to retrieve the appropriate data for investigation or analysis.
Let’s look into roles of a Data Engineer.
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The first and foremost role of a data engineer is to plan and build the database systems according to the industry specified requirements and practices.
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After planning, establishing these database systems and their connectors is vital responsibility.
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Examining and preserving the data in these systems is the primary role of a data engineer.
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Designing and building highly effective prototypes, analytical concepts, and models.
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Explore the chances for new data requirements and uses of already existed data.
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Building up new methods for data representations, data collections, and data constructions.
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Incorporating new technologies for data managing and establishing new tools in the old database systems.
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Creating specialized components of software and analytical functions.
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Make use of wide range of tools and scripting languages to maintain systems in one place.
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Build and maintain the procedures to revive failures.
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Suggest techniques for improving data excellence, effectiveness, and reliability.
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Team up with other data modelers and IT sectors to achieve goals.
Apart from the above-mentioned roles, a data engineer has to work in collaboration with data architects and data scientists. Collaborating with data architects is to identify better data management systems whereas with data scientists help to determine the data to be analyzed. The final goal is to provide crisp and clean data to the end users who need it.
How the role of Data Engineer evolved in years?
The growth in the data infrastructure increased data engineer role. The scope has moved from report maintenance to developing data warehouses and tools for infrastructure growth. Today the data engineering acts a connector between data science and software engineering by establishing production rules that let data science to balance successfully. Machine learning has made an additional inclination pushing the need for data engineering. Techie companies have earned the designation of Data Engineers so popular that Data engineers who at the present work with dataset of enterprise-size and their skills have been extended to take account of everyday jobs such as data mining and also code development besides writing SQL queries.
What made Data Engineering so important today?
Rise in the current age techies such as Uber, Notify, and Airbnb; in India Ola, BigBasket, and Amazon which are mainly dependent on data and Hadoop adoption made the rebirth of data engineering in the current era. These companies have been investing more in their database systems expecting that they would be at cut edge competition to their peers. Since then, the role of a data engineer has gone beyond from data collecting and analyzing to adjusting the new technologies to maintain big data. A survey conducted in 2016 has explained why data engineering is considered as the most time taking a job and also mentioned why many companies must make up their data engineering team to spend nearly 80% of the time on data analysis. This show how crucial is the data engineer role in a company to obtain more data value.
Let’s have a look at the Future.
The recent survey conducted by Stitch Data, world’s half of the data engineers, are from the United States. While India ranks second with nearly 12% on data engineering skill set. Data Engineering has developed invisibility and size due to development of new age techie companies since they know the actual value of data which can be understood with robust data architecture and infrastructure. Though the data engineering has been maintaining industries for the past 50 years, the present data explosion has demanded a move in an ability to require a new type of skill that will bridge improvised data and run algorithms and architecture with easiness.
So, the gist is, I found Data Engineering as the best career path since enterprises are moving quickly to discover the best skill sets in this competitive world.
Vinodh Kumar, postgraduate from the Business Administration background. He is currently working as a content contributor for Mindmajix and loves to write tech related niches. Contact Vinod at vinodkumar.dm1@gmail.com. Socially connect to Vinod at LinkedIn and Twitter.
