The engineering is in saying "I need to get this data within these performance constraints", not in the now worthless knowledge of exactly how to fetch it.

That’s not engineering, it’s operating. There’s nothing wrong with operators as a career field, but don’t equate it to engineering, and don’t expect to be as highly paid (why should you be? You can’t fix it when it breaks, and you don’t know how it works).

Just because you don't write it doesn't mean you suddently become incapable of understanding it.

Sure, that's the kind of "engineer" that then needs to offload the work entirely onto someone else when things don't magically work as he wanted.

The other person is the engineer here.