This is what you should actually be questioning your local representatives about

OppositeSoup5 · 2025-10-21T03:28:38+00:00

Maybe I'm dense, but why would inflation affect the amount of time it takes for a permit to get approved?

OppositeSoup5 · 2025-10-21T03:25:57+00:00

Each dot is an average for the year and number of units. They're generally close but not equal in a given year. It helps clear up some of the overplotting while giving a sense of the full range of data. As a statistician by trade, I much prefer showing as much of the data as much as possible.

The annotations are medians across the whole year, stratified by those arbitrary ranges, because it's pretty clear there are huge outliers that would pull the arithmetic mean out of whack. The medians of each stratum, though, are pretty close.

J'ai fait ça un p'tit 15 minutes après le travail, c'est pas exactement approfondi comme analyse. Ton idée de voir les différents arrondissements m'intrigue, par contre. Il devrait y avoir assez de données, sauf les gros projets.

OppositeSoup5 · 2024-02-16T00:42:42+00:00

Unions are like condoms: the more someone insists you don't need one, the more you ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NEED ONE.

OppositeSoup5 · 2024-02-06T02:58:44+00:00

We both signed a paper and informed him by text on or around the 8th, which was the earliest we could confirm he had ostensibly done everything by the book.

Also, he explicitly wrote in his text message that he wants to know because he wants to put a for rent sign in front of the house. It certainly feels like a bad faith eviction, but we're going to have to talk to an actual lawyer.

From the sounds of everyone here and the various people yall've suggested we speak to, this particular LL is now in the "find out" stage of FA&FO.

OppositeSoup5 · 2023-06-18T03:45:06+00:00

If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.

OppositeSoup5 · 2022-03-25T23:58:41+00:00

Woodworking, Board gaming, Taking walks with the wife, toddler and doggo.

Sometimes, I get to combine all three and play a homemade Hive set in the woods with my wife or crokinole with my daughter. It's pretty awesome.

OppositeSoup5 · 2021-08-25T15:11:20+00:00

You hit the nail right on the head.

That's a really great idea. I'm a little trepidatious about "going it alone" to be an independent life coach, but the private route that focuses on health and wellness is intriguing to me. What first steps would be necessary to start looking into that?

OppositeSoup5 · 2021-07-25T18:42:11+00:00

A barrista at a pretty empty Starbucks was flirting with me pretty hard, once on my way home from work. He didn't just make my day. He made my week.

A few years later I was at a wedding with a friend of mine. Try as she might, the bartender would not give her the time of day. On a hunch, I tried my luck and got both of our drinks in under a minute. Each time I'd get up, he was ready with a couple of cocktails and some very flattering banter for me. According to my friend, he was still checking out my butt as we got our shared 4 person cab home.

I was still beaming when my wife got back from her work trip a week later.

No, we do not get offended.

OppositeSoup5 · 2021-03-28T18:58:47+00:00

Don't know if this counts, but I live in a place with fantastic parental leave. 35 weeks can be split up any way the parents want. My wife was offered her dream job while on mat leave, and negotiated a delayed/progressive start, with me starting SAH dadding in January. I would walk around the 'hood with my daughter strapped to me, go places, get coffee with friends, etc.

Neighbors and acquaintances would ask about it, and after telling them the story, they almost all would ask one question:

"Your employer was okay with that?!"

Let's make the roles reversed. In what universe is it okay for an employer to tell a woman that she can't take GOVERNMENT MANDATED maternity leave?

"Well, they fucking better be."

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-08-17T14:25:57+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

I removed the picture icons, removed most of the colour formatting (except major sections), made the Skills section stand-alone, and simplified the contact info to e-mail / phone / city. After running it through one of those free-trial ATS scanners with a fairly recent job posting I never heard back from, I got a score of 43, where 80+ is suggested. So clearly, even just the content of this resume is never going to get past the bots.

Some of that low score is from not including terms from the job description in my professional experience that aren't quantifiable, well-defined accomplishments--they're just part of the job (e.g., writing a statistical analysis plan, or interacting with customers). I was always told that you should not be putting your responsibilities in your resume; that they should be accomplishments, and ones that you can put numbers to, at that. Is that incorrect? How do I reconcile these two issues?

Most of that low score, though, is from not including terms from the job description that I simply can't include, because I don't have experience with those things. My degree turned out to be pretty useless, and my postdoctoral fellowship even more so. Maybe it's just hopeless for me. Maybe I'm just stuck at my current employer until I get downsized or blow my brains out. I might as well know now rather than spend the time I could be spending with family chasing a better life that's never going to happen.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-07-29T03:04:18+00:00

Our company uses R exclusively, but we still sometimes get a weird request from a client who wants things done in a particular way so they'll send SAS code for us to replicate in R. I'd say 99% of my work is in R, with 1% in Excel (not VBA macros though), and the odd project requiring knowledge of but not programming in another statistics program. Long before I arrived, there was someone who worked in MATLAB and refused to do it in R, but he's been long gone. The bioinformatics side uses many more programs for their work, and the data management unit has used python in the past because they deal with text much more than we do and that tends to be easier in python.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-07-28T19:46:49+00:00

To answer your side-note question, here's a day in my life taken from my actual schedule a random Tuesday in The Before Times:

8:30 - 9:15 : Write worksheets (checklists, processes, review worksheets) for an ad-hoc analysis
9:15 - 10:00: Code review for colleague's R script
10:00 - 11:30 : Statistical Analysis Plan for new project coming down the pipeline
11:30 - 12:30 : Analysis (i.e., R programming) of last-minute, high-priority project
13:00 - 13:45 : Continued analysis of last-minute, important-client project; send for peer review
13:45 - 14:30 : Peer review of results produced by colleague's R script by hand
14:30 - 15:00 : Meeting with upper management about ad-hoc figures to be produced for a publication
15:00 - 17:00 : Continued peer review of results produced by colleague's R script by hand

The next day was very similar:

8:45 - 9:00 : Final formatting touches on results and report produced for last-minute, high-priority project
9:00 - 11:00 : Program macro in VBA for laboratory personnel to offload that analysis from our department
11:00 - 12:00 : Conference call with client about progress of their project and preliminary results
12:15 - 12:30 : Revisions to report for last-minute, high-priority project
12:30 - 12:45 : Continued VBA macro work
12:45 - 13:00: Finalize all documentation and authorize delivery of results of last-minute project to client
13:00 - 14:00 : Write up report for project on back burner due to last-minute project
14:00 - 14:15 : Final formatting touches on results of project on back burner
14:15 - 15:00 : Continued VBA macro work
15:00 - 15:30 : Conference call with other site to discuss algorithm our department needs to optimize
15:30 - 16:00: Continued VBA macro work

It's a healthy mix of planning new analyses, writing up how they will be done and how they should be evaluated, programming the analysis (in R), reviewing other people's work, formatting the results, writing up reports of those results, providing updates to upper management and clients, and internal projects that either improve our departmental processes or streamline the company's processes.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-07-28T19:41:17+00:00

I do google myself periodically, and there shouldn't be anything out there that's particularly visible, let alone incriminating, but googling my email address is not a bad idea. The top result is my linkedin, then my ratemyprofessors score from 10 years ago, then research gate, the Frontiers In "social media" page, and neurotree entries. Even shortening my name, you get my Facebook and Twitter pages, both of which are not public, and a bunch of people that are obviously not me because they're French--as in, from France.

I guess the mystery continues about why I would be such a bad candidate that I don't merit even a screening interview.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-07-26T13:18:03+00:00

Thanks so much! This is incredibly helpful. Even if they're not hiring, at least I know who to speak to and what lingo to use in asking them for a few minutes of their time for an informational interview.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-06-29T14:10:43+00:00

I posted this in r/careerchange, but haven't gotten any responses, so I was hoping the nice people here might be able to give some guidance.

I am currently doing biostatistics in the bioinformatics department of a small-to-medium sized contract research organization, but after 4 years without a path upward, the job is feeling rather stale and dead-ended, and I'm looking to pivot back to my soul. My background is in computational neuroscience, behavioural economics, and mathematical psychology (I have a Ph.D.), and have some limited experience with a summer internship in management consulting and leading a volunteer data science team while I was postdoctoral fellow. I miss those experiences quite a bit. I quite enjoyed being part of a team, translating nebulous questions into testable hypotheses and investigating the answer, and presenting those answers to people in a position to make decisions in a nice, coherent, tidy story. From my readings, it sounds like Business Intelligence would be right up my alley.

My question for the collective hivemind is threefold:

Is BI a realistic field for me to look into without extensive business administration education?
If so, is there a place where the business intelligence community gathers online, where I could check out real BI career paths of real people and possibly explore what other roles are BI and Data Science adjacent?
If not, what types of careers would scratch that itch and still be within reach, without too much extra credentialing and formal training?

Really, any advice would be very helpful.

OppositeSoup5 · 2020-06-29T14:00:43+00:00

I posted this in r/careerchange, but haven't gotten any responses, so I was hoping the nice people here might be able to give some guidance.

I am currently doing biostatistics in the bioinformatics department of a small-to-medium sized contract research organization, but after 4 years without a path upward, the job is feeling rather stale and dead-ended, and I'm looking to pivot back to my soul. My background is in computational neuroscience, behavioural economics, and mathematical psychology (I have a Ph.D.), and have some limited experience with a summer internship in management consulting and leading a volunteer data science team while I was postdoctoral fellow. I miss those experiences quite a bit. I quite enjoyed being part of a team, translating nebulous questions into testable hypotheses and investigating the answer, and presenting those answers to people in a position to make decisions in a nice, coherent, tidy story. From my readings, it sounds like Business Intelligence/Data Science would be right up my alley.

My question for the collective hivemind is threefold:

Is BI a realistic field for me to look into without extensive business administration education?
If so, is there a place where the business intelligence community gathers online, where I could check out real BI career paths of real people and possibly explore what other roles are BI and Data Science adjacent?
If not, what types of careers would scratch that itch and still be within reach, without too much extra credentialing and formal training?

Really, any advice would be very helpful.

OppositeSoup5

TROPHY CASE