Also a job title doesn’t really say much. On all of these 4 roles there’s people doing trivial work, as there’s people doing very deep technical work. Same with pushing the envelope on tech.
Ok. I think this is just going to end up being "no true scotsman". I'll say "in many companies, data engineers are more doing BI data preparation and presentation than building distributed processing infrastructure or whatever and they are compensated more like analysts than general software engineers" and you'll say "well that's not data engineering".
My argument is not an "ought" argument, it's an "is". I agree with you that data engineering "ought" to be, if anything, a more difficult specialized practice of software engineering, because you need all the software engineering skills and then also specialized data skills. But I'm saying that what it often "is", is more like a specialization of BI and analyst roles.
I think the OP is a pretty good demonstration of this. If "all you need is SQL", does that sound more like a specialization of a software engineer skillset or an analyst skillset? I think the latter... And sure you can say, "well the article is wrong, if all you need is SQL, that's not data engineering", but we're just back to "no true scotsman"; I believe it is common to see the role this way.
