🔥🎬 THREAD
This this this this and this.
If you are studying STEM and soon to graduate, you are in a high-risk category, please heed this advice. And here's my take based on personal experience:
This this this this and this.
If you are studying STEM and soon to graduate, you are in a high-risk category, please heed this advice. And here's my take based on personal experience:
There are large cashed up corporations running around at careers fairs and such crying out for STEM workers. They'll tell you about their plans for the new hotness, data science, AI, robots, the works.
The issue is, these are all just 'aspirations'.
The issue is, these are all just 'aspirations'.
They'll paint amazing pictures of their graduate programs and how they will have you working on this cutting edge stuff. But trust me, the reality will be turn out to be nothing but an absurd caricature.
I saw extremely bright math honours students with perfect grade point averages hired as 'data scientists' spend their entire working weeks copy pasting data between Excel spreadsheets. Following extremely prescriptive instructions written in a word document. 😵
Or another friend of mine, now back studying and killing her PhD, was made to feel like a dunce (and dare I say bullied) because she had no enthusiasm for writing SAS macros that were just SQL wrappers.
Or A math honours ex-student of mine, hired by a big 4 acct firm as a data analyst, spent 6 months in a grad program writing SQL schemas. When he asked for a rotation it was denied. And he was told there's no real data science work to be done in Australia yet.
Or my own experience in FinTech: Hired as a data scientist, given SAS, SQL, Tableu and Excel as a tools. I asked for R, denied. After some intense battling I got Python - though "We don't normally give these tools to marketing functions".
They had me spend 2 days a week logging into a database and manually running a massive series SQL queries for reporting, step by step. Of course I proposed automating this task and was shut down. It was soul destroying stuff.
So of all these people I know with this really consistent experience, only about half up and quit. Why? Because you are made to feel like, "quitting looks bad". "You really should see out the program". "You need to develop some resilience". You're basically being Gaslit.
I'm now at the point in my career where I sometimes have influence over the people we bring on, and I can tell you: If I heard you say you were hired to do a role and it turned out to be not as advertised, so you quit? MAD RESPECT TO YOU FROM ME. 👍👍👍
