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What I’ve learned in my career as a Data Scientist?

What career advice would I give to myself If I could go back in time? What did I do right and where did I go wrong?

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash
Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

I’ve been actively writing on Medium for almost two years and some great unexpected things happened along the way.

From time to time, students ask me for advice. While responding, I always do a bit of retrospective on my career in Data Science.

What did I learn? Would I choose a different path?

This article is a write-up of lessons learned through my professional career.

Eight years ago…

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I started my professional career in 2013 when I got a Data Scientist internship in a research institute – a dream come true. I was doing research in distributed Machine Learning algorithms, which was a popular field at the time. Those were the days of Hadoop.

Things were simple back then, Big Data was the only buzz word. Then came Deep Learning and AI.

I have the best memories of that time – working with cutting edge technologies, soft deadlines, great team… I could go on and on.

There was only one problem – salary!

A year and a half into the internship I was offered to pursue a Ph.D. in Data Science focusing on Natural Language Processing. While I was honored, I declined the offer as NLP didn’t interest me that much that I would focus at least 4 years of my life to it.

Other reasons were that I was broke and I wasn’t getting younger either – 26 with no professional experience.

You don’t need to have a Ph.D. to work in Data Science.

In retrospect, I never regretted my decision not to pursue a Ph.D. By declining the offer, I had to make a jump from academia to the industry.

You Don’t Need a Ph.D. in Data Science, but …

A great leap

Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash
Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash

I’ll never forget that day. A CTO of a small startup invited me to a job interview. The day I got the invitation was the same day as the interview itself.

I said to myself, what do I have to lose and I went. We had a nice chat about my experience, how would I solve certain things – not too technical, more concept-wise. In the end, he asked me what I was getting paid in academia and he offered me 3x more.

What do I have to lose?

I didn’t intend to accept the offer prior to going to the interview. It felt great working in academia, but then I thought about the salary and those cozy offices with new MacBooks… I accepted the offer. There was no way back.

The Startup

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

The startup hired me to make a recommender system that would work on Big Data. This was quite a challenge for me coming from a research-oriented environment.

I had experience in building concepts that work in a controlled environment, not production-ready systems. Those were the days, where I had a few sleepless nights and working holidays.

Back then, I thought that my project was the most important thing. I was so caught up in it that I didn’t see a bigger picture. How will we integrate it into production? There were many times when we went to lunch with the team and I was only thinking about the code and errors that I needed to fix.

The important lesson that I learned was that building relationship is more important than the project you are working on. We still hang out with colleagues that I met in the startup, but no one ever talks about the projects we were working on back then.

Building relationships is more important than the project you are working on

While I managed to build the recommender system, I later found out that great recommendations weren’t the most important thing. It was all marketing!

Machine Learning buzz word was selling services like crazy at the time.

Like with many startups, it was no different with this one. Soon funding dried up and I went looking for a job again.

Dream Big

Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash
Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash

By the time the startup funding dried, I saved enough money that I could be well off for a year (no wonder that funding dried 😂 ).

I started looking for a new job the same day I heard we won’t have the funds for next month.

Being a developer and code being a universal language, I haven’t thought about moving to another country for a year or two. I haven’t thought about monetizing my side hustles. I had enough money, I was young, I had experience, but it didn’t cross my mind.

Don’t be too caught up in your local environment

Looking back, I was scared of uncertainty. This reminds me of two great quotes:

Things are never as bad or as good as they seem.

Don’t let the highs get too high and don’t let the lows get too low

Way forward

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash
Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

In the startup, we were working with advanced technologies so it wasn’t hard to find a new job. I even got offers from multiple companies. The hardest thing was to decide which offer to accept.

If you are inexperienced and in a similar situation, I have simple advice for you:

When you have multiple job offers, accept the one with a better mentor

Let’s connect

Talk: Book a call Socials: YouTube 🎥 | LinkedIn | Twitter Code: GitHub


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