I made the change from SWE to DE a few months ago and several fellow SWEs saw it a first glance as if I was downgrading into a less technical role. They assumed it was some kind of modern DBA.

I’ve always seen it as a Data Oriented Software Engineer but it seems that isn’t always the case, specially recently where I’ve been offered jobs that were basically analyst roles or BI roles.

A lot of “data engineers” are former db analysts and such that don’t know much of anything technically outside of SQL and even that might be something they only are “certified” to know rather than actually good at.

It’s basically becoming a title I’d associate with being low-skill. I used to be a “software engineer in data” and never call myself a data engineer because people would think I don’t know how to write/maintain production services, just write ETL pipelines