Which role has fewer meetings: DevOps or Data Engineering?

It's honestly more about the company culture than the role itself. Someone who's worked in both roles would know better. That said, if management supports you in declining unnecessary meetings, that can really help too! So it fluctuates between different organizations.

From my observations, the main difference isn't about fewer meetings but rather what the focus is in the delivery lifecycle. DevOps leans towards streamlining processes with less direct business interaction, while Data Engineering is more about the hands-on building and understanding of data, which often leads to more discussions with business teams.

In my experience, DevOps roles usually have fewer meetings. Data engineers often end up in business meetings discussing data because everyone seems to want to understand it better. They act as translators between data and business needs. Meanwhile, DevOps might get paged when things go wrong but doesn't typically have as many regular check-ins.

Honestly, I've found that Data Engineers often have to field a lot of questions from managers and stakeholders. The communication can be heavy, especially when building BI reports. You spend a lot of time trying to decode business jargon and ensuring the data meets their needs. It's definitely a lot of back-and-forth.