How ruthless prioritization got me a 40% raise and a head of data title I didn’t even want
If you’re drowning in work and still not getting noticed, this is what changes everything
If you're a data engineer, you’ve probably lived this.
You’re managing broken pipelines while debugging someone else’s dashboard. You’re answering last-minute stakeholder pings, rewriting a report because “the numbers feel off,” and trying to find five quiet minutes to think through that one project you actually care about.
It’s not that you can’t do the work. You’ve proven you can.
But somehow, despite the long hours and constant firefighting, you’re still stuck in the same spot, mid-level projects, mid-level pay, mid-level influence.
I know that feeling well. For a long time, I thought being helpful would get me noticed. That if I said yes to everything, eventually someone would say yes to me. A promotion, a budget, a team.
That never happened.
What finally changed things for me wasn’t working harder or becoming more efficient. It was learning how to prioritize in a way that made my value obvious. First to myself, then to everyone else.
And that’s what this story is about.
Not just how I changed my work, but how you can too, before burnout makes the choice for you.
Burnout & blunt feedback
For a while, it’s easy to believe the chaos is normal.
In data engineering, there’s always too much to do. Legacy pipelines to fix, tables to migrate, dashboards to QA, execs asking for numbers five minutes before a meeting. You get used to jumping from one thing to the next.
You convince yourself it’s just part of the job. But here’s the thing:
You might not realize how unsustainable it’s become until someone else tells you.
That’s what happened to me. I didn’t feel burned out. I felt behind.
But my manager noticed. So did my wife. And when two people from completely different parts of your life tell you the same thing, you listen.
I took a week off. Not to “recover,” but to think.
When I came back, I asked for what I thought was the obvious next step: a team. Someone to help me cover the growing pile of work.
The answer was blunt.
“No,” my VP said. “Everybody sees it okay as it is.”
It wasn’t cruel. Just honest.
From his view, I was doing the job. Slowly, maybe, but nothing was crashing. No alarms were ringing.
So why change anything?
I heard the same message from the CFO. And that’s when it hit me:
As long as you’re the one absorbing the chaos, no one else feels the cost.
If you’re waiting for someone to notice how overwhelmed you are, you might be waiting forever.
This was the wake-up moment, not just for me, but maybe for you too. Because the work won’t stop. But your energy, your time, and your career momentum will, unless you make a different move.
The lie that kept you stuck: “They’ll respect me if I do more”
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that being helpful is the way up. That if you’re always available, always responsive, always stepping in to clean up the mess, people will eventually reward you for it.
They won’t.
Тhe more you say yes, the more you teach people to treat your time like it’s free.
That was the hardest lesson to learn. Not because it’s complicated, but because it feels wrong. Especially if you’re the person on the team who genuinely cares about doing things well.
But here’s the reality most data engineers don’t want to hear: If your impact is scattered across ten half-finished tasks, no one can see your value.
You become the person who helps everyone. But never the one who owns anything.
It took direct feedback from leadership for that to sink in. I was seen as someone who worked hard, yes.
But also as someone who couldn’t focus. Someone reactive. Not someone you hand budget to. Not someone you give a team to.
If you’re constantly switching between low-impact work just to keep stakeholders happy, you’re not building trust. You’re building a reputation for being the go-to fixer. And fixers don’t get promoted. Builders of leverage do.
So here’s the shift that changed everything for mem and might for you:
Respect doesn’t come from being available. It comes from being intentional.
Once that clicked, the whole way I worked started to change.
Building a ruthless system
Once you realize that saying yes isn’t helping your career, the next question is: “So what do I do instead?”
For me, the answer wasn’t magic. It wasn’t even complicated. It was structure.
I built a simple prioritization framework to stop making decisions based on volume and emotion, and start making them based on impact.
Every project, every request, every shiny new thing, ran through that system.
What’s the business value?
How urgent is it, really?
Who’s asking, and why?
If you’re overloaded, this kind of clarity is everything. Because once you know what matters, you can actually say it out loud.
That’s what I did.
I sat down with my manager, shared a list of everything on my plate, and told him what I thought the top three should be.
I didn’t come with a complaint. I came with a plan. And he backed it. Fully.
That gave me something even more powerful than time: air cover.
From then on, every new request ran through the same system. I shared my priorities publicly in a weekly Slack update. Nothing fancy. Just bullet points with what’s done, what’s in progress, and what’s next.
I wanted it to be visible and boring. No drama, no surprises.
When people asked me to drop what I was doing and handle something “urgent,” I didn’t argue. I just shared where I was focused, explained why, and gave them a real estimate for when I could take their task on.
And if they insisted, I directed them to the VP.
Nine out of ten times, they backed off. Not because they were wrong, but because they saw I was working with purpose.
Here’s the part most people miss:
You don’t need to convince everyone. You just need a system that makes it easier to say no.
That system became the foundation for everything that came next.
I broke the whole system down in a separate post, including the full rubric, how I score incoming work, and how I communicate priorities to leadership. You can get it here: The Data Engineering Workload Prioritization Playbook
Space, clarity, and unexpected power
The first thing I noticed wasn’t a raise. It wasn’t a title. It was space.
For the first time in months, I wasn’t waking up with a sense of dread. I could sit down, look at my list, and focus on one thing, without the constant fear that I was forgetting something urgent.
The panic was gone. So was the pressure to please everyone.
People started to respect my time. Because I was clear on my priorities, they were too. They stopped seeing me as “the person who can fix things fast,” and started becoming “the person who’s building the right things.”
That shift had a funny effect.
Some of the same people who used to pull me in five directions started advocating for me. I still remember one of them saying:
Yordan is extremely busy. He works on these things, and we appreciate that they’re important. But we can’t wait. The gains from our initiatives would easily cover the added resource.
That was the turning point.
They weren’t asking me to do more anymore. They were asking leadership to support me, because they finally saw the value in what I was already doing.
If you’ve ever felt invisible, like your work just disappears into the system, this part matters.
You don’t need a louder voice to be heard. You need a system that makes your work undeniable.
And once that happens, the rest starts to move.
The promotion you didn’t chase
A few months later, I got a 40% raise and a new title: Head of Data Engineering.
It wasn’t part of a performance cycle. I didn’t apply for it. I didn’t ask for it. It just… happened.
Because by that point, the impact was already obvious. Not just in my work, but in how others talked about it.
It’s funny. When you’re buried in busywork, nobody wants to give you a team. But when you build systems, say no with confidence, and focus on high-leverage work, suddenly everyone wants to support you.
Even then, I didn’t care much about the title. What mattered more was the shift in control.
I wasn’t reacting anymore. I was shaping the roadmap. Choosing where to go deep. Protecting my time and teaching others to respect it.
And here’s the part nobody tells you:
If you don’t protect your time, nobody else will.
Once you do, the people who matter start to notice. And when they notice, everything moves faster, money, opportunities, influence.
That’s the leverage most engineers never build.
Not because they aren’t capable, but because they’re too busy trying to be useful, instead of being essential.
What most data engineers get wrong
A lot of data engineers believe the key to career growth is mastering the tech. New tools, faster queries, more efficient pipelines.
And yes, that matters.
But the truth is, your proximity to the business is what makes you irreplaceable, not just your skill with SQL or Airflow.
You can be the best engineer in the room and still get stuck maintaining someone else’s roadmap. Still get passed over for the promotion. Still feel like you’re fighting to prove your value.
If you don’t control what you work on, it doesn’t matter how good you are.
That’s the shift I want you to think about.
The real unlock isn’t a new framework or a fancy title. It’s realizing that your value isn’t just in building. It’s in choosing what to build.
Once you start treating prioritization as a strategic skill, not just a scheduling tool, you move out of the execution bucket and into the decision-making layer. And that’s where everything changes.
You get to lead instead of react.
You get to shape instead of follow.
You stop surviving on urgency and start building leverage.
Final thoughts
If you’re feeling buried right now, working hard, doing everything, and still not getting the recognition or roles you deserve, you’re not alone.
But here’s what I learned: the way out isn’t through more hours or better tools. It’s through clarity.
And that starts with one question: What are you actually here to deliver?
Not what’s screaming loudest. Not what shows up in Slack at 4:58 PM.
But what moves the needle, for the business, and for you.
If you don’t know the answer yet, that’s your first priority.
And if you do know, then it’s time to build a system that lets you act like it.
Start with this:
Write down every task or project on your plate right now
Score each one based on impact, visibility, and alignment
Drop the bottom half
Show your manager your top 3Share your priorities weekly
That one habit, protecting your time in public, can change the way people see you.
It did for me.
If you want the exact framework I used to do this, it’s all inside the paid article: The Data Engineering Workload Prioritization Playbook
The raise was great. The title too.
But the best part? I finally got to choose what mattered.
Now it’s your turn.
Yordan
PS: Want more leverage, less chaos? The paid plan shows you how.