[elevanation]

To your questions #3 and #5, my suggestions would be threefold:

1. If you decide to switch to data engineering, talk with your professional network, and grow your current network, to find the new role. It can be pretty tough to change roles via the conventional hiring process, and finding a new role "organically" leads to some of the best jobs.

2. Evaluate your current situation and do a little writing: What's good? What's bad? What do I want for the future? Putting these answers down on paper, and revising them over the course of a couple weeks, enables you to achieve clarity, which then leads you to constructive actions.

3. Speak with a career mentor or coach. Because of inherit human bias and observation effects which we are all trapped in, we suck at self-evaluation. While friends indeed help, there are limits to what friends can do, and over-doing this with friends will damage friendships.

The job of a professional mentor/coach is to give you rational feedback, free of constraints such as friendship or working together. In this way, you learn and solve your problems much faster than you would alone. (Source: I am a career mentor and coach myself).

[passwordoops]

Thanks for the suggestions! They make sense, and you're right about the writing :)

I haven't tried a mentor or coach yet, but it does make sense