The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods D2DO287: Leveling Up in Data Science
Nov 19, 2025
Darya Petrashka, a Senior Data Scientist at SLB with expertise in natural language processing, shares her unique journey from management and linguistics into data science. She breaks down the data science umbrella, discussing the roles of data engineering and machine learning. Darya contrasts junior and senior positions, emphasizing the importance of business understanding in senior roles. She also highlights common challenges in data quality, team communication, and the impact of AI tools in coding. Her advice for newcomers? Leverage your unique background to enhance your career.
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Data Science Is An Umbrella
- Data science acts as an umbrella covering data analysis, data engineering, and machine learning tasks.
- Teams split these roles in large projects but one person can cover them end-to-end in smaller shops.
Single Spreadsheet Running The Company
- Kyler recounted a fast‑growing company relying on a single unbacked spreadsheet to run operations.
- That fragile setup risked the company's survival if the owner left or the file was lost.
Career Switch From Languages To NLP
- Darya switched careers from management and economics into NLP because she loved language systems.
- She learned Python to combine her interest in languages with computing and entered data science around 2018.