This hits home. I communicate a lot more with up and downstream stakeholders as a data engineer. Be it for designing future changes and how those affect others. Or, as you said, triaging outages/delays, figuring out where the missing dependency is. Less problem solving by coding.

The SQL thing the article mentions is also true. Even if you work with higher level tech like Spark. SQL gives you a good feel for joins. I also like the fast feedback cycles you get from SQL compared to something Scala/Python based.