[cletus]

I will add that certain SWE fields rely upon and interact heavily with DS and for anyone wanting to make the switch, this is a natural "in".

Any company with a rigorous approach to product development or even SRE will rely heavily on metrics. The ability to create, maintain, monitor, transform, understand and reason about those metrics is invaluable. To decide what to work on and the quantify your contribution, the ability to effectively run experiments is invaluable. This will naturally fit into a structured product management cycle.

This will be a way more natural fit than, say, "purer" software development (eg writing device drivers).

So much of successful software engineering is not just how to do something but deciding what to do (and not do).

[thomzi12]

Yes -- one thing I struggle with is choosing whether to work on data engineering projects (which I know I'm good at and can provide immediate value) or challenging myself with more "traditional" full-stack engineering work where I can learn a lot.

Maybe a 60/40 mix is optimal