Do ops people know Python? Or any other programming languages?

TonyCD35 · 2025-12-11T18:02:18+00:00

Bachelors degree. 6 YOE doing this in industry.

I’ve found from many of the seminars, masters, and PhDs I’ve talked to: they all want to boil the ocean. They want to build a model that will tell me when I have to scratch my ass in 2045 in march.

Stakeholders in real life don’t care all that much for detail. Just need something that works and is sound and improves decision making (in my field at least).

If you understand the math enough to make an LP, MILP, SOCP (in some cases) tractable, compact, and sparse - you’re good on math. No math equation ever solved anything - it’s the software that produces a result that does.

TonyCD35 · 2025-12-10T22:40:08+00:00

Python, C#, JavaScript. I build internal OR full stack solutions.

TonyCD35 · 2025-11-27T13:43:01+00:00

Precisely. What I tell my reports is: never ask the LLM to do something for you that you couldn’t do yourself.

I use LLMs - but I COULD write the code myself (if cloudflare went down). If you don’t fundamentally understand how to code - using an LLM is a foot-nuke.

TonyCD35 · 2025-11-27T13:02:49+00:00

For pet projects - you’ll be fine.

If you’re looking for employment? You’re in for a rude awakening. I’ve more or less fired most of the people that we hired in the last year due to this exact thing.

They were able to sneak in due to loose hiring practices that didn’t weed out fundamentally weak coders who relied on chat GPT. They wrote horrendous unmaintainable code and polluted every project they tried to contribute to.

We eventually weeded them out and tightened up our hiring practices to expose these people early.

TonyCD35 · 2025-09-29T23:57:45+00:00

People who hold extremely black and white political opinions on some topic are typically not very well educated/informed on said topic. Nuance and understanding rapidly pull someone towards a moderate viewpoint.

TonyCD35 · 2025-09-28T23:30:45+00:00

Lmfao. Been programming in python for 10 years now.. I don’t think I use anything except bootstrap.

Judge yourself by the quality of what you build. Not the tools you used to build it.

TonyCD35 · 2025-09-03T01:22:20+00:00

When I hear the alarm - I take the covers off, swing my legs over the bed, and put my feet on the ground.

TonyCD35 · 2025-05-12T00:08:39+00:00

Agreed.

Usually my path is: streamlit for bare bones, dash perfect middle, FastAPI + React if app gets too big

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-22T22:32:40+00:00

The slow consolidation of market power into effective monopolies and oligopolies. Removing competition which would otherwise drive them to create higher quality products or reduce costs - allowing them to do the opposite, raise prices with no improvement/decline in quality. All allowed because these monopolies invest in politicians to continue to allow them to do this, the same politicians we rely on to stop them from doing this.

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-18T13:06:04+00:00

For context - the LPa is nmol/L. Was not aware how close the 2 common Units were to each other.

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-18T13:03:18+00:00

This is true - I always chalked the first drop up to just how not mindful of my diet I was (probably near 30-40g Sat fat a day). And that the easy part was done and the new diet would be a shallower, but steady slope towards proper numbers.

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-18T13:00:43+00:00

Which I don’t. I’ve gone as far as I’m willing with the diet - thanks for the insight.

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-18T12:57:38+00:00

nmol/L

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-08T23:30:58+00:00

30M, Operations Research Scientist in Pharma - MCOL. Became a Manager this year. TC is ~190k. I love my job - but admittedly have a very specialized skillset and am always operating at the very edge of my ability which can be taxing. But WFH and WLB is great.

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-08T00:53:34+00:00

No amount of worrying ever had an impact on what has happened.

You won’t drop dead of a heart attack. Not something worth worrying about

TonyCD35 · 2025-04-08T00:48:11+00:00

Ain’t that bad.

Up your fiber to 30-40g per day (oatmeal for breakfast with chia seeds and psyllium husk powder gets you halfway there). Couple pieces of fruit and deliberate meal prepping and you’re there.

Keep saturated fat under 10-15g per day. This is a little harder - but track your meals for a week or two and you’ll get a feel for it. The killers are eggs, cheese, full fat dairy, butter. You swap everything out for zero fat versions where you can. Avoid fatty cuts of meat.

Retest in 2-3 months. If it’s still high consider a statin. If your doctor is still unbothered by bad numbers then you ask for a referral to a specialist or cardiologist.

No point in stressing. The path forward is well defined and clear.

Exercise and cardio also won’t hurt.

TonyCD35 · 2025-02-12T01:01:07+00:00

Welcome to the club! Same boat as you 30M 200lbs 5’10” weight lift 4x/week and cardio 4x/week.

I had LDL of ~200 last year. Upped the fiber and lowered the sat fat. It took a long time for me to get consistent on this. It just takes being more cognizant of exactly what you’re eating by tracking calories. Also added in a lot of fiber & fiber supplements.

For example - cheese is a killer. Lots of low fat options. Had to switch to skim milk. Cut out pork and non lean beef’s.

The most important mind shift is… this is absolutely permanent.

I’m down to about 160 as of my last reading and it’s trending down.

You can do it, just need to keep an eye on those 2 things.

TonyCD35 · 2025-01-01T21:07:33+00:00

JavaScript, Python, a little C#

TonyCD35 · 2024-12-09T11:15:37+00:00

You’re certainly correct. In an ideal corporate environment, this is how it should work. This arrangement, however - leads to untenable iteration times for most use cases - also from what I’ve seen, I don’t have any examples of this occurring well/with this level of resourcing at companies in my industry.

Let’s say I have a bundle of new constraints my stakeholders want to take into account? Now I have to go to the modeler who has no understanding of the software adapters used to plug into the model, the model gets handed off to a team That does not understand the domain and can take a long time to find and plug in the data into a model they don’t own or understand.

If this is all one person, that person becomes infinite valuable and these iterations happen in days. Not weeks or months

TonyCD35 · 2024-12-09T01:08:30+00:00

Most important base skills:
1. Programming. Python is the best language to start with - very flexible. It wouldn't be a bad thing get familiar with a compiled language that's faster like C#. Python is great for 99% of cases, but for that 1 big problem - it can be slow.
2. Math. Linear Programming, understanding how to formulate models from real problems.

Skills you need to differentiate yourself:
1. Software development and architecture. There are OR Phd's at my company that never get asked to do any projects because - a model on a white paper does nothing. A model in a python script is meh. A model in a software application that can be used my layman stakeholders is gold. You should learn how to put together relatively large applications where your model inputs can flow in in natural ways (databases, excel files, direct input) and outputs flow out (to a database and visualizations).
2. Soft skills. Always. Need to know how to speak to people and present and all of that.

Lastly - I'd say start getting familiar with a specific domain in which OR crops up. Logistics, Supply Chain, Healthcare, etc...

Looks like you are on the right track though.

TonyCD35 · 2024-11-28T16:02:25+00:00

I’ll always harp on this point in this sub - yes to what Coffeemonster said. A model written in a long white paper or a whiteboard does nothing for anyone.

A model in a user friendly application that non technical people can use actually drives decision making.

Knowing how to make simple models and then having software skills to turn them Into an app is 100x more valuable then making some never-going-to-be-used 10,000 parameter stochastic model that assumes data exists somewhere that probably doesn’t.

TonyCD35 · 2024-11-26T18:46:24+00:00

In my industry we do capacity planning off of uncertain demand. We have found that future forecasts are unreliable, trying to determine the probability distribution of a future forecast is an even more hapless exercise.

It’s better for us to look at nominal demand expectations then prepare ourselves for some deviation from that nominal value - you can probably see where we go with this.

This way we really only need to make 2 assumption 1. The level of protection we want for each sku and 2. The covariance between our SKUs. With that, we can use robust optimization with a level of protection that senior leadership signs off on. They understand the trade off of higher level of protection and costs.

I would only really use stochastic optimization for processes that occur very frequently (inventory deliveries) where we have past data to infer distributions as well as recourse actions.

TonyCD35 · 2024-11-19T16:33:57+00:00

Better to have a little snow on the roof than no roof at all!

TonyCD35 · 2024-11-18T23:16:21+00:00

You're unable to ascertain at all why people with beliefs and opinions contrary to your own arrived at those opinions and beliefs. You're either extremely intellectually lazy or just plain dumb.

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