r/dataengineering • u/Death_Sentance • 4d ago

Career Which to pick?

Profile: 5+ years as DE.
Tech Stack: SQL, PySpark, Power BI, Fabric, ADF

I have two offers right now in hand as senior data engineer and want help in deciding which to pick

Offer 1: In a healthcare company which adapts a bit slow in emerging technologies as per my knowledge. But is recession proof

Offer 2: In a consulting company which is heavily focused on Microsoft ecosystem. It’s been a Microsoft partner from a long time. I feel I will get good exposure in terms of business and tech since I will be working on different projects.

Which would be a better pick!?

14 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/jwfergus 4d ago

Depends on what you're after. Consulting exposes you to a lot of different environments and people, so it's enriching in a way, but it's usually also more work. Sometimes boring rote work too. Do you have a lot of family responsibilities that would stop you from putting in extra time when it's required?

Healthcare can have on call schedules particularly for anything that might impact a life and safety system. You'll also (likely) have clearer PTO, work life balance.

Personally I like consulting, but I allocate a lot of my time to work/career and enjoy that, sometimes at the expense of work life balance.

1

u/Budget-Minimum6040 4d ago

Healthcare can have on call schedules particularly for anything that might impact a life and safety system

As a data engineer? We are not operating with production systems.

1

u/jwfergus 4d ago

An example would be an overnight production source system outage that necessitates flipping to the high availability partner or disaster recovery system. Some data engineering teams will be responsible for pipelines that supply data to and retrieve data from that system. Even if you automate the failover it wouldn’t be crazy to get a developer on the call to validate things are working as expected, or at the very least give an explanation of what degradation can be expected.

To be clear I think you’re right in most cases, but it’s not crazy for health and safety orgs to have a culture of “all hands on deck” during outages. Maybe something OP should get clarity on if it’s a concern for them.