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👋 Hi there! I’m Zachary. I’m sharing my experience with this career switch in case it helps other data scientists plan their own.
Why pivot from data science to software engineering? 🤔
I really enjoyed life as a data scientist. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up in a data science role again later in my career. That said, a couple of ideas drove me to explore developing my skills elsewhere:
- I’ve already done most of the typical data science projects: this includes experimentation, metrics design, regression analysis, etc. Most of my new projects as a data scientist would resemble past work.
- I think the intersection of expertise is valuable: for career development, many elevate the idea of T-shaped people. T-shaped professionals can handle many kinds of tasks but have expertise in one. I would go a step further than this and advocate for people with deep expertise in two things. The intersection of those two skills often proves to be unusually valuable. I already had deep knowledge of data science, so I went looking for an adjacent skill skill set.
- Early career is a great time to build technical skills: people tend to have more time to focus on building skills like statistical analysis or…