A Typical Data Engineering Workday — Abroad.

A glimpse into a data engineer’s typical workday with an international twist.

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After braving the crisp French morning, I walked my wife next door to catch the 7 a.m. train. I waved goodbye and walked the 150 meters to the apartment we were renting for the month.

As I opened the blind-less windows (it’s Europe, they’ve seen everything), I checked my phone and breathed a sigh of relief as I enjoyed a feeling I hardly ever experienced in the U.S. this time of morning: Silence.

Unless someone Slack’d or emailed overnight, I wasn’t beginning my day with the usual deluge of logs, alerts and the odd DM. This is what happens when you work 6 hours ahead of EST.

If you’re new to reading my work (welcome), the spring and summer of ’23 have been a mixture of rather intense engineering work and even more extensive and sometimes grueling international travel to visit my wife while she worked a short contract abroad.

In working so out-of-sync with my teammates I inverted my working day and experienced a tremendous amount of freedom and responsibility; I worked the U.S. third shift so I handled any pipeline breaks or other data concerns during this time frame.

After writing about my field for nearly two years it’s occurred to me that some folks might not really understand what data engineers “do” on a daily basis. Personally, I find “day in the life” posts a bit boring, so in an effort to make that a bit more interesting, I’ll share my “inverted” schedule along with my experiences working an engineering job abroad.

*Some of the working details will be vague to avoid disclosing any proprietary information.

8–10 a.m.

I’m naturally an early riser, so even in the U.S. I tend to log on before 9 a.m. I prefer to jump on problems and requests ASAP since my energy peaks before 1 p.m.

With no obligations until later in the day, my mornings were flexible and would follow two patterns.

Pattern 1

My wife had to be at work early. We’d walk to the train station around 6 a.m. If we were up late the prior evening, I might go back to sleep.

Pattern 2

My wife goes to work at a human hour. I’d walk her to the train station around 8–8:30 a.m. Then I’d go to Aldi for a fresh pastry (pain au chocolat or a croissant) and fruit.

Work would start around 9–9:30.

Unlike my normal east coast schedule, the beginning of the day was for “catch up” time. Since my team members graciously accommodated my different time zone, they would message me with the expectation I wouldn’t see it for several hours.

These messages were typically considered FYI or “hand off” messages to make me aware of a code change, new error or updated request.

Months later I found out that one of the analysts I worked with frequently would schedule his messages for 3 a.m. EST to make sure I saw them at the beginning of my day. I applauded his dedication.

After clearing my Slack notifications, it was onto email which, on a bad day, contained error messages from our various Google Cloud Platform (GCP) builds (mostly Airflow).

I’d troubleshoot and fix these errors as they arose throughout my morning. I think the fact that I fixed things before the east coast team even woke up made them slightly more ok with my schedule.

The last type of email-based communication I’d receive would be pull request reviews (PRs). If someone is working late or working on a task I assigned (turns out I have some authority), I’d review it the next time I logged on.

12–13:00 (Europe does military time)

If I had a particularly busy morning, this would be the time I start development. The time I start coding varies. Like I said, I’m a morning person, so I’d prefer to code earlier and tweak and review in the afternoon.

For this hypothetical, I guess I’m still jet lagged and I start coding at noon.

I’m a data engineer so I primarily conceive and write ETL/ELT data pipelines. Depending on the nature of the task, I’m working in either Python or SQL. In addition to pipeline building I’ll also work on the odd automation project, like getting a G-Sheet to automatically update our downtime metrics based on BigQuery metadata.

If I’m actively working on something, I can just jump into wherever I left off the previous day. If I’m starting from scratch, this period of the day is reserved for API documentation reading.

As I’ve gained experience, I’ve learned that I get less frustrated coding if I spend more time deeply understanding my end goal and the data sources/APIs that contribute to it.

13:00–14:00

Lunch time. At this point, I’m in France so I’m getting something I would rarely have in America.

My go-to is a croque monsieur (grilled cheese and ham) or maybe some leftover quiche.

If I’ve had a mentally taxing morning I’d also take a walk or run during this time. I really wanted to get a head start in working off the pastry weight that would ultimately follow me to the U.S.

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15:00–16:00

9 a.m. EST. My Slack starts pinging because the work day has started and our alert function starts firing.

I jump on some alerts. If I need a review on any code or a question answered, this is when I bother my senior engineers and my manager.

Sometimes a co-worker greets me with Bonjour or another common French phrase in their message. Though it’s tongue-in-cheek, the greeting is warmer coming from them than most Parisians I encounter.

16:00–17:00

This is typically the earliest anyone wants to meet. Since I’m not yet a senior or lead, my day isn’t full of many meetings. The ones I have I typically look forward to, like one-on-ones with my boss or team meetings where my senior engineers are entertained by my cynicism toward European life compared to America.

Air conditioners and dryers. That’s all I’m going to say.

This meeting block might end with a check-in or pair programming session if I have someone working on a task or I’m beginning a senior engineer’s ticket. Unfortunately, I’m not as sharp at the end of the European day but I do my best to power through.

Sometimes my wife gets back from work in the early evening. I may have to cut something short or convert to Slack to let her into the apartment.

18:00+

If I’m on this late something has gone horribly wrong. Critical data is distorted. Infrastructure is failing.

Someone needs access to a Google Doc.

World-ending stuff.

There was only one instance abroad when I stayed on past my normal sign-off time. I’m very fortunate to work somewhere with good work-life balance, even on another time zone.

19:00–23:00

Post-work, my wife and I either cook or go to a cafe for dinner. Since the sun sets after 10 p.m. in the summer we have a leisurely meal. Either that or we go to the store to get wine that would cost twice as much in the U.S.

You can’t say working in France doesn’t have its perks.

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