Why Every Data Engineer Feels Like a Janitor Sometimes

It’s not just pipelines — it’s cleaning up the mess no one else wants to touch

Photo by Yanny Mishchuk on Unsplash

There’s an unspoken truth in the data world: being a data engineer is a lot like being the custodian of a building.

You’re responsible for cleaning up other people’s messes, keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes, and fixing problems no one even realizes exist — until everything breaks.

Let me explain.

The Data Dumpster Fire

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Data engineering often starts with a wake-up call. For many data engineers, their first day on the job includes navigating chaotic systems. For instance, Forrester Research highlights that nearly 70% of enterprise data is unstructured or poorly organized.

This was the experience shared by several professionals on Reddit’s r/dataengineering and in KDnuggets forums, where data engineers described starting jobs with tables named Final_v2, LastVersion_Final, and DONOTUSE_backup. In fact, one engineer mentioned discovering critical ETL scripts running on personal laptops—something Gartner describes as a hallmark of companies with low data…