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Alternate route, especially to machine learning / data science: - Become a "business analyst", AKA spreadsheet jockey, at some gigantic & relatively faceless c
by fiatmoney 13y ago
Alternate route, especially to machine learning / data science:
- Become a "business analyst", AKA spreadsheet jockey, at some gigantic & relatively faceless corporation.
- Learn Python, or some other scripting language that runs on Windows and has hooks into spreadsheets / backend data stores / email systems and makes data manipulation easy.
- Automate your job away. Use the time to learn the basics of "real" statistics and machine learning. Gradually feed these into your work product, for instance by putting confidence intervals on your reports or generating trend lines via simple ARIMA.
- Write some public demo projects that implement these techniques. Do some public evaluations of different techniques or implementations of techniques.
You now have a super plausible "in" to do basically the same thing at a technology company or someplace that sees analytics as a key part of their value proposition, and bootstrap yourself from there.
- chococat 13y agoThanks for this comment. If you have the time, could I ask for your advice about this route? I'm a Windows sysadmin who's been working to transition into programming. I've made a few webapps, which I somewhat enjoy making, but lately I've become interested in data science. I have a stable position now where I have a lot of time to learn new things not directly related to my job. I've been trying to figure out if I should simply take advantage of that while not working in a related field or to look into a business analyst position. In fact I was just contacted a few days ago by a recruiter for just such a job! Would creating public demo projects alone be enough? Or should I get some experience -- even just as a spreadsheet jockey -- while potentially having much less time to devote to learning? To give you a better idea of my situation, I oftentimes have days where I can spend half of it learning whatever... and my boss is even fine with that (and has encouraged me to move on to better things, since I can't really go any further here). Any insight that you can offer would be very much appreciated.
- fiatmoney 13y agoIf you can post your email somewhere I'd be glad to talk in depth.
- chococat 13y agoThanks so much! Please email me at chococat9000@gmail.com
- pchristensen 13y agoI'd also be happy to talk more about this if you email me. Here's some similar advice I've given in the past: - http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/teach-yourself-programming/ http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/teach-yourself-program... - http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/advice-to-a-college-sophomore-programmer/ http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/advice-to-a-college-so...
- chococat 13y agoThank you! I'll send you an email after checking out those articles. I actually ran across your website the other day looking for info on Pedestal.