Ask HN: Data analyst and software engineering? Is there a role like this?

4 hours ago 2

Is there a role where you get to be a data analyst and a software engineer at the same time? What is such a role called?

__Some context__

At my current F500 company, I'm in an odd situation. I work at a marketing department. Our IT department works per quarter (e.g. Q1 get feature request, Q2 start implementing it). From our marketing perspective, this is way too slow for most of our requests.

This means that for requests that need to move quicker, there has been a gap. The marketing department wants something, and no one can actually build it (or build it fast enough). This is where I stepped in since I used to be a SWE before this.

Not only did I build, I'd build without resources, without support, only the requests. You can imagine all the horrible hacks I had to implement in order to get stuff done, but I got it done. Besides, once I validated the business idea with my horrible hacks, then I did get more resources and could do a proper rewrite. The bigger things get, the more properly I can be a software engineer. Plus, I don't care where I am on that spectrum. I'm fine with being cowboy code slinger or with engineering for scale with all that implications of it.

The requests are also all over the place. I therefore did: data engineering, AI engineering and front-end engineering. Soon, I'm sure I can add full-stack to it, but for now it's front-end only.

My manager understands that we are in a bind. I'm acting way beyond my role, but it is needed, so it is fine. The thing is: I really like this. I really like driving things end to end like this.

So do roles like this exist in a more formal way where you don't have to be in a bind, but get the actual mandate to do this? What is such a role called?

It's a really entrepreneurial role and while starting a startup would be fun, I can't stomach the risk.

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