I always enjoyed helping students, undergraduate and graduate, get jobs. Most professors have never been gainfully employed and send students (out of disinterest if not incompetence) to equally clueless ‘academic advisors’ and ‘placement directors’. Now that I’ve left the professorate, one of my proudest accomplishments is having helped several people— on Twitter and in real life— secure nonacademic jobs, and by popular demand I’ve decided to share whatever wisdom into the process I can. I am writing this mostly with graduate students in the social sciences and related fields who want to pursue a career in ‘data science’ in mind.
Thanks for the post- I've been wondering when you planned to elaborate on the typology of data jobs you proposed.
I'm an undergraduate student studying economics, and I'm looking to become a strategy consultant once I graduate. I'm well aware of your opinions on consultants, but my goal when entering the workforce is to find a job where I can use my social sciences training to parse data in a way relevant to corporate clients, which would be more of an Astrologer job. Do you have any tips on what I can do to find a place to work that's large enough that I can use the name as a springboard for my career, but not so moribund that I get sucked into their Data Nigger plantations and eventually emerge with no motivation or marketable skills?
I have known quite a few fine Astrologers with an undergrad econ degree only. If you're inclined at all in this direction, I would recommend developing strong coding skills (most commonly python and SQL), as well as ML, and applying broadly to tech companies. Even in the gay megacorps, in tech you're less likely to descend into niggerdom, and startups are great early career environments too (but these might be scarcer in the next few years). A tech trajectory will help you build up skills and earn a good deal more money. If you're more into, say, econometrics then you can always switch to that area later, and it's helpful in tech too (many smart ML guys are absolutely retarded in this kind of work).
With an econ undergrad background, one thing to watch out for is 'business / data analytics' roles. Usually these don't involve stats, ML, etc., but are more barcharting, writing Excel reports, dashboards, ppts, and some SQL queries. There's nothing wrong with these roles, and usually they offer quicker paths to management, but they're also quick paths to niggerdom if you're not careful. Because they're more on the 'business' rather than 'technical' side, often they're swept into the politics of data niggerdom and you find yourself fiddling with Excel and Tableau and trying to please your eight managers for 60 hours a weeks-- not very helpful when it comes time to skillsmax or if you want to transition to a more technical role later. I am not really sure what strategy consultants do but it sounds more business oriented: 'analyst' roles might be a normal path in career but a smaller, more innovative company might help avoid niggerdom (one of the startups I worked with had several strategists, and they seemed to have manageable and relatively interesting work to do).
It's hard to know ex ante which companies are best to avoid planation work. You want someplace that's a little more relaxed and will help you develop the skills you need, but it's hard to figure this out because this is another way companies conceal their type: most companies pretend to offer 'professional development', but in most cases it's negligible or irrelevant. Do some background research on the companies you interview for when it comes time. A good number of PhDs to work with a sometimes a good sign, not because they're any better but because like me they're all pretty lazy and it might (but that's a big 'might') be a more laid back environment with some time to research. And if you do inadvertently find yourself in a Big Gay Zombie, just try to do the absolute minimum to keep the position till you can transfer elsewhere-- a natural instinct is to feel anxiety over this, but remember you're not actually skimping on productivity since these environments are pathological (they thrive on wasting everyone's time with busy work to create the illusion of productivity).
Working for a Mediocre is often underrated for many of the reasons you describe. Being a technical expert at a Mediocre can give you some amazing work life balance.
On the other hand I wonder sometimes how safe some of the data roles are when costs get tight—I would never, ever want to work in sales because it’s literally illegal not to be gay in sales, but where I work for example the sales folks are the golden children because they bring revenue, and that helps shield them from downturns somewhat.
My experience here is still limited but from what I've seen in the current waves of layoffs is that data roles are relatively stable, if only because there's a lot of fluff (outside sales) that can be cut first. But this is one reason a lot of Mediocre companies have their data jobs gravitate toward janitorial work. If you are really one of the few people who can even query the databases or migrate the data then your job is pretty sound. Same goes for some astrological work I've seen: if you have three clients who need demand forecasting done and you're one of the only people who knows forecasting then you're pretty secure as well (and this is usually true because they aren't incredibly bloated like Big Gay Zombies). Mediocre companies seem like a stable option, the big exception is if you get hired onto a new team (like the company made a data analyst or data science team only last year and, oops, recession hits, then you might want to start floating out resumes).
So incredibly accurate in so many ways and I wish I could share it to the rest of my team who have to enable an entire platoon of these people as their primary job. Alas.
It was very interesting to read this having basically no knowledge about data science (beyond a Bachelor's course in Sociology) or the corporate world at all. It's remarkable how the market in data science works compared to other historic fields.
Thanks for the post- I've been wondering when you planned to elaborate on the typology of data jobs you proposed.
I'm an undergraduate student studying economics, and I'm looking to become a strategy consultant once I graduate. I'm well aware of your opinions on consultants, but my goal when entering the workforce is to find a job where I can use my social sciences training to parse data in a way relevant to corporate clients, which would be more of an Astrologer job. Do you have any tips on what I can do to find a place to work that's large enough that I can use the name as a springboard for my career, but not so moribund that I get sucked into their Data Nigger plantations and eventually emerge with no motivation or marketable skills?
I have known quite a few fine Astrologers with an undergrad econ degree only. If you're inclined at all in this direction, I would recommend developing strong coding skills (most commonly python and SQL), as well as ML, and applying broadly to tech companies. Even in the gay megacorps, in tech you're less likely to descend into niggerdom, and startups are great early career environments too (but these might be scarcer in the next few years). A tech trajectory will help you build up skills and earn a good deal more money. If you're more into, say, econometrics then you can always switch to that area later, and it's helpful in tech too (many smart ML guys are absolutely retarded in this kind of work).
With an econ undergrad background, one thing to watch out for is 'business / data analytics' roles. Usually these don't involve stats, ML, etc., but are more barcharting, writing Excel reports, dashboards, ppts, and some SQL queries. There's nothing wrong with these roles, and usually they offer quicker paths to management, but they're also quick paths to niggerdom if you're not careful. Because they're more on the 'business' rather than 'technical' side, often they're swept into the politics of data niggerdom and you find yourself fiddling with Excel and Tableau and trying to please your eight managers for 60 hours a weeks-- not very helpful when it comes time to skillsmax or if you want to transition to a more technical role later. I am not really sure what strategy consultants do but it sounds more business oriented: 'analyst' roles might be a normal path in career but a smaller, more innovative company might help avoid niggerdom (one of the startups I worked with had several strategists, and they seemed to have manageable and relatively interesting work to do).
It's hard to know ex ante which companies are best to avoid planation work. You want someplace that's a little more relaxed and will help you develop the skills you need, but it's hard to figure this out because this is another way companies conceal their type: most companies pretend to offer 'professional development', but in most cases it's negligible or irrelevant. Do some background research on the companies you interview for when it comes time. A good number of PhDs to work with a sometimes a good sign, not because they're any better but because like me they're all pretty lazy and it might (but that's a big 'might') be a more laid back environment with some time to research. And if you do inadvertently find yourself in a Big Gay Zombie, just try to do the absolute minimum to keep the position till you can transfer elsewhere-- a natural instinct is to feel anxiety over this, but remember you're not actually skimping on productivity since these environments are pathological (they thrive on wasting everyone's time with busy work to create the illusion of productivity).
Working for a Mediocre is often underrated for many of the reasons you describe. Being a technical expert at a Mediocre can give you some amazing work life balance.
On the other hand I wonder sometimes how safe some of the data roles are when costs get tight—I would never, ever want to work in sales because it’s literally illegal not to be gay in sales, but where I work for example the sales folks are the golden children because they bring revenue, and that helps shield them from downturns somewhat.
My experience here is still limited but from what I've seen in the current waves of layoffs is that data roles are relatively stable, if only because there's a lot of fluff (outside sales) that can be cut first. But this is one reason a lot of Mediocre companies have their data jobs gravitate toward janitorial work. If you are really one of the few people who can even query the databases or migrate the data then your job is pretty sound. Same goes for some astrological work I've seen: if you have three clients who need demand forecasting done and you're one of the only people who knows forecasting then you're pretty secure as well (and this is usually true because they aren't incredibly bloated like Big Gay Zombies). Mediocre companies seem like a stable option, the big exception is if you get hired onto a new team (like the company made a data analyst or data science team only last year and, oops, recession hits, then you might want to start floating out resumes).
So incredibly accurate in so many ways and I wish I could share it to the rest of my team who have to enable an entire platoon of these people as their primary job. Alas.
Can't wait for the next parts.
I regret that this isn't shareable, for some of the linguistic choices. Appreciate the read (and will try not to take forever on the followups)
kek, "linguistic choices"
"I'm something of a philologist, myself"
It was very interesting to read this having basically no knowledge about data science (beyond a Bachelor's course in Sociology) or the corporate world at all. It's remarkable how the market in data science works compared to other historic fields.
Lmaooo, I'm laughing so hard
Excellent, wish I had thought of this in time