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Fellow literature student here. I'm very curious how you managed to shift to data analysis. I've made a successful shift to marketing, but technical work stil

Fellow literature student here. I'm very curious how you managed to shift to data analysis. I've made a successful shift to marketing, but technical work still eludes me.

sdoering 11y ago
I had always a knack for the technical stuff. While in school my main focus where natural sciences. You could say, I always had two hearts beating in my chest. So when the chance arose, I first started doing some web analytics. As the data grew more and more (esp. in our internal tools) I needed more then excel. So I tried to learn a little bit of (in my case) python to help crunch bigger numbers. From there I got to manage the technical side of an ad server, did a lot of project management and via a gig in online marketing as a "pure" web analyst I came to work in a digital agency as a so called data analyst. Most work is "classic" web analytics, some is work on bigger datasets (growing part of my work). So basically I had a knack for math, science, empirical stuff, statistics and tried some programming (bad code, but code non the less) and that way I was able to jump ships. One day I will try to incorporate my love for literature/texts into the mix - maybe NLP or some things like that might be fun. We'll see.
werber 11y ago
I studied literature as well, and made the jump to being a developer by doing a bootcamp.
gregcohn 11y ago
literature major here, just chiming in to say it can be done! (I'm a founder/CEO now.) Follow the things that challenge you and that you can learn from, that intersect with things you have some strength in. Maybe marketing in the context of developer platforms?
- sdoering 11y ago
  Hey Greg, whenever you scale to Germany, please shoot me a line. What you are building seems to me the ideal service to use. So many use cases shooting through my head... Greetings from the old world Sven
  - gregcohn 11y ago
    thanks -- will do!
jtheory 11y ago
There's a lot of luck involved, and just persistence over a long period of time. But I figure you also just have to start doing what you want to do. This is amazingly possible in the developer world in a way that's hard to imagine in any other industry. I was a music major in university (and planning on an English lit or creative writing minor) -- then I took an intro compsci course halfway through, and had a bit of a shock; it was an entirely new thing for me, but I really had a knack for it, and enjoyed it as well. It was a bit late to change my major... but I just fit in as much compsci as I could, and also just starting building things outside of coursework. I managed to get a software dev job right out of college based on a bunch of interactive online drills I wrote for the music department, plus I had very solid communication skills and academic recognition. The software dev job was doing custom dev on lots of different kinds of projects (that was good), and in my spare time I turned the interactive music stuff into a site that's still a side income stream. It's languishing somewhat these days, because 5 years ago I started as a developer at a UK-based startup (working remotely from France; long story) and gradually became the CTO -- mostly just from looking for the hardest, riskiest problems we had and chasing them down one at a time, and being easy to work with. It's hard to abstract any of this to general advice -- maybe just that mastering anything requires a good deal of focus and just time. If you want to do technical work (huge range there) you need to be doing it -- making mistakes, finding your way to solutions (good ones and bad), paying close attention to what's hard and why. It's probably worthwhile building something other people use, and can look at, etc. -- plus (whatever your focus is), mastering the context of working with customers, colleagues, competitors is valuable. If you build and support something all on your own, you're forced to learn a lot about all that.

Fellow literature student here. I'm very curious how you managed to shift to data analysis. I've made a successful shift to marketing, but technical work still eludes me.

sdoering 11y ago

I had always a knack for the technical stuff. While in school my main focus where natural sciences. You could say, I always had two hearts beating in my chest. So when the chance arose, I first started doing some web analytics. As the data grew more and more (esp. in our internal tools) I needed more then excel. So I tried to learn a little bit of (in my case) python to help crunch bigger numbers. From there I got to manage the technical side of an ad server, did a lot of project management and via a gig in online marketing as a "pure" web analyst I came to work in a digital agency as a so called data analyst. Most work is "classic" web analytics, some is work on bigger datasets (growing part of my work). So basically I had a knack for math, science, empirical stuff, statistics and tried some programming (bad code, but code non the less) and that way I was able to jump ships. One day I will try to incorporate my love for literature/texts into the mix - maybe NLP or some things like that might be fun. We'll see.

werber 11y ago

I studied literature as well, and made the jump to being a developer by doing a bootcamp.

gregcohn 11y ago

literature major here, just chiming in to say it can be done! (I'm a founder/CEO now.) Follow the things that challenge you and that you can learn from, that intersect with things you have some strength in. Maybe marketing in the context of developer platforms?

sdoering 11y ago
Hey Greg, whenever you scale to Germany, please shoot me a line. What you are building seems to me the ideal service to use. So many use cases shooting through my head... Greetings from the old world Sven
- gregcohn 11y ago
  thanks -- will do!

jtheory 11y ago

There's a lot of luck involved, and just persistence over a long period of time. But I figure you also just have to start doing what you want to do. This is amazingly possible in the developer world in a way that's hard to imagine in any other industry. I was a music major in university (and planning on an English lit or creative writing minor) -- then I took an intro compsci course halfway through, and had a bit of a shock; it was an entirely new thing for me, but I really had a knack for it, and enjoyed it as well. It was a bit late to change my major... but I just fit in as much compsci as I could, and also just starting building things outside of coursework. I managed to get a software dev job right out of college based on a bunch of interactive online drills I wrote for the music department, plus I had very solid communication skills and academic recognition. The software dev job was doing custom dev on lots of different kinds of projects (that was good), and in my spare time I turned the interactive music stuff into a site that's still a side income stream. It's languishing somewhat these days, because 5 years ago I started as a developer at a UK-based startup (working remotely from France; long story) and gradually became the CTO -- mostly just from looking for the hardest, riskiest problems we had and chasing them down one at a time, and being easy to work with. It's hard to abstract any of this to general advice -- maybe just that mastering anything requires a good deal of focus and just time. If you want to do technical work (huge range there) you need to be doing it -- making mistakes, finding your way to solutions (good ones and bad), paying close attention to what's hard and why. It's probably worthwhile building something other people use, and can look at, etc. -- plus (whatever your focus is), mastering the context of working with customers, colleagues, competitors is valuable. If you build and support something all on your own, you're forced to learn a lot about all that.