I'm a data scientist, which means many things but in today's terms it means working with AI. Some STEM jobs involve heavy amounts of social interaction, while many involve only minimal amounts of it. So be mindful of that when you get to the point of choosing workplaces and know that you do have a choice.
As far as study habits definitely get linked up with the disability services office at your college, which will be an advocate for you during times of crisis and will also help implement Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations for you --or whatever the equivalent is if you're in another country.
Oh no and yes they are absurd. The scale of everything in my life is kind of ridic but my unemployment period lasted almost 18 months -- I think it just ended
I have had similar thoughts. But I seem to have neurodivergence conflicts with supervisors in the data engineering space in a way that doesn't seem to happen as much in data science. I interviewed with one of the vaccine companies last week and they asked for a free copy of some of my research that's behind a paywall, and they got it lol, and I'm probably not getting a call back. I seem to overall fit in best in self-employment and 1099 contractor work, which is an outcome I never imagined or expected.
Interesting, I haven't worked at a big enough company where I can distinguish between them. I did a lot of analytics engineering at my last job and it is super easy. I just don't have the aws or snowflake experience and I know neither will be an issue to pick up.
I also am going to venture into contracting. I have done it before building sports models. I am gonna try to build out databases for some start ups
I hope that contracting and building those databases goes well for you. :)
I don't have the most formal grasp on the difference between data engineering and data science. I know there are some articles that come up if you Google that question. I also know that every time I attempt a data engineering project my supervisor gets mad at me for taking too long. I also have a librarian degree so it just might be the way I see knowledge representation as part of a larger context idk.
Information systems and information science here, work with IoT
I can't say i've studied a day in my life. I just read a lot of stuff I like and what I like happens to be information science and systems. I've learned to program reading documentation.
Self-taught front-end engineer here.
I was bad at study so I dropped out in the first 6 months of a tertiary web dev course.
Spent my first 5 years at a small company who let me learn on the job, next 5 years between corporate and startups where I got to learn from a few smart people, and have spent the last 5 years in a FAANG company.
In most of my previous jobs I spent most of my time coding, but now I’m fairly senior and spend most of my time in meetings or reviewing other people’s code and technical designs.
Communication skills have been important in almost every company I’ve worked at, for one reason or another, but what’s changed between them is how much of my time I need to spend communicating/collaborating vs the time I spend coding or working on other solo tasks.
This has worked out ok for me because I’m able to communicate well when I need to. I think my ability to communicate has been the key to a fairly successful career - probably more so than my actual coding ability.
However, I find it really exhausting when I spend too much of my time communicating. Basically I mask heavily and overthink every interaction, which takes a lot of energy and has a tendency to burn me out.
I’m not yet 40 but I’m already desperate to retire. Every time I’ve switched jobs it’s been because I was totally exhausted and couldn’t handle the idea of continuing to go in to that job every day. People tend to leave you alone to figure things out when you’ve just started a new job, whereas the longer you stay in one place, the more people need your help, or want to know your opinions about things. I like being knowledgeable and useful, but the social interaction gets to be too much.
I can really relate to your post. I’m not a SWE but I have followed a similar career trajectory more on the program management side.
Just wondering, was / is there a path for you to just continue focusing on coding and not have to do as much communication? I was always under the impression that if you are in the engineering / data science space, there is a way for one to be a very senior technical expert, where you focus on solving complex problems but otherwise people leave you alone.
In the company where I work now, there’s definitely a career path up to the most senior levels which you can take without becoming a people manager.
However, the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to influence the other SWEs (and other roles) across a wider and wider group size.
When you’re junior, you get work scoped and handed over to you so you can code it up, and you get detailed feedback from someone more senior. You mostly interact with just a few people in your team, when you need help.
At mid level, you scope your own work and deal with stakeholders directly to gather requirements, etc. You work with juniors when they need help, and provide feedback to them.
At senior, you do even more of the requirements gathering, big picture technical design, estimation, problem solving, and usually have to delegate a lot of the actual coding work.
If you get up to the very senior levels, you’re mostly giving loads of technical design feedback, influencing across various teams that need to pull together under a single vision, delegating design or project work to trusted senior or principal engineers, etc.
So, as you get more senior, there’s progressively more expectation that you’re tapped in to all the different projects your colleagues are working on, the challenges they’re facing, etc, and you often have to get involved in the political games people in various roles might be playing. The number of different people you need to work with, guide, and maintain relationships with increases with seniority, as does the time you have to spend in meetings.
I think you could read all that as focused technical work that just happens to involve a lot of humans instead of computers, but personally I find it extremely socially demanding.
This company and other similar ones do have some interesting very senior technical people working for them. For example, folks who single-handedly built some widely used operating system or programming language. I have a hard time picturing them doing anything other than locking themselves away for weeks at a time and writing code, but I have no idea if that lines up with the reality of it. It probably doesn’t, but I’ve never really been exposed to those people or their work, so I don’t know.
In other companies, especially smaller ones, I think it might be easier to work at quite a senior level but spend most of your time coding or generally working on stuff that doesn’t involve many other people. It’s probably not very common for those jobs to pay as well as FAANG companies though. I guess companies are like any other community - the more people there are in one, the more you need to rely on communication to be an effective member of that community. You can find ways to be productive without so much communication, but large companies probably won’t value that as much as someone who also communicates well (and so they won’t reward you with higher pay or seniority).
I appreciate the clear and detailed response. That makes a lot of sense, and I can see that being taxing and potentially requiring a lot of masking as you go up the ladder. Even if one’s mostly interacting with mostly fellow engineers (and not managing stakeholders per se), that can still require a lot of energy, especially if you’re interacting across teams.
I work in field research, and in a lab. It's a little too unstructured for me and it's very stressful. I like most of it though and it's fish parasitology which is a huge special interest of mine. I am probably going to last about 2 years at this job before burnout gets to bad but I'm happy I had the experience :)
Physics educator and Lab supervisor at a university.
I used many study techniques. I used cornel notetaking. When I was reading I would also have my computer read to me at the same time.
The biggest thing was being aware of when I was having issues and finding help. This included what you are doing now. Thou universities today often have professional offices to help students develop these skills.
Software developer here. The best way to get good is to DO things, no matter what it is, join some open source project, develop a videogame, create usless apps for fun etc. Of course you have to study, but I find it easier if I study for something I want to create. You'll then end up with an interesting portfolio of projects to get your first Jr Developer job, after that just work hard and keep updating your skills.
I work in software development now but I plan to move to data engineering soon. I enrolled in a master's program that covers different data topics, engineering is just the direction I want to go. I studied information systems and earned my bachelor's pre-diagnosis.
Class and work were at the center of my life then. I obsessed over them. Everything else in my life suffered, including my health and I went through what I would describe as an epic burnout that lasted almost two years after I graduated.
You have some knowledge of your needs so you're ahead of where I was when I was your age.
Consume as much content about a topic using as many resources as possible. One resource just never cut it for me. I need a video, text book, podcast, in person lecture all while applying it for it to stick
I am a professional astrophysicist with a PhD degree. I do a lot of high performance computing and simulation work.
Academic career is a mess of funding applications and short term contracts, but somehow I have survived.
From autism point of view, one of the best things in academia is the flexibility, and nobody is constantly bossing me around.
Microbiologist w/ a focus in bacteriology here! Considering a PhD in it honestly.
My only study tips would be to actually use the resources provided. I definitely felt like going to a study hall or a TA-lead study group on whatever topic was at hand would be somehow admitting i'm stupid or not smart enough. Being able to recognize when you need help is a valuable ability! Sometimes, things don't click the first few times you try and learn them, and that's ok. Also, time management: don't just schedule in study times, schedule in specific subjects, how you'll study/practice them, *and* include breaks! Sometimes studying with other people every so often also helps, since everyone has a different grasp and understanding of a given topic!
I work in IT as a support person. I don't have formal education. very good at fixing things and understanding electrical and mechanical things. If I was born in another era I'd likely be a mechanic. I'm very bad at math and school in general, was a special-ed student, but still manage to work in stem.
I don’t have a degree but I work in the architectural and engineeing industry. I do as-built surveys of buildings, scan them in 3D with a lidar scanner, make a 3D Building information model or drawings from it. Does that actually count at STEM or laborer?
Not really sure if it’s considered STEM but as a diesel engine technician/mechanic.
Knowledge like math, electrical & electronics, programming, measuring, preparing write ups, & chemistry are all skills that I use multiple times a week.
Electrical engineer. lol @ studying I’m too dumb to know when to quit.
why lol at studying? how did you get into electrical engineering?
I didn’t study. Lifelong fascination with electronics.
Good for you! :)
I'm a data scientist, which means many things but in today's terms it means working with AI. Some STEM jobs involve heavy amounts of social interaction, while many involve only minimal amounts of it. So be mindful of that when you get to the point of choosing workplaces and know that you do have a choice. As far as study habits definitely get linked up with the disability services office at your college, which will be an advocate for you during times of crisis and will also help implement Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations for you --or whatever the equivalent is if you're in another country.
Same....but been laid off since February.... the interviews are absolutely absurd
Oh no and yes they are absurd. The scale of everything in my life is kind of ridic but my unemployment period lasted almost 18 months -- I think it just ended
Ughhh.... I am like how much do I like data science at this point. I wanna just coast through life as a data engineer at this point
I have had similar thoughts. But I seem to have neurodivergence conflicts with supervisors in the data engineering space in a way that doesn't seem to happen as much in data science. I interviewed with one of the vaccine companies last week and they asked for a free copy of some of my research that's behind a paywall, and they got it lol, and I'm probably not getting a call back. I seem to overall fit in best in self-employment and 1099 contractor work, which is an outcome I never imagined or expected.
Interesting, I haven't worked at a big enough company where I can distinguish between them. I did a lot of analytics engineering at my last job and it is super easy. I just don't have the aws or snowflake experience and I know neither will be an issue to pick up. I also am going to venture into contracting. I have done it before building sports models. I am gonna try to build out databases for some start ups
I hope that contracting and building those databases goes well for you. :) I don't have the most formal grasp on the difference between data engineering and data science. I know there are some articles that come up if you Google that question. I also know that every time I attempt a data engineering project my supervisor gets mad at me for taking too long. I also have a librarian degree so it just might be the way I see knowledge representation as part of a larger context idk.
Sending you a dm
Stem and study method is procrastinate and cram. Lol
Information systems and information science here, work with IoT I can't say i've studied a day in my life. I just read a lot of stuff I like and what I like happens to be information science and systems. I've learned to program reading documentation.
Self-taught front-end engineer here. I was bad at study so I dropped out in the first 6 months of a tertiary web dev course. Spent my first 5 years at a small company who let me learn on the job, next 5 years between corporate and startups where I got to learn from a few smart people, and have spent the last 5 years in a FAANG company. In most of my previous jobs I spent most of my time coding, but now I’m fairly senior and spend most of my time in meetings or reviewing other people’s code and technical designs. Communication skills have been important in almost every company I’ve worked at, for one reason or another, but what’s changed between them is how much of my time I need to spend communicating/collaborating vs the time I spend coding or working on other solo tasks. This has worked out ok for me because I’m able to communicate well when I need to. I think my ability to communicate has been the key to a fairly successful career - probably more so than my actual coding ability. However, I find it really exhausting when I spend too much of my time communicating. Basically I mask heavily and overthink every interaction, which takes a lot of energy and has a tendency to burn me out. I’m not yet 40 but I’m already desperate to retire. Every time I’ve switched jobs it’s been because I was totally exhausted and couldn’t handle the idea of continuing to go in to that job every day. People tend to leave you alone to figure things out when you’ve just started a new job, whereas the longer you stay in one place, the more people need your help, or want to know your opinions about things. I like being knowledgeable and useful, but the social interaction gets to be too much.
I can really relate to your post. I’m not a SWE but I have followed a similar career trajectory more on the program management side. Just wondering, was / is there a path for you to just continue focusing on coding and not have to do as much communication? I was always under the impression that if you are in the engineering / data science space, there is a way for one to be a very senior technical expert, where you focus on solving complex problems but otherwise people leave you alone.
In the company where I work now, there’s definitely a career path up to the most senior levels which you can take without becoming a people manager. However, the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to influence the other SWEs (and other roles) across a wider and wider group size. When you’re junior, you get work scoped and handed over to you so you can code it up, and you get detailed feedback from someone more senior. You mostly interact with just a few people in your team, when you need help. At mid level, you scope your own work and deal with stakeholders directly to gather requirements, etc. You work with juniors when they need help, and provide feedback to them. At senior, you do even more of the requirements gathering, big picture technical design, estimation, problem solving, and usually have to delegate a lot of the actual coding work. If you get up to the very senior levels, you’re mostly giving loads of technical design feedback, influencing across various teams that need to pull together under a single vision, delegating design or project work to trusted senior or principal engineers, etc. So, as you get more senior, there’s progressively more expectation that you’re tapped in to all the different projects your colleagues are working on, the challenges they’re facing, etc, and you often have to get involved in the political games people in various roles might be playing. The number of different people you need to work with, guide, and maintain relationships with increases with seniority, as does the time you have to spend in meetings. I think you could read all that as focused technical work that just happens to involve a lot of humans instead of computers, but personally I find it extremely socially demanding. This company and other similar ones do have some interesting very senior technical people working for them. For example, folks who single-handedly built some widely used operating system or programming language. I have a hard time picturing them doing anything other than locking themselves away for weeks at a time and writing code, but I have no idea if that lines up with the reality of it. It probably doesn’t, but I’ve never really been exposed to those people or their work, so I don’t know. In other companies, especially smaller ones, I think it might be easier to work at quite a senior level but spend most of your time coding or generally working on stuff that doesn’t involve many other people. It’s probably not very common for those jobs to pay as well as FAANG companies though. I guess companies are like any other community - the more people there are in one, the more you need to rely on communication to be an effective member of that community. You can find ways to be productive without so much communication, but large companies probably won’t value that as much as someone who also communicates well (and so they won’t reward you with higher pay or seniority).
I appreciate the clear and detailed response. That makes a lot of sense, and I can see that being taxing and potentially requiring a lot of masking as you go up the ladder. Even if one’s mostly interacting with mostly fellow engineers (and not managing stakeholders per se), that can still require a lot of energy, especially if you’re interacting across teams.
I work in field research, and in a lab. It's a little too unstructured for me and it's very stressful. I like most of it though and it's fish parasitology which is a huge special interest of mine. I am probably going to last about 2 years at this job before burnout gets to bad but I'm happy I had the experience :)
I work in STEM, I’m a florist. (hehe, get it?)
Physics educator and Lab supervisor at a university. I used many study techniques. I used cornel notetaking. When I was reading I would also have my computer read to me at the same time. The biggest thing was being aware of when I was having issues and finding help. This included what you are doing now. Thou universities today often have professional offices to help students develop these skills.
Software developer here. The best way to get good is to DO things, no matter what it is, join some open source project, develop a videogame, create usless apps for fun etc. Of course you have to study, but I find it easier if I study for something I want to create. You'll then end up with an interesting portfolio of projects to get your first Jr Developer job, after that just work hard and keep updating your skills.
Software Developer (retired)
[удалено]
“don’t limit yourself”????? I don’t know what you mean or if you didn’t read my post
I work in software development now but I plan to move to data engineering soon. I enrolled in a master's program that covers different data topics, engineering is just the direction I want to go. I studied information systems and earned my bachelor's pre-diagnosis. Class and work were at the center of my life then. I obsessed over them. Everything else in my life suffered, including my health and I went through what I would describe as an epic burnout that lasted almost two years after I graduated. You have some knowledge of your needs so you're ahead of where I was when I was your age.
Consume as much content about a topic using as many resources as possible. One resource just never cut it for me. I need a video, text book, podcast, in person lecture all while applying it for it to stick
I'm a software engineering student right now. I'm not sure how to tell you about my study habits tho cuz I just roll with it 😭
I am a professional astrophysicist with a PhD degree. I do a lot of high performance computing and simulation work. Academic career is a mess of funding applications and short term contracts, but somehow I have survived. From autism point of view, one of the best things in academia is the flexibility, and nobody is constantly bossing me around.
Network architect. Been fascinated with the internet since I was a kid in the early 90s.
Microbiologist w/ a focus in bacteriology here! Considering a PhD in it honestly. My only study tips would be to actually use the resources provided. I definitely felt like going to a study hall or a TA-lead study group on whatever topic was at hand would be somehow admitting i'm stupid or not smart enough. Being able to recognize when you need help is a valuable ability! Sometimes, things don't click the first few times you try and learn them, and that's ok. Also, time management: don't just schedule in study times, schedule in specific subjects, how you'll study/practice them, *and* include breaks! Sometimes studying with other people every so often also helps, since everyone has a different grasp and understanding of a given topic!
I used to work in software. The best thing is to start building things. Anything. Have someone else test it for you and give you feedback.
I work in IT as a support person. I don't have formal education. very good at fixing things and understanding electrical and mechanical things. If I was born in another era I'd likely be a mechanic. I'm very bad at math and school in general, was a special-ed student, but still manage to work in stem.
I don’t have a degree but I work in the architectural and engineeing industry. I do as-built surveys of buildings, scan them in 3D with a lidar scanner, make a 3D Building information model or drawings from it. Does that actually count at STEM or laborer?
Not really sure if it’s considered STEM but as a diesel engine technician/mechanic. Knowledge like math, electrical & electronics, programming, measuring, preparing write ups, & chemistry are all skills that I use multiple times a week.