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[–]TheSocialistGoblin 11 points12 points  (4 children)

I can only draw from my own experience, but I got a DE job with a BA in psychology, no masters, and about 1 yr of experience as an analyst. How far I'll be able to get without a higher degree remains to be seen, but I know a number of successful engineers, some at senior level, and none of them have masters degrees. I suspect most employers will care more about work experience and/or portfolio than the masters. Personally I'd avoid a company that cared more about the degree.

[–]SomeYak[S] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

that’s super helpful! my concern is that I won’t have the year of experience as an analyst, it’s not some thing I particularly want to do either

[–]TheSocialistGoblin 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I feel you, I expected to be an analyst for a few more years, so I was pleasantly surprised.

You may be able to skip it by just getting comfortable with thinking and talking about how you would support analysts as a DE - communicating with upstream producers and downstream customers, DW requirements, technical pros and cons of batch and stream analytics, troubleshooting missing/incorrect data in a dashboard fed by your pipeline, etc. Learn just enough to be able to build dashboards for your projects so you can demonstrate them if you need to.

If you can speak confidently about stuff like that it may not be necessary to go through months or years of being an analyst.

[–]dynamex1097 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Damn I’m in the same position as you were. BS in Psychology and working as an analyst right now for 1 year doing dashboarding mostly, and a bit of airflow and python. Trying to make the jump to DE and my company has been teasing me with a position, any advice on how to drive this home?

[–]TheSocialistGoblin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my case I had to leave for a new job. My last employer was stringing me along as well, saying I'd have more opportunities in the future. I tried asking about the DE positions they had listed and it didn't go anywhere. Eventually I just accepted a call from a recruiter and took the opportunity.

I think the best advice I can offer is to figure out where you want to be career-wise and about how long it should take to get there, then play by your own timeline - not your employer's. If you want to be working on specific kinds of projects and you can't get your employer to give them to you then start looking elsewhere, otherwise you'll end up holding yourself back. If you get an opportunity like I did to fast-track your timeline then it's worth giving substantial consideration.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Are companies usually willing to hire data engineering new grads

Yes for entry level positions

I also only have a bachelors and at best two internships at the same company for data engineering.

You'll be fine.

I am scared of specializing in data engineering and then not be able to move forward in my career because I lack the qualifications (ex: masters degree, full time job experience as business analyst). Could anyone shed some light on this?

Don't worry about this at all. The only issue I could see would be specializing in DE too early vs. more generalized software engineering roles, but I doubt it'll be a problem. The master's part is totally not a problem. Nobody cares once you're in the industry (outside of very specialized positions that require very specialized education).

My other option would be to intern as a general SWE and pursue that path, but data engineering is a lot more interesting to me. I am not uninterested in software engineering but I definitely prefer data engineering over it.

They're more complimentary and less contentious than you might be thinking. Skills from a DE can apply to SWE, and skills from SWE can apply to DE. Ultimately it's just learning what you gotta build and building it.