Soft Skills Engineering

Episode 253: Not coding after 2 years and fake data scientists

Mar 22, 2021

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Engineering - Should I Leave or Should I Stick Around?

Don't Leave Me Alone

You've Got a Slow Start to Your Career?

Doing a Bad Job at Excell Worddocks

Is There a Way to Automate Your Writing?

Is There Value in Doing This Work?

Do You Know Python?

Aren't We All Data Scientists?

It's Really Hard to Hire for Data Scientists

Data Science - Is This the Kind of Role That You Can Get on the Job?

Data Scientists Aren't Besmirched by Excel Jockeys

You've Found the Littlest Pond

Machine Learning - Is Your Company in Trouble?

How to Date a Science Seminar?

Are You Picking Up a Lot of Slack on the Team?

The Back Log Grows, and So Does Our Love for You

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

Thanks for the show, I absolutely love getting awkward glances from people when I LOL randomly in public places.

I’ve been at my first job for 2 years, including an internship. The work I got to do as an intern was absolutely brilliant and I learned new things almost every day. Then I joined as a full-time employee, and things were good at first.

For the past year, things have gone downhill.

I barely get to write code and spend most of my time reviewing and writing documents in excel and word.

I find this unsatisfying and can barely get the work assigned to me done due to lack of motivation and interest.

However, I am fairly convinced that the compensation and other perks I get here, as well as the coworkers and management here are some of the best I could find.

Should I follow the soft skills advice and quit, or should I stick around because of the other favourable conditions I mentioned? In other words, how should I decide between satisfying work vs the favourable conditions?
Hi, I am a data scientist. I work on a team of about 30 other data scientists. It’s a new team and I have determined after talking to everyone for a few weeks, that about 1/3 of the team does not know Python, 2 even admitting to me privately they lied in the interview, and probably 50-60% have no idea what git is. I feel like they hired a bunch of excel, tableau, business-y people and assumed any experience with data qualified you to do data science. You may say “quit your job” but this is my first job out of college and I don’t think I could find another easily. Do I tell my manager about this? How do I teach them these things? I’ve already had to pick up a lot of slack on the team, luckily since I have no kids, no girlfriend, a ton of free time, and have been coding since middle school it’s been manageable, but I’m concerned about how to handle this going forward.