Title. Recently landed a new DE gig after searching casually for the majority of this year. I applied for about 30 jobs over the course of 2026. I was at a dead end with my old place, dealing with a ton of micromanagement and a botched migration from SSIS to ADF that left everything more complicated than it was when it was on-prem and no hope of migrating off of it. Old company tech stack: SQL Server, SSIS, ADF(Azure), Snowflake. Pretty repetitive from an engineering point of view.
New gig came with a 30% pay bump, no on-call, and better benefits. The tech stack is mostly legacy stuff, but they're hiring for an architect and staffing up up the DE team (which is why I got the job) because they're trying to modernize everything. I got the job because I have experience with older on-prem stuff and some newer cloud stuff. New company is a highly-regulated industry (power), so things are pretty slow moving in the IT area, hence all the legacy stuff still in place. New company tech stack: Talend, Snowflake, Azure, Exadata, Denodo, Informatica Catalog, Monte Carlo. They already have a lot running in Snowflake, and the endgame goal is to get more moved up there over the next few years. I've got a couple weeks off before I start at the new gig so I'm gonna take on a homelab project or 3 this weekend.
Just wanted to say thank you to the /r/DE community for being a soundboard for me a few times this year, and hopefully provide some inspiration for folks out there who feel like the market is all doom and gloom. In the interviews that I had for the job I landed, I focused a bit more on the migration efforts that I've been a part of and focused on the business intel side of things, not simply the code and tools. Yes, the market is tough and over-saturated right now, I don't want to dismiss that - but the reality is that companies still need engineers, and businesses still need business intelligence, so there will still be jobs out there.
Cheers!