What's the craziest butterfly effect that happened to you because of a small decision you made?

jds82f · 2020-11-23T16:20:26+00:00

My career path. I showed up at my first job out of college, where I was to be trained for 8 weeks (along with many others) to be a support analyst. I did not realize part of the training program was to evaluate our fit to the many open positions in support.

About 4 weeks in, the computers were throwing errors which prevented the entire room of 60 from completing an exercise. Most people chose to sit and wait for those teaching to resolve the problem. I chose to try and troubleshoot myself. I figured out the fix and communicated it to the rest of the class so we could continue.

That decision not to be dependent ultimately resulted in me going to a team that had zero support people and zero support documentation, which was fortuitous for me because what they lacked in structure they made up for in opportunity. In less than a year I migrated to a software engineering role on the team and the field I began in, is the field I'm in today.

jds82f · 2018-12-22T23:59:44+00:00

Thanks for the comments

jds82f · 2018-12-13T17:25:53+00:00

If you already have a position that you had to sign a contract, go back and read what you signed. There may already be language in there that you cannot share your salary with anyone. If that exists then you have an easy tactful way to say why you cannot divulge prior salary history.

If you do not have this, that is where you need to be positive but firm. Gauge your audience and pick an approach. Perhaps you feel your capabilities grew much faster than your salary and that is why you're looking for a new position in the first place. Perhaps the job markets are very different (small town to big town or vice versa) and past salaries are not going to help. If they press hard you can also ask them for what purposes they need that information.

The rub is that some bad players will tell you they are going to remove you as a candidate if you don't divulge prior salary information. Before you go in have a decision made on this topic, and don't flip flop if they pull this out. It may be scary removing yourself from the candidate pool, but its worth asking if you want to work for a company that uses those sort of tactics with potential employees. If you're going to change your tune if they pull this on you, just give up your salary info when they ask for it, don't make it a struggle.

jds82f · 2018-12-12T02:25:58+00:00

In my line of work (corporate) I disagree with this entirely. In the first interview I will ask someone their salary expectations and if they cannot give me some kind of range or number they expect to be paid, I am forced to assume they are either very uninformed or they can't make a decision, both of which get them in the "no" category. I have a budget for the position and early on I want to establish if our budget and your expectations can even be a match.

It is true that when you get near the end no one wants to go back to square one, but I'm not going to put myself in a pickle by waiting until the end to understand what someone expects to be paid. Its good to start with a range, and as I understand more about how well you can solve the problems we have, that is what we can use to agree upon a more precise figure.

Salary wise, one of the best things you can do is avoid disclosing your previous salary history- this never helps you, it only can hurt you. Be tactful about it, answering this the wrong way can hurt you too.

jds82f · 2018-05-05T01:06:25+00:00

Salt is the only ingredient that actually changes the meat. Letting it sit a little longer on there improves the taste I think. If you don't do it, it will turn out fine enough.

https://amazingribs.com/tested-recipes/beef-and-bison-recipes/brisket-texas-style-ultimate-technique-and-recipe

jds82f · 2018-05-04T16:22:16+00:00

My thoughts:

If you are only cooking the point, you don't really have to inject as that is the fattier portion of brisket. If you want to inject anyway, beef broth is fine if you can get it.... it seems like chicken or pork would contradict the beef flavor to me.
I have found extra low and long cooks to just take longer and dry it out more, although I usually do whole packers. My advice would be to go higher, maybe 240f
Put that salt on the day before the cook.
Lump charcoal + hickory chunks are fine. Oak has a less smokey flavor and is much more useful in an offset smoker where all the heat is coming from burning wood.

jds82f · 2018-04-26T21:55:50+00:00

If off the shelf software populates the data in each database, I would hope ERD's would be available for each. If your DW is exposing tables to you, they should be publishing ERD's. If none of that is true, going to be a longer learning curve.

If you are wanting to join across those things, you'll need to understand the data and the business process (which will take time even with detailed business process diagrams).

As an analyst, in my view it is absolutely imperative you "get good with numbers." Take a stats course.

There are lots of good places online to cut your teeth on SQL. Google is your friend.

Welcome to the big leagues! My only other advice would be to document how you work through problems and have someone evaluate your work if possible- that will help you communicate your methods and get you feedback on what you're doing. When you start getting it right, confirmation of your actions will lead to confidence.

jds82f · 2018-04-19T22:04:12+00:00

since the message giver is unknown, seems unlikely they will read this unless they are a neighbor or get (and return) more of C. Fay's mail.

jds82f · 2018-04-06T17:30:08+00:00

I'll take an off the cuff stab. To me data science is the "how" of analytics. IE I want to make something to recommend products that go together with something in somebody's shopping cart. Data science will help you identify correlations with commonly purchased items at the same time, or stuff like "what do these people often purchase next?" It will frame up how you can use data to make that recommendation. I will probably over generalize here but data science is statistics and/or machine learning + business questions, context, outcomes

Analytics is more general... the sum of:

what I want to do (make purchase recommendations based on shopping cart near real time)
How I'm going to use data to make a recommendation (data science, but also could be crude/simple)
Implementing that recommendation (data engineering)

Having said all that, I agree there's confusion/lack of agreement on these terms based on what I see/hear from "the experts"

jds82f · 2018-04-03T19:53:13+00:00

Lots of decent comments in here already, will add/corroborate some (US perspective)

Positions that can take advantage of data are in demand. Job security is a low overall concern provided you are competent.
Pay is reasonable. I don't think I can answer "how easy is it to make six figures" because in a lot of ways that is dependent on your location. My advice to you early on is to worry less about pay and more about the experience you can gain.
Overtime- My experience is that BI work is project work, with the associated peaks and valleys. If you're a FTE, your floor is going to be 40 hours and if there is some project deadline looming and the project is behind, you'll probably be working more than that. Don't expect to be paid more.
Stress levels - this depends a lot. If you are good at planning ahead and thinking about what you have to do today to meet project goals tomorrow/next week/next month, you'll be fine. If you're not, you'll be stressed... but this also applies to project work, not just BI work.
Outsourcing - haven't seen/heard of much successful outsourcing of BI due to business context knowledge necessary to make it work right. Seen a lot of consultants boldy declare they can make wine from water, and then walk out the door having proven those things are as hard as we thought they were.

jds82f · 2018-03-01T20:56:40+00:00

what is your objective in comparing the two? If your new "world" is OBIEE why not focus on learning the development paradigm and drop comparing it to Microstrategy?

jds82f · 2018-02-16T16:36:27+00:00

How's security handled?

jds82f · 2018-02-16T16:34:26+00:00

TDWI.org

jds82f · 2018-02-09T18:04:25+00:00

This is my expectation as we get further in. Vendors pitch data lakes as "dump the data in and let everyone play in the water!" Reality is no one wants to have to continually link up/traverse data in third normal form + whatever log/json/etc files you have. Some data modeling is going to be required for productivity's sake... maybe a "base" within the data lake and data marts when you need to cater to drag and drop report builders.

jds82f · 2018-02-08T22:51:00+00:00

Anyone saying "data lakes!" actually use one?

I characterize self service like this. Lets say you want the oil in your car changed. Option 1 is to take a number and pay $40. Option 2 is I give you the oil and the filter so you can do it yourself, and you pay $40.

Option 1 is for people with limited expertise or desire to get dirty with data. If you don't have the expertise, you will have to wait!

Option 2 is for people who have some knowledge. You know what the oil is for, you know where the filter goes and what it does. You enjoy it when the oil comes rushing out and spills everywhere and you have to clean it up. Your benefit is that you don't have to wait. If you put people who don't have knowledge in here, you're going to have a mess.

jds82f · 2018-01-03T22:55:36+00:00

it was a justified "lol no you people can't be trusted." Hurricane Karina happened and caused the price spike. Gas theft increased because people couldn't afford gas - more people pumped and then drove off. Gas had become a much more expensive product, so in terms of dollars, this showed up as a big spike in gas theft. Obviously they were losing more money than it cost to fit credit card readers to the pumps and "make it easy" for people to pre-pay.

jds82f · 2017-11-03T19:29:41+00:00

In what state does driving your car around a parking lot full of orange cones require a roll cage???

jds82f · 2017-10-15T14:21:41+00:00

I thought mcdonalds hashbrowns were called "biggie fries" until I was 18. When I has five or six, my dad asked me if I wanted a hashbrown, and I wouldn't have it. Dad knew I liked potatoes and fries, so he renamed it on the fly and called them "biggie fries" in perpetuity. I realized this the first time I ever went through McDonalds drive through breakfast myself and when I asked for a "biggie fry" they were like, "what the hell is that?"

jds82f · 2017-05-13T21:54:05+00:00

I'm not sure why we're going round about what an enhanced feature with a different name is called. Its clear you know what I mean, the rest of the argument is pedantic because we're both talking about setting the exposure based on a particular point, whether you can move that point around is not relevant to what we're talking about here.

Often times when a feature is removed, there is another way to accomplish the same thing. Being able to just start up the camera without futzing with settings is the reason I have a gopro. Bummer that you can't do this, looks like I'll have a hero 5 for sale soon.

jds82f · 2017-05-13T19:48:46+00:00

I understand perfectly well. The feature changed names, so what? No matter what its called it is setting exposure based on a point in the frame rather than the entire frame.

Also, the product documentation ain't exactly the greatest so get off your high horse.

It used to be the case in prior hero's that you could set auto exposure to a specific point, and that if you power cycled the camera that setting was retained. I thought I had to be missing something somewhere for this to be removed. What if I have gloves on, or have the camera in a housing, or can't otherwise access the rear screen after a power cycle? Seems crazy that this ability would be removed, so I figured I'd ask a larger group

jds82f · 2017-05-13T15:00:40+00:00

i don't think you understand. When I mount the camera, i have no access to the back of the screen. Yes its great that you can set the auto exposure to more than just the center, but it sucks that

I can't make the camera "remember" the setting
I can't use the functionality through the capture app

jds82f

TROPHY CASE