Data Engineer vs Data Scientist

Comments debate distinctions, overlaps, and responsibilities between data scientists, data engineers, software engineers, and related roles like ML engineers, often discussing career advice, job titles, and skills required.

📉 Falling 0.2x Career & Jobs
1,980
Comments
18
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#8073
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2008
1
2010
1
2011
6
2012
32
2013
16
2014
22
2015
27
2016
112
2017
108
2018
142
2019
173
2020
183
2021
326
2022
337
2023
247
2024
151
2025
89
2026
9

Keywords

e.g FB StackOverflow DBA LLM DE ETL ML SWE SQL data data science data scientist data engineering engineer science scientist data scientists engineering engineers

Sample Comments

pryelluw Feb 27, 2017 View on HN

Do data scientists do as engineers?

SilurianWenlock May 26, 2021 View on HN

Why cant software engineers just do the data science role?

VHRanger Oct 6, 2018 View on HN

"Data engineer" (more Dev) or "Data scientist" (more analytics).

ldng Feb 23, 2020 View on HN

Data Engieneet to Data Scientist what Fullstack to Developer, aka more work responsabilities while paying the same ?

paulluuk Sep 8, 2021 View on HN

What's wrong with relying on data engineers for data engineering?

ummonk Mar 12, 2019 View on HN

Have you tried data engineering jobs rather than data scientist?

achompas Sep 8, 2016 View on HN

My official title is "Data Scientist" although I'm closer to the "ML Engineer" someone else mentions in a child comment.Frankly speaking, if your company doesn't need a data engineer, it won't hire one or move you into that role. They likely don't, either, if you're experiencing this pushback -- data engineers often develop ETL pipelines or data warehouses, both of which are very useful if your company has a data team and very useless if it does no

fbemployee1234 Mar 12, 2019 View on HN

The skills you described are those of a data scientist/engineer hybrid. Have you tried clearly branding yourself as a data engineer? There’s a lot fewer of those, and the job is overlapping to the nearest understanding of a hiring manager or non tech person.

Orou Jul 9, 2021 View on HN

I would also vote for "data engineer" (it's my current job title).You very likely don't want a data scientist to be doing a data engineer's job (and they probably don't want to be doing it themselves!). While there are similarities, data engineering tends to be a lot closer to software development than data science. If you're advertising for a data scientist role, don't expect them to be happy if 80% of their job is writing ETL scripts and cleaning data

apohn Aug 20, 2018 View on HN

Rather than thinking of Data Science and SWE as two different fields, think of Data Science on a spectrum, with "Advanced Data Analyst" on one side and "SWE/Machine Learning Algorithm Engineer" at the other.Data Science is a weird field. A lot of the jobs descriptions have similar keywords, but there is just a huge amount of variance in what the job requires. There are definitely a large number of Data Science roles where solving a business problem requires you to w