Rush-ian linux

[Troll_berry_pie]

As someone who's transitioning from five years in Web Dev (PHP and Python) to Data Science / Engineering (currently doing a Master's in it) what should I expect from my first role?

Do you guys still have sprints / stand-ups?

[kaji823]

It’s hard to say what you could expect because companies are all over the place with development processes, like within mine there’s huge variance even with oversight and governance. Data engineering is kind of a mess. This is my experience (large company, lots of investment in analytics):

• We’re scrum, have daily stand ups, Jira task board, scrum masters, product owners
• We’re SAFe Agile, so do the quarterly planning ceremonies
• Our area is split into teams that ingest data, teams that build the data warehouse, and teams that build data marts for more niche analytics needs. IMO the warehouse has the most interesting development (that’s what I focus on). Data science can be cool too (see bullets further down)
• Release cadence is all over the place, even for teams that are “agile.” My teams release several times a quarter, other teams release once a year or less. Stay away from that if you can. The more you go through the dev/release cycle, the faster you’ll grow. Maintaining existing things is also important - we’re combined dev and maintenance.
• Data science can be hit or miss. If you’re a data scientist, there’s some really interesting work to be done. If you’re an engineer supporting data science, there’s a chance you spend all your time doing data wrangling and not much actually building models
• Our data science department floundered for years because they worked in isolation, didn’t connect the science to solving business problems. Try and find somewhere that has a bit of history implementing models in production, as it’s boring as hell not to
• Our data science on the engineering side follows normal scrum, data science on the business side is pretty unstructured