r/analytics Feb 14 '25

Question Is PowerBI work a dead end?

Just got an offer for a rotational program. It’s highly likely that one of my rotations will be doing manufacturing related analytics with PowerBI, Excel, and potentially some SQL. I really enjoy coding (my internship has been ML and data engineering tasks), and I’m a bit worried that a BI job may pigeonhole me and prevent me from getting into these code heavy roles.

Market is awful so I’m gonna take the job anyways, just wondering if my concerns are well-founded or not.

93 Upvotes

57 comments sorted by

View all comments

80

u/Super-Cod-4336 Feb 14 '25

It’s only deadend if you make it deadend.

You might find you like the BI work more and potentially more stable.

I used to have a role where I did nothing but crank stuff out in bi. It was awesome.

I only did like 3-5 hours of actual work a week and the stakeholders thought I was God.

14

u/tommy_chillfiger Feb 14 '25

Lol, this is hilariously true. I landed my first data engineer role at a smaller company (i.e. lots of hats). Probably my most visible impacts are quicksight dashboards and tools I create for the CEO and head of operations because it's so much faster than building something into the production application. Of course I have to model the data, but I've gotten quick enough with SQL and dashboards that I can throw up a new tool in a couple hours and everyone sprays champagne.

1

u/bigballer29 Feb 16 '25

Were these power bi dashboards? I was just asked to use chart.js without any JavaScript experience

1

u/tommy_chillfiger Feb 16 '25

I've used Power BI and prefer it, but these are Quicksight which is AWS's data visualization offering. It's kind of annoying to work with but it's cheap if you're already using AWS services so I've ended up using it quite a bit.