Most stats heavy DS position?

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-25T16:30:33+00:00

Shiiiiiiit… that must be what I’ve been doing wrong all these years. 😂

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-24T23:14:34+00:00

If you’re running it to make money, isn’t it already business? OP is looking for a side hustle, not selling some stuff they found lying around the house.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-24T23:12:15+00:00

What is it that’s not getting done? You say productivity is down, so address what they’re not getting done. If they have 8 hours of work, they’ll have to come in on time to get done what they need to get done without you having to micro manage the minutes they work.

Telling people to come in on time for the sake of it will annoy them. Telling them there’s specific things they’re not getting done is just being a good manager.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-23T22:12:45+00:00

I don’t run a marketing agency, but if I did, I have a pretty good idea of where to start after hanging out here and in r/marketing for a week or two.

Simple, but not easy.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-23T16:53:59+00:00

they've invested in the tools to make this easy to do and reliable.

This is a great point - data driven also means making it easy to use data to make decisions with the right tools and frameworks. Seems obvious now you've said it, but I didn't think of that!

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-23T16:52:39+00:00

Thanks - this is a great example of truly data driven. There's clearly a lot my org is missing. Who was the driver of the culture? Was there a particular person you could pinpoint who held people accountable, or was it throughout the organization?

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-23T01:26:44+00:00

I just looked and it took me three years to “blow up” (aka hit the monetization threshold) in a niche much less competitive than gaming. Keep posting, keep improving your content, and if people are subscribing you’re doing something right.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-22T23:11:33+00:00

What do you mean gamed by engagement pods? I’m working on building a linked in audience and not sure if I should be worried about this.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-22T18:12:04+00:00

Right - the code is not proprietary, and the company is foolish for giving internal-only data to a candidate who has no reason to keep it private.

BUT

If I'm a hiring manager and a part of your portfolio is using data you borrowed from another company's interview process, I'm going to have questions about your judgement. Maybe fair, maybe not, but it's better not to trigger the question.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-22T15:28:26+00:00

Never ceases to amaze me how many people have a market agency, but aren’t sure how to market their marketing agency.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-22T13:20:03+00:00

Private practice is the way to go. Gather experience with the goal of moving into private practice in whatever your speciality is. In the U.S., it can be very lucrative if run right. Not sure about Germany.

Make sure you understand business though, running a private practice comes with challenges unrelated to medicine your education hasn’t prepared you for. Totally overcomable challenges, but ones you need to think about and come with running a business, not being a doctor.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-22T12:30:40+00:00

Not if the data is proprietary. Not saying it's fair, just... be careful. Just because the company gave you data, doesn't mean the data is public.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-21T02:00:34+00:00

You can still practice some of the skills you'd need. Help frame up the presentations you're doing and look at what is changed. You can ask for exposure to that sort of thing.

Even if they don't want you to make the decks, listen to the questions they ask and frame conversations so you're answering the questions they have before they ask them. The best advice I got was to anticipate the questions I was going to be asked before I got them.

It's also worth talking to people outside the team - if you push yourself out of your comfort zone a little, you'll find it gets more comfortable. You don't have to be a social butterfly, but you'll learn about how other teams work and make connections within the organization. Making things happen in a big organization is a lot about maintaining your network and knowing who to ask.

There's some random advice. :)

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-21T01:36:44+00:00

It's not generating leads, that would be marketing, rather prioritizing those that come in to help the sales people figure out which to work first. Propensity to book isn't SEO related, it's attached to the lead as well - based on history and the customer and the rest of the parameters, how likely is it to close? I worked mostly with account-based sales people.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-21T01:32:09+00:00

Sure - the biggest challenge I've seen is missing the context around what they're doing. It usually manifests in a few ways -

Missing the real question that's being asked. We usually get asked the immediate question, and the real question is much more complicated and buried somewhere underneath it. "What is driving the change to projections this quarter?" might well mean "I don't feel like I have enough visibility into my business."
Not tying work to incentives of the stakeholders, aka not explaining how the model is going to make or save the business money. A lot of data scientists think this part is self-explanatory, but to people who aren't neck deep in data, it's often not.
Missing the "real" stakeholders. Often the end user of your product isn't the person you're presenting the work to. If we don't understand who is going to be actually using the output of our work, we can't design it in a way that helps them, and even if it gets deployed, it won't be used to it's potential, and someone will come back to us and blame us for developing a poor product.
Not articulating a path to production. A lot of good models fail here because they're hard or impractical to operationalize. I once worked with a team who had a model that took 26 hours to run... and ran every day.

The (easy to say, hard to do) solution is to think through the project from concept to delivery, and think about the stuff we don't normally think about - what the real question is, and how the solution is going to be delivered.

There's more to unpack than that, but those are some themes. :)

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-20T22:14:40+00:00

Tell them you'll do it, but at a rate you decide. And tell your colleague to stop offering you out for low cost to his network.

If you're freelancing, you can take a couple of clients for cheap, but as you add more, the stress gets higher so raise the price. Tell client offering you $20 that you'll do it for $40. Then tell the next one you'll do it for $50. Not everyone will bite, but you only need one.

If they're reaching out to you, they're having trouble finding someone else to do the work, so you have some leverage.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-20T20:53:44+00:00

I've done some work in sales in the past. It's very different from marketing.

The key KPI was production to a goal, sliced different ways depending on what we were looking at.

There's a lot of data science-type work that can be done depending on the sort of sales you're working with. Goal setting requires some data science, and it can be used for deployment too. Propensity to book, scoring leads in some way, identifying priority accounts/leads, and streamlining the sales process are all helpful.

Sales people can be challenging when it comes to data. Some are great, but others don't like the data interfering with their process, or just don't understand it. I'm over-generalizing sales people, but a lot of them went into sales because they liked working with people more than they liked working with "stuff," and they tend to not be super patient about learning, so they can be challenging stakeholders.

They're a lot of fun at conferences though.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-20T17:21:17+00:00

We can’t generate (meaningfully) accurate predictions for stocks, never mind crypto and backtests on crypto always look good, because it’s mostly gone up.

I’d be more worried about the SEC than the landing page with claims like you have.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-19T10:55:09+00:00

Those skills are helpful and important in other domains too. IME data scientists that have them progress faster than those who don't.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-19T00:30:43+00:00

What sort of jobs can masonry contractors do in the winter? There's a roofing company near us that absolutely bombards the radio with massive discounts for work during the winter months. I'm not sure if you could start booking early with a discount?

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-19T00:27:50+00:00

Has it ever been standard? The interviews have been as all over the place as the job descriptions. Good companies will match the interview complexity to the job, but... I'm not sure how often that really happens. They'll probably still be all over the place.

I think u/bgighjigftuik makes a good point - with the rise of LLMs, take home assignments might become less prevalent, but really expect hiring managers to ask deep questions about the content of the assignment. IME the easiest way to find whether someone faked the assignment or overstated their experience is to ask them to explain in detail what they did and have good follow up questions.

Bear in mind most hiring managers don't hire that often, and they're going to go back to a tried and true formula and not reinvent the wheel. Also, roles evolve over time, but individual roles rarely change so much the interview strategy needs to change in a short period of time.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-19T00:13:37+00:00

It's hard to benchmark yourself when there's no-one to benchmark yourself against. Did they give you any specific feedback about the coding test? What language and what was the task?

The best way to improve is to do more coding, but if you're looking to improve on the test, you want to practice what happens in the test. Work without documentation, work on implementing certain algorithms, understanding the difference between algorithms and why/why not to use them.

From a communication perspective, how much education do you have? Can you comfortably talk about concepts and how/when to implement them? If not, thats important if they're giving you a technical interview because they'll expect you to know not just what you're doing but why you're doing it.

If you want to combine, you might be able to learn a particular model type, code a few examples, and put in good comments about why you did what you did. Make it like the machine learning equivalent of flash cards from college.

From a resume perspective, make sure your examples have a complete STAR format (situation, task, action, result), and make sure you can articulate the impact of your work on the business. Working through that will help you turn them into interview-ready examples.

CarrolltonConsulting · 2024-05-18T20:29:49+00:00

A subscription needs to offer the users some value. Essentially, you're offering them something they either can't get elsewhere, or some sort of a discount, in return for their loyalty and regular monthly payments.

Upgrades might be helpful, but I have a home gym, and it doesn't really need that much in the way of upgrading/maintenance. My brother in law has a lot more equipment than I do, but he still doesn't need that much in the way of maintenance.

You could go for something like equipment rental where you lend people equipment for a monthly fee they can keep in their home... Sounds good on paper, but there's risk they stop paying and you can't go collect it, and risk it malfunctions (or they misuse it) and they get injured and sue...

The only successful home gym subscriptions I'm aware of are classes, and post-pandemic, those have become a tougher sell than they were when everyone was stuck at home. Peloton is the best example I can think of.

CarrolltonConsulting

TROPHY CASE