The number one thing that keeps getting hammered home to me, by experience and the folks at work I'm responsible to, is that the point of data/analytics engineering is to generate value for the business.

New pipelines and data sources don't inherently create any value. Usually, they're a net loss. Doing your own job well isn't enough: you need to make the data easy to access and use, and deliver it to the right people at the right time. Every data engineer should be at least a little bit of a data architect, too.