[tom_b]

Ignoring the breathless nature of the article, this is a buzzword label for a commodity skill set that pays a commodity salary in tech. It is also the commodity skill set that my employers have all paid me for.

There has been for a long time hype around new technology and labels for business intelligence, data warehousing, big data, and now data engineering/science. I'm not saying there are not some roles in this space that return huge value to organizations, but that these opportunities are much rarer than the buzz indicates.

I wonder if the perceived shortage is mainly hype as the shift to new cloud technologies makes many of the older ideas a little less useful - if you are plowing data into BigQuery, you probably aren't so worried about your star schema data model for reporting.

I would strongly advise people that look at these types of articles to look at the roles in question and ask "Is this role on the critical path to customers paying us?" My experience has been that the answer is often "No." This is bad. I have also seen situations where businesses that do rely on smart data integration can show that they are selling dollar bills for ten cents that still have trouble getting customers on board with spending that ten cents. Business is weird.