- Actually big data (so, not something you could grep...) will trigger your code in every possible way. You quickly learn that with trillions of input, the probabily to reach a bug is either 0% or 100%. In turn, you quickly learn to write good tests.
- You will learn distributed processing at a macro level, which in turn enlighten your thinking at a micro level. For example, even though the order of magnitudes are different, hitting data over network versus on disk is very much like hitting data on disk versus in cache. Except that when the difference ends up being in hours or days, you become much more sensible to that, so it's good training for your thoughts.
- Data engineering is full of product decisions. What's often called data "cleaning" is in fact one of the import product decisions made in a company, and a data engineer will be consistently exposed to his company product, which I think makes for great personal development
- Data engineering is fascinating. In adtech for example, logs of where ads are displayed are an unfiltered window on the rest of humanity, for the better or the worse. But it definitely expands your views on what the "average" person actually does on its computer (spoiler : it's mainly watching porn...), and challenges quite a bit what you might think is "normal"
- You'll be plumbing technologies from all over the web, which might or might not be good news for you.
So yeah, data engineering is great ! It's not harder than other specialties for developers, but imo, it's one of the fun ones !