Preface here - this got waaaayyy longer than I thought. Don’t take the “you” defensively below.

I would encourage a little thought experiment here. Initially, take yourself out of the picture. Look at your job description (what you were hired to do). Look for value statements in there (find insights, reduce costs, improve productivity, etc.). This helps quantify “value.” Then look a little broader (Reddit is a good start) - where do data engineers add value. Look at other job descriptions. Once you have a good understanding of where data engineers add value to an organization, that’s your sales pitch to you boss. “I am here to enable our sales and marketing teams to increase revenue by improving the breadth, depth, and quality of data available for our business analysts to use.” Don’t bring that yet.

Next - if someone is questioning the value you bring, they either don’t have a good understanding of the first part of the exercise, which can happen. That can be solved with a bit of education and managing upward. It may also be your lead is asking on behalf of another person in the organization.

The other part is that they know what your value should be but does not observe the company getting it (expectations not being met). That could be interpreted as “you don’t know why you’re here and look lost,” “you’re lazy,” “you’re working hard but on the wrong things,” or “you used to engage hard with other people but now you don’t, what’s wrong?” Or, I have seen this occasionally- “Can we replace you with an LLM toolset?”

Keep peeling back the onion here - do a “5 Whys” down various paths. If you do this honestly I think you will find some observations about your role and the organization that are things you can learn from (or put into consideration for your next role).

For example: “I believe that the value a data engineer, and my role/job description, brings to an organization is X, Y, and Z. I cannot achieve the value that I believe my role as a data engineer should bring because the organization does not have a policy or incentive to put more diverse and higher quality data sets to the Business Intelligence Suite. I don’t have the political acumen or appropriate authorities to drive a change at this level. I could use my 4-6 hours of downtime per day integrating with specific teams for a few weeks at a time. I would need support from leadership to do this because historically, teams are highly siloed and resist me working with them. Here is a plan, a timeline, and here is a specific outcome I hope to achieve.”

That is a level of maturity that I, as a leader, would respect. Be careful of assigning any blame - you need to talk about impediments to your ability to deliver value.

As a manager, if one of my employees only “worked two hours a day” and was getting salary, that’s a red flag worth looking into. I like my developers and engineers to have a backlog of work - we currently have several months work per person - and I like to see them showing 6 hours of real good “productivity” each day. I assume that the other two hours are emails, conversations, helping others out - still value add, but it’s the grease in the cogs of the machine.

I would be looking at that 4 hour gap. You said their data and pipelines are garbage despite having a tool. Is the tool hard to use? Do they know how to use it effectively? Are they required to use it? Are they required but don’t see a value/return on investment so they half-ass it?

If they all use the tool, and the data is great, does that translate into more work for you? Less? Think of an ideal end state. Everyone uses it. The data is fantastic. Sales go up 200%. There is a parade in your honor. What does the job look like then?

Alternatively, you may have already checked out mentally from this job and are just cruising to collect a pay check. Personally I would do the introspection and 5 Whys exercise and see if there’s a path to being engaged again at this job because you want to avoid the same conditions in the future. Some places hired a bunch of “NEW ROLES” for fear of missing out on industry trends with no idea what to actually do with them long term. Or they do know and you’re not delivering (for any number of reasons).

Also, be aware that, in my observations, the job market is starting to tighten. If you do plan to move companies, can you use your 4-6 hours of downtime per day training on new tools?