The lack of a roadmap is disastrous in terms of professional quality IMO. A lot of orgs have data scientists who are good at coding and maths who can't do their work because the data engineers, who got their jobs because they kinda knew SQL a decade ago, are incompetent.

I'm sure this is less of a problem in tech companies which are skimming the cream of the crop, but in other organisations it's apparent that a third-rate data scientist or software engineer is probably much better at their job than a second-rate data engineer. And indeed if I were running an IT dept I'd probably just fill the data engineering roles with decent coders and tell them to reskill a bit.