As a data engineer I've made the same joke. But the statement is also a bit like saying you can use plumbers to design and build a chemical refinement plant wh

As a data engineer I've made the same joke. But the statement is also a bit like saying you can use plumbers to design and build a chemical refinement plant which also just moves chemicals from point A to point B. Or you can design a citywide sewer system with a bunch of plumbers. There are many cleansing, refining, orchestration, dependency, data quality, governance and optimization problems to be solved and a wide variety of tools that have for whatever reason never grown into higher-level open source frameworks and are thus reimplemented in various forms in many places. Data engineering (somewhat like software engineering actually) doesn't require much if any of the math and physics I took in engineering courses in college, but it does require rigorous systems thinking about how to design and build structures that withstand adverse conditions that are thought patterns common to other engineering practices, so I don't think it's a totally crazy title for the role.