To rephrase the title a bit: most data work seems fundamentally like research. You look at a bunch of data seeking a nice, clean X/Y relationship that yields p

To rephrase the title a bit: most data work seems fundamentally like research. You look at a bunch of data seeking a nice, clean X/Y relationship that yields positive ROI for the org. These types of situations are rare - that’s the sort of e-commerce landing page / conversion optimization problem where a bunch of other factors (particularly whether anyone needs or wants the widget) are answered already. That doesn’t sound like the nature of these data engineering type roles. Sounds like there’s an explicit “Get us this spreadsheet!” BI-grunt functionality, with the overhead of doing researchy type work that might pay off for the company later. I’d guess that the “get the business unit their spreadsheets” is the actual valuable part of this role, and any other useful insights about the data are just considered gravy by the org.