being a data engineer in Indonesia: 1yr 9mo in

i've been a data engineer for one year and nine months. it's my first real job, and i think i'm good at it. i'm also a little worried about what that means.

what the work actually looks like

it's mostly SQL. a lot of SQL. stored procedures, MERGE statements, incremental loads, control tables. the architecture stuff (medallion layers, watermarking patterns, dimension design) is genuinely interesting. the day-to-day is debugging why a SSIS package silently failed at 2am.

i work in insurance data, which is its own thing. policy numbers that change. products renamed mid-year. regulatory reporting with very specific formats that nobody fully documented. you learn to be suspicious of everything.

the tech stack is conservative: SQL Server, SSIS, Python utilities, Tableau. no dbt, no Spark, no fancy orchestration. it works, and it's made me very good at the fundamentals, which i think matters more than i expected.

the comfort trap

here's the thing about being good at your first job: it's comfortable. stable paycheck, known expectations, you're competent and recognized for it.

the trap is when comfortable becomes a reason to stay rather than a description of the current state.

i've been thinking about this a lot. the skills i'm building (T-SQL, SSIS, SQL Server) are real and valuable, but they're also narrow. the market for modern data engineering wants Python, dbt, Airflow, cloud-native stacks. i'm building the right concepts on the wrong tools.

so i'm treating the current job as a foundation while building toward something else. Azure certifications (DP-900 this year, DP-203 after), public GitHub projects that show modern stack work, and eventually roles where i'm not the most experienced person in the room.

what i actually like about it

i like systems that work. there's something satisfying about an ETL pipeline that runs cleanly every night, handles edge cases gracefully, and produces data you can trust. it's unglamorous infrastructure work, and i find it genuinely interesting.

i also like that data engineering is close to the actual business. the pipelines i build feed reports that people make decisions from. that's not abstract. it has weight.

where this goes

contract ends September 2026. after that, i want to work in an environment that moves faster, uses a more modern stack, and pushes me harder. remote preferred. possibly abroad eventually.

not running away from the current job. just making sure i don't mistake comfort for growth.