Comment by mettamage

Comment by mettamage 5 days ago

I think I explained myself poorly.

> At a large-scale organization, as an SWE, I did far more programming work than I ever did as a DA.

Yea, this is what I meant. The amount of programming I do now as a DA feels low (since I'm a software engineer historically, that's what I meant with "but for a software engineer" - a bit of a confusing sentence). Well specifically, the amount of engineering feels low.

> That said, there are different ways to cope and build skills—it takes time. I do side projects and, more importantly, write about them regularly [1].

Good point, to what extent do employers see this as experience though? It's my experience they don't care at all. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. The reason I'd do it is (1) I want to keep on building and (2) I want to keep on building experience as a SWE that employers will be impressed by. I'm not sure if I want to switch back, but for now I want to keep that option open.

> More than once, people have reached out with job offers just because they stumbled across my writing on Hacker News or other social media platforms.

I guess you answered your question here. I think it's good enough to test it out :)

> As a DA, I mostly wrote aggregation queries, built dashboards, and did some Python, Pandas, and Notebook munging.

Yea, I see a lot of SQL queries here, notebook stuff (so also Python/Pandas) and dashboarding. It's probably a 50/50 split. I have a suspicion that my manager wants me more on the programming side of things though. So far me as well. I'm allowed to pick any tool I find right for the job. I already wrote a bash script today.

scarface_74 5 days ago

> Good point, to what extent do employers see this as experience though?

They don’t see it as experience.

> I'm not sure if I want to switch back, but for now I want to keep that option open.

For the most part once you start going deep down one rabbit hole, it’s almost impossible to change jobs and go back to software development. I see it happen all of the time with people who leave software development and go into “DevOps” [sic].

Companies aren’t going to take your side projects seriously. With the current job market, why wouldn’t they hire someone with recent relevant experience? If you can get an interview with a company that relies heavily on coding tests you might stand a chance.

The best way to pivot back is to get a job where you do have recent experience - in your case data - and then after awhile do a formal or informal transfer to more of a software engineering focus

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mettamage 5 days ago

> If you can get an interview with a company that relies heavily on coding tests you might stand a chance.
Fair point. I think if I grind leetcode full-time for 3 months, I'll be there. I have around 250 questions under my belt (50 hard), and I feel definitely familiar nowadays. I'm mostly in the refining part, sometimes still in the "I don't see the trick" part.

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- scarface_74 5 days ago
  
  So the question becomes how do you get to the interview and stand out among the hundreds of people applying for the same position?
  I don’t have a good answer for that as a software developer. I looked for bog standard remote development jobs as a Plan B with 20+ years of development and deep AWS experience last year and the year before and it is a shit show out there now.
  Luckily, I have deep experience in my niche - strategic cloud consulting + app dev and a stint working at a BigTech company in the consulting department that opened a lot of doors.
  I think the play may be to stay in analytics and get into a well known company.
  Also, make sure you are taking on assignments with bigger “scope” and higher “impact”. Don’t be a ticket taker.
  
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  mettamage 4 days ago
  
  > I think the play may be to stay in analytics and get into a well known company.
  > Also, make sure you are taking on assignments with bigger “scope” and higher “impact”. Don’t be a ticket taker.
  Solid advice, thank you :)
  I was a ticket taker. The irony is that I'm not even a week in on my first job and this manager is definitely not making me be a ticket taker. I already completed some scraping projects. Not sure where that falls as being a "data analyst" but yea the data analysts are quite technical anyway (i.e. no one uses Excel, it's all SQL and Python).
  
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rednafi 5 days ago

> Good point. To what extent do employers even see this as experience, though? In my experience, they don’t care at all. Maybe I’m looking at this wrong.

I don’t know to what extent this is considered experience either. That said, the hiring process in tech is completely broken. There are companies that ask LeetCode hard questions for positions where you’ll just write HTML templates and React.

I work on side projects and write because I enjoy the process—not because I’m fishing for potential employers. In the past half-decade, I’ve written close to 200 articles. Researching for them was immensely helpful in building knowledge. At the start, I didn’t care if anyone read them. But eventually, the site got traction, and now it forces me to try new things and keep my skillset sharp. This works as a positive feedback loop.

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mettamage 4 days ago

Ah I see, thanks for the perspective. Follow your bliss, get traction ;-)

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