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

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

1. 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?

2. 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.

Episode source